sue OpenSource Ltd.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tzafrir Oct 01, 2004 3:54 PM EDT |
The author seems to believe that there is a "open source company" whose interests are to promote the FOSS programs. This is simply incorrect. Whereas some will only use or only write free software because proprietary software is immoral in their opinion, most of the users and even most of the development contributions come from people for which a specific free software work (I personally try to avoid non-fre software. But this is mostly for practical reasons: the overhead of licensing is too much in many cases, and generally not worth the bother unless there is no reasonable free alternative) The GPL is RMS's great idea on how to make all of those selfish contributers cooperate. Those selfish contributors have nothing more in common than any other regular companies/individuals. There's no point in trying to set up a separate dispute resolution mechanism, as parties won't use it if they don't have the will to cooperate. And if they have the slight will to resolve the conflict rather than go to court, there are many existing channels. The author further suggests forcing much stricter code contribution rules. Forget it. Take a look at the Linux kernel project and see what simple solution they have come up with. And this is for a huge project with almost 500 names in its CREDITS file. The source is there for the world to see. Many projects have their source control system available for the world. Others simply publish their releases. Almost all keep a reasonable changelog. There is no way you could easily prove that the code did not come from an external (private) source, because that source is simply not available for the other contributors to verify agains. No amount of analysis will help here. |
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