[OT] How to vote (was Re: [oclug] Politics and Linux / Open Source)

[Robert Brockway]

On Sun, 6 Jun 2004, Francis J. A. Pinteric wrote:

> the whole Free Software Movement. The Free Software movement would still
> be nowhere if Linus Torvald hadn't come along.

While I see where you are going with this, I must disagree on this point.

Linux was not the only free OS to emerge between 1991 and 1993.  I
concluded a long time ago that if Linus had not started Linux then all the
people who were attracted to Linux would have ended up in one of the BSD
camps.  There is nothing that has been done to Linux that could not have
been done to one of the BSDs.  Even those who had a problem with the BSD
leadership would not have been left out in the cold since it is trivial to
fork the BSD code into a new distribution.  Today we'd probably mostly be
using FreeBSD and producing huge numbers of BSD Daemon dolls instead of
Tux.

Anyone so enamoured with the GPL as to despise a BSD licence could always
create a new BSD based distribution and add any new applications under GPL
- thus leaving the distribution subject to both licences just as any Linux
distro is today.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org, rbrockway at uqconnect.net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah