Re: [tlug] Cultural differences

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:45:07 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:

 
> Er, no.  As long as we're talking about culture, it's important to
> note that the BSD developers maintained completely separate trees of
> the development toolchain as well as libc.  They were forced to use
> GNU tools as the BSD people were unable to cherry-pick from GNU trees
> and maintain their freedom, while GPL-licensed tools are full of BSD
> code, and ended up better because they could use the best modules from
> both worlds.

Not 100% true. It's also because BSD people often come with the
attidute that everything you write should be free enough for them
to be used commercially.

Eg. a friend of mine wrote some linux kernel networking code that
was quite interesting and stirred up some dust. Some BSD people
contacted him, whether it would be possible to relicense the GPL
code so that it could be used in BSD. He agreed to relicense it
under LGPL with static linking exception so that the BSD guys
could use it in their kernels too. The whole talk came to a sudden
halt, when the BSD guys tried to "force" him to release it under
a BSD license so that they could use it commercially as well.
My friend would have agree to that, given proper compensation
(he had spend quite some time on that project), but the friendly
BSD guys didnt want to spend anything.

 
> Many BSDers are still disgruntled, or may be a better word is
> disheartened, about that, as they believe that GNU tools are in
> general bloated overfeatured messes ...

That's not only the BSDers thinking. Anyone who had a look at
glibc, gcc or any other infrastructure GNU code has the same feeling.
Huge, bloated, overcomplicated and buggy code. Not to talk about
such efforts like Gnome and freedesktop where people work on X11
without haveing the slightest clue what X11 is. etc pp.

> ... and are shocked (SHOCKED, I tell
> you) at the relative success of GNU/Linux.  However, that is the goal
> of BSD (may the best project win), whereas GNU will happily shoot off
> its own feet with poorly chosen tools whose developers espouse
> politically correct views (cf Stallman's Choice of infrastructure --
> Bazaar for VCS and debbugs for tracker -- for Emacs).

I'm often surprised how many people are faithfull to the church
of Emacs and follow St.Gnucious every step. A lot of what the FSF
does is utter bullshit. Especially when it comes to technical
decissions.

On the other hand, there majority of OSS developers just ignore
the FSF and RMS. They just have fun coding and enjoy the great
community without caring for any religious views.


> My own opinion is not so much that GNU/Linux had better tools, but
> that it provided a better environment for those who like bright shiny
> things, as Linus's dictatorial development style made the Linux kernel
> much more agile, and he was more open to destabilitizing features,
> more willing to delegate decision-making power to lieutenants, versus
> the relatively conservative *BSD cabals.  But once the balance of
> features shifted to GNU, the GPL made it hard for BSD to catch up.

Yes, Linux (as a OS, not the kernel) wasnt better. It was worse.
But it offered more recognition, reward and play ("Spiel, Spass und Spannung"
for the german speaking people here :-).
That attrackted more people, and more people is always better.

And this problem with the conservative *BSD cabals is still there.
It's still very hard to get patches into BSD. Heck it is even hard
to get patches from *BSD back upstream into your project again.
They just patch your project to hell until you cannot recognize
it anymore in an attempt to get it work on *BSD, but they wont
bother to send those patches upstream, but instead expect you
to check their CVS server for such patches.

			Attila Kinali

-- 
If you want to walk fast, walk alone.
If you want to walk far, walk together.
		-- African proverb