Having offended everyone else in the world, Linus Torvalds calls own lawyers a 'nasty festering disease'

Re: So, to sum up...

I would guess that Bradley Kuhn is trying to become some sort of an important "High Priest" in the community. Having them too involved is a risk hardly worth taking, easily poisonous indeed.

It's a general rule that you ought to distrust anyone who is "speaking up for you" when you haven't asked them to because it means that someone is serving their own playbook and using your name for it. If you come across someone like that you must disabuse them of that notion ASAP, preferably by formally informing them that they do not speak on your behalf, because I give you one guess who will get the blame and problems when the activities of such people go sideways.

Yes, not your "representative" - it'll be you.

It's an old political trick.

Re: So, to sum up...

I would guess that Bradley Kuhn is trying to become some sort of an important "High Priest" in the community. Having them too involved is a risk hardly worth taking, easily poisonous indeed.

If you don't attempt to enforce the GPL, then you may as well have used the BSD license in the first place. Some people might be fine with that outcome (eg. permissive license proponents), but for the GPL to have any practical meaning in the real world, someone has to bring the legal actions necessary to hold to account those who breach the terms of the license.

Whatever you might think of their personal motives (and I, having followed these issues for many years, think you're completely wrong), Bradley Kuhn and the SFC are doing the dirty, apparently thankless, job that no-one else seems to want to do.

Re: So, to sum up...

I would guess that Bradley Kuhn is trying to become some sort of an important "High Priest" in the community. Having them too involved is a risk hardly worth taking, easily poisonous indeed.

I found it funny that Mr. Kuhn isn't even a lawyer. Perhaps he is actually looking to become the next RMS.

Re: So, to sum up...

Indeed, having any person set themselves up as some kind of important "High Priest" in any community -- for example, the kernel developer community -- is a risk hardly worth taking, and as you say, poisonous.

Re: So, to sum up...

Um...I don't think Shakespeare [I]did[/I] hate lawyers, and Christ didn't want the competition...

Re: So, to sum up...

I expect to be dealing with a lawyer soon.

Her family has been working with my family for generations. She knows her stuff. We meet to get specific jobs done. It's likely to be another will. It's something essentially routine.

This instance does sound more like an outsider trying to stir trouble. It needed lawyers to make the GPL. and I have seen enough cases of tech-industry lawyers straining to understand what they are dealing with. At some point there will be a test case.

Linus may be right about this lawyer, but if he thinks he doesn't need a lawyer at that discussion, he's dangerous too. Law and computer programming each have their own jargon, and I have certainly come across computer programmers with a strange idea of what the law says. You can see the same with other specialised areas. It is perhaps the biggest problem in politics, finding somebody who really knows what they're doing, who you can trust to give you advice.

Re: So, to sum up...

As a self-proclaimed MS-fanbøy, I can only echo your sentiments.

Jolly nice of you to exclude yourself from the start from People Who Have A Clue™ - using MS products is sometimes not a matter of choice for all sorts of circumstances, but being a fanboy is - there is no feasible excuse for that one, that's a personal mistake choice.

And yes, in that context I can well imagine a hate for lawyers - with all the court cases Microsoft has lost, they cannot not be a fan. The only positive thing the legal world has done for Microsoft was SCO vs Linux and hanging to FAT patents.

Re: So, to sum up...

Marketing people are of course #1 on the list.

No - just above them should be "Project Managers". They are overpaid worthless parasites. They are the wasps of the engineering world - they have no reason to exist.

Re: So, to sum up...

As a self-proclaimed MS-fanbøy... First ones against the wall when the revolution came and all that. Marketing people are of course #1 on the list.

So RICHTO/Vogon gets on your tits too?

Strangely comforting!

Re: So, to sum up...

We've all muttered "fucking morons" or similar when reading a choice helpdesk ticket, discovering some particular anal fissure of code, or some other WTF implementation in hardware or software that is impossible to fathom, it's just most of us keep our feelings to ourselves to keep our friendships, jobs, and professional relations more or less intact. With his position, he can apparently afford to turn off his filter. That doesn't mean he'd be a lot of fun to work under for some.

That's the price of fame, you can't just go public on anything that comes up in your head, not in the least because it means you're an inconsiderate, asocial f*ckwit.

However, even in that context I'd be less forgiving because (a) if that is your (apparently continuous) internal dialogue, you really need help and (b) it means you have zero consideration for the feeling of others which happens to deprive you of a route and the goodwill to improve matters, which is potentially more brain dead than the original issue.

I've worked with people who made mistakes that took a while to undo (and led to some very firm discussions, but I have those behind closed doors, not in public), but by taking the time to guide them through those and work out where they went wrong they learned. And improved.

Praise in public, discuss in private, debate with care.

Re: So, to sum up...

yeah,

attention grabbing but misleading headline, check

half the article then converted into a hatchet job, check

obvious author bias, check.

basic click bait article designed to stir the pot. Pretty poor from El'Reg

> Effectively Red Hat and Oracle have both done that. They publish their own version of the kernel as a tarball

Haha. Not sure if that's meant to be a joke since the main reason that Redhat produce a monolithic patch of their modifications to the kernel is to stop Oracle from hijacking their work.

Publishes its own kernel?

The Red Hat (that's two words folks) mantra is "upstream first."

The RHEL kernel is whatever version it claims to be, plus 500 (or whatever the real number is) patches of fixes back-ported from Linus's tree. Red Hat's policy is that No fix – I repeat – no fix is in the RHEL kernel unless it has been accepted into the upstream source. That aside, I'd be amazed if any of the major enterprise distributions aren't doing exactly the same thing.

Red Hat loves Linus, warts and all[1]. AFAIK the notion that Red Hat would fork the kernel and leave Linus behind – just because he's an asshole – is absurd.

[1] Which is kinda sad IMO. I personally think that Red Hat should take a more progressive role in calming Bigus Dickus down and getting him to act more professionally. I personally don't think his behavior reflects well on him or anyone who associates with him. (Guilt by association?) By ignoring his boorish behavior Red Hat is effectively condoning it. Considering how progressive Red Hat is in other areas this one is disappointing.

And if the GPL violator doesn't care to be "educated" nor to bring themselves into compliance with the license? What then?

Re: So?

Good counterpoint - except Linux is much more successful than Unix.

Re: So?

Oh... mention to him how he wouldn't have anything around the kernel without the FSF and watch him blow steam out of his ears. That can be fun.

I like to do the reverse with Stallman who is far further removed from the real world than Torvalds. You can start gently by just calling Linux "Linux" and not "GNU Linux" and work your way up to the fact that the Hurd doesn't seem all that lively compared to Torvald's kernel - by that point he'll either stomp off or his beard will catch fire. This is the short version, of course, if you have time you could insert a firm conviction that the BSD license is better than even the LGPL, just to lengthen the path to self-ignition..

Re: So?

Actually not.

There were so many forks of UNIX that it devolved. Now there are three varieties of BSD, and a few dozen varieties of UNIX (one for each vendor), and none of the kernels are all that cross compatible. Just try taking a driver from AIX and add it to a Mac OS/X.... Not a chance. Try taking a driver from Solaris and add it to AIX or OS/X (or even any of the BSD systems)... not a chance.

Contrast that with Linux. A hundred or so distributions - yet the linux kernel is cross compatible with all of them.