Re: Honest does not pay here ...

Adam J. Richter
2003-01-06T02:00:17Z

Larry McVoy writes:
>I could be wrong but if I'm not what do you hope to accomplish other
>than wasting a lot of time?

1. A clearer legal situation either way would reduce
competitive economic pressure on employees and companies
alike to go into darker and darker grey areas.

2. A clearer understanding that GPL-incompatible kernel
modules are illegal would prevent a repeat of the old
unix days when lots of companies invested money in
duplicating each other's kernel work. Perhaps fewer
dollars would be invested this way, but I believe
that ultimately more functionality would be delivered
to more people.

3. Most modestly, a clearer understanding that not every
kernel copyright owner grants the
EXPORT_SYMBOL / EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL permissions will at
least help everyone better assess the situation for
themselves in making their own decisions.

[...]
>Until that time,
>how about you go back to coding rather complaining?

Well, let's see. I've recently posted GPL'ed patches to
shrink devfs to a fraction of its size, to clean up /dev/loop, to
remove 1-2 copies in the crypto api path depending on how it's used,
to eliminate the need for special locking to do raceless module
unloading, and my name appears in 11 of the 2.5 ChangeLog files for
various little things. Sorry if I'm not working hard enough for you.

Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 575 Oroville Road
adam@yggdrasil.com \ / Milpitas, California 95035
+1 408 309-6081 | g g d r a s i l United States of America
"Free Software For The Rest Of Us."