So my subscription to Linux Journal has
lapsed, and I’m not remotely disappointed. Which is a little sad, since
LJ used to be one of my favorite technology periodicals. For quite a
while LJ and Dr. Dobbs were the only two journals I’d pay to receive:
and now there is one. So what brought about this change? The new editor,
Nicholas Petreley. Well, new may not be the right word — he’s been there
for over six months now. But his column, /etc/rant, has driven me
(and
others) away.
/etc/rant is, as the name implies, a place for Petreley to rant. And
since he’s the editor, that’s his right. Here’s the thing: I don’t like
rants. In particular, I don’t like absolutist positions that don’t allow
for movement. I do like pluralism, and that usually fits right in with
open source software. So while /etc/rant wore on my from the start, the
February column, The Spirit of Open
Source, is when I decided
“yeah, I’m over it.” The Februrary column discussed a particularly silly
flame war brought on when Linus Torvalds recommended KDE over Gnome
stating (my words, paraphrased, possibly mis-remembered) that GNOME
treated him like a child and didn’t let him twist all the dials he’d
like. Even though I personally enjoy using Gnome and use it as my daily
working environment, I can respect Linus’s opinion. After all,
regardless of his contributions, Linus is just one man, and his choice
of KDE doesn’t really matter to me.
But in that column Petreley took Miguel and GTK to task for using the
LGPL claiming that it violates the spirit of open source. I have a few
problems with this claim. The first (and one that really frustrated me
the most) is the statement:
The whole point of the LGPL is to allow you to add something to GTK
without having to compensate the GTK developers with either money or
source code.
No, it doesn’t allow you to add to GTK and not release your changes. I
guess we can argue over what “add something” means; to me it means
having your code distributed with GTK. I suppose Petreley might be using
“add something” instead of “link to”, but that would just be sloppy.
However, even assuming that is the case, so what? If a developer was OK
with releasing their code under an open, freedom-granting license from
day 1, why not on day 2? Just because it might be used by someone? If
they were really concerned about that situation, they wouldn’t have
(shouldn’t have) released it in the first place.
Petreley also draws QT into his argument, accusing “open source zealots”
of mistakenly lambasting it for it’s poor license when (in his view) it
is more free since it is available under the GPL. I get what he’s
saying. But I don’t agree that QT is better or gets a pass because of
it’s license, or even that it’s superior to GTK in this respect. My
feelings on licensing have swung from GPL to MIT in the past two years:
I like my freedom libertarian style (sunny-side up, natch), so a license
like the MIT license (or LGPL) fits my mentality better than the GPL
these days.
So my subscription has lapsed, and I’m OK with that. It actually took me
a bit to realize it had happened. I was in Border’s and noticed a new
issue on the newstand. And I was about to reach for it and I remembered
“oh yeah, I think editor’s sort of a flake…” and put it back down. So
maybe I’ll check it out in the future, maybe another periodical will
catch my interest. Regardless, thanks for everything Linux Journal; have
a good life.
date: | 2006-08-04 18:57:40 |
wordpress_id: | 406 |
layout: | post |
slug: | goodbye-linux-journal |
comments: | False |
category: | geek |