[Sussex] Linus get's bitten on the arse

[Paul Tansom]

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 16:29 +0100, Geoffrey J. Teale wrote:
> Well, Linus made a bad decision and it has finally came back to bite him.
> 
> I missed this news in the week, but here it is for those who are as
> uniformed as I am:
> 
> http://kerneltrap.org/node/4966
> 
> 
> ... that's the real difference between "Free" (as in speech) and "free"
> (as in beer).  I use GNU Arch (or tla to it's friends) a lot and I
> imagine this would be the easiest transition for the kernel developers.

Hmm, I remember a lot about this when it first started, but I've either
forgotten or didn't fully take in the restrictive licensing agreement
they were under. It sounds like an attempt to ensure that an open source
competitor was not developed more than a charitable gesture aimed at
helping Linux software development. To allow a large number of
developers to use a product that aids development, but on the condition
that they don't work on a competing product - well I'm amazed the
arrangement lasted so long on those terms. I may be being a little too
cynical here, but it sounds like they realised the strategy wasn't
working, so decided to abandon it! Maybe I'm being too harsh, or maybe
it's just the way that article was written.

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/