Hi,
Just my 2 cents about this issue.
I think that Linux has no special responsibility in The Hurd having few
help on its developing; If it wasn't Linux, it would have been FreeBSD,
or NetBSD, or MyUnixClone.
The fact is that people wanted:
. Reliable systems
. Free systems
And Linux and the others gave it to them, "quickly" (faster than The
Hurd could, probably).
But I don't think this is a Bad Thing for The Hurd; It is having much
more time for a much better development, and if, finally, it's design
proves superior, I have no doubt that it will clear the world of Linuxes
and alikes.
But "meantime", I think we have some excelent, free unix derivatives.
8)
Regards.
--
Eneko Lacunza
# Por un mundo con conocimiento libre #
Apoya el Software Libre - No a las patentes
http://www.hispalinux.es - http://www.es.gnome.orghttp://www.fsfeurope.org - http://www.es.gnu.org
LWN daily pointed me to Jack Moffitt's critique of the BitKeeper license:
i.cantcode.com/writing/bitkeeper.html
It is worth a read.
(Though it is a bit odd that he does not mention that
the definition of the OSI basically explains the same differently
what the FSF defined earlier. *wink* )
| With all of the restrictions that have been outlined, BitKeeper
| seems almost free.
| If we amend the requirements to accomodate something that is almost
| Free Software or almost Open Source, these boundaries will diminish
| gradually and not only will our campaign be unsuccessful but we will
| have weakened our efforts.
| BitKeeper under the terms of the BitKeeper License is neither Free
| Software or Open Source software. It fails to meet the criteria and
| therefore fails to meet the standards of freedom that these criteria
| define and that the community have adopted. If the aim is to promote
| Free Software and Open Source and preserve these rights and
| freedoms, we should not be satisfied with almost free or almost open
| source licenses like the BitKeeper license.
| 4. Conclusion
|
| Sometimes it is tempting to sacrifice our rights and freedoms for
| convenience, but we should not do so. There are many problems with
| CVS and other Free source management packages, and it would be nice
| to move to a more robust and more well-designed tool. We are better
| off to repair or fix the tools which are free, or if that is not
| acceptable to create new free tools that preserve the the rights and
| freedoms we enjoy.
| I also encourage Free Software hackers to avoid or cease using
| BitKeeper in their own projects. It might not be as convenient to
| use other tools, but in the long term we should be more concerned
| with preserving those rights and freedoms we currently exercise and
| enjoy daily. I personally have stopped using BitKeeper
| I encourage the entire community to support the efforts of Free and
| Open Source projects in this area.
http://www.gnu.org/software/cvs/cvs.htmlhttp://subversion.tigris.org/http://regexps.com/#archhttp://prcs.sourceforge.net/http://aegis.sourceforge.net/index.html
Jan Wildeboer <jan.wildeboer(a)gmx.de> schrieb/wrote:
> Interesting - Free software can violate antitrust laws? Can you
> construct a theoretical example? Just curious :-)
Consider this: Apache changes the licence to GPL. As Apache has a
large market share, 3rd party vendors for WWW server solutions
would have to make their products compatible with Apache.
However, taken the GPL literally, they could not, for example,
write a plugin like mod_fancy_shopping_solution and release that
under a proprietary licence.
So proprietary software vendors could not access that market,
giving an competive advantage to Open Source software vendors.
Claus
--
------------------------ http://www.faerber.muc.de/ ------------------------
OpenPGP: DSS 1024/639680F0 E7A8 AADB 6C8A 2450 67EA AF68 48A5 0E63 6396 80F0
Hello all,
please let me introduce myself first. My name is Jan Wildeboer, I am member
of the core team of a GPL'ed shopping cart solution, written in PHP, called
osCommerce (www.oscommerce.com).
We just celebrated the second birthday of our project, we have the feeling
we are quite successfull and we managed to build a community that supports
our project.
Because we try to produce a global solution, we introduced a
modules-structure for shipping and payment routines. We provide sample code
and some global modules. Shipping and payment sometimes is very
country-specific, so there are some country-specify mailing-lists/support
sites that offer modules for these specific countries.
The way we understand the GNU General Public License all modules programmed
to be used in our system must be published under the terms of the GPL. Our
opinion is mainly based on this GPL-FAQ entry:
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins
This is due to the fact that shipping/payment modules use objects generated
by our project (the cart object, customer address etc.). So we are quite
sure that the second part of this FAQ-entry is valid in this context, so all
modules written for our project MUST be published under the terms of the GPL
or a GPL-compatible license.
Now we have one company that doesn't want to do this. They are selling
modules under a closed-source license and they don't seem to be willing to
accept our arguments.
I will provide more details if a serious discussion can be possible on this
mailing list. From what I've seen in the last few days (The HURD vs.
Schilling) I must wait for reactions :-)
Jan Wildeboer
>From: MJ Ray <markj(a)cloaked.freeserve.co.uk>
>Joerg Schilling <schilling(a)fokus.gmd.de> wrote:
>> There is limited time for useless discussions at CeBIT.
>This is just a short apology for contributing to the list traffic with this
>"useless discussion" distraction. I could give you a sob story about what
>is happening here and why I'm not feeling my usual slef, but it doesn't
>excuse my tone and some of the emails of the last few days.
>I'm returning to dealing with less "useless" matters and will doubtless be
>writing to the list again later about more interesting things.
.... Starting to write mail again after retired a bit from CeBIT....
I had a face to face discussion with Marcus Brinkmann on Wednesday at CeBIT
and it seems that parts of the discussion have been a result of miss
understandings. It was a real nice discussion and I am sure that I will hear
from him about porting results in the near future.
It may be that the discussion with people like you would have been different
too if we were face to face.
Jörg
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js(a)cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1
schilling(a)fokus.gmd.de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling
URL: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix
FOKUS at CeBIT Hall 11, A14 - BerliOS at CeBIT Hall 11 D11 (Future Market)
Meet me at CeBIT in Hall 11 D11 on the BerliOS booth - www.berlios.de
No, no, you both miss my point. What if the company and employee did it _on puropose_ ?
To gain acceptance for their product, then rip it back out the market and charge for it?
JohnFlux
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I was just reading on /. about that perl monk who released some code under
the GPL, then his employees claimed ownership, and yanked it back.
I was wondering - if an evil company got someone to unofficially write some
GPL code and that person then released it to the community. Then wait say a
year for everyone to become dependant on it. Then the evil company yanks it
back, revokes the GPL license claiming it was illegal in the first place,
then charges lots of money for the program.
This is very similiar to the perlmonk case, except I hope it doesn't have
the evil purposes..
Thoughts?
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Hi,
These are not the same exact words each of us have talked, but it does
express his inability to understand the motivation behind free
software...
Boss: Does GPL really allow someone to use commercially the output of a
program?
Me: Sure, it's even in the GNU GPL FA...
Boss: Yes, I've just read it.
Me: [surprised] so?
Boss: I've been looking at Nessus[1], and it does some pretty good job,
so good, that you can earn a lot of money with a default audit check
from nessus. It is unfair that you can exploit so much money from it
without having to pay anything. How do they live off? I don't think
their rights are well protected by the GNU GPL.
I went on trying to explain that they have made nessus on their free
time, and probably as a funny project, and/or as a way to reduce the
ammount of repetitive work they may have to do at work (I know I'm going
to use nessus reports to kick away some windows servers at work in
favour of gnu/linux systems). They also can make money by using nessus
on local companies, and they probably do.
However, my boss wasn't moved... not even when I told him some of the
examples even recently cited on this mailing list... tactics to make
people pay for a copy... geez, I'm lucky I'm a sysadmin and not a
developer here!
It is, however, hard to make someone understand free software when they
can't understand that the ulterior motives may not be money.
Sure they need to make money to live in our current society and it is
indeed harder to make big bucks with free software. Nonetheless, the
easy way is imo immoral and doomed in time.
I really want to make a "free software only" company in one or two years
time here in Portugal so I can live off free software commercially... I
just hope I can fullfill such wish!
Hugs, Rui
Editor's notes:
[1] www.nessus.org -- security scanner, winner of a comparison among
free and proprietary scanners last year
--
+ No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown
+ Whatever you do will be insignificant,
| but it is very important that you do it -- Ghandi
+ So let's do it...?
>From marcus(a)gnu.org Tue Mar 19 16:14:29 2002
>> Also note: if you are going to compile on an unknown platform and don't like
>> to understand how the Schily makefilesystem works you NEED to use smake.
>> GNU make has limited features and don't helps you for unknown platforms.
>>
>> Also note: I am not forcing anybody to use smake but if you don't use it, you
>> will have to be aware of the negative effects of this decision.
>So there is an alternative to smake? I am confused.
On a known platform you may use GNU make, on unknown platforms smake is
required.
>> You don't like to go the easy way and you are trying to make me responsible
>> for your decision. This is really silly.
>Well, if you say I can use GNU make, I will of course try to do that.
>Don't claim that you don't need smake if GNU make doesn't work.
Well if you read the REAMDE's you see:
If you have the choice between all three make programs, the
preference would be
1) smake (preferred)
2) SunPRO make
3) GNU make (this is the last resort)
If this is not ehough, I can add a notice that GNU make will only work on known
systems, but I am sure that people will not read this.
>> The method propagated by GNU does not give me the features I need.
>> FSF people always claim that people should write free software when
>> they don't get the features they want. Well I did it and I am now critisized
>> by FSF people :-(
>I think it would be easier to see what it is going on if you would just
>say that smake is required, and GNU make not supported. You don't need
>to add your critic to gmake to this decision. The GNU project does it
>the same way, sometimes GNU make is required and other makes simply won't
>work. But they don't hook their critic to other's make systems into it.
Well GNU make is supported with known platforms. As this currently supports
> 99.9% of all running systems it may confuse people more than it helps
if I write that GNU make is not supported.
Jörg
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js(a)cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1
schilling(a)fokus.gmd.de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling
URL: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix
FOKUS at CeBIT Hall 11, A14 - BerliOS at CeBIT Hall 11 D11 (Future Market)
Meet me at CeBIT in Hall 11 D11 on the BerliOS booth - www.berlios.de