On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 4:42 PM, Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:
HURD is taking long because of its goals to surpass most existing kernels, and having had numerous rewrites. Both are likely a result of having a working kernel in Linux, and if Linux had not existed and BSD's kernel not forked, I think it very likely the complexity would be put off and a simplistic HURD completed a long time ago. At this point, this line of discussion has become purely "what if" and therefore pointless, so I doubt it's worth continuing.
LOL you made me laugh again. You do realize that they said the EXACT same thing fifteen years ago? HURD was overambitious, impractical, and had a bad development model. Nowadays it is simply an academic exercise.
But you are correct sir, let's return to the task at hand.
Greg, the guy I quoted earlier, is a Linux developer and copyright holder. Furthermore, none of the developers nor RMS are IP lawyers. The only citation of IP lawyers thus far in this discussion has been that binary modules are illegal.
I stated "significant parties" for a reason. There are thousands of contributors to the Linux kernel. Given that Stallman wrote the GPL and that Linus is the principal copyright holder I think that their statements are far, far, far more important than what "Greg" says. No offense to him or his efforts.
Copyright holders have the ability to grant permission to use their IP in ways different from their copyright. You could argue that Greg could try and sue nVidia for its infringement, but don't you think that it is an absurd effort and unlikely to succeed given that Torvalds wouldn't be party to it? I'm certainly no IP lawyer, but I'd think that a court would have a hard time determining injury without a claim of one by Mr Torvalds.
Jeffrey.