Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 09:58:06 -0500 (EST)
From: Patrick Finnegan <pat@purdueriots.com>
To: Rob Landley <landley@trommello.org>
cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: What's left over.
In-Reply-To: <200211020012.05529.landley@trommello.org>
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First I want to apologize to anyone I've pissed off too badly with this.
Another note - I have no relation to the LKCD developers, other than a
very satisfied, and sometimes excessivly vehement, user. I was about to
respond to this message in detail, but I dont need to put more Magnesium
on the flames.

Pat

On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Rob Landley wrote:

> On Friday 01 November 2002 16:16, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
>
> > > It's not a fscking public service.  Linus has full control over his
> > > tree.  You have equally full control over your tree.  Linus can't
> > > tell you what patches to apply in your tree.  You can't tell Linus
> > > what patches he should apply to his.
> >
> > I'm sorry it _is_ a public service.  Once tens of people started
> > contributing to it, it became one.  This is like saying that the
> > Washington Monument belongs to the peole that maintain it, any building
> > belongs to the repair crews and janitors.
>
> You pay taxes to support the washington monument.  When's the last time you
> paid a tax to Linus?
>
> > I'm not saying that Linus is
> > necessarily a janitor, but when you consider how much of the Linux kernel
> > that he didn't write, you may relize that it's not just his kernel.
>
> He's the editor of a periodical publication.  A cross between an academic
> technical journal which people contribute to for professional reasons, and a
> hobbyist fanzine that people contribute to 'cause it's cool.  This is not a
> new thing, there are real-world precedents for this sort of relationship
> going back hundreds of years, to the invention of the printing press...
>
> Linus's editorial decisions are as final and unappealable as any other
> editorial decision at a magazine or newspaper.  You can publish your article
> elsewhere, and if it doesn't have the same prestige as the Harvard Law Review
> or the New England Journal of Medicine, tough.  They said no.
>
> And like ALL editors, his job isn't to write a significant portion of the
> articles in the publication, but to be a Sturgeon's Law filter throwing out
> 99% of the submissions in the slush pile, correcting the spelling and grammar
> of the remaining few, and trying to stitch them together into a coherent
> whole.
>
> Go track down somebody with a Journalism degree if you want to understand
> Linus's job.
>
> >  It
> > also belongs to every single person that has written even a single
> > line of code in it.
>
> If you get an article published in Time magazine, and you say that this gives
> you the right to print your own copies of Time and distribute them yourself,
> Time's lawyers are going to come after you.
>
> The GPL gives you the ability to do this, but it doesn't obligate the
> publication's editor to listen to you.  If next month's issue contains a huge
> rebuttal to one of your articles, calling you a boogerhead, tough.  The
> editor doesn't owe you anything as a previous contributor, and certainly
> doesn't owe you anything as someone from whom he did NOT take a submission.
>
> What Linus basically said was that if a significant number of distributions
> integrated it, he might take another look at the thing in the future.  But
> wasn't going into 2.5.
>
> Now, thanks to people pestering him beyond the Annoyance Event Horizon, he's
> got his fingers in his ears.  Congratulations.  Hopefully, he'll calm down a
> bit in a few months, but there's no guarantee.  In the mean time, the most
> productive thing to do is drop the topic and work on the Red Hat, SuSE, and
> Debian guys.  (Mandrake feeds from Red Hat, and SuSE is now making kernels
> for Connectiva and TurboLinux.  Gentoo and Slackware might be good to bug as
> well...)
>
> See if you can convince Alan Cox to pick up your patch.  That'll get you Red
> Hat, and the single largest concentration of roll-your-own kernel guys
> outside of Linus's own tree.
>
> Rob


--
Purdue Universtiy ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage
http://www-rcd.cc.purdue.edu

http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2040637020924.gif


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