Ugh. Usually I'm only following this list to see what's happening in
the Linux world. But sorry, I can't resist: seeing this mess makes me
happy that I'm running and tracking FreeBSD, where there is a single
CVS source for everything (kernel *and* userland) without such issues;
not to say that there are never conflicts, but at least it is clear
what the single source for the system is, and everyone can view it
(see every single source line being changed) and about 80 people can
directly commit changes. It creates stability, unity and a steady
progress.
And if you consider the number of political fights which have cropped up
over the years concerning the direction of the OS, and who is allowed to
have commit rights and who is allowed to be on the core team, I'm rather
gald that Linux has not taken the BSD route.
Who many political fights have they had, and how bad are they? Well,
the nastiest of them spawned the original FreeBSD/NetBSD split, and the
OpenBSD split later on. And to this day there are occasional arguments
amongst the *BSD folks about who is stealing credit from whom, and who
is taking patches from whom, etc.
It's funny --- the BSD folks say that they don't like the GPL because
they want to let anybody use their code; yet when the OpenBSD crowd
start taking NetBSD patches and applying them to their tree, suddenly
they start singing another tune. There was even the time when a
developer put a copyright notice on their code saying anybody (except
for this particular other BSD variant) was allowed to use that
particular patch file.
And you think we should go that way? No thanks.....
- Ted
P.S. And for us Linux developers, we should take heart knowing that as
bad as some of our internal disagreements have gotten, I don't think our
worse disagreements have ever gotten as bad as the worst of the
internecine BSD conflicts.
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