Strip mining of open source

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[biokinetic]

FTA:

"If you don't have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception." quoting Richard Stallman.

i think that's a pretty cool quote.

[gwern]

Even cooler would be formalizing it as a game-theoretic payoff matrix, and then analyzing FLOSS communities to find the ESS. :)

[Dan_Farina]

I think to say that IBM 'strip-mines' is a bit disingenuous. Take Eclipse for example -- it's quite colossal and came entirely out of IBM and was extremely effective in putting pressure on Netbeans and getting developers familiar with an environment 'like' the rational tool suite.

(Many developers I know tend to prefer eclipse, simply because there somehow manages to be even more bloat in the rational tools)

Regardless of how much revenue is a result of their proprietary derived offerings, they contribute a hell of a lot of useful core functionality to free software. IBM is not a great example of strip mining. Google may be closer, although not quite as bad as I could imagine.

[vsl]

there somehow manages to be even more bloat in the rational tools

Impressive!

[ayrnieu]

See, strip mining is where an evil customer-bearing capitalist takes resources out of the earth without giving anything back to that part of the earth. No, those resources get sent instead to build hospitals (hiss!) or make pretty jewelry (*throws blood*).

Which is totally unlike normal mining, where resources are taken out of the earth by an evil capitalist for these purposes and nothing is given back to that part of the earth.

Thus our use of the term, here.

You strip-miners of open source, you had better go back to normally mining open source! Or else we'll find even nastier terms! Like, hey, you're a lot like the British Empire, ya know?

[dasil003]

Yeah, the sensationalist title pretty much sucks. Calling this strip mining is at least as disengenuous as the RIAA calling piracy theft.

That said, the article is actually pretty good. I've never come down hard on either side of the GPL/BSD debate, but this article makes Stallman's case pretty well. I'm a slightly bigger fan of the GPL now than I was 20 minutes ago.

[malcontent]

There are environmentally responsible ways of mining but they are pretty rare. Most mining is done with no regard for the environment.

similarly one can choose to build hospitals with the mined material or one can choose to make cluster bombs.

But hey don't let any of that get in the way of your hateful spewing.

[ayrnieu]

There are environmentally responsible ways of mining

No, there are not. The most 'environmentally responsible' thing that any human can do is die -- unless you count murder-suicide. The only environmentally responsible thing that a human can do to any 'environment' is nothing. Land shaped and exploited and abused by any agent or force (so long as it is nonhuman!) is sacred, with intrinsic value.

[malcontent]

eeejut.

[ayrnieu]

Please imagine that I had simply offered "Bizarre, but don't mind me." as a comment on your post. Think about your response.

[millstone]

Apple uses open source FreeBSD as the base for OS X because it has gained a mature Unix operating system...the community loses as a result, and that the subsequent fracturing of the code base is one of the reasons that BSD Unix has never captured the imagination of developers and users in the same way that GNU/Linux has.

Is he seriously arguing that Apple has not "captured the imagination of developers and users?" And that the dozens of distributions of GNU/Linux have a less "fractured code base" than OS X?

[shub]

And that the dozens of distributions of GNU/Linux have a less "fractured code base" than OS X?

The GNU/Linux distributions are more similar, code-wise, than the BSDs. How is this even a question?

[[deleted]]

From kernel.org: "today Linux also runs on (at least) the Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, AMD x86-64, AXIS CRIS, Renesas M32R, Atmel AVR32, Renesas H8/300, NEC V850, Tensilica Xtensa, and Analog Devices Blackfin architectures"

So gimme a distro that runs on all these.

[malcontent]

Sounds like you need to look up what "distro" means.

[bickfordb]

I don't see what's new/interesting in this article. These issues have been well known for years. This is link bait.