[Sussex] Linus get's bitten on the arse

[Geoffrey J Teale]

Paul Tansom <paul at aptanet.com> writes:
> 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.


I don't think you're being to harsh.  I think that Linus made a bad
decision so he could use a piece of software that he liked.  At the
time no F/OSS software was available to do the same job and nobody on
the development team had the time to do it.

Linus's feelings about F/OSS are often not as strong as we might
imagine, he tends to be "pragmatic", but often people who are
"pragmatic" about F/OSS end up loosing out in the end (proprietary
support has a habit of fading out long before the F/OSS community does).

-- 
Geoff Teale
Cmed Technology    || Free Software Foundation
gteale at cmedltd.com || tealeg at member.fsf.org