Interview with the Arch Dev Team

[reed9]

I don't know where you're getting your free lunches, but if they're making you enter into a binding contract granting you specific rights and imposing certain restrictions, it must be one hell of a sandwich. My point simply being that it's hardly an aww-shucks handshake affair, the way it's handled. I don't really have a preference what you call the consumer, but the fact remains that you agreed to a EULA to use it. That makes you more than a benificiary in my eyes.

You lost me here. I never agreed to any EULA to use Arch and I wouldn't use a distro that included one. If you're buying a license for RHEL or Suse, then sure, you have a right to complain to those companies if you don't like something. I wouldn't dispute that.

I simply maintain that in my opinion, many of those that share their labor with us make us suffer through their pompous attitudes. Not all and maybe not even most, but enough to make you not want to put yourself in the same camp as them.

And I equally maintain that I haven't seen this. I'm sure it happens at times, but I've found the vast majority of linux folks to be very friendly. It's the internet, so there are always a subset of people who are a**holes, but I've found them to be the minority.

In the context of the Arch devs, I see a group of people with a strong vision and idea of what they want. And (to my mind sadly) what they want is in the minority now. Small, clean code that adheres to the Unix philosophy.

Since every other distro and linux in general seems to be moving towards greater and greater abstraction and automation, those of us who like to keep it simple are a bit under siege. So when you have users constantly saying things like, "Arch is great, but too hard to install. Can you make a pre-built desktop ISO?" - which is another way of saying, "Please do lots of extra work that doesn't interest you for my benefit" - I can understand if they come across as condescending to these users. I can understand if they shoo those people off towards Ubuntu.

[schwim]

You lost me here. I never agreed to any EULA to use Arch

Call it the GNU licensing agreement if you'd rather. You also don't have to consider it an end user licensing agreement although you're an end user and it's a licensing agreement. Call it something else, like a warm-fuzzy document of guidelines, wishes and preferences presented by the cool guys that wrote the OS to the awesome dude that is about to use it. I warn you though, you're going to find that phrase too long to use a lot in conversation.

And I equally maintain that I haven't seen this.

As coopstah stated, it's all personal perception. He saw nothing out of sorts in the same article that I poked fun at.

The debate loses some of it's edge-of-your-seat excitement when we begin saying the same things, so I guess we can safely assume that it's time to put the baseball bats away and apologize to the horse.

[reed9]

Call it the GNU licensing agreement if you'd rather. You also don't have to consider it an end user licensing agreement although you're an end user and it's a licensing agreement. Call it something else, like a warm-fuzzy document of guidelines, wishes and preferences presented by the cool guys that wrote the OS to the awesome dude that is about to use it. I warn you though, you're going to find that phrase too long to use a lot in conversation.

It does matter what we call it. A horse isn't a car just because they can both be used for transportation and the GPL isn't a EULA just because they are both a form of license. I don't have to agree to or even with the Gnu Public License to use the software. Although the GPL does explicity grant me as the user extra rights not normally provided for under copyright law. But I don't have to take advantage of those rights and I have entered into no agreement or binding contract with the software developer or company by using their software.

If I pick up a book at the library, have I entered into a binding contract with the author or publisher of said book because it's under copyright? Should I expect the author to change the story around and re-publish because I don't like the original? Does the fact that the book is under copyright and I read it put the author under any obligation to me whatsoever? Why would it be different for software under copyright?

The debate loses some of it's edge-of-your-seat excitement when we begin saying the same things, so I guess we can safely assume that it's time to put the baseball bats away and apologize to the horse.

Yeah, but it's hard to walk away when you haven't realized I'm right. Which is to say, without feeling as though I've successfully communicated my position.