woodenshoe-wi wrote:This makes me think that the best way to protect FOSS projects is to try to stick to the KISS principle. The smaller, more modular and easier to understand each piece is the greater the likelihood that more people would be capable of understanding and maintaining it.
Theoretically it should be harder to "take over" an operating system made up of independent programs, each maintained by independent individuals or teams, than a large distribution with a large, centralized organization.
right. and then, by turning your words into their opposites:
the best way to attack FOSS projects is to try to get away the KISS principle. The larger, less modular and easier to understand each piece is the greater the likelihood that fewer people would be capable of understanding and maintaining it.
this is what james said basically. but if we go to this brian stevens (red hat cto) interview from 2006:
Red Hat's model works because of the complexity of the technology we work with. An operating platform has a lot of moving parts, and customers are willing to pay to be insulated from that complexity.
I don't think you can take one finite element - like Apache - and make a business out of it [ using our model ] . You need product complexity.
http://asay.blogspot.nl/2006/10/intervi ... brian.html
this is what theyve really been doing, and this is what systemd does.
systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux control groups, maintains mount and automount points, and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic.
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/
its complex to the point of absurdity, and made of many parts that are also complex. and it runs everything else.
the attack on foss (from within) goes beyond this. microsoft (who has numerous deals with red hat, and not just red hat) continues to attack foss by attacking companies that use it:
http://techrights.org/category/microsoft/
and then selling "protection" to devlopers like suse and others.
theyre basically shaking down companies that save money avoiding microsoft and demanding to get paid for the right to not be sued over patents.
and then they go and literally take over github. of course they wont do anything to github right away, or probably all at once. but strategically this is important to them.
you cant technically own free software, but you can try, and you can paid for trying (to own and control it.) and thats what microsoft is systematically doing:
trying to gain enough "ownership" of something that belongs to everyone that they can basically tax everything we do and use the money OUR software makes (or saves companies) to fund their attacks on everybody.
these attacks didnt stop when steve stepped down; only the rhetoric changed. theyre still buying up their competition and suing and threatening to sue. all with a ridiculous "<3 linux" slogan on the whole thing.
they even wanted to get a royalty (upheld in germany) on every usb stick that was formatted to work with microsoft windows:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/6/26/314
if you dont pay, you get sued-- if you dont want to get sued, you have to spend time writing around your own code to avoid going to court for patent disputes on patents they refuse to even show you. "but we have them!"
the truth is that microsoft has never stopped kicking around free software authors (or commercial users of free software with deep pockets.)
the literally want to own all their competition-- one way or another-- either by buying the company, licensing the technology for cheap, or suing commercial users and vendors of free software.
non-stop, since 2003 at the latest. buying github is not unrelated.
people think this is a non-issue because hardly anyone ever has to pay out in court. but they have to sign things that say "yes, you own this, this is your patent" and companies are shaken down for money, time (and billions of dollars) are wasted in court--
and on top of everything else, it sets back development for literally years.
its a brilliant strategy (15+ years running) for preventing free software from taking over by abusing the legal system and by obvious antitrust violations.
microsoft never changes.