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Wow. Thanks for noticing and bringing this to our attention, Matthew. I, for one, am ready to drop my membership and stop supporting the foundation. Not that t
by theGimp 11y ago
Wow. Thanks for noticing and bringing this to our attention, Matthew.
I, for one, am ready to drop my membership and stop supporting the foundation. Not that they care. A single platinum sponsor is worth 5,000 individual "supporters" to them, but it's a matter of principle -- it's a withdrawal of endorsement.
What options do we have to give the community a voice as far as Linux governance goes?
- mlinksva 11y agoYou might switch your support to http://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ http://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ (the other organization mentioned in the article, and a charity rather than a trade association).
- JoshTriplett 11y agoSeconded. They currently have a company matching donations through the end of the month, so now would be the perfect time to donate.
- theGimp 11y agoThank you for your recommendation.
- danieldk 11y agoWhat options do we have to give the community a voice as far as Linux governance goes? I think the consequences much more dire than 'just' losing a community voice, when you take VMWare and AllWinner into account. The Linux Foundation is basically a funnel for multiple cooperations to collectively pay the pay checks of some important kernel developers. In other words, some major kernel developers are now indirectly working for companies that make proprietary forks of Linux. If anything, it gives a lot of legitimacy to the actions of AllWinner and VMWare to the outside world.
- vasili111 11y agoOne option is to migrate to FreeBSD.
- anonbanker 11y agoWhat if one doesn't want to abandon the four freedoms the GPL provides? Is there another alternative?
- cyphar 11y agoBSD licensing also offers the same freedoms as the GPL. I do like the GPL for many reasons, and I would prefer contributing to a project that uses the GPL rather than licenses that allow proprietary derivatives of code that I spent time and effort writing.
- xiaoma 11y agoDid you read the article? It said a major issue was the enforcement of copyright claims against GPL violators. The foundation has had a lax approach to this, but one of the community members planning to run for election has a much stricter view. How would moving to a non-GPL alternative possibly be a rational response for community members who wanted to elect someone who would fight for the GPL in court?
- TheCondor 11y agoGovernance? Like they tell Linus what to do or something? I don't think it's quite like that
- jlgaddis 11y agoWikipedia lists the Foundation as Torvalds' employer although their own web site states that "Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel".
- geofft 11y agoAs you might imagine, no, it's not. Linus, by choice, doesn't write most of the code in the kernel, and what code he does write is, again by choice, not primarily driven by what would most amuse him. The Linux Foundation organizes the major Linux development conferences (LinuxCon, Plumbers, Collaboration Summit, etc.), where development plans are discussed in person. Plenty of subsystems have formal workgroups hosted/organized by the Linux Foundation. That's what governance is. This isn't about being the parliament to the figurehead monarch Linus.
- makomk 11y agoThey may already have basically dropped individual membership anyway if I'm reading between the lines of https://sillymon.ch/data/lfmail.txt https://sillymon.ch/data/lfmail.txt correctly - having replaced it with a supporter package that doesn't just lack voting rights, but also emphasises funding for other organisations (currently Outreachy, FreeGeek and #YesWeCode - Outreachy is the spun-off and hopefully better managed version of the former Gnome Outreach Project for Women). Curiously, I think Outreachy is currently run by the Software Freedom Conservancy, though it's a passthrough program which doesn't help fund their GPL enforcement work.