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It's a small wonder that the Linux operating system remains vibrant in multiple industries and is poised to make a dash for more consumers' desktops, considering how often misunderstandings get in the way of its advancement. For instance, Linux was not immediately recognized as a real OS in the way that consumers and business owners viewed the Apple computer or IBM PC in the early days of computing. Linux was available in too many confusing distributions. Even today, many non-Linux users misunderstand the open source model.
>>The notion that the GPL is a hindrance to advancing Linux is more perception than reality, according to Garbee.
That may be all we’ll and good, I’ve personally don’t have the insights into what may be hindering the advancement of Linux, is it being hindered? Perhaps we should just ask the people who don’t choose it. Are they saying it’s a lack of hardware support, a lack of required drivers?
But I do take concern with the folks that are so easily dismissive of concerns around GPL and concerns around derived works. Here’s the main point that is never discussed is these soft on GPL discussions – The GPL under Linux Kernel is ‘different’ then the GPL under say the Gnu owned components in a Linux distribution. The GPL for the Kernel is different then say the GPL under MySQL. How can GPL be different ? – simple because the initial determination of what the license terms mean is in the hands of the copyright holder. The Linux Kernel copyright holders, Linus and others, take a different interpretation of the ‘derived works’ then say the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This is a well known, old issue, but people seem to be forgetting this and now we have people extrapolating the Linux Kernel team’s view of the GPL out to all GPL products. This is erroneous and will lead people astray.
>>"Senior business people is where the real problem is. They haven't done the research on what the real situation is with the GPL. They think they have to give up all proprietary code if they use open source drivers. That is not what the GPL says," he explained.
So imho statements like the above are truly misleading, dangerous, and in effect can be flatly wrong. The GPL doesn’t really ‘say’ anything, it is interpreted to mean specific things by the copyright holder that choose to use the GPL. The FSF’s ‘interpretation’ does in fact push copyright law to extremes that have never been addressed in any court. Particularly in the areas of derived and collective works.
That may be all we’ll and good, I’ve personally don’t have the insights into what may be hindering the advancement of Linux, is it being hindered? Perhaps we should just ask the people who don’t choose it. Are they saying it’s a lack of hardware support, a lack of required drivers?
But I do take concern with the folks that are so easily dismissive of concerns around GPL and concerns around derived works. Here’s the main point that is never discussed is these soft on GPL discussions – The GPL under Linux Kernel is ‘different’ then the GPL under say the Gnu owned components in a Linux distribution. The GPL for the Kernel is different then say the GPL under MySQL. How can GPL be different ? – simple because the initial determination of what the license terms mean is in the hands of the copyright holder. The Linux Kernel copyright holders, Linus and others, take a different interpretation of the ‘derived works’ then say the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This is a well known, old issue, but people seem to be forgetting this and now we have people extrapolating the Linux Kernel team’s view of the GPL out to all GPL products. This is erroneous and will lead people astray.
>>"Senior business people is where the real problem is. They haven't done the research on what the real situation is with the GPL. They think they have to give up all proprietary code if they use open source drivers. That is not what the GPL says," he explained.
So imho statements like the above are truly misleading, dangerous, and in effect can be flatly wrong. The GPL doesn’t really ‘say’ anything, it is interpreted to mean specific things by the copyright holder that choose to use the GPL. The FSF’s ‘interpretation’ does in fact push copyright law to extremes that have never been addressed in any court. Particularly in the areas of derived and collective works.
AMD/ATi has not released code to their video driver, they released specs but not to all of their chipsets. Nice try, though.
