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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!lll-winken.llnl.gov!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!boulder!rintintin.Colorado.EDU!nelsoni From: nelsoni@rintintin.Colorado.EDU (Ian S. Nelson) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.advocacy,comp.unix.misc Subject: Re: Linux vs FreeBSD Date: 11 Dec 95 15:59:31 GMT Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder Lines: 75 Message-ID: <nelsoni.818697571@rintintin.Colorado.EDU> References: <489kuu$rbo@pelican.cs.ucla.edu> <49osrd$ptg@times.tfs.com> <49rm0g$o8o@daffy.anetsrvcs.uwrf.edu> <DJ2IBL.71t@nntpa.cb.att.com> <4ah39c$mt3@klaava.helsinki.fi> NNTP-Posting-Host: rintintin.colorado.edu X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #8 (NOV) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:31118 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:10966 comp.unix.advocacy:12462 comp.unix.misc:20219 torvalds@cc.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds) writes: >I'll be the first to admit that I'm a dictator when it comes to linux: I >_don't_ like the core-team approach, and no, nobody else ever gets to >change _my_ kernel without my approval first. I go through every little >patch before it taints my personal kernel sources. >So if you want to bandy political terms, this makes linux an >"enlightened dictatorship" when it comes to the kernel, as opposed to >the FreeBSD monarchy and/or anarchy. I happen to think that this is the >best system for linux. Probably correct. >(Political science people will know that this has been considered the >optimal political system by some people too, the "only" problem being >the actual choice of dictator ;-) >But being a "dictatorship" doesn't make it less open, or less free. I >don't take any rights _away_ from you: I only give you the _choice_ of >using my kernel development. And I do make kernels availables at >reasonably regular intervals and the fact that I don't use "sup" is just >a technical thing, not an issue of "openness" or "freeness". Could somebody run down the linux community definitions of "open" and "free?" I'm fairly certain that we all agree that "free" == "no cost, you don't pay for it" but I'm having a hard time parsing this thread with all the occurances of the word "open" By industry standards, OS/2 is open. OSF/1 is open. A lot of things the linux community calls "proprietary" are open systems and standards. Now BSD users and Linux users are questioning the openness of each other's OS? This much be a different kind of "open." >The fact that I don't give other people permission to modify my kernel >sources is just due to the fact that I'm a paranoid bastard, and I >wouldn't trust anybody with my kernel that I use on my personal >machines. I _want_ to know what goes into the kernel, and I don't trust >people to do the right thing all the time. As you shouldn't. I don't exactly just randomly patch my kernel either. Being that Linux is kind of tested by the "it worked on my machine so I put it to alpha" method it only makes sense to be cautious about a lot of the patches floating around. (especially if you need alpha drivers to make sometihng work) >The "official" linux kernel is just something that I personally am >working on, and no, I don't use cvs or anything like that because I >happen to think that I can do it better myself. But you're free to >disagree, and do a Linux distribution of your own, if you want to. I >won't fight you (but I might as well unmodestly warn you that you'll >have to more-or-less devote your whole life to it if you intend to do a >better job than I do). This is just my opinion, but I think it would be pimp if the kernel was in CVS and we could grab the whole tree. Patches would still be patches just like they are but complete distributions of the kernel would be the whole tree so whenever you download a new distribution of the kernel you got all the versions of the kernel before that version. >Where linux is really open is not perhaps the kernel as much as the >whole _system_: Linux (not the kernel, the whole thing) development is >really a matter of a lot of different people working more-or-less >independently of each other - and they may all use completely different >development stategies depending on what they feel is appropriate. >THAT is what I call open and free (*). A lot of commercial operating systems are developed by many different teams working in parallel on different parts of the whole project. Does that make them open? Likewise it is possible to run a windows machine with essentially only a windows kernel and a lot of third party products to link it all together (eg: fo fileman, no progman, non of the MS included stuff. You can probably even use a custom filesystem if you wished) Is that an open system? >(*) Other people will call it confusing, but that's _their_ problem, not >mine. Freedom doesn't imply that things are neat and clean, often quite >the reverse.