On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 10:42 PM, Rich Felker <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 01:26:23AM +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote: >> On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 1:14 AM, Rich Felker <[email protected]> wrote: >> > In my book the wishes of the copyright holders are virtually >> > worthless. It's the rights of users that matter. GPL exists to protect >> > the rights of people who receive software, not the rights of people >> > who write it. If you write GPL software with the intention of not >> > enforcing the GPL and discouraging others from enforcing it, and then >> > use the fact that it's "GPL" to allow yourself to incorporate >> > thousands of contributions and code snippets adopted from other GPL >> > projects, you're barely one notch above infringers on the moral >> > scale.. >> >> Yes, that is the all so usual free software vs. open source divide in >> approaches. >> >> It doesn't matter why the GPL exists, it only matters why the >> copyright holders chose it. If they realize the GPL is doing a >> disservice to them, they might choose something else. > > You mean they might decide to start over and write something new from > scratch without all the GPL-only contributions they've accumulated. > Good luck to them...
You mean the GPL-only contributions from people that *do not agree* with the license change. Depending on the project that might be difficult, and some code would certainly need to be rewritten, but it's not unheard of. >> > No, Toybox being open source has nothing to do with Sony. It was open >> > source many years before Sony was involved. >> >> OK. I would say then we would have to wait and see if Sony >> contributes, but really, the complexities of big companies make it so >> sometimes by their own policy they cannot contribute directly, so they >> create a separate entity which can contribute, and they do so under a >> name that is not sony.com. Crazy, but I've seen it happen _exactly_ >> like that. > > Why should I care if they contribute? The quality of code that comes > out of corporate environments is (on average) so abysmal that it's > probably part of the reason things like Android remain forks rather > than getting integrated upstream. I really don't want Sony's or even > Google's code in itself. I want users to have access to their > platforms as a foundation for disencumbering their devices. You can want whatever you want. What Linux developers want is for Google'd Android team to become active part of the community, and learn how to submit clean patches. I for one have been working on the Maemo team in Nokia, and the code quality of the developers on our side was good enough to get patches into the upstream kernel relatively easy. With time and effort, our partner for quite some time, TI, managed to get confident as well. You can grab the latest Linux kernel and run this command: % git log -p --no-merges -- arch/arm/mach-omap2 You would see many clean patches coming directly from TI developers, and you can see a quite active linux-omap mailing list with open discussions. Nobody had to sue anybody for that to happen. And that's what Linux developers want. Good luck getting their approval for this kind of pointless enforcement on their behalf. Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
