Alan,
I still stand by my assertion that educating companies as to the
realities and philosophies of open source is better than threatening them.
Your analogy of open source as a standard, a practical de facto standard
written in a programming language is a good one. Forking code (by never
upstreaming it) tends not to be sustainable (although some companies still
try). Proprietary code exists for all sorts of reasons, often a bogus belief
in an intrinsic value. Graphics, in particular, is a very litigious world
and also, the biggest cause of proprietary code, surely some link?
Back to the plot. Linaro is trying to help here, both in reducing
non-optimal code forking and in helping its members work better with the open
source communities. As I said in my earlier mail, this will take time. That
said, I've seen enormous shifts within the ARM partnership already this year
and look forward to more next year.
Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays to one and all.
Dave
ps nice to see that you keep your old email address. Are you still in Wales?
On 23 Dec 2010, at 17:17, Alan Cox wrote:
>> way to behave. The best way to get companies to change their behaviour is
>> to find them and support them. Making threatening GPL noises in email does
>> not help them in any way.
>
> I would disagree based on years of history.
>
> The best way to get a company to change behaviour is for a situation to
> occur in which it is in their own hardcore capitalist self interest to
> change.
>
> In my experience open source usually mirrors standards in this. The
> leading vendors refuse to take part, the smaller vendors see the
> opportunity - often working together - and the bigger vendor eithers gets
> its backside kicked or does a sharp turn in the right direction.
>
> That's the story of email, of the web, and is occuring currently in
> telephony and other areas.
>
> It's also why folks like Dell deserve a lot more credit than they get for
> the success of Linux.
>
> If its not commercially sensible it doesn't matter what the licensing
> says. They are corporations not charities, if it's not economically
> viable for them to manage it all themselves including new driver
> releases, legal risk, all their own review and keeping up with DRI then
> they have to decide which way to go - some go the "hit and run" approach
> ('not got kernel X then sorry but not our problem'), some do the work to
> support it release by release but don't go GPL (eg Nvidia), some open up,
> others just walk away.
>
> Alan
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