In article <ev6ln8$2qir$2@p...>, 
richard@c... says...
> I'm not sure what you're getting at here.  Linus does not sue people
> who extend the Linux kernel.  His authority is (currently) sufficient
> to limit fragmentation, but anyone who wants to produce a modified
> version of Linux is free to do so.


That's a good point. Since the kernel is under GPL2 I guess I could 
modify it and fork it. Fortunately for him and Linux, he does that power 
of moral authority. But Linux took a long while to take hold. The only 
people who paid any attention were advocates who had just seen UNIX's 
last breaths due to fragmentation. So the last thing they wanted to see 
was Linux suffer the same fate. I went to a few UNIX users group meetings 
back when Linux was first coming out. This point was all they could talk 
about.


>  It's one thing to have the moral
> authority to keep a standard intact, quite another to use legal means
> to stop people trying.

Very true. I guess my concern is that I would not have the kind of moral 
authority that Linus Torvolds has. A) He wrote the entire Linux OS on his 
own. That gives you a hell of a lot of "street cred." And B) He was able 
to get in on the ground floor of the open source movement.

I am a relative nobody. I have very little in the way of coding skills. 
Instead, I have an incredible natural knack for organizing the heck out 
of things. Standards and systems for solving major problems come to me in 
the shower. Even among the computer uber-geeks in the world, my skills 
are not considered cool. This makes it is harder for me to attain that 
kind of moral authority. Therefore, in order to achieve the goals of the 
standard, which is educating the world for free, I will need to ensure 
that the standard isn't fragmented.

Besides, as I and many experts have said, a standard is not software. 
Slightly different rules apply. It's OK if software forks a bit because 
people can always choose which fork to take and then switch to another 
one at will. Forking can be the death knell for a standard, especially a 
standard in which vast quantities of data will be shared worldwide. Once 
the data set is split into two different, incompatible groups then no one 
will want to participate in either.


> And Unix obviously isn't dead, because Linux is an implementation of
> it.

Now here is where you are flat wrong. Ask any Linux fan, especially Linus 
Torvolds, and they will tell you that Linux is not UNIX. Linus replicated 
the functionality of UNIX because that wasn't patented but he did not use 
ANY of the UNIX source code. This is what allowed him to distribute it 
under the GPL in the first place.