Le Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:19:44 +0200, Lucian Adrian Grijincu <lucian.grijincu@xxxxxxxxx> a écrit:
I'm completely aware of the licensing issue and how distributing code linked to GPL would affect companies using Haiku. IANAL, but I think distributing such a file system driver as a loadable module would not let GPL go viral on the rest of the kernel.
It wouldn't.But the choice of making haiku free software was made in a different context and thinking than the choice of many other projects. Basically the idea was to secure the code so if the project dies (like that hapenned for Be, Inc), the code is still there and other people can take over the work. Most of the people working on Haiku at that time were not coming from the opensource world, but people willing to keep their favourite OS alive, for all kinds of different reasons, including being able to sell proprietary software for it.
This is the spirit of Haiku : you can contribute to the project and take from it the way you want, and we make it possible to use it as a closed-source application with all the changes you may need. Thus, we are trying to keep gpl code away from the system core.
Such objections were raised for ndiswrapper but some users found value in it. I understand why you don't see this as a morally/ideologically correct solution.I know how convoluted the Linux ext3/4 code can be, especially when you throw journalization into the mix and I have seen problems created by file systems silently eating away data. I don't think it's a clean way to do things either, but I see it as a pragmatic choice: have the functionality here, now and concentrate on the things that make Haiku great.
Well, native support of the filesystems on my hard disk seems like a thing that makes haiku great :o) We are trying to get things done the right way. When I look at linux and see things like gnash, with hundreds of dependancies that were not really strictly needed, I fear the same may happen to Haiku...
The same holds for ndiswrapper as you say, but also with wine. Wine is slightly older but definitely didn't help with linux getting more native apps (google applications are tested with it but never get a really native port to linux, which in turns lock them from running on a different OS or CPU architecture...)
-- Adrien Destugues / PulkoMandy http://pulkomandy.ath.cx
