What do to about BitKeeper and the Linux Kernel

Bernhard Reiter bernhard at intevation.de
Fri Mar 8 20:41:53 UTC 2002


On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 09:22:27PM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 07:51:44PM +0100, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

> I haven't seen any piece of nice free software from Linus. No, I don't
> consider Linux nice and you don't want to get me started about it.

Okay.
But note that we also can have _some_ competition and 
different opinions within the Free Software camp.

> > It is good to keep in contact with people who do this.
> > In general it is good to keep communication and discussions going.
> 
> True, but I don't see why we should care about it. We could rather
> support the Hurd instead of putting time in convincing Linus not to
> use BK. Both for technical and social reasons.

Some people will consider linux and important piece of Free Software.  
Others will consider Hurd more important.
We need more people for the hurd, though.

> I don't like the phrase "The Linux kernel". It's a pleonasm, it
> implies that Linux is more than a kernel and that you're talking about
> just the kernel of the bigger thing, which clearly isn't the case.

I wanted to make sure that people recognise that "linux" is the kernel
and not an operating system.

[ About the reasons to develop Hurd ]

There are good reasons to continue to develop the hurd and put it into a
useful state. However it is not as urgent anymore as there are
some free software kernels. 

Thus there are areas, where we do not have Free Software at all.
To conquer these might be more important than to develop another kernel.

> > You have to keep the perspective here.
> > Linus himself never tried to get all credits for an "Operating"
> > system.
> 
> He does by calling the OS "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux". He knows
> that Linux is just the kernel and not the complete OS, but still he
> doesn't call the OS by its right name.

To call it "GNU/Linux" is a lot about the awareness.
If everybody would knew about the importance of the GNU-Project
we could give it any name. Linus knows about the importance.
IIRC he thinks it is okay if people call the whole operating system GNU/Linux.
He also does not care if they call it differently, though.
His wish is to not deal with the political part of the question AFAIK.

The FSF Europe certainly still regards his work on linux as good.

> > Additionally different people have different ideas on how to promote
> > and progress things. Linus is definatly doing good things for the 
> > Free Software-Community. We want him to keep doing this.
> 
> I don't see much good things. I see broken 'stable' versions of Linux,
> waste of manpower, promoting of non-free software, etc.

I'd wish that more people were interested in the Hurd or the GNUStep projects.
But we do not need to downgrade the archievements of the linux developers 
for this to be a legitimate wish.

	Bernhard
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