[Gllug] caldera calls out.

[Nix]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Simon Trimmer gibbered:
>> Excuse me for being relativly new to the GPL concept and therefore I may
>> have this completely arse about face, but isn't this guy talking crap???
> 
> He's not the most respected person in the community, but some some of what he
> said is true. I came to a similar conclusion a while back that you can't make
> money out of a linux (or unix) distribution.

They make a good loss leader though; ask Red Hat.

> They can't understand that the kernel changes every few weeks and that it's

... but you don't need to upgrade, and this doesn't normally affect
userspace at all. The C library changes much less often and has really
strict backward-compatibility guarantees. Unless they're writing
kernelspace code (drivers or something) they shouldn't have to care
about kernel changes much.

> an ongoing process of new bugs being created whilst others are fixed. They

I have trouble believing that they have trouble with this. It's the way
every software development process in the world works...

> find it hard to believe that the interfaces between drivers and the kernel
> are fuzzy and prone to change at a whim.

If they're writing drivers, they really should be reading linux-kernel;
then they'd know what was changing, and get a chance to argue about it
to boot :)

> I don't think I've changed the fundamental operation of the microcode stuff
> in months, perhaps a year, but I need to keep putting out new releases every
> few months because of the differences in the startup methods of the
> distributions (and we still don't have SuSE's right).

The LSB should fix this; it has a standardized way to add and remove
programs from the set run at startup. I don't know if anyone implements
it yet.

>> And how much of the OS they are now going to be selling was contributed
>> from people like us[1] who donated it to the cause.
> 
> So, are you suggesting no money should be made from Linux? :)

I'm certainly not :)

> There are quite a few professional linux developers on the list and I'd
> suggest to you that the handful of core kernel people are now all full time,

At least two are not. Probably more. (I don't pay much attention to such
things.)

Certainly most of the GCC people are working on it full-time, not least
because companies got started specifically to frob at GCC and GNU
software (Cygnus as was, CodeSourcery).

> Linux started out as a hobbyist's operating system and to many people it
> still is. To have full time developers and to have us doing work on the
> boring or complicated bits someone has to finance the work and hardware.

Boring, yes; complicated, no :)

> I'm not attacking you, nor the GPL, the opensource community is still
> working things out as we go along.... :)

As is the free software community ;P

-- 
`It's all about bossing computers around. Users have to say "please".
Programmers get to say "do what I want NOW or the hard disk gets it".'
                        -- Richard Heathfield on the nature of programming

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug