ZDNet: Of arrogance and embedded systems

Apr 23, 2001, 17:05 (26 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by John Taschek)

"But wait -- anyone with a clear mind would question this purchase. While the advocates of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD continue to bicker over -- er, discuss - the merits of each particular version of the BSD operating system, WindRiver purchased the proprietary rendition of the famous BSD Unix. But WindRiver, which has a reputation for being arrogant and difficult to work with, has marketed this purchase as a way to jump into the open-source fray. It's a lie."

"It's also arrogance. So is the decision of the Linux god himself, Linus Torvalds, to ridicule the Mac OS X operating system. He's apparently ingested way too much of the Linux freedom fighters' fodder while forgetting that people just want their things to work."

"Even more arrogant is open-source movement henchman Bruce Perens' decision to ask the biggest vendors -- IBM and Hewlett-Packard -- to return some of the intellectual property that the vendors created by using open-source technologies, including Linux. This won't give anyone the warm fuzzies, and it may hurt Linux in the long run."

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