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Date: Sun, 3 Nov 2002 01:34:03 -0800 (PST)
From: "Matt D. Robinson" <yakker@aparity.com>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
cc: Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>, Steven King <sxking@qwest.net>,
       Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>,
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       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
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Subject: Re: [lkcd-devel] Re: [lkcd-general] Re: What's left over.
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On 3 Nov 2002, Alan Cox wrote:
|>On Sun, 2002-11-03 at 01:24, Matt D. Robinson wrote:
|>> P.S.  IBM shouldn't have signed a contact with Red Hat without
|>>       requiring certain features in Red Hat's OS(es).  Pushing for
|>>       LKCD, kprobes, LTT, etc., wouldn't be on this list for a whole
|>>       variety of cases if that had been done in the first place.
|>
|>I would hope IBM have more intelligence than to attempt to destroy the
|>product by trying to force all sorts of junk into it. The Linux world
|>has a process for filterng crap, it isnt IBM applying force. That path
|>leads to Star Office 5.2, Netscape 4 and other similar scales of horror
|>code that become unmaintainably bad.

I think you misunderstand me.  If IBM considers a feature to be useful,
they should require distributions to put into a release from a contractual
standpoint.  That doesn't mean Red Hat has to put it into all their
distributions -- it just means they have to produce something that
IBM wants.  If nobody else uses it, that's fine.  IBM gets what they
want, and Red Hat gets what they want.  End of story.

You're looking at this from an engineering perspective and open source
philosophy rather than a business unit at a company like IBM might look
at it.  That's not a bad thing to do, but the two concepts are very
different from each other.  The Linux world may filter "crap", which
is great, but some of that "crap" is important to companies like IBM,
and if they were smart they'd use their leverage ($$$) to make sure the
"crap" ends up in the products they care to use/support.  The rest of
Linux can do whatever it wants, doing things the "Linux world" way.

|>> P.S.  As an aside, too many engineers try and make product marketing
|>>       decisions at Red Hat.  I personally think that's really bad for
|>>       their business model as a whole (and I'm not referring to LKCD).
|>
|>You think things like EVMS are a product marketing decision. I'm very
|>glad you don't run a Linux distro. It would turn into something like the
|>old 3com rapops rather rapidly by your models (3com rapops btw ceased to
|>exist and for good reasons)

Again, I wasn't mentioning any product in particular.  Making decisions
like GPL-only as an engineering philosophy rather than as a product
marketing decision are more problematic than looking at EVMS vs. anything
else as a question of which is technically better.

But again, that's a complete aside and would probably open up a plethora
of opinions from people who care about both sides of that argument, and
would inevitably head down an rathole infinitely deep.

--Matt

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