davemc wrote:Heres something else to chew on --
I find it quite petty and unfortunate that some in the Open Source world openly seek to subvert Linux Businesses. This is not only counter productive to the Open Source movement, but subverts the success of Linux itself when it comes to market share vs. M$. Transgaming, CVS, Novell, Red Hat, and others, are in fact businesses which have in some way (some more than others obviously) ties to the Open Source world. Fact is, like it or not it matters not at all, Linux MUST find a way to succeed in the business world for the Open Source movement to succeed overall. If Linux and Free Software truly are your creed, then I suggest you look for ways to support these companies rather than subvert them.
I agree. I saw an article in "Linux Format", about how Novell recently scored a _HUGE_ deal with Peugot. They are eventually going to switch _all_ of their desktop and server computers over to Novell linux and save a bundle of money. Money that would've gone to microsoft is now going to the linux community.
I can also understand why people don't like "open source" companies like cedega. There's a difference between Novell, Red Hat, and Cedega. When you give a company like Novell or Red Hat money, that money goes _back into_ the open source community. Novell is paying programmers to work on Sun's Open Office.
paying for cedega though... will get nothing back to wine.
Cedega provides a great service, that is the ability to vote with your dollars on what you want to have worked on next. They should share their work with the programmers they based their work off of.
cedega could still be cutting edge, work with all the latest games, and when they release a new version with better compatibility they could share their previous generation code with wine to help them out.
In terms of "unethical" companies, Cedega is still WAY the hell lower than Apple or Microsoft. But they could go alot further to helping the community that allowed them to make money.
This is not likely because kernel devs wont move to it. What we will have in the end is a ton of cross licensing and probably the subversion of the GPL itself due to splintering. It all boils down to a complete lack of unity within the Linux world itself which will ultimately be its death knell. Because we are seeing the bastardization of Linux Businesses with the M$ racketeering deal, and an inability of those within the Linux world to take M$ to task for it, we could eventually be seeing the end of the end.
I think the MS deal is a good idea. It gets linux out there to companies who may have not heard of it. It says to alot of those companies, "hey my stuff will work with linux, I can do what I want under it.."
Sure, MS has made threats of patent violations, but if it ever went to court it would hurt them more than the open source community. When asked to _show_ their patent violations, they sheepishly replied, "We can't produce them as there's too much paperwork to go through."
As for GPL v3? I think Linus said it best.
http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl? ... 02/1636216
GPL v3 will scare businesses away from using linux. A company should still be allowed to keep secrets so that they can make a profit on something they spent R & D dollars on.
Take the palm pilot that's using the GPL v2 kernel. Under v2, everything else about the palm pilot can be kept business secret. Under v3 they'd have to release ALL of their research and work into the product to the public domain. There's no way, Palm or any other company would agree to such terms.
that's my 3 1/2 cents on the subject.
"Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated."
GK Chesterton
