In fact, even in the USA, whenever "individualism" and "freedom" come to clash with the interests of those in power, then we see that governments re-discover themselves as interventist in a bizarre "reverse socialist" way, and here come all kinds of imaginary property, patents, bailouts for the banks, suspension of civil liberties - so much for the principles of free market and laissez faire.

Give a look at the post I was responding to.

The current view of the Israeli Government is this one. If the Palestinian seek to be recognised as a State by the UN, Israel will topple their government. If they quit that pretense, they could be granted authority over 40% of the land they claim.

Well, if I try to put myself in the shoes of a Palestinian, I think that it would be hard for me to accept a peace treaty involving the loss of 60% of my country, especially if my country was tiny to begin with.

You can't deny that the Palestinian are second-class citizens somehow; whether this is because of the trust the Israeli have of them or not, it must not be easy for the honest Palestinian to withstand this (I mean those who would never do a terrorist attack; there must be some!).

Indeed, I'm not denying that Israel doesn't have the right to self defense, especially given the enemies that loom at its borders. Patrolling the borders is one thing, enforcing embargos is another.

Yes, but the strained relationships between Israel and the Palestinian were always there, whether Hamas or Fatah was in charge. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but the role of religion in the conflict has increased only recently, it was a more laic conflict before the rise of Al Qaida etc in the Muslim world. I like to call things with their name, so I do understand that Hamas are terrorists, but the problem is upstream, we can't reduce it to a religion clash.

Well Turkey, although being an Islamic country in religion, has long been quite "western" in culture and politics. So it's not intrinsic that a country inhabitated mostly by Mulsims must be a retrograde theocracy. Unfortunately, now that the world is foolishly polarising around religions again, this might change.

I could think that people resorted to vote for Hamas because they were unsatisifed with the results they had obtained when voting for Fatah in these years (e.g. Israeli settlements growing into what the Palestinian perceive as their own territory). Moreover, people who live in a state of desperation (I think we can agree that Gaza is a hell, whatever the reasons) easily make severe mistakes, even by means of democratic elections (think about Germany during the Weimar Republic).

I think that searching for historic support to justify today's politics leads nowhere; decisions must be taken looking at the needs of current populations. Every people has been an immigrant at some time in its history.

I understand that we can't accept Hamas declaring that they want an Israeli state not to exist. But what is happening now (in facts, not in declarations) is that it's the Palestinian state that doesn't exist, and its people are de facto "dhimmi" in their own land.

It's unacceptable for Hamas to launch rockets into Israel killing innocent people. But what is also happening now is that Israel's response has killed a number of innocent people many times larger than the terrorists have (I know that making math over the number of victims is disgusting, but it helps to put in perspective who is slaughtered in the end, and please note that we're only talking about the innocent here).

It's unacceptable for religious fanatics to decide the political course of a nation. But we can find religious fanatics in Israel too, and they're calling for the flattening of Palestine as well. Why, the Bible is full of incitations to violence against the enemies of God, there's no need to go looking for them in the Quran. We just have learnt not to follow religious texts to the letter.

So, is it terrorism or is it war? Against terrorism, you use police, and police operations have precise rules. You wouldn't tolerate the FBI to blow up your house when your family is inside because a terrorist is living on the lower floor, would you?

Is it war? War has its rules, too. Two countries declare the matter of contention, they attack each other's military forces, and in the end the interested countries make an agreement to stop the hostilities. At the end of the WW2, the Nazi were prosecuted for their war crimes, such as killing 10 innocent persons for each german soldier killed (many of the innocent persons they chose to massacre were Jews). Even some American officers were prosecuted, by the American themselves, for the force they used against the innocent.

Innocent people are not "enemy's capacity to make war".

Killing many more innocent people of the opposing faction in retaliation for one's victims was a distinctive mark of the Nazis during WW2. Israel shouldn't become a monster to fight another one.

With this line of reasoning, there would be no Linux today. And therefore no Android. Possibly not even the iPhone as we know it, as no KDE => no WebKit. You could probably choose between Windows 2012 and Apple Copland, each one extending HTML in its own proprietary way.

Open source needs no marketing, and it opens up new possibilities (and new markets) for everybody, including commercial entities. So to me this Firefox OS is a welcome new player.

Doesn't seem to work with Office. Office 2007 had the ribbon interface, Office 2010 still had it. Office 2012 has BOTH the ribbon and "the design language formerly known as metro". Still waiting for the iteration that "doesn't suck".

GPL-based Mozilla? "Partially BSD based" OS X? You're climbing mirrors.

Mozilla's license is closer to the BSD ones than to the GPL. Chrome is closed source, not BSD.

OS X is mostly closed source, too, although the core kernel (with no drivers) is BSD-licensed the source they release doesn't even boot on any existing machine so I'd hardly consider it an example of a "mature open source development".

Since you're quickly writing off Android's kernel in order to depict the whole product as "BSD based", I wonder how come Google haven't replaced the kernel with a BSD one, given their continued love for the BSD license. Could it be that what you relegated between parentheses is more important than you would make us believe? By the way, ask Android users how happy they are every time a new Android release is out and they cannot install it on their phones because their manufacturers violated (at least the letter of) the GPL and stuffed their kernels with binary blobs. So much for the "restrictive" licensing.

1) Read about the meaning of the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() function. It's a matter of public APIs vs internal interfaces.
2) By your reasoning, if I sent a mail to NVIDIA asking them to change their driver's license to the GPL, and they refused, I could write the very same things you've written against the kernel developers. With the same inappropriate adjectives and derogatory replacement of terms that you've chosen to use.

The fact that many capitalists are taking advantage of Linux, while at the same time improving it, doesn't mean that you can say that the open source model of the Linux kernel resembles capitalism. It's so far away from the concept of capitalism, that thinking about it ("to each one according to his need, from each one according to his abilities") it's possibly closer to communism... except that it works.

And would IBM with its corporate culture have *dreamt* of releasing source code for free, which could be used by its competitors too, before Linux entered the scene?

I kind of agree with the rest of your post, but I think that just as NVIDIA poured millions into the development of their cards, so did their users in order to buy them, and they have all the rights to ask NVIDIA for first-class support, which doesn't happen with binary drivers (not even on Windows, as soon as your card ages more than 12 months. And this is true for AMD too, by the way).

AMD OSS drivers are catching up very slowly, but they're finally doing it (for instance, for R300 class hardware you get support from the OSS drivers that is comparable to the binary ones - and better, because unike the binary drivers, the OSS ones work out-of-the-box, still support older cards, get bug fixes and work with new kernels). Part of the code that is being written for AMD and Intel chips can be reused or adapted for other chips, and most important, it can be used to train new developers in writing a 3D graphics card device driver, which is something that until now was exclusive to the developers employed by some GPU manufacturer. This is an investment that won't go away when the next GPU architecture is out, and it cant' be ignored IMHO.

And what about Intel? They got to the point where they only release OSS drivers, with OSS drivers supporting their new hardware even before it comes to the market, and next-gen Intel GPU are sophisticated enough that many average Joes won't feel the need for a discrete GPU anymore. I wouldn't have believed this was possible just a couple years ago, yet we got there. So while I accept your understanding of NVIDIA's position, I don't share the "defeatism" according to which things must either work their way or can't work at all.

Be careful not to be carried away by the strong opinions that you have for the last three letters of the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL identifier, otherwise you risk making incorrect assumptions about its nature.

From the documentation included in the Linux kernel tarball:

EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() -- Similar to EXPORT_SYMBOL() except that the symbols exported by EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() can only be seen by modules with a MODULE_LICENSE() that specifies a GPL compatible license. It implies that the function is considered an internal implementation issue, and not really an interface.

Also see http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2012-January/018273.html :

The controversy is about whether a module is a derived work of the kernel when you link it in. Traditionally, some modules were not considered derived works by a lot of people arguing that we have a public module interface that acts as a barrier for the license in the same way that the syscall interface lets you run proprietary applications. The EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is all about symbols that are too low-level to be considered part of that public module API (assuming that this API exists). The argument is that symbols which are not meant to be used in third-party modules can never be a license barrier and anything using them is a derived work even if you consider other modules not to be a derived work of the kernel. Note that this argument can still hold for low-level symbols that are marked as EXPORT_SYMBOL, using EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL just makes it explicit.

Why, even read the original mail from NVIDIA themselves:

EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is intended to be used for "an internal implementation issue, and not really an interface". The dma-buf infrastructure is explicitly intended as an interface between modules/drivers, so it should use EXPORT_SYMBOL instead.

The users are free to use proprietary drivers: NVIDIA haven't published but proprietary drivers so far. All embedded graphics chips (but Intel's) are currently exclusively supported by proprietary drivers (and this has been a source of continuous pain for the users, by the way).

The kernel developers extert no control over the users. They "extert control" over what API they want to become public and therefore will have to be supported BY THEM forever (not by NVIDIA, who don't give a damn about supporting the user, as you can see every time they release a new GPU and stop supporting the old one in their "proprietary driver", and also don't give a damn about the progress of Linux, as you can see with their obsession not to share anything). Nothing is preventing NVIDIA from writing a GPL module glueing the internal API to their drivers (which is what has always happened until now). The difference is that in this case the onus of keeping the glue module up to date with the changing internal API would fall on NVIDIA, while making the internal API public would mean that the weight of supporting the API forever is carried by the kernel developers.

On the other hand, you'll see that in the end the API will become public anyway. Linux already has APIs to write userspace drivers (FUSE, CUSE, UIO, ppdev, libusb...), so unlike what you believe kernel developers have nothing against people developing drivers out of their "control" by principle. It's just that they want that to happen with a proper API and not with a wildcard access to the kernel internals.

Even if it is true that NVIDIA is just in it for the money, I think capitalism works the same way.

And that is exactly what the GGP was saying. Open source is no capitalism. Which is not to say that capitalism is bad. It's just that open source works differently and Linux is open source.

Why did he suddenly become pist? Because they decided to roll their own infrastructure code - due to the fact that they couldn't use the gpl version.

...which in turn is due to the fact that they don't want to share a thing, as the GGP was saying. Which is completely different from the picture of NVIDIA that you were painting with the figures for the ARM kernel.

So, Linus is pissed because NVIDIA didn't do what he wanted, not because they do a bad job. He's pissed because they don't contribute or integrate into standard Linux DRI drivers.

He's pissed because if you don't integrate, the resulting operating system is a mess to develop, debug and maintain. Not to mention, that it's much worse for end users.

But they did exactly what they had to do in order to maintain their non-derivative status.

Which is an elaborate way of saying:
they did exactly what they wanted to do, in order not to share code like everyone else on the desktop (ATI, Intel) is doing.

I know how this goes.

I don't doubt that, but why are you throwing patents into the discussion, when patent protection is independent from the open source status of the code, as patents by definition must be disclosed?

1. I want to give away a large amount of money to the poor. This is a good thing, a very good thing. I know that the bank near my house has a large amount of money.
2. The current licensing of the bank makes it impossible for me to get the money, unless I work hard to earn it. Whether this is good is questionable because:
a. It means that I have to get tired OR
b. It means that I have to work like everybody else does for a living, preventing me to have an easier life than all the others.
3) My only other option is that I have to find a less easy way to obtain the money rather than simply picking it up the from the bank. This is a questionable premise.

So, given that my choice is to work to earn money or to give up the idea of giving money to the poor, how are private property laws "good" in this case?