Whats with the petty Open Source Pureness that has killed PWCX

Listman fedora at linsolutions.com
Sun Aug 29 14:06:31 UTC 2004


On Sun, 2004-08-29 at 06:12, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-08-29 at 03:22, Listman wrote:
> > We are all being shafted in this one. For those of you like me that have
> > experienced high quality video courtesy of PWCX.....
> > 
> > http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/
> > 
> > Is their any way to talk some sense into the Kernel maintainers?
> 
> Is there any way to talk some sense into all these people who don't even
> take the time to understand the issue before moaning loudly?
> 
> I mean; the guy demanded his driver to be removed from Linus' tree. We
> might just put the driver back for fedora. We don't know yet.
> 
> As for the hook thing and binary modules... Personally I consider about
> all the binary only kernel modules that are distributed in violation of
> the GPL. I'm not saying one cannot do one which doesn't, just that I
> haven't seen many that don't. Note that that is my personal opinion and
> not my employers'. Nor am I a lawyer. 
> 
> Linus and the bulk of the kernel developers want the kernel to be free
> of pure hooks for binary modules regardless of the outcome of the
> gray-area discussion. The PWC driver author somehow doesn't agree with
> that policy and no longer wants to maintain his driver and has requested
> his driver to be removed. His right to ask that.... Others have been
> reverse engineering this thing in the last few days and it appears it's
> just a fancy interpolation scheme... quite valuable IP that is ;)
> 
> What most "uninformed" people who moan on several mailinglists seem to
> ignore is that the GPL offers anyone the freedom to keep using the
> driver. Linus did not say "Nobody can use this driver". He said "I
> respect the wishes of the author to remove this". Just like Greg/Linus
> removing the hook in their trees doesn't mean you or anyone else doesn't
> have the freedom to put them back. The only snag is that the nemosoft
> guy no longer distributes the binary only bits... which is the part that
> isn't covered by the freedom of the GPL; anyone depending on those bits
> voluntarily gave up their freedom and I find it really hard to feel
> pitty for that.
> 
> The apparent PR campaign (including your email) actually does more
> damage than good; all these random emails contain no new arguments other
> than repeating the incorrect assertions, and as such make the people
> that would matter actually care *less* not more about this issue.
> 
> 
After reflecting on this, I have to agree. What is the point in wasting
core resources? Near term benefits at the cost of long term gains are
always bad under almost all circumstances and especially in this one.

If anything, the user base should be the ones fighting these battles
with the vendors, not the developers. 

Kicks self in @$$.

Ted

















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