LXer: A fight against evil or a fight for attention?
 

Published at LXer:

Two hot issues are making the rounds. First, Debian and Firefox are having a spat, and the end result may be that Debian will distribute Firefox under a different name. Second, the war betwen Linus Torvalds and other Kernel developers and the Free Software Foundation over GPLv3 is continuing, with Torvalds saying he's fed up with the FSF. Here is my take on both, and related issues.

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An interesting take on the subject, and one fairly easy to grasp for us non-lawyers. The respondents are in strong disagreement with the article, tho.

I think the result of the GPL v3 battle will have huge ramifications for the FOSS community.

For better or worse, we've survived the hard times, but I think the pressures of commercialization are starting to catch up on the development community... and I personally don't think that we have the same ideological grounding that the community had say, 10 years ago, to carry on. And when we talk about kernel development, we're talking about a rare kind of talent that takes years to develop and is not easy to replace.

I'm not going out and predicting doomsday here, but I think there's going to definite changes for better or worse and as Linux users, we've got to understand that things won't be the same in the future.

All the top names in the community have to put aside their egos and work together, otherwise we're just playing into the hands of vested interests.

I'm starting to think the battle over GPLv3 is missing the point. There are so many open source licenses out there already, and developers are simply picking (or inventing) the one that best fits their business model. Look at projects like SugarCRM. It has some appearances of a FOSS project, but in reality it is much more akin to the crippleware model in the Windows world. The developers chose that path to try and maintain their revenue from the product and prevent others from forking the project. Their license reflects those desires. I'm betting we are going to see a lot more of this COSS (commercial open source software) in the future, and GPLv3 will not be part of that world.

Hari is definitely right here, change is coming to the FOSS world. Some of it will be good, some of it will be bad but it definitely will be different.

i suspect that in a world without "commercial open source software" , there wont be enough modern hardwares(of all kinds) to play and explore with , and eventually "re-invent" them ...

i think its an more important necessity ...


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