News Linus Torvalds in bizarre attack on open source

Has King Penguin gone mad? This from elReg:

Normally we expect an attack on free software to come from one of the usual suspects: payola analysts, right wing "think tanks", or Steve Ballmer. So it's an odd day when Linus Torvalds himself weighs in against the principles of the movement.

Torvalds launched a blast against OpenOffice.org, and defended Microsoft's right to keep its binary Office formats proprietary. "I'm happy with somebody writing a free replacement for Microsoft Office. But I'm not fine with them writing a free replacement just by reverse engineering the proprietary formats," said the Linux founder. "Microsoft has its own reasons for keeping them proprietary, and I can't argue with that."

Actually he didn't - we just made that quote up.

But what Torvalds really did say this weekend is only slightly less bizarre. The Linux leader also encouraged a software company to take its code under a proprietary license, his friend alleges.

More here

 

I can sort of see his point, effort wise but Torvalds advocating closed binaries?... that one's got me scratching my head.

- H.

 

Well, tbh I can see his point!

If I wrote something and someone produced something similar - that's competition and all fair. They would I hope have overcome similar trials and tribulations as I did in creating my product.

For someone to take what you have written and just reverse engineer it back to source, recompile it under a different name is not competition; its effectively plagarism...

I don't seem him (in the article) actually saying that open source is wrong per se.

 

The problem here is that reverse engineering in a clean-room environment for compatibility is fine. It's why we have things like Samba. Torvalds is being a bit hypocritical in this case because he knows the developer involved.

I also find the argument that the free client was costing BitKeeper $500k a year unlikely. It uses the falacious reasoning that everyone using the free version would buy the expensive product. The only way I could see the argument is if they were providing support for the free version, which from a business standpoint would just be stupid.