What is Linux ? (Was Re: Formal Member Registration)

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 29, 2000 at 01:09:58PM +0530, Indranil Das Gupta wrote:
> term "community" in a loose sense)... the principal underlying
> binding that held us all together was the technology and the
> love/fascination/admiration/fanaticsm we shared for it... although
> the so-called "politics of Linux" was also in evidence.

Technology helps people socialize. The Mozilla party for example had
a network of machines for playing Quake. Is there a quake movement or
community ?

> political statement. If the GNU/GPL is a political statement, by the
> same yardstick, the FreeBSD license model is as much political as is
> the proprietory model of s/w licensing....

Non aligned movement _is_ a /political/ movement of the cold war era.
I think BSD is similar in many respects. You could use it to socialize,
have fun, exchange code, do academic research and later you could use
it to earn a living. In that sense, it's politically neutral. The emphasis
is on technology, not the community.

When Bill Joy took away the code and started Sun Microsystems, few people
saw him as a traitor. He continued to be a part of the BSD world and 
respected for his technical prowess and vision.  Compare that to his
colleague James Gosling's fate.

> I don't feel comfortable with the idea that Linux is good but
> GPL is bad. Sure... GPL does make things a little difficult for
> ppl/organisations trying to commercially exploit the potentials of
> Linux... 

One of the reasons why I'm quibbling over the use of words here. By
repeating the same themes over and over again, people are conditioned
to believe the ideas. "Commercially exploit" is the case in point.

> Technical points aside, IMVHO, its precisely the GPL that makes Linux --
> Linux and not FreeBSD!

That's the heart of the argument. After spending the last 6 months or
so reading BSD mailing lists and literature (predominantly FreeBSD),
I think Linux ~= FreeBSD. Even if you were using FreeBSD, you'd be
asking the same questions about fetchmail, sendmail, apache, X, networking
and to a lesser extent, perl, python and C. 

Because, the non GPL'ed projects focus on software and not the community,
you don't hear that much about them - you just use them and get your job
done.

A side effect of this whole community business is software bigotry. Even
when someone comes up with a technically superior solution (Note: I'm not
saying that BSD is "better than" linux in all respects), you can't move
away "betraying" your brothers and sisters in the community [1].

So when you say "Linux", a significant (but non vocal) part of it is
really "FreeBSD". You just don't realize it, because there is no
community or the movement.

For those of you watching from the sidelines, asking yourselves, "Man,
I'm impressed! But should I go burn my Linux CD and buy a FreeBSD CD ?",
my advice would be to stick with Linux, if Linux is getting your job
done (as is most likely). But please be aware of these issues and if
Linux were to move further into GPL land (as I hope would not happen)
or you start experiencing growing pains with Linux, remember there is
an alternative. 

	-Arun

[1] You probably won't have that much of a problem switching from
sendmail to qmail or postfix. But you realize that you have a problem
switching from Linux to FreeBSD. Why ? It's the community and movement.
Is that good or bad ? It's up to you to decide.