Jim has warned us that a war is coming in the open source community, and everyone will be forced to choose sides. The force driving the division is FOSS' Richard Stallman. Novell, the perennially struggling company that Eric Schmidt must be so happy he was able to jump ship from, apparently feels it needs to side with the zealots, and it has announced it will no longer distribute closed modules such as video drivers designed to work with Linux. (There's nothing stopping a Linux end-user from adding them herself, however.) Meanwhile, the Linus in Linux, Mr. Torvalds, continues to badmouth Stallman's GPLv3. He wrote: "The GPLv3 is designed to take the FSF back to its original 'good old days,' when 'Free Software' was a war, and [Stallman] was its proselytizing general. But the fact is, it's not a war, and peaceful and happy co-existence is actually much preferable to moral jihads. And that's why I think the GPLv2 is much better. It allows us all to agree to just work together, without making it a religion." Can one avoid a war, can one refute a religious movement, merely by ignoring it and hoping it will go away? We'll see.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 1:44 PM | Software

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