Comments on: What? Can’t take a bit of competition?

By: Links 12/07/2009: GNU/Linux Shames Vista 7 and XP in Benchmark | Boycott Novell

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:05:38 +0000

[...] What? Can’t take a bit of competition? So now the IT media world just went wild over Google’s Chrome OS announcement. Comments are coming in from all over, some overly optimistic, some dismissive. All of these are speculative at best, and none of them carry a lot of weight as Google hasn’t even done a code drop yet, much less a release. [...]

By: Rahul Sundaram

Rahul Sundaram — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:01:07 +0000

“I’ve been tracking flame wars between KDE and Gnome since someone decided that GPL wasn’t a liberal enough license for them and started writing a new widget library.”

Qt was a proprietary toolkit and not under GPL when GTK was created. So you got that bit of history wrong. Capitalism isn’t really the opposite of working with the community. In fact, it might save them quite some money to work with the community.

By: feicipet

feicipet — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:36:23 +0000

@Karl:

Yes, agreed. Google is just placing its own bets in this case. They’re free to fail if they want to. The rest of us will just vote on which we think is better.

By: feicipet

feicipet — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:34:18 +0000

@James:

I agree with that. And that’s what the license is supposed to enforce. The letter of the law as opposed to the spirit. It’s really less easy to fudge around on specific legalities.

But in this case, even if Google does not use the full Linux stack and instead cherry-picks the components they want while adding its own implementation of what it deems to be right, it just adds on more choices to our already rich stack as long as those components are released under similar licenses. I really can’t see this as abuse.

By: feicipet

feicipet — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:25:42 +0000

@Magice:
1) Apologies for the insulting tone;
2) However, your arguments towards reinventing the wheel can be abstracted at several different levels. KDE/Gnome apps have never worked well with each other and they represent redundancies / reinventing the wheel as well. Yet, they exist to provide competition to each other and it’s fine. My point is, it’s impossible to pinpoint the yardstick against which all Linux developers must code against for the simple reason that there will never be any consensus. Some might even point to the LSB as the standard to measure against and see how successful that is(n’t), even on the Linux desktop track.

Yes, if Google were to go their own way for most of the OS stack, it would probably isolate themselves from the rest of the Linux world. That may be what they wanted, or it may be to their detriment as well. The knife cuts both ways . All that remains to be seen is whose bet is on the winning horse.

By: James E. LaBarre

James E. LaBarre — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:15:57 +0000

> There seems to be this presumption that having something that’s OpenSource means
> you must “work with the community”. The GPL or any other OpenSource license
> defines the usage of the code. As long as you abide by the terms set in the licenses,
> you’re safe.

No. but for those companies that make use of OpenSource for their products and/or services, we at lest expect some level of RESPECT from them (are you listening eBay, et al?). We don’t expect them to take from the community, then turn around and spit upon the same community as something beneath contempt.

By: Ulrik Mikaelsson

Ulrik Mikaelsson — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:33:37 +0000

Friendly competition is good. But the keyword here is friendly. As long as it’s friendly (friendly as in no unnecessary back-stabbing, and not burning all bridges for cooperation down the line) it’s all good.

Unfriendly competition on the other hands is called war, which only creates minefields, barbed-wire-coated walls and suffering for the losers and innocent alike.

By: Karl O. Pinc

Karl O. Pinc — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:18:46 +0000

There’s capitalism, and then there’s democracy. The GPL and other copyleft licenses ensure that there will always be competition, a free market, _always_. Public access to the development branch, the revision control system, and a willingness, nay eagerness, to accept code contributions is the mark of an open development process. Without those a project is just somebody’s private playground, no matter how big. An open development process is what ensures vibrancy and the ability to keep up with the cutting edge. The network effect of having the whole Internet available as a code contribution resource is unmatched. The history of the XFree86 project serves to illustrate the point. The project owners were a closed circle and development was slow. Now that Xorg has forked the code contributions come pouring in and the new features just keep on coming. It’s the difference between a staid tyrannical bureaucracy, something Soviet block, and a modern, transparent democratic society. Which would you bet on?

License alone doth not a vivacious project make.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:00:05 +0000

Finally some one with some business sense talking about this

By: Magice

Magice — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:57:03 +0000

*sign* feicipet, if you are unable to speak of “community” without drawing the worst possible stereotype of hippies, I believe you should shut up. And if you cannot find a second person to quote on, you should make your post a direct reply. Your way of writing is just too insulting, you think?

Furthermore, about Google Chrome OS, yes, they do break with current “communities”, however you define that. The only thing gets reused is Linux kernel. It seems that they want to write an alternative to Xorg. From Android, I suspect that they would also replace libc and other GNU components. From there, they may also work out a new scheme for sound and everything else. This means reinvent the wheel! Of course, not like I hate people implementing new things, but this means that majority of GNU/Linux software will not work. Nay, this means majority of GUI Unix programs will not work. This is, of course, really bad, since we will need to rewrite everything from scratch, except for the kernel.

Now, does that clarify your doubt? Thank you for being respectful next time.