Path: csiph.com!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder3.hal-mli.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!us.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!news-1.dfn.de!news.dfn.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Rainer Weikusat Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.apps Subject: Re: FOSS and development philosophy; was "Linux O_NONBLOCK bug/ quirk" Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 16:46:43 +0100 Lines: 30 Message-ID: <87wqf5t7vg.fsf@sable.mobileactivedefense.com> References: <878uro7xkp.fsf@sable.mobileactivedefense.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: individual.net ngOlCaRW56R+Bp+9GFdE+QcAtiHDDDLLoX7uVfUQsQLfc9s0E= Cancel-Lock: sha1:Yu13VtnOHzurI+6pxSn4KQvGhak= sha1:Icu7aXs+a7CNrKMKienrum/3w3Q= User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.2 (gnu/linux) Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.development.apps:683 crankypuss writes: > On 04/02/2014 05:57 AM, Rainer Weikusat wrote: [...] > Then we're back to people needing to eat food and sleep in a warm > place, that tends to jerk folks around on a short chain. And back to > the fact that a lot of good code is buried where "users" never see it, > what users want is glitz so there's a lot of bad glitz out there. Harking back to the GPL: Since 2003, I've worked for a succession of rather small 'proprietary software companies' which has enabled me to pay my bills but little else and even this only with constant worries. I'm living in the humble luxury that I have enough to eat (this wasn't always the case in earlier times) and can, if I so desire, always spend more money on 'recreational alcoholic beverages' than I usually consider sensible but that's about it (minus basic necessities). During the same time, a bunch of people who are about my age or only a little older on average have become 'insanely rich' (by my modest standards) despite giving all their code away 'for free' under GPL and that's - frankly - not because they're so immensely 'talented' while I'm so completely hopeless: I've written my share of device drivers, have ported some version of Linux to an hitherto unsupported ARM architecture etc etc etc and all of this code has at least been used by hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of people without problems. Ergo: The GPL in itself is not only not a problem but may actually be helpful in suitable circumstances.