Re: [Fsfe-uk] Kernel hacker cooperatives?

[MJ Ray]

Alex Hudson <address@hidden> wrote: [...]
> My hazy recollection is that Tony Stanco - the guy who drove fd.net -
> eventually fell out with the CEO of fd.net, RMS, and he went off and did
> eGovOs. Or he was already doing it and did it more, if that makes sense.
> I may be completely wrong about that, but that's my feeling for what
> happened.

That seems plausible enough.  I saw a link on some fdnet article to
http://eGovOs.org and tried to check it, but that's also dead now.
Looking further now, it seems eGovOs caused a bit of upset in
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6784

I'll mail RMS.  I didn't realise he was their Chief Ethics Officer.
Lots of links confirm that and give more background on
http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2001022200120PS%20

RMS holds a similar post for gnuherds.org - hmm.

> [...] I'm not surprised the MS ones are as
> easy to find - I would have thought it would be easier to co-operate on
> what are a relatively narrow set of products compared to the free
> software galaxy. 

I'm surprised by MS-certified cooperatives: I don't see how a group
can be autonomous and independent (4th ICA cooperative principle) when
you have so little influence over the product line.  Also, I think
it's not sustainable (7th principle), for similar reasons to why RMS
describes proprietary software as a social problem.

I'm not surprised if companies specialise.  My own business has a
stable but evolving set of software offered (including debian, Apache,
Wordpress, Koha, OSCommerce) and we develop for some of it (which
doesn't include the kernel, really), but we can consider anything that
gives enough autonomy.  We don't ship the whole free software galaxy.

Thanks for the info,
-- 
MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 -
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