Re: [PATCH] Remove Bitkeeper documentation from Linux tree

Stevie O
2002-04-20T22:06:21Z

From what I can see, this is the situation:

Daniel is now bothered by the presence of BK documentation in the Linux kernel tree. Therefore, he submitted a patch to remove this documentation.

Just about everybody else involved in this thread accuses him of censorship, for attempting to restrict the dissemination of ideas. I do not know whether all of these people use BK; all I know is the "censorship" claim, on the basis that he is restricting the dissemination of information.

I ask this: What if, instead of Daniel removing this documentation change, Linus himself did the patch?

2600 asserted that source code is speech, with the DeCSS case. I doubt EVERYONE here agrees with that, but I do agree that source code is a very precise form of communcating ideas...

(1) If I were to write a driver, and submit it for inclusion with the mainline kernel, would Linus be "censoring" me if he did not include my patch?

And here is a better reason:

(2) If I had such a driver included in mainline, and that driver broke in the 2.5 series -- due to, say, BIO changes, VFS changes, procfs changes, DMA changes, PCI subsystem changes, you get the idea -- and as a result, Linus chose to remove it from mainline, he's restricting the dissemination of my ideas (driver). Does that mean he is censoring me?

--

Stevie-O

*This sig was deleted for violating the DMCA.*