Re: Nvidia and its choice to read the GPL "differently"

Mark Mielke
2003-01-12T03:16:18Z

On Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 06:23:23PM -0500, Rob Wilkens wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-01-11 at 17:26, Kurt Garloff wrote:
> > It is presumptuous. Very much so.
> I'll accept that on face value, and take your comments five comments as
> good pieces of information which I'll comment only briefly on.

Also take into account that your claim to faim -- vxWorks, a real time
commercial operating system, may not of the same calibre as Linux.

Why do I doubt the calibre of vxWorks? People I trust who work on RT systems
have told me that in many cases, products with RT requirements can perform
better on Linux, than on vxWorks. (Better meaning managing a higher capacity
without significant side effects)

For your suggestion that writing an operating system is not hard -- I
agree with your chosen qualification of 'a'. Most anybody who passes
1st year in CS at university can complete 'a' DOS-like operating
system.

Not just anybody could take this operating system to the next step in
less than a year. I consider Linux several steps above DOS.

Also, FYI, most of the patches that I see coming through here are patches
to *other* people's code, usually code that has not existed more than a
few months. Which doesn't mean that Linus' code is flawless.

Just -- evolution has a price. Sometimes bad, inefficient, or last generation
code must be heavily maintained, or thrown completely out, to be replaced
by code that itself may contain bugs. Since this is "Linux-devel", and not
"Linux-stable", I don't see how you could expect anything else. How many
patches do you see for Linux-2.0.x, or Linux-2.2.x? You'll note that the
majority are for Linux-2.5.x and then Linux-2.4.x. Do the math. Figure it
out.

mark

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