Re: [git pull] drm

Linus Torvalds
2009-12-10T18:43:29Z

On Thu, 10 Dec 2009, Maarten Maathuis wrote:
>
> You assume that Red Hat has full control over the project, which i
> don't think is the case. The reason it isn't in staging yet (as far as
> i know) is because of some questions over the copyright of some
> (essential) microcode. Either the question needs to be answered, or it
> has to be reverse engineered to the point that it's possible to
> generate it.

I think people are just making up excuses, as evidenced by the fact that
you're quoting a different excuse than I've heard before.

The fact is, if there are license questions, then Fedora had better not be
distributing the code either. And they clearly are.

And don't tell me about "full control". There's absolutely full control
over it being included or not.

When I brought this up at the kernel summit, there were various other
random excuses. I think one of them was that it wasn't part of an official
Fedora release (which is sure as hell not true at least as of Fedora 12).

I've heard the "but it's hard to merge" excuse too - which I also know is
bullshit, because I can look at the git tree Fedora apparently uses, and
it merges without any conflicts what-so-ever.

The most common excuse is the "oh, but it might change" crap. But that's
not even a very good excuse to start with, and it's what staging is for
anyway.

Somebody even made the crazy comment that "but Fedora isn't a real
distribution, so it doesn't need to follow the rules everybody agreed to
several _years_ ago wrt merging stuff to mainline".

I _think_ that last one was meant as a joke. But it's damn hard to tell,
because the ones that are apparently sincere are equally crazy. People
just seem to make up total crap to make excuses for something that
everybody knows is wrong.

Linus