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> In reality, the opposite is true even though it burns up FSF folks. Linux is alive and well. You can download, read, edit and contribute back to the kernel fo

> In reality, the opposite is true even though it burns up FSF folks. Linux is alive and well. You can download, read, edit and contribute back to the kernel for free. Maybe your patches won't be accepted, but the license doesn't guarantee that they will be anyway. This isn't untrue, but it does not take away the main point: the community that drives the development agenda and dictates priorities is no longer a community of independent programmers (in the broad sense of the word; many contributions used to come from people who were hired by commercial entities, but they were still relatively small groups, and contributions were limited to small pieces that were specifically interesting for their small-ish employers: a driver for this or that network card, improvements in this routing protocol and so on). This is no longer the case, and the development agenda of the Linux kernel is almost completely dictated by large players, at the expense of small ones and, to a large degree, individual users.

epistasis 10y ago
> at the expense of small ones and, to a large degree, individual users. Is that a real expense at all though? I would argue that, empirically, it is zero. As in zero evidence of contributions to Linux detracting from my needs as a small player and user. Every community is going to drive things in their "own" direction, and that direction is largely dictated by use by those developers. If it were a difference, an expense on the people, there would be a community with differing views of what the kernel should be doing. They could contribute code towards their ends, or fork. Given that there is practically zero interest in this, I would say that it's fairly clear that a so-called "corporate Linux," in the form of largely corporate code contributions, has come at zero expense to the "people."

epistasis 10y ago

> at the expense of small ones and, to a large degree, individual users. Is that a real expense at all though? I would argue that, empirically, it is zero. As in zero evidence of contributions to Linux detracting from my needs as a small player and user. Every community is going to drive things in their "own" direction, and that direction is largely dictated by use by those developers. If it were a difference, an expense on the people, there would be a community with differing views of what the kernel should be doing. They could contribute code towards their ends, or fork. Given that there is practically zero interest in this, I would say that it's fairly clear that a so-called "corporate Linux," in the form of largely corporate code contributions, has come at zero expense to the "people."