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My father, as the son of one Protestant minister and nephew of two others, had early experience with church politics, and during his career he also participated in politics of every sort -- academic, university, military. bureaucratic, electoral. He always said that church politics were easily the most intense.
Too bad he never saw open source software politics, though I suppose that would be a subset of "church." (Here and here.) As Stephen Vaughn-Nichols says:
While [the above] were the major Linux stories of 2006, as I look back at the year as a whole, I sense that all this plays into a larger story: there are growing signs that the Linux community itself is forking.
On the one side, you have those who object to Mozilla's trademarked artwork for Firefox so strongly that they'd rather fork Firefox into IceWeasel than "compromise" on letting users modify the image. On the other side, you have Red Hat buying JBoss and joining the New York Stock Exchange to plant itself even more firmly into big business.
I expect we'll continue to see these trends play out in 2007. We'll see Linux stick with the GPLv2, leaving GPLv3 loitering awkwardly on the fringes of open-source. We'll see some groups -- Debian? -- denouncing all the commercial Linuxes -- from Novell to Red Hat to Linspire -- as betraying Linux's free software roots. We'll see the crack between free software idealist and commercial open-source pragmatists grow into a true gap. He does not see this as particularly disastrous: "But, at the same time, Linux is going to grow to new heights in popularity both for individual and business users." He and Bill Gates seem to be on the same page.
posted by James DeLong @ 3:55 PM | Software
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