BoughtForFreedom™

As usual, Monco over on LHB can’t be bothered to do the spade work: so I will.

Specifically, this comes from here. But that’s just Pogson. Pogson can generally be ignored.

So what’s the latest glorious news on the battlefront between Eurasia, Oceania, and Eastasia? Are we winning yet? Where’s the Airstrip?

It’s so difficult to tell. But, in the Spirit of Freedom (which is of course entirely different to the Spirit of St Louis), here is the news:

(1) Google forks the Linux kernel, takes it to one side, and refuses to give it back.
(2) IBM and HP (and others) follow suit.
(3) Apple goes another way and forks BSD. But that’s all right, because BSD isn’t really free. Not unless they sacrifice the right goat under the right pyramid on the correct midnight, anyway.
(4) Not content with (1), Google now re-uses some fork of the Linux kernel as the basis for a forked Java stack with an incompatible JVM (Dalvik) and other encumbrances. But don’t worry. It’s free, as in you’ll never see any of it.
I missed out Oracle and others along the way. And I missed out Linux in 't Cloud. Oh well.
Apparently, it’s OK if you’re a corporation and you use the license against itself and, effectively, steal free software. Well, isn’t that nice? Also Piestar (sorry for formatting, but the website is playing up).