Boy did he get back to me on it. Check out the post titled " Long but
Insightful Linux commentary" here:
http://www.aliceandbill.com/
He included both Q and Richard's remarks on their site! Also mentioned
ACF!!
And his response shows he doesn't it at all.
First he says Linus can't own Linux if it's open source.
This is not entirely correct. Linus owns the copyright on Linux and
has released it under the GPL. This means that while he cannot
CONTROL Linux development any more than anyone else, he still OWNS it.
More importantly, he and the team of kernel developers are the people
who really control the kernel. A lot of people may work on portions
of the kernel, but nothing gets put into it "officially" until Linus
or Alan Cox or some others agree it goes in.
Linus is in a sense the "Godfather" of Linux. If he were to
disapprove of something, it's not likely to happen - at least as far
as the kernel is concerned.
OTOH, he definitely does not control things like the KDE and GNOME
desktops.
Secondly, the response says he took a job because there was no money
to be made from Linux. Somebody should mention Red Hat to this guy.
Linus is a developer, not a corporation. How is he supposed to make
money off Linux without a company? This guy should note that Linus is
making money working for a foundation that promotes Linux - one which
is funded by big corporations like IBM, so it's not going away anytime
soon. (Technically Linus is on "sabbatical" from his "regular" job at
Transmeta, but he's unlikely to be doing anything but Linux work in
the future, I would guess.)
Not to mention that the fact that it's not easy to get rich off of
open source has not stopped open source from making it hard for closed
source people to get rich. Microsoft is being forced to negotiate
major deals much more aggressively because open source alternatives
allow people to threaten Microsoft with defection if they don't lower
their prices.
His third notion is that IBM will force Linux to be "sold" to them.
This is impossible since the license is the GPL. IBM has tried to be
in the PC software business before - remember OS/2? - and got its ass
kicked by Microsoft. Linux is the only thing that stands between IBM
kissing Bill Gates's ass forever and a modicum of independence for IBM
in the PC arena. IBM can no more afford to walk away from Linux than
they can afford to walk away from the Internet or Java or anything
else currently on the market (unless of course they invent something
better - which so far they haven't been able to do.) Nobody is saying
that IBM has become an angelic company - no one is more surprised than
me that IBM is supporting anything even remotely resembling open
source. But to suggest that IBM's long term game plan is to force
Linux into its ownership is stretching things.
Basically, this guy just doesn't get it. His reference to being in
the business long enough to understand how things work indicates to me
that he's been in the business too long to get anything new.
I might agree that once the big companies like IBM, Sun, Novell, and
Oracle get their hooks into Linux big time, that they may be able to
come out with versions that are incompatible with community developed
versions. But in all cases under the GPL, they have to release the
source code to anything that is directly applied to the kernel or any
other software connected to Linux which is under the GPL. If they
don't, they get sued by somebody eventually - assuming anybody has
enough legal funds to do that. The GPL AFAIK has only been tested in
Europe, not the US.
In any event, it's mostly irrelevant. Most of the development of
Linux will continue right along regardless of what the big companies
do. Nobody can stop coders from working on open source and nobody can
stop its distribution one way or the other.
The only significant threat Linux faces is a massive patent lawsuit
blitz from Microsoft. And even that would only threaten the US-based
distros (and perhaps the Euro ones if software patents fly over
there.) But you can bet the Asian countries - Japan, China, and South
Korea already working toward Linux distros of their own - will give
the finger to Microsoft in that case. It might not even fly in the US
and result in silly software patents being rescinded by the Patent
Office. And even patent lawsuits cannot stop coders from working on
and distributing Linux.
The bottom line is that he's simply afflicted with "neophobia".
