Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote: > At 2005-09-23 16:35:27 +0530, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >>What does Cray / NaSA and the likes actually give to the community - >>will they give their source code - ever. I have my doubts - so then >>what is their stake ? > > > NASA has contributed a *lot* to Linux. Donald Becker's work at NASA is > how Linux first got into the supercomputing space (Beowulf), and he's > the reason the kernel has such excellent Ethernet device support. Ask > Google about "cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov" sometime. > > I don't remember offhand if Cray has contributed anything, but did you > know that the NSA (the US National Security Agency) was responsible for > the development of SELinux? Not only did they contribute it back, most > distributions ship with it these days.-
Thanks - thats education and good to know and 3 cheers for NASA - really > > (But that's not the point. It *doesn't matter* what anyone's stake is. > Anyone may use free software for whatever reason, as long as they are > complying with the terms of the license. It doesn't matter if you like > them or not, or what they believe in. That's what "free" means.) I won't argue at the licensing terms - of course they may be complying with the licenses and again everyone is free to choose whichever way they want to go. But is open source and the *community initiative * only about about complying with licenses. There is that cliched statement of freedom - "ones freedom ends when it begins to affect anothers" - so their ( the solid state commercial interests) freedom does not just end with everything is *free forever and after* thats the ultimate fantasy of the capitalist crowd- they are not (rather should not be) free to choose to *not contribute* - irrespective of licenses. Because it would be nice to think we are not talking only licenses and legalities. Call is social responsibility, call it a *"request from the community"* This, however, is from the view point of a community versus corporate - where the community is the large amorphous mass (whose collective resources base is large but individual resource base disparately distributed) and the corporate are the proprietory privateers (who have even larger private and unshared resources) whose sole motive is profit, wherever it may come from and whatever the cost. So is there a responsibility with that freedom , to access code, to make profits etc and my uneducated question is are they giving back from where they have taken - Maybe for this discussion I bring my own baggage of what a communtiy should be like and what the big corporate brother is up too. ram > > -- ams > > _______________________________________________ > ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] > http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd > Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > > Event: Freedel 2005, 17th & 18th September, 2005 - http://freedel.in > _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Event: Freedel 2005, 17th & 18th September, 2005 - http://freedel.in
