Re: Wasting our Freedom

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[email protected] wrote:
you claim that it's unethical for the linux community to use the code, but brag about NetApp useing the code. what makes NetApp ok and Linux evil? many people honestly don't understand the logic behind this. please explain it.


There are two highly relevant angles to this that nobody is mentioning:

1) Does it make sense to share code, at a technical level?

The fact is, BSD and Linux wireless stacks are quite different. Linux also has a technical requirement that "Linux drivers look like Linux drivers." This enables a vast array of source code checking tools like Coverity and sparse, as well as maximizing human reviewer bandwidth.

Therefore, there is a strong /technical/ motivation for the source code to diverge. That's quite natural.


2) Information sharing is both rampant and healthy.

Linux and BSD projects share a vast amount of hardware knowledge, information on how to properly program hardware. Linux folks use BSD code as /reference documentation/, and BSD folks do the same with Linux code.

This is far more efficient in many cases, due to the natural divergence of the respective codebases. It is often easier to look at codebase A, and then mentally translate that into code for codebase B, than to directly copy and reuse code.

	Jeff


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