Only Idiots Don't Give Back To Free Software 326
Julie188 writes "Downstream projects who take without contributing back to the upstream project defeat the benefit of open source and sooner or later, all organizations developing on top of open source code will realize this, contends Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. So the time for cajoling those users — even commercial projects like Canonical — into participating is over. Contributing is 'not the right thing to do because of some moral issue or because we say you should do it. It's because you are an idiot if you don't,'" he says."
Update: 08/30 21:40 GMT by S : Reworded summary to clarify that Zemlin wasn't referring to end users.
Thanks for the Stab in the Back, Pal (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Anyone should be free to decide (Score:0, Interesting)
With the GPL, the author is effectively saying that you *cannot* NOT release the code upon request. BSD licence is actually *free*, as in, the author does not put any prohibitions on the end-user except not to remove copyright notices.
An Eigenvalue Too Far (Score:2, Interesting)
That's like saying the ten commandments are not restrictive because you never wanted to sleep with your neighbour's wife in the first place, though you wonder after he wanders off on a three year sea voyage whether he is similarly disposed toward the marital customs of half-naked illiterates. The GPL must be the world's first moral code offering nothing to adhere to.
I don't give Linux much credit for pioneering open source. Yes, and Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he built his own hands. There's a reason why Linus rather than Steve Gibson is responsible for the Linux kernel: Linus had the wits to build on what came before him. At a minimum this included GCC/binutils, the TCP/IP network stack, Perl, TeX/LaTeX/Metafont, and the X Windows system, all of which claim greater precedence for pioneering in the collaborative space.
Linus was more like the Larry Wall of collaboration: he was gifted for the task of polygamous union. As it turns out, Perl wasn't the only way to do it. The great progenitors always leave a stamp of their gifts and weaknesses. While we're at it, let's give America full credit for the invention of democracy, and ignore any role the establishment of the British parliament might have had in this story. Let's forget Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, Hume, and Smith. There weren't there at the beginnings of the one true metropolis.
The GPL solves a problem in game theory concerning the forward gifting society which facilitates cooperation by replacing the technicalities of forward gifting with the established custom of a broad social institution. It's an eigenvalue in the game theoretic matrix of cooperation/competition. There are other eigenvalues, too, such as the BSD model, and the proprietary model.
I often read that there's enough food in the world to feed everyone; as soon as we distribute this food so that everyone eats, we can cross proprietary off the list as a gruesome expedient of our savage past. Proprietary is also a distribution model, but you can see the cracks already. The last three winners on Survivor all signed a blood bond in the first episode to honour the GPL.
Sometimes I think the GPL came to Stallman in a flash of insight while watching A Taste of Armageddon [wikipedia.org] back in 1967. The whole system would be so much more efficient if we just flipped a coin to determine those who will starve. If you're going to subject yourself to a coin flip about stepping into the suicide booth, you want to first examine the source code. If the booth were provisioned by Diebold, it could be a gruesome end. No one would take that risk, and nirvana would die on the drawing board. Seriously, that whole episode makes you think deeply about the provenance of the source code. Spock muttered "fascinating" but the crew had learned by then not to ask.
That episode should have been titled "An Eigenvalue Too Far", but this was before Slashdot and the four digit user ID, so there was no-one to get it.
I also think Stallman was influenced by some of those 1970s PBS series on the origins of life in which replication puts the yin/yang hammerlock on metabolism. Source code is replication. Metabolism is everything else everyone contributes to pushing the source code around. Metabolism does not function in the role of the one true eigenvalue, so it was quickly discarded on the road to manifesto. Putting all your eggs into the metabolism basket as Ubuntu tends to do is kind of risky for the long term concerning those mysterious failures of the uniform distribution of metabolic inputs from our savage past. Replication is king.
After all that, what is this guy actually saying? You might stray into metabolism, but sooner or later you'll succumb to the blinding light of the one true eigenvalue and return to the flock?
The curious thing, though, is the tendency of the one true eigenvalue to wink out like a dying star, only to be replaced by an even b
Re:Anyone should be free to decide (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with bsd licensed code is that it quickly becomes fragmented proprietary code.
Like for instance, the bsd sockets implementation.
Microsoft made heavy use of this code to make the earliest version of their winsock api. A modification that is closed.
As far as I know, osx uses a bsd flavored sockets implementation as well. It is quite possibly the most widely used tcp\ip reference stack implementation anywhere.
The issue is that osx sockets, winsock, bsd sockets, et al are all fragmented, and with the exception of the parent bsd implementation, all closed and proprietary.
Had it been licensed under gpl, all the child implementations of the parent would be open, and advancements or improvements could cross proliferate.
That is the real strength of the gpl. The improvements you make to the code to make it useful to you could very well be improvements that others can use to make the code work for them. Instead of fragmenting the code, it helps to unify the code, and helps it to evolve with much less "reinventing the wheel."
The bsd license has its place, but it is no substitute for the gpl.
Re:Anyone should be free to decide (Score:4, Interesting)
If it was GPL they would not have touched the code. So you wuld have not just have fragmented versions but entirely written from scratch versions.
I prefer BSD or Apache style licences. But I understand the goal of GPL. It just went to far. LGPL is a good level but it is so poorly defined that any company lawyer looks at it and they start pulling their hair out and shout NO.