One quibble

Posted Sep 2, 2004 8:00 UTC (Thu) by mbp (subscriber, #2737)
Parent article: Pointless ideology?

To be fair, this problem of the driver being pulled out is not *entirely* due to licencing.

Two things happened here:

1. Greg K-H noticed the hook to support non-free code, and removed it.

2. In response to that, Nemosoft asked that the entire driver be pulled out.

Although the provocation was a conflict over closed code, Nemosoft's actions are entirely independent of the licence. The uncompressed-data driver was removed because the author wanted it removed, and Linus and Greg decided to respect that. Nemosoft couldn't force it to come out, but it seems the maintainers thought it was good to do what he wanted. I think I'd do the same; it's bad form to go against the wishes of the author even if it's technically legal.

That could happen with anything else: if a kernel flamewar pushes somebody over the edge we might lose a filesystem one day, for example. Or at least, the author might disown it. I think if it's a significant feature then someone will eventually pick it up and fork it, which may happen with this driver.