... unless you are Microsoft. Or if they don’t like what your code implements. Or if they think your code smells bad.
So I guess the following promises:
“The very good side effects of having your driver in the main kernel tree are:
- The quality of the driver will rise as the maintenance costs (to the original developer) will decrease.
- Other developers will add features to your driver.
- Other people will find and fix bugs in your driver.
- Other people will find tuning opportunities in your driver.
- Other people will update the driver for you when external interface changes require it.
- The driver automatically gets shipped in all Linux distributions without having to ask the distros to add it.”
were really a bunch of lies. If they don’t like it, they will not maintain it (no matter how useful it might be). And I am not talking just about drivers.
Now, will anyone compensate Microsoft for the time they lost writing the aforementioned GPL code (which, being GPL code, will never bring them a profit), that won’t be part of the stack anymore?
PS: I wonder if Microsoft made the following code submission under an Anonymous commit, pretending it was the result of reverse engineering skillz, would the code still get the same treatment? My guess is yes, because loons are committed to eliminating any ebil Microsoft standards from the server space. Monopoly would be OK if Linux did it.
Comments
Oh, I see the pattern here http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/android-kernel-problems.html
“So, what happened with the Android kernel code that caused it to be deleted? In short, no one cared about the code, so it was removed.”
Gold coming from the same idiot who promised the brightest future possible once you GPL your code.
Also, tmrelated: http://tmrepository.com/trademarks/basementdeveloperarmy/
To be fair, it sounds lik OpenStack just doesn’t have the development resources to devote to Hyper-V right now … although the “Dead Wood” comment is interesting. I presume there’s at least one Greg Koahn-Hartman-style nutter in there; it’ll be interesting to see how long it lasts.
An elegant summary of broken promises, however.
It brings up yet another point: as we all know, developers suffer from a very strong version of the NIH syndrome — and that’s even for stuff that comes from the same ecosystem. I’ll cite Btrfs here. Precisely how difficult is it to merge the FOSS of Btrfs and the FOSS of fsck and produce a consistency checker? Yet nobody has done it yet.
As you say, Hyper-V is “M$” and therefore the Dalit of the Open Source world. But, in addition, it’s bloody complicated. Hypervisors in general are a small niche of software development that requires arcane knowledge and a certain amount of commitment.
How, exactly,, are a million undifferentiated eyeballs supposed to help with that?
As they said, it’s because they don’t believe anyone is actually using it. Well sure, if you treat HyperV like ass, surprise nobody even considers using it.
And evidently, nobody uses Android either.
@DrLoser
Just a sidenote, btrfs is just another ripoff of ZFS (and there is another effort to reimplement ZFS itself). Because CDDL is not free enough http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue
IMO the CDDL mess is Sun’s fault. “We are making our OS copyleft open source, but under a license that’s incompatible with the GPL, which means code can’t be shared between the two. What do you mean that whatever little advantage there is to copyleft is the ability to use existing GPL code? Plus we 've got like, 3 programmers that threaten to resign if we release under GPL”
Whatever you think about the GPL, it’s the copyleft license everyone uses (with some LGPL for the libraries) so this is the license you should use if for some weird reason you decide to go copyleft. Or at least LGPL. If Apple could work with it, Sun could do. Onstead by choosing the CDDL they made Solaris “foreign” to any other copyleft software project, because they couldn’t share code. Plus many comtrbutors didn’t want to write code for a license they didn’t like. So if they were like 10 people who wanted to comtribute, they were probably put off.
Now you can start to flame me.
CDDL is not “strong copyleft” (not viral):
“3.6. Larger Works.
You may create a Larger Work by combining Covered Software with other code not governed by the terms of this License and distribute the Larger Work as a single product. In such a case, You must make sure the requirements of this License are fulfilled for the Covered Software.”
It’s permissive license, but somehow it’s “compatible” with everything (even proprietary EULAs) – just not GPL.
Notice similarities to MPL (http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/license-policy.html), which (what a coincidence) is not compatible with GPL either (and for that reason Mozilla distributes its products under double/triple licenses).
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