Re: The Trolling on the freebsd- lists

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    There's always emotion involved, but there's an easy solution.  The
    primary problem is that (A) many people have a myopic view of open
    source...  so anything that threaten's 'their' project tends to threaten
    them personally, and (B) Regardless of the software being freely reusable
    by others, when an author loses control over a piece of code he wrote,
    or system he has been a major part of, it can be a stressful and emotional
    experience.  So when someone forks a project the people with these
    particular afflictions will almost certainly feel that their hard work
    is being stolen and make some hay, so to speak.

    But if they want more control, they shouldn't be playing in the open 
    source sandbox.

    The truth of the matter is that open source is about as borderless as you
    can get.  FreeBSD as we know it would not exist without gcc, ssh, cvs,
    mozilla, XFree86, fvwm2, gimp, konq, multi-platform drivers (such as
    the sound drivers), firewire, usb, and so forth.  Nor would Linux,
    nor would any other free operating system.  The major differentiator for
    all of these systems is with the capabilities, features, and performance
    of the operating system core.

    So, what that means is that we freely take those pieces from other
    systems, like the USB core, which are better then what we currently
    have, we freely ignore those pieces that are junk or do not achieve
    the level of reliability that we expect, and we build the rest fresh.
    And I expect the result is going to be pretty blasted good when the day
    is over.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>