a long rebuttal to the Linux-is-the-engine fallacy

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 28, 2008, Antonio Olivares <olivares14031 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> But my *kernel* is free.

Nope.  That's another lie they told you.  If it was Free, and it was
intended to be Free, there wouldn't be any need for Linux-libre.

> What is wrong with the Fedora kernel?

It contains non-Free Software.

> I can download it from kernel.org, and compile it and it is free.  

You can't compile all of it, or study the source code of all of it,
because there's non-Free Software without source code in there, or
with source code obfuscated so you can't understand it.  So you can't
adapt it to your needs either.  For several of them, you don't even
have permission to modify.  Some may even cause your license to the
rest of the kernel to be automatically terminated, if as much as one
of the 1500+ copyright holders of Linux decide to take it upon you.

Just compare linux-2.6.26.tar.bz2 with linux-2.6.26-libre1.tar.bz2 and
you'll see how misled and fooled you were by the people you're siding
with and promoting.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}