| It's all good! I was just trying to avoid looking like I was only responding to half a post! You're right about IBM & Google being there for a while, and I think their participation is largely innocent (ironically, one of the main reasons I dislike the committee enough that I went out of my way to note that I dislike the committee a few comments up was actually protested by as far as I'm aware most of the proprietary companies & Red Hat). I still don't believe that funding GCC development is really enough to count the organizations, though. It's something I'll think on for a while, if nothing else; thanks for bringing it up. The argument is actually a pretty classic one (it comes up nearly every time autonomous computers of any sort come up, and was something I read for the first time in a book from...1998, I think, though I can't recall the name; something on cybernetics from some university press). I agree that Red Hat is and has largely been in violation of free software principles since their move unto SaaSS. You certainly won't find me arguing they're a moral company. I do think it's unlikely they actually work directly on proprietary code, but that would lead the discussion into very murky territory trying to draw a line, and so I'll largely cede the point. Red Hat is antithetical to free software as a movement. I don't think we've been fine with IBM for years as some steward of the free software movement; they contribute to free software, yes, but only tangentially. Their support is of open-source, and is orthogonal to the free software movement. It's still useful to the free software movement, but I don't think we're fine with IBM itself. I, too, want to have that discussion at some point! And yeah, the JSLint story is incredible. It's less IBM's customers (though they are definitely by-and-large evil) and more...IBM outright, though. They did support the Nazis, after all; there's really no coming back from that. |