Text 3677, 57 rader
Skriven 2005-04-16 08:25:14 av Rich Gauszka (1:379/45)
Ärende: Linux hypocrisy?
========================
From: "Rich Gauszka" <gauszka@hotmail.com>

I agree with the "this does not compute" remark

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/15/perens_on_torvalds/

With Andrew Tridgell silent, apparently on legal advice, open source community
leader Bruce Perens has stepped up to defend the work Tridgell did reverse
engineering the protocols used by Bitkeeper. Bitkeeper is the closed source
proprietary source code management tool that until last week, Linus Torvalds
used to manage Linux kernel source code.

Torvalds has responded to the controversy by blaming Tridgell, and made two
extraordinarily intemperate attacks on him online, the second accusing him of
willful destruction

There are times when Linus Torvalds can be a real idiot, and this is one of
these times," said Perens.

He pointed out that the closed source tool was foisted on kernel developers
despite the consensus that it was inappropriate for a GPL project. Many
declined to use it regardless of the gateways McVoy created, says Perens. So
the criticism is "very severely unfair" to Tridgell, he says. Larry, Mungo and
Tridge
Why, according to Torvalds, is exploring proprietary Microsoft protocols good,
while exploring proprietary Bitmover protocols is bad? This does not compute.

"Let's look at what Tridge has done," said Perens.

"Firstly, he's well known because of Samba. He reverse engineered the
over-the-wire protocol of Microsoft networking, so he could interoperate with
it from a Unix system or Linux or a Macintosh. This is very welcome, and it's
in commercial products from HP, IBM, Apple, and many other companies. No one
seems to have a problem with this."

"There was never a question of copyright infringement, because he did not look
at the software, only how it communicated over the wire."

"So becoming commercially very desirable for this task [Tridgell is on
sabbatical from IBM Research as an ODSL Labs contractor, where he was named the
second Fellow after Torvalds himself - ed] he again started a hobby project -
which is how Samba started - which is a Bitmover compatible product. And he
reverse engineered the over the wire protocol."

"He never laid hands on the Bitkeeper software. He did not look inside the
software to do this."

"So I think a lot of people are giving him a great deal of trouble for the
exact thing he did for Samba. It seems to me hypocritical. I can't tell Linus
Torvalds what to say. But it's Andrew Tridgell who is literally not allowed to
reply, here, and Linus is being very severely unfair."

"There are times when Linus Torvalds can be a real idiot, and this is one of
these times."

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