Free software has always been a threat to the "capitalist" business model espoused by the big corporations. This model has no room for products that threaten their high profit margins, so they always attempt to buy or hijack the problem people and products. An example from the dark side is Mark Russinovich being bought off by Microsoft after the Sony rootkit affair.
Another way to look at the Linux Foundation is that we have isolated the problem to a small place and made the corporates pour their money into a different rat hole, but we have to act on that approach, perhaps by forking the kernel and making the community version the important one, removing the Linux Foundation's influence over the real world by simple community action.
While this approach would seem cruel in that Torvalds would be shorn of his halo, in fact devolving the "governance" of the Linux kernel would serve as a way of keeping him honest, and potentially improve the overall product. Just like all of the MySQL forks forced Oracle to be honest, so would a hurd of Linux forks force "Linux" back to the real world.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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Re: Is this trend isolated or common?
Date: 2016-01-23 12:18 am (UTC)Another way to look at the Linux Foundation is that we have isolated the problem to a small place and made the corporates pour their money into a different rat hole, but we have to act on that approach, perhaps by forking the kernel and making the community version the important one, removing the Linux Foundation's influence over the real world by simple community action.
While this approach would seem cruel in that Torvalds would be shorn of his halo, in fact devolving the "governance" of the Linux kernel would serve as a way of keeping him honest, and potentially improve the overall product. Just like all of the MySQL forks forced Oracle to be honest, so would a hurd of Linux forks force "Linux" back to the real world.
Just my $.02