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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada
From: russell_-at-_flora.ottawa.on.ca (Russell McOrmond)
Date: 6 Apr 1999 13:23:44 -0400
References: <3707A3FB.60674F8E@vsnl.com>
On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Paul J.Y. Lahaie wrote: > code splits. If Dave Miller started releasing his own "Linux v2.x.x" > and Linus another one and .... The usefulness of Linux in the market > place would seriously hampered by compatibility issues which would > surely arise. What the average consumer buys and uses is RedHat, Caldera, SuSE, etc. They for the most part don't care who the maintainers of various thread of various packages are, or which particular project the Distribution creators decided to use. If Dave Miller went off and made incompatible changes to the kernel component that affected RedHat's ability to market their product, then those features would be ignored by RedHat. What these people do very much affects us hackers and our thirst for the latest cool toys, but these things don't make it to the average joe user. They aren't going to have 7 browsers and 5 webservers, 10 desktops and other such things on their computer. Yes, the project would not have gotten where it is today without leadership skills, but I do not at all believe that we are so fragile that if these leaders were lost that the projects them-self would disappear. Having Linus leave would not even affect the code base to the same level as having competing GNOME and KDE projects does, and I for one still believe that having both these projects is going to be beneficial to the future of Free Software based desktops. For me personally, Linus's contributions to the Free Software community as a spokespersons far outweighs his contributions as a software developer. Many people have made larger code contributions but few have come close to his effect on public relations for the movement! And so what if the kernel for Linux died some time in the future after Free Software is established? I for one plan to jump ship to HURD once it gets to the stability that I currently enjoy with Linux. As more software moves to the Free Software model, "Binary compatibility" will not be an issue and with it most of the compatibility issues you speak of would not be an issue. We're talking very different things here. I'm not suggesting that these people are not great leaders and that their projects and contributions are not important. I am suggesting that if small components of some of these projects stopped 'moving forward' that there is no possibility of us loosing access to what we already have today. This is quite different than the proprietary world where it is impossible to do minor bug fixes and maintenance on a product that you don't have source code for. --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://russell.flora.org/work/> FLORA: Planned Upgrades/outages! http://www.flora.org/flora.announce/90 Melissa Virus - the real story! http://www.flora.org/flora.comnet-www/1453 Who owns Linux?(Letter to editor) http://www.flora.org/flora.comnet-www/1459
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