Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Daniel Robbins' come back ?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Monday 14 January 2008, James wrote:
> If it dies lots of folks
> can pick up the code, rename it and start a fork that can be GPL or
> commercial, IMHO.   The GPL get's in the way, IMHO. Handing it over
> to Daniel with ~100% non publish control is a recipe for the serfs
>  and the majority of the serfs to get the privilege of remaining on
> massa's farm, IMHO.
>
>
> Why else do you think the real discussions are going on behind
> closed doors?

Even if Daniel does wrest control of Gentoo from the non-existant 
Foundation and change the license on Gentoo's copyright works, very 
little actually changes.

He can't prohibit anyone from using what they already have under GPL, 
and each one of us already has a complete copy of portage on our 
machines. If he does turn Gentoo into some evil empire, the rest of us 
always have the choice to say "So long, it was nice knowing you", fork 
and create a new distro. A new gentoo might be able to tell us that we 
can't use any portage code published after tomorrow, but so what? How 
much code is that actually going to be?

Same with the docs, that was published under CC Attribution/Share-Alike. 
I can rip all of http://www.gentoo.org/doc/ right now with wget, remove 
the Gentoo logo and stick it up on any web site I feel like as long as 
I clearly say (preferably on every page) that the original was written 
for and copyrighted by the Gentoo Foundation. Nothing anyone does now 
or in the future can legally prevent me from doing that.

Trying to undo the GPL on Gentoo's creative works will be distro 
suicide, as no distro has ever managed it, and Gentoo is in no position 
to try. Red Hat is the most business-savvy Linux out there and they are 
very very careful to GPL every last keystroke. SuSE tried to keep Yast 
proprietary but when Novell bought them, the community forced their 
hand and now Yast is open source and we have OpenSuSE a la Fedora. 
Ubuntu is moving toward GLPing Launchpad last I heard (I can't fathom 
why it's taking so long...)

No distro has ever managed to succeed in the Linux market with anything 
other than the GPL, fully and completely complied with.

I don't doubt that Daniel has financial goals for Gentoo. The original 
reason he left, amongst others, was because he couldn't get this past 
the other leaders at the time, and he had pressing financial needs. 
It's not unusual to negotiate these things behind closed doors. I sure 
as hell wouldn't do it in public right now. Heck, I'd have to contend 
with people like myself who factually couldn't add much to the 
negotiations but certainly have an opinion. No thanks, I wouldn't do it 
that way.

I don't see much of a downside overall. If worst comes to worst then 
Daniel kills Gentoo and we fork.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
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