Jeff Waugh wrote:
That's claptrap. It's because their tree has the momentum. If anyone forked,
creating way more momentum (cf. xorg), Novell copyright assignment would no
longer be relevant. But they maintain the momentum, because they've done
nothing wrong by the community, and there's no value forking.
I think people simply don't have much of an opinion on dual licensing. We have no idea how many bugs Novel or RealNetworks have fixed in their proprietary distribution and failed to put into the community distribution. The fact that no-one has called foul yet is probably the only reason why community driven forks havn't taken off from these projects. On the other hand, have a look at Trolltech. By refusing to release Qt/win32 under the GPL they've earned the distain of the KDE community causing ports of Qt/X11 to both Cygwin and native win32. The fact that TrollTech doesn't even accept patches might have something to do with this too.
Don't attempt to solve social problems with technology.
The social problem here is caused by the technology. CVS repositories centralize power. Those who control what gets committed to the repository can put all sorts of conditions of entry on contributors. Decentralized systems like GNU Arch correct that power imbalance.. well they would, if they were used better. The Linux kernel is the best example of this. The BSD kernels are not as modular as Linux specifically because they use a centralized development model. Which means it's hard to maintain a patch set with the main development branch, and that results in an inertia when trying to implement ideas that are not acceptable to the guardians of the repository.
Trent -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
