Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752498AbXBRXnB (ORCPT ); Sun, 18 Feb 2007 18:43:01 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752499AbXBRXnB (ORCPT ); Sun, 18 Feb 2007 18:43:01 -0500 Received: from wr-out-0506.google.com ([64.233.184.233]:1509 "EHLO wr-out-0506.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752498AbXBRXm7 (ORCPT ); Sun, 18 Feb 2007 18:42:59 -0500 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=beta; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:cc:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=Dz5DRf4pgPKkGMu14Kw4vdjr3doThmaQHwDA2fxPOPieKHCT+4MzJC61m+LcvdG9XTcJ85KyyODZjZH0yIYkohbgSZQEGCTJ4+xYo8uqhiozVvQpSUlhRkcQ7JV+Jd7jFJGEbq54ivDw2KbhfMTZ2hEzSk9jGmQrXqzR1tRaepc= Message-ID: Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2007 15:42:58 -0800 From: "Michael K. Edwards" To: "Oleg Verych" Subject: Re: GPL vs non-GPL device drivers Cc: "Trent Waddington" , "Neil Brown" , davids@webmaster.com, LKML In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <20070216125353.GN13958@stusta.de> <17878.48376.629016.49202@notabene.brown> <3d57814d0702171926v53812baeqaeeda326aa225acf@mail.gmail.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 3446 Lines: 65 Eensy weensy follow-up. No screed. Well, maybe just a _little_ screed. On 2/18/07, Oleg Verych wrote: > Ulrich Drepper is known to be against current FSF's position on glibc > licence changing. Will that stop the FSF? Will it stop Red Hat, MontaVista, or CodeSourcery? Even if Ulrich tells the FSF to stuff it where the sun don't shine, and hosts his new fork on Google Code along with the rest of the GNU corpus, the moment he or you or any of us wants to run any binary that was compiled against a newer FSF glibc, we're screwed. All it takes is for that binary to have a post-v3-switch symbol in its link table (which can easily happen _without_ any change in the application source code). It's all very well to say we can live without anything that ships as a binary, but commercial applications atop glibc are a big part of how Linux left the hobbyist ghetto, and I don't want to go back there. Do you? Or do you really want to spend the rest of your precious time on Earth shimming clean-room reverse-engineered crap into glibc-GPLv2-fork to keep Oracle running on a distro that Moglen doesn't have by the 'nads? Not that it really matters whether you're using Oracle or MySQL -- an RDBMS, like any racing thoroughbred, goes lame if you look at it funny, and once you've gotten burned once in production by the unreproducibility of the golden bits, you won't try it again. The existence of GNU-free userlands is nice for us embedded folk but ultimately useless for desktops and servers. Talk to the people who have spent untold person-years scrubbing bashisms out of Debian's /etc/init.d. Talk to the people who have ported their industrial-scale multithreaded apps from linuxthreads (with its annoying non-POSIX behaviors) to NPTL (with its equally annoying POSIX behaviors). Talk to the people struggling to package Gnome and KDE for anything other than glibc, libstdc++, and (worst of all) ld.so.2. Portability ain't all it's cracked up to be. If you think "embrace, extend, destroy" is tattooed on Ballmer's forehead, you should take a good look at an RMS word-portrait sometime. And imagine a nice private chat with the if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em club -- from IBM and HP to Apple, Wind River, and Sun. Say what you will about Steve Jobs, he's a survivor -- but the ex-CEOs of all the rest will give you an earful about being shot out of the saddle by the "free software" mafia and replaced with people who know how to do a deal with the devil and call it a come-to-Jesus moment in the press release. Intel is keeping mum -- they've made an industry out of playing both ends against the middle, and they've got a compiler that can more or less do Linux anyway, so they don't really care. Google doesn't care either -- they've got more cash than they can spend and can afford to fork internally and go their merry way. The only heavyweight that had refused to get on board until very recently was Oracle. Not just because Larry Ellison likes to fly solo, either -- read http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3614721. Then read http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3655261. Larry, too, is a survivor. Cheers, - Michael - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/