Messages in this thread |  | | Subject | Re: BSD-Linux FlameWar over SoftRAID | Date | Wed, 26 Sep 2001 08:12:54 -0600 | From | Warner Losh <> |
| |
[[ This message is sent as a private person and is not an official statement from FreeBSD's core team. ]]
: It is clear that BSD is going off the deep end.
Actually, I'm on the FreeBSD core team. BSD is not going off the deep end. People in slashdot are going off the deep end. The reporter that reported it didn't bother to do his homework. The reporter erred in not checking with those in the Linux development efforts to find if the issue had been resolved. The fact that it had been resolved at least 12 hours before the story hit slashdot (I saw pointers to patches which corrected the problems posted to an IRC channel the night before I saw it on slashdot).
The fact of the matter is that the code was copied from FreeBSD verbatium, or with minor alterations. That's not a problem at all, since our license allows for that. The problem came in that Soren's name was removed from the headers which he'd put a lot of time into. The problem was corrected, no big deal except for the weirdos on slashdot.
FreeBSD's core team has never issued any statements on this issue, nor have we made any demands. Frankly, I think that this is way overblown as well. People should remember that slashdot isn't reality and that it should be taken with a grain of salt.
Healthy code and concept sharing between Linux and FreeBSD (and between any opensource groups) is in everyone's best interest to continue the cooperative competition that we've had in the past.
I won't address the supposed borrowing from Linux -> FreeBSD in the IDE driver in the head of this thread, since I've not done any research on that topic. I do know Soren has access to all the IDE/ATA specs and is bright enough to dig what's necessary out of them. Let's be careful of tossing accusations of theft in a public forum when it is possible that he figured it out himself. Prior availability in Linux doesn't mean that later groups necessarily took anything from Linux to make their code work. Let's not loose sight of the fact that there's plenty of bright people with good will who do good work in both groups.
So take a deep breath and realize that this isn't the end of the world.
Warner Losh
[[ who released ObjectBuilder for Linux as the first (or one of the first) "demoware" product for Linux back in 1992 or 1993 and did some Linux/Mips work. He now happens to be the FreeBSD pccard maintainer and in FreeBSD's governing body named core. ]] - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
|  |