Creating an operating system with Linux but without GNU

Antonio Olivares olivares14031 at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 29 19:15:48 UTC 2008


> If you are going to make this effort, why not just ditch
> the kernel too 
> and re-implement any missing drivers for the *BSDs or
> OpenSolaris 
> instead?  That way you lose both the zealot political
> movement and the 
> restrictive license in one fell swoop and end up with code
> that people 
> can actually use.  You'd get dtrace and zfs as a bonus
> and the decades 
> of having to duplicate and waste effort because of GPL
> restrictions that 
> prevent sharing could finally be over.
+1)  See below
> 
> -- 
>    Les Mikesell
>     lesmikesell at gmail.com
> 
> -- 

To those still monitoring this thread, The comments section at Distrowatch.com is flooded with GPL stuff

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080728&mode=67#comments

The GPL cops are asking for sources to several distros that have only produced binaries.  They get the sources from a mother distro and make a few changes and then release a distro of their own.  Then people complain that they are not GPL compliant and call RMS and the FSF foundation to make the bastards^{1} give back their code and comply.  

All of this could be prevented if someone follows through with this idea.  The hard part is actually implementing it.  The Linux kernel from kernel.org, even with the non-free stuff supports a great deal of devices that are not supported over at *BSD and OpenSolaris, if those devices are made available and the support is there.  It would help tremendously alleviate the problems encountered over here.  While those problems are not major, they can bite back at any time :(

The other idea is forking the Linux kernel and get rid of the restrictions that pollute/tarnish all the good progress that has been made across the years since the birth of the project.  

Regards,

Antonio 

{1} Those distros that use GPL code and distribute binaries and do not post their changes or source files(with modifications), and therefore fully comply with the GPL.



      




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