Smoothwall not free software

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 06:11:56PM +0100, markj at cloaked.freeserve.co.uk wrote:
> I now have a contact in the Smoothwall team who is willing to take a
> list of questions and follow it through, acting as a sort of firebreak
> for Mr Morrell's usual reaction to criticism of the project which he
> has put so much money into. 

We may want to consider today's events also, in writing this list (which I
think is a good idea). Check out the news page on smoothwall.org. To
summarise:

- SmoothWall 0.9.9 is delayed until middle of September, ostensibly for
language translation
- SmoothWall 0.9.9b source is now available for download[1]
- There is an article by Richard Morrell about the ongoing GPL situation.
It's entitled "GNU put the record Straight - SmoothWall IS GPL" (I believe
we've ascertained that it's not, and I don't believe any of these events
change that fact - see later). I think this was Brian Youmans @ FSF Boston
following up on an earlier complaint by Jason Clifford, regarding the phone
home spyware in SmoothWall, not the source code availability complaint.

[1] I have downloaded the 'source'. The package weighs in at about 77k, and
unpacks to about half a meg. Over 50% of that is language translation,
although the installer and setup stuff appears to be there. However, the
administration stuff (the web app) is gone, and that _was_ present in
earlier source releases. We need to ask about what software is covered by
the GPL - all that in the source package appears to be GPL, but it's not
anything like the whole source to the system.

Cheers,

Alex.