Microsoft was violating the GPL after all [repost] | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft was violating the GPL after all [repost]

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40 points10ren14 comments

Pretty ironic with preceeding commentary by Linus. As so often happens, he speaks on licensing, or on free vs. proprietary and it bites him in the ass.

Pretty much anything he talks about outside of his area of expertise makes him sound like an idiot. I especially enjoy his rants about how OOP is useless, Emacs sucks, and how databases are too slow for real work.

It is amusing because he uses OO techniques in Linux and Git, mg is a more complex and harder to customize than emacs (and has fewer features), and databases are not slow by design; svn and monotone just happened to misuse them.

I am not so hot on monolithic kernels or UNIX either, but those are issues for another day ;)

I really fail to see how any of this "bites" him or makes him look like an "idiot."

Specifically, I don't see how any of the broad sentiments he expressed (tech over politics etc) is at all impacted by the contention that MS's hand was forced by a GPL violation.

Yet more generally, it seems out of place to speak on his behalf as to what his area of expertise is. For example on OOP its been rather more about C++'s implementation vs the explicit expression of OOP in C.

Certainly he has the right to an opinion based on his own observations and experiences, and certainly those opinions are interesting because they come from a different perspective.

So when those opinions happen to differ from one's own, is it really fair to suggest he now looks like an idiot?

It bites, because he dismisses certain people as paranoid crackpots, expressing lack of respect to FS movement in whole, while, as found later, their paranoia was justified.

I wasn't ever calling him an idiot, because he isn't. He is however would be better advised to shut up and wait sometimes, before jumping the gun.

You'd think he knows better after that BitKeeper saga, but duh.

Whoa.

He merely said there are extremists in FS, that he does not want to be associated with people espousing exclusion or hatred, and that is a reason why he doesn't like referring to what he does as "Free Software" anymore.

I'm not aware he used the term "paranoid crackpots" at all, surely there are extremists in any movement, and certainly he did not suggest all or even the majority of the FS movement falls into that category.

I've had many occasions where people have thought I must be an MS-bashing zealot when I mention "free software", and I've had many other occasions where people have understood the broader idea of freedom. Clearly there are multiple interpretations of the term "free", and certainly I (or Linus) have a right to manage what connotation we want to be associated with or disassociated from.

So, for my connotation to the term "free software," I hardly consider this a lack of respect to the FS movement as a whole (especially taken in context with all his other actions).

Further I don't understand what paranoia this is that is so justified. So they contributed some code to the kernel so that it might run better on their virtualization. But this must be selfish because its to benefit them. So they scratched their own itch (though no-one seems to mention that it might be to the disadvantage of Windows as a client OS if linux as a client OS suddenly runs better). So? So it turns out really they had to because of the GPL. Again, selfish because it was not about contribution. So?

Facts are: 1. they contributed code 2. they complied with the GPL 3. they did this without kicking, screaming & court cases (that I know of) 4. this (supposedly) improves running linux on certain environments - technically its an improvement and not a step backward.

Lets say (hypothetically) things are wholly different and the intent here is really to usurp the kernel, pollute the GPL, inject patent violations into the kernel or whatever -- well if one day this turns out to be the case, then at that time the phrase "paranoia was justified" would itself be justified. But even then I would not say "wow that Linus fellow really sounds like an idiot now and should have kept his mouth shut because he never saw this coming" -- because hindsight is always 20/20 and it does not seem to me that any reasonable person looking at the facts now on the table, would surmise there to be that type of hidden agenda.

Look, he wrote his rant in response to voices suggesting that Microsoft would not contribute to Linux unless there was some compelling, unadvertised, hidden motive for that. Turned out they were right in the end (license violation), but already got under the swing of Linus. Declaring them fanatics, implying that he shy to associate with FS due to them (which means they're not a fringe in Free Software movement one can shrug off, but more like a norm, right?).

Just ask yourself, would've he likely put it as harsh now, with the hindsight? I still maintain that it's best if he takes effort to postpone insults a few days or so, just in case he is not right. This is not a technical debate, and as a geek celeb whose opinion has extra weight he should be careful before throwing accusations.

All of that has nothing to do with Linux (which I use daily since 1999 and wrote a few device drivers for), or Microsoft (which I'm mostly indifferent to). Just about some basic caution in making wide ranging statements on political subjects or personal traits.

Given that none of the articles referenced actually give any details about what GPL'd code was improperly used or linked, I'm still skeptical.

Call me a fanboy but I believe in innocent until proven guilty. Show me the offending code.

Don't say "it's open source, see for yourself," because I'm not the one making the claim.

I'm also skeptical. As I recall the GPL only requires source code to be made available to someone who has been provided the binary; ie in effect MS would only have to make source available to their customers if asked, there would be no requirement to make it available to the community at large.

Last time I checked, e.g., Windriver was only making available their linux patches to customers who had purchased their embedded linux flavor, citing precisely this interpretation.

You are a fanboy.

Earlier submission http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720261 didn't get the attention it deserved (EDIT url edited)

There has been reams of discussion of this on the other threads about it :)

(my opinion: it doesnt matter - this happens all the time, it's only news because of it being MS)

Thanks, I hadn't noticed any comments about it actually being a GPL violation, just speculation. Probably added after I'd looked.

That's this submission ...

Thanks - I assumed that I could get the old one back by resubmitting, but it went to my more recent submission instead... oh, I see why: I added a "/" to distinguish the url, and firefox preserved this when I clicked on my link to the story, and thus HN identified it as my submission.

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