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VIRTUALISATION Memo to Con Kolivas: why not roll your own?
VIRTUALISATION Memo to Con Kolivas: why not roll your own? | Memo to Con Kolivas: why not roll your own? |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Thursday, 26 July 2007 | |
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During a long chat in September 2004, de Raadt told me that this was due to personality issues with Charles Hannum, one of the four who had been the core team which started NetBSD as a fork from the FreeBSD project. By mid-1996, deciding that the issues could not be resolved, de Raadt decided to split off and start his own project; three months later, he put out the first release of OpenBSD. (I'm not going into more detail, this is all I need for this piece; you can read de Raadt's entire story here .) A few days back, Australia's APC Magazine carried (only online) the absorbing tale of a Linux kernel developer named Con Kolivas; the man has quit due to what clearly are differences between the aims of the main project - headed by Linus Benedict Torvalds - and his line of thinking. To put it very loosely, Kolivas has concentrated on patches which make the desktop experience better; he claims that the people who run the kernel development project are more interested in the changes which businesses want. The non-inclusion of some of Kolivas's patches is not, as exaggerated by the American technology news site Slashdot, the sole reason why GNU/Linux has not made bigger strides as a desktop operating system. It is merely cheap hype to headline such an interview - which you have linked to and had no hand in creating - "Why Linux failed on the desktop". Some of Kolivas's ideas have been incoporated into the kernel proper; others, according to him, have served to inspire similar changes by others. APC sensibly ran the interview in its entirety so you have Kolivas's own words to judge him by. In some respects, his tale echoes that of de Raadt, though the latter endured more savage treatment - at one point his FTP access to commit was cut off. Kolivas, according to the interview, came up against three of the big guns in the kernel project - Torvalds, Andrew Morton and Ingo Molnar - when trying to lobby for his patches. With free and open source software, there is a way out, if Kolivas really wants to put his improvements out there and prove his point. Follow de Raadt's example and fork the project. |
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