Re: [LIG] [ilugd] [x-posted] potentially-damaging news: Apple 'buys' CUPS

On 7/14/07, Raj Mathur <[email protected]> wrote:

> It boils down to a question of trust then, doesn't it?  How much do you
> trust the FSF?  How much do you trust the Gnome development leads?  How
> much do you trust Apple?

Absolutely. It is without doubt a question of trust. On the specific
issue of managing GNU Emacs and the interests of its contributors, I'd
bet on the FSF to do the Right Thing.

In the case of Apple it is not all evil and has a track record of
giving back to projects like GCC. This contrasts to the behavior of
many other large product companies who use heavily customized GCC for
internal development. This is perfectly legal, of course. One specific
company I know of fiercely guards the source tree of its internal gcc
version from its non-compiler engineers, even though the place
otherwise has a very very open engineering culture. Apple seems to
have done much better. Of course there could be other practical
considerations such as the overhead of maintaining significantly
diverged code bases, which might have pushed them into saying, "not
worth all this hassle - let's just feed all the main infra-type
changes back in" ...

Anyway, my point is, this whole trust business has to be taken on a
case-to-case basis. No single entity will ever have my complete,
unconditional, irrevocable trust :-)

-- 
Sriram Karra

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