[Sussex] Ok the gauntlets on the floor!

[Steve Dobson]

Angelo

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 05:48:37PM +0100, Geoff Teale wrote:
> Tell Ajay that he should actually _read_ what he quotes.
> 
> The OSF, The Open Group and X/Open that Ajay mentioned are 
> _nothing_to_do_with_ Free Software or Open Source.  They are standards 
> groups who worked on a common basis for _commercial_ UNIX they are hang 
> overs (some of them are now defunct) from an older, nastier times.
> 
> If Ajay wants to talk about Free Software please direct him to his local 
> representative of the Free Software Foundation (me) or talk to someone 
> from the  Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org).
> 
> You may also point out that the terms of the GPL do not require you to 
> obey any directives from any group other than the rules set out in that 
> license - all of which are about how you can distribute and modify the code.

Geoff is completely right about this, and put it much better than I could.
 
> One major tennant of the GPL is that it does not exclude any person.  
> You can come from any faith, country, political view point or 
> corporation and use GPL programs and code so long as you comply with the 
> terms of the GPL.  SCO can use the GPL code with the same rights as IBM 
> or Linus Torvalds.

I'm not quite sure that this is quite the right way to put this.  Linus
Torvalds has more rights to the code he has written in Linux than everyone
else.  Just as SGI has more rights to XFS, Alan Cox has to the SMP code, etc.
But the core code of Linux has been patched, re-written, re-patched and so
on by so many people that it has no one owner any more.  Therefore Linus 
couldn't take the Linux source code today and sell it to Microsoft.  So 
in that way he has no more (or less) rights to the code than anyone else.

But if your question is on programming generally being "American" I would
have to say that it is.  Software development is basically split into three
equally sized "zones" (in terms of numbers of people working):
     North America (including Canada),
     Europe and
     The Rest of the World.

Americanisiums dominate.  A few years ago I was working for a company and
took a trip to Paris to investigate buying a source code licence from this
French company.  The comments in their code were in French, but the code
itself was mostly (American) English.  Some of the local variables were
in French, but that was about it.  I've noticed that about my self too.
It is just easier when writing code to spell colour without the "u", that
way you don't have to remember the origin of a function.