Archive for April 13th, 2005

RMS Right Again

Wednesday, April 13th, 2005

Those of you familar with the Linux Bitkeeper saga know that RMS was very against the move to use bitkeeper to maintain the linux kernel because it forced software developers to use non free software when developing the linux kernel.

Linus Torvalds, who works at OSDL, justified it’s use by claiming it would result in more open source software, not less, and as such it would be a net gain for the open source community.

RMS pointed out this was exactly the difference between free software and open source software, and that Linus was a bad philosophical leader. A lot of other people had concerns with locking up the revision data inside a proprietary database with no way to get it out in case McVoy and the Bitkeeper gang changed the license around last minute or something. Lo and behold, McVoy killed the free version, and the people using Bitkeeper were kind of screwed.

The reason McVoy killed the free version was because Andrew Tridgell, who also works at OSDL, was reverse engineering the protocol so people have an open source client that could access data they had a right to that was locked into a proprietary database. Linus, amazingly, was against this.

(more…)

FCC v. Brand X

Wednesday, April 13th, 2005

There have been two court cases recently heard by the supreme court that are very important to the future of the internet. I’ve been wanting to write an entry on them since oral arguments were made but never got around to it. The first was the FCC v. Brand X, the second the all famous MGM v. Grokster case. Due to my laziness the great Lawrence Lessig beat me to the punch in noting how relevant these cases are to the stewards of end to end internet. Now that the oral argument transcripts have been posted, I have no excuse not to comment. The law is however, a very interlinked and complicated thing, so bear with me.

(more…)