Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1998 13:56:46 -0500 From: Matthew Cashdollar <mattc@rfcnet.com> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: More ignorance about BSD.. Message-ID: <19980411135646.54588@rfcnet.com>
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Just read this today.. another article from Eric Raymond, author of the "Cathedral and Bazaar" paper... -------cut------------------------------------------------------------- To pragmatists, the GPL is important as a tool rather than an end in itself. Its main value is not as a weapon against `hoarding', but as a tool for encouraging software sharing and the growth of bazaar-mode development communities. The pragmatist values having good tools and toys more than he dislikes commercialism, and may use high-quality commercial software without ideological discomfort. At the same time, his open-source experience has taught him standards of technical quality that very little closed software can meet. For many years, the pragmatist point of view expressed itself within the hacker culture mainly as a stubborn current of refusal to completely buy into the GPL in particular or the FSF's agenda in general. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, this attitude tended to be associated with fans of Berkeley Unix, users of the BSD license, and the early efforts to build open-source Unixes from the BSD source base. These efforts, however, failed to build bazaar communities of significant size, and became seriously fragmented and ineffective. Not until the Linux explosion of early 1993-1994 did pragmatism find a real power base. Although Linus Torvalds never made a point of opposing RMS, he set an example by looking benignly on the growth of a commercial Linux industry, by publicly endorsing the use of high- quality commercial software for specific tasks, and by gently deriding the more purist and fanatical elements in the culture. A side effect of the rapid growth of Linux was the induction of a large number of new hackers for which Linux was their primary loyalty and the FSF's agenda primarily of historical interest. Though the newer wave of Linux hackers might describe the system as ``the choice of a GNU generation'', most tended to emulate Torvalds more than Stallman. -------cut------------------------------------------------------------- (You can read the whole article at http://earthspace.net/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading.html) This guy really badmouths RMS, but I think his comments about BSD falling apart were probably just out of ignorance rather than malice. Ignorance seems to be the number one problem with the Linux people. They will all agree that "Linux is better than FreeBSD." but they can't come up with any reason why and 99% of them have never even used a BSD system!! -- Matthew Cashdollar <mattc@rfcnet.com> RF Communications, Inc. -- http://www.rfcinc.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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