Slashdot Mirror

If I want BSD news, I'd just head to BSD Today, Daily Daemon News, or the OpenBSD User's Journal, rather than waiting a month for new stuff.

Granted, BSD doesn't move quite as fast as Linux, but one issue every four weeks? That's just not enough any more.

-- Floyd

Is procfs still being used as a replacement for sysctl?

Has pre-emptive swapping been integrated yet? If it does, how does it compare to FreeBSD's?

And finally, how has the VM system grown since Matt Dillons Daemonnews Article?

FreeBSD on the iPAQ was covered in this month's issue of Daemonnews. But I guess FreeBSD isn't trendy enough. sigh...

There's big news in the BSD community today, as two important mergers are occurring. First, Berkeley Systems Design, Inc., better known as BSDI, and Walnut Creek CDROM, the primary backer of FreeBSD, are merging. The combined company, BSD Inc., will have a strategy of promoting BSD on all levels. This merger, combining the two primary corporate supporters of BSD, will allow the new company to really focus its efforts on the improvement and promotion of BSD.

The other merger is that of the codebases of BSD/OS and FreeBSD. This merger will occur over (hopefully) the next year and result in a single operating system, still named FreeBSD. FreeBSD will remain completely open source and primarily under the BSD license, as it is today. Certain commercial drivers and components of BSD/OS which remain under NDA will be administered by BSD Inc. as add-on components. These components, along with the commercial backing, will be the value-added features separating FreeBSD from BSD/OS, which will continue as a commercial product (with FreeBSD at the core).

Can anyone here say NIH?

I agree with RG Ristroph's post -- the hard part is establishing version control -- the tool is not the most important part. That said, CVS is a pretty good tool. It works well over both LANs and WANs (unlike sourcesafe, for example), handles branching/merging about as well any as tool can, and bonus, is free. You *will* need someone who is dedicated to managing the system and answering questions. It may not (should not) be a full-time job, but until people are up-to-speed, they will make mistakes, and you need someone whose priority it is to fix those mistakes, and help the other developers learn how to accomplish what they need. (The above is true of any version control system, by the way, not just CVS.)

Before you install any VC system, you need to decide what you're trying to accomplish, and design the procedures to do that. CVS (or whatever) is a tool, not a methodology.

Finally, here are some hopefully useful links:

• Karl Fogel's CVS book (actually, portions of it, mostly dealing with using CVS), which I find more readable than the Cederquist manual.
• Some links about using CVS for websites:here, here, and here. Different view points, worth reading, and generally applicable even if you choose something besides CVS.

Well, I'm certainly not pissy that OpenBSD has integrated my code (although it is a bit annoying that they credit Allen Briggs, when he wrote none of the code. I mean the first line of the thing even says it's copyright David Huang... Allen was the NetBSD/mac68k portmaster, and certainly answered a lot of my questions and was very helpful in general though.)

Anyways, I think it's great that people are using my code, and I haven't seen any other NetBSD folks complain that OpenBSD is taking NetBSD code. I do see some grumbling when OpenBSD takes NetBSD code and makes out like it's some new feature of theirs, but that's human nature. They're not against OpenBSD taking the code, they just want some credit for it. NetBSD folks don't like Theo for a reason... while I've never met him in person, based on email conversations with him and watching him on the NetBSD mailing lists (before he was banned), he's rude and quite abrasive. To be fair, some NetBSD folks can be too, but Theo seems like that all the time :)

We see the little Mozilla pic every other day but anytime there is a BSD story, slashdot won't use Chuck as the picture. Even though this is a more Apple area I just thought I should bring this some attention it deserves. Daemon News

In the daemon's advocate column, Greg Lehey explains Microsoft's SIS (the symlink thing) and why they aren't really the same as symbolic links. Pretty informative.

darren

Perhaps that's a little too broad. How about an all-encompasing computer-oriented news page like the almost forgotten c|net?

Er. That's not much better, it seems. What sayeth of something that deals almost entirely with open source-related news? No, wait, you're already here.

Unfortunate though it may (or may not) be, Linux has the most attention these days. Not just in the media, but in the minds of users. You want more BSD news? Submit more of it. Or start getting your fix from a BSD-specific page.

Point is, if you don't like Slashdot, try to change it. If you can't change it, find somewhere else. If you can't find somewhere else, grab the code and create something more to your liking. If you can't do that, hire someone who can. If you can't afford to, perhaps your desired news isn't as important to the world as you might think.

As an aside, I really don't see your reason for concern. Slashdot never claimed to be business-oriented. And if there's a real-world computer issue that involves money, there's someone out there attached to it like a leech, sucking it for all the juicy bits it has, and printing them. Try PC Week if you want to see what "real-world" business uses today. Me, I want to know what they'll be using tomorrow.

Good point. FreeBSD 4.0 went stable, and I'd like to see more stories about how it's being used, who's upgrading, what issues are involved, etc. Plus, FreeBSD and BSDi are merging much of their code. Let's hear from the developers on this. What's going on at BSDi? Maybe we can now get some juicy insider interviews with these guys now that BSDi will be open its source into the FreeBSD tree.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad a court recognized Anderson was harmed, and wants to set things right.

But I can get this hostage news from CNN. An frankly, CNN's reporting is not so far fetched. (The judge is the same in both cases, and Bill Gates is wealthy . . . So this is the basis for a news story?)

I'm reading the Deamonnews for REAL "news for nerds".

How can you substantiate this? The BSD community is by far the most active by scale.

when ./ posts a .00000000001 upgrade to the freaking linux kernel you sheep come out droves.

Amen to that brother! Slashdot is VERY Linux-centric. Just look at the way the ignorant zealots flocked to the Slackware story over this. Stigma is all that matters rather than maturity and performance. Anything that is remotely BSD is crucified on slashdot plus most BSD users avoid slashdot because of its one-sidedness. if you want the current BSD news check out OpenBSD Journal, Daily Daemon News, FreeBSD'zine, FreeBSD Diary, FreeBSD Rocks and OpenBSD Explained

At first much of the BSDI codebase will remain proprietary. It will only be freed as it is integrated with FreeBSD. There are some parts of the codebase that cannot be freed because the code was written under a contract that does not permit disclosure.

According the Karels the only thing that will remain proprietary is the kernel...for now. And a lot of the things they can't just put under a BSDL comes from things under NDA's.

No, it won't be moving. Read the announcement at http://www.daemonnews.org/200003/merge r.html.
--
Brad Knowles

• Most of the BSD/OS code will be available to open source projects.
• BSD now has a commercial backer on the same scale, or at least potentially so, as some of the Linux backers.
• A more competitive BSD means that Linux will have to respond to an increased rate of BSD improvements (just as BSD has had to respond to a faster rate of Linux improvements!), forcing general innovation.

• Most of the BSD/OS code will be available to open source projects.
• BSD now has a commercial backer on the same scale, or at least potentially so, as some of the Linux backers.
• A more competitive BSD means that Linux will have to respond to an increased rate of BSD improvements (just as BSD has had to respond to a faster rate of Linux improvements!), forcing general innovation.

I quote:

• The other merger is that of the codebases of BSD/OS and FreeBSD. This merger will occur over (hopefully) the next year and result in a single operating system, still named FreeBSD. FreeBSD will remain completely open source and primarily under the BSD license, as it is today. Certain commercial drivers and components of BSD/OS which remain under NDA will be administered by BSD Inc. as add-on components. These components, along with the commercial backing, will be the value-added features separating FreeBSD from BSD/OS, which will continue as a commercial product (with FreeBSD at the core).

Why not try Zsh? It has all three forms of history, !-history, fcedit and arrows/I-search. Most of which can be turned on and off at your leisure. And don't forget the many other improvements over most other shells in use today.

I wrote an article for daemon news some time ago about the advantages of zsh over bash. Check it out.

Software raid is also described in the book. In fact, the above linked article looks based on the book. Or maybe it's the other way around.

Anyway, the I saw the "Power Pak" at a major book chain, and I had to have it immediately, so I didn't order it from Walnut Creek, sorry. It was $99 I think, a little pricey, but comes with 6 CD Toolkit besides the base 4 CDs of BSD.

I thought it well worth it.

Editorial freedom for Slashdot or not, I'd like to diversify my newsreading by quite a bit, like maybe check in with five or ten sites on my own instead of just Slashdot or articles on other sites that Slashdot refers me to. What other sites to Slashdot-ers read to get their tech news?

I've got a few to start, but not many.

• http://www.daemonnews.org (a bit sparse by comparison)
• The politech mailing list--``send a message to majordomo@vorlon.mit.edu with this text: subscribe politech''

I anxiously await your suggestions.

There's an article over on Daemon News about using *BSD with a package called MRTG (sp?). Anyway, as far as I remember it was graphical and did everything necessary for system monitoring. Methinks its portable, too. And isn't there a program called Xosview which also does this? What I'm trying to find is a monitoring package that will let me remotely monitor NT 4 servers (mostly disk usage) from a *nix box...

Maybe I'm just getting old, but what's the point in stuffing the web.ballot.box? I don't think anyone takes these
polls seriously, and most of them seem to be vulnerable to trivial attacks. It's a low-skill hack on a low-value
asset, so I can't see anybody scoring major reputation points by doing this.

Actually, if you wander over to Daemon News' article "BSD Rated Number 1 OS", you'll find that the *BSD people took that poll quite seriously (at least when we were winning it ;-). Of course, people tried to point out there what crap it was too, but didn't seem to get anywhere.

Keep an eye on Dæmon News for more information about this issue, if you care to have your prejudices rearranged.

You've made your assertions. Now back them up.

Linux has BSD beat on reliability, scalability, security and popularity, you claim. That's provably either false or misleading or both. For example, consider popularity. Windows has Linux beat on popularity. So what? Next, security. Oh come now. Shall we please track the number of exploits for various Linuxes, and compare them with those for, say, OpenBSD? 'Nuff said. Now this scalability thing. Yawn. BSD ran on minicomputers and minisupers years before Linux was even a figment of your imagination. And those were big iron by today's standards, with separate I/O processors and hundreds of concurrent interactive users. BSD runs on little tiny machines, too. BSD scalability is hardly an issue. Let's see, what was the other thing? Oh yes, reliability. Shall we compare mean-time-between-failure data? What are you talking about? I haven't seen either sort of machine go down on its own for the last couple years, and when it did, it was a Linux box, not a BSD box.

Your statement that BSD has done nothing innovative or positive for the OSI/Unix community is a blatant, flamethrowing, slanderous lie. I could list a hundred things. I challenge you to read the last 20 years worth of Usenix proceedings if you need details.

But I'm sure you don't need details. They would interfere with yours lies. Damn it, repeating a lie doesn't make it true. What the hell is wrong with some people?

> The belief that OpenBSD or FreeBSD is more secure than Linux is total bullshit. Here's some anecdotal evidence about the level of security available from an out-of-the-box OpenBSD. http://www.daemonnews.org/199910/open bsd.html

I'm not a *BSD user but I think one can't ignore the auditing that has gone into the OS.

Not to long ago I was in much the same position as yourself. There has been quite a bit said already, personally I am using FBSD for my servers and OBSD for the firewall/router. I would use NetBSD if I had some (more) obscure hardware other than x86. Well nevertheless, here is a url that I have found to have good links, and some up to the minute BSD news. Daemon News. Now all will be great if slashdot keeps up with the BSD news as much as the Linux stuff.

A few other good sites, are Daemon news, for all sorts of info on the *BSDs, and FreeBSD Rocks for FreeBSD information, and FreeBSD Zine for more information, and finally, to buy your own cuddly daemon, FreeBSD Mall. George

If you really want to learn what's going on in the BSD world, go have a look at Dæmon News Daily, where they print all the BSD news, not just what gets past the /. censor corps.

A few weeks ago when OpenBSD announced its method of solving this problem, as best they could, some users on my LUG began talking about (if I understood correctly) emulatting OpenBSD's approach (except non-US citizens must do it).Thank Daily Daemon News for covering that tidbit.

And what should Slashdot do to protect itself against bogus "news"? A recent thread on the FreeBSD advocacy list suggested flooding Slashdot with BSD press releases in the hopes that they would get on Roblimos nerves and force him to post them as "News" just to shut up the malcontents. Isn't that dishonest?

That HAPPENS to be Roblimo's suggestion. But you left that little tidbit out didn't you?

Before I go further let me assure you that my post was not meant to be hostile. I was bringing to attention the fact that the FreeBSDCon story was apparantly being rejected simply because it was BSD, and it seemed odd considering what's to come.

Slashdot was founded as a site for Geek news. Linux is predominant because that's what Rob uses, and it's his site. Still, BSD has it's place here. Slashdot apparantly thinks so too, or the soon to be announced new section wouldn't be forthcoming. Surely you saw reference to that while you were in the -Advocacy archive eh?

I wouldn't expect to see Linux stories on BSD sites(Daemonnews, FreeBSDRocks, FreeBSDZine, FreeBSD Advocacy, etc) any more than I would see BSD stories on sites such as Linux.com.

There was a FreeBSDCon story on Slashdot when it was first announced. It's NOT too much to ask to follow up on that when a full schedule of events is released.

When participants tried to register for the FreeBSD event, the hotel manager didn't know what the heck they were referring to.

Funny, I had no trouble whatsoever.

The behavior of WC CDROM is exemplary. They are the primary financial backer of the FreeBSD Project, and there's nothing shady about them booking the room. All such Conferences have Sponsers, and you see their names all over them. Why would this be any different, and why should they try to conceal their identity?

And no one who reads your comments will go read the archives for themselves. A Shame.

Have you ever worked for Microsoft? Maybe in Marketing?


- Avid Linux User and BSD Advocate.

http://www.daemonnews.org/
http://www.freebsdrocks.com/
http://www.freebsddiary.com

as far as the license, it boils down to: "Give us credit for our work, and don't sue us if something breaks".
try this

xuvetn (proud freebsd-er)

Many, including Richard Stallman, have criticized the BSD license due to its demand for credit in advertising. Since this is the only restriction on further redistribution, the BSDs are the only freely re-distributable operating systems in common use. However, due to the advertising clause, FreeBSD cannot simply tack the GPL onto the existing license. The GPL prohibits this. Much new development removes the advertising clause of the copyright statement.

So, now that the advertising clause is gone, does this mean that FreeBSD can simply tack the GPL onto the existing license?

If you've decided once and for all that you're never, ever use an operating system other than Linux (or FreeBSD, or Windows, or whatever) ... why not just say "I'm really close-minded" instead of "Your operating system sucks?"

For the desktop user the advantage of FreeBSD is that it is more 'consistent', easier to install, configure and maintain than any distribution of Linux I know, but the differences are probably big enough to switch, if you have a system that already does what you want it to.

Read what Daemon news has to say about this issue, also chech the back issues.
---

Why do people always see MS behind the scenes
sowing dissension in the free Unix ranks? I will admit that MS has certainly questionable business practices but it doesn't typically openly try to do this, but rather subtly in the background (ie. make Netscape run slower on MS hosted sites, etc...)

I even got a similar response like this one to my editorial in this month's Daemon News. I swear people think Bill Gates is like the Wizard of Oz and hiding behind every curtain.

Go back to Daemon News and read some of the other columns and articles, or maybe a few back issues. This isn't the only thing that has ever appeared there, you know. ;^)

just installed freeBSD I didnt like it... I wanted to see whitch was more solid freeBSD seemed nice but A
lot of the basics just wouldnt work like *netscape* which hurt my feelings..

That's interesting, because I tried FreeBSD out of desperation in searching for a UNIX that would work well without much initial effort from me (I had not yet learned much about Unix, but that has changed largely since then). I found it to be far superior to Linux in that respect. I had been using Slackware for several months the year before I installed FreeBSD. I didn't like it much. As to other distros, I didn't like the feel of Redhat and didn't want to pay money for free software anyway.

FreeBSD was extremely easy to install. The ports tree system and Handbook on the homepage flattened the slope of the initial learning curve, and was remarkably rock stable. The centralized nature of FreeBSD is unbeatable. One also gets the advantage of benefiting from the many years of clean, efficient, intelligent coding done at Berkley University by all of those PhDs. Your tax dollars at work, take advantage of it. :)

Besides all that, FreeBSD has complete Linux emulation, so any proggie that will run on Linus' OS will run on any FBSD system.

As to the basics such as netscape not working (I never had any difficulty with any of it) perhaps you are going about things wrong? Did you try and install it from the ports, or did you try and install the Linux distrobution? If you tried the ports, that is curious. If a Linux distro, it may take some tinkering to set up right. If you are trying to run a Linux binary, did you make certain that your Linux emulation was working properly? go into /etc/rc.conf and set lpd_enable="YES". You may find you get better results. ;)

Maybe BSD is faster now.

It was always my impression that Linux was catching up to FreeBSD. After all, as the web page says, it has "The power to serve". They're not being overconfident, FreeBSD was built to be server first, workstation second. But as I type this note on my FreeBSD 3.2Release system running on a Toshiba Satellite laptop, I can't help but remember the article one or two months ago on Daemon News called The Power to...Work? which discussed something I had learned to my joy six months ago...that FreeBSD is a superb choice for a workstation. I'm a graduate student doing computational chemistry, and I most of the same stuff on my laptop that everyone else in the office does on their SGIs.

But I wouldn't trade it for my linux box anyday..

That's too bad. But if you want to stick with the penguin with the fat butt, it's your call. It's okay, too, because FreeBSD can just ride piggy-back on Linux's success. And like the sig I've seen here on /. before, "FreeBSD, Linux, it's like blondes and brunettes, I like them both". Let's not forget with these entertaining holy wars we're all on the same UNIX side. On the other hand, these little family squables can be extremely entertaining and productive, don't you think?

Happy hacking, Linux people We FreeBSD folk will just occassionally poke you fat penguin folk in your huge butts with our tridents every now and again so you don't get too comfortable in that oh so hot spotlight. ;)

just installed freeBSD I didnt like it... I wanted to see whitch was more solid freeBSD seemed nice but A
lot of the basics just wouldnt work like *netscape* which hurt my feelings..

That's interesting, because I tried FreeBSD out of desperation in searching for a UNIX that would work well without much initial effort from me (I had not yet learned much about Unix, but that has changed largely since then). I found it to be far superior to Linux in that respect. I had been using Slackware for several months the year before I installed FreeBSD. I didn't like it much. As to other distros, I didn't like the feel of Redhat and didn't want to pay money for free software anyway.

FreeBSD was extremely easy to install. The ports tree system and Handbook on the homepage flattened the slope of the initial learning curve, and was remarkably rock stable. The centralized nature of FreeBSD is unbeatable. One also gets the advantage of benefiting from the many years of clean, efficient, intelligent coding done at Berkley University by all of those PhDs. Your tax dollars at work, take advantage of it. :)

Besides all that, FreeBSD has complete Linux emulation, so any proggie that will run on Linus' OS will run on any FBSD system.

As to the basics such as netscape not working (I never had any difficulty with any of it) perhaps you are going about things wrong? Did you try and install it from the ports, or did you try and install the Linux distrobution? If you tried the ports, that is curious. If a Linux distro, it may take some tinkering to set up right. If you are trying to run a Linux binary, did you make certain that your Linux emulation was working properly? go into /etc/rc.conf and set lpd_enable="YES". You may find you get better results. ;)

Maybe BSD is faster now.

It was always my impression that Linux was catching up to FreeBSD. After all, as the web page says, it has "The power to serve". They're not being overconfident, FreeBSD was built to be server first, workstation second. But as I type this note on my FreeBSD 3.2Release system running on a Toshiba Satellite laptop, I can't help but remember the article one or two months ago on Daemon News called The Power to...Work? which discussed something I had learned to my joy six months ago...that FreeBSD is a superb choice for a workstation. I'm a graduate student doing computational chemistry, and I most of the same stuff on my laptop that everyone else in the office does on their SGIs.

But I wouldn't trade it for my linux box anyday..

That's too bad. But if you want to stick with the penguin with the fat butt, it's your call. It's okay, too, because FreeBSD can just ride piggy-back on Linux's success. And like the sig I've seen here on /. before, "FreeBSD, Linux, it's like blondes and brunettes, I like them both". Let's not forget with these entertaining holy wars we're all on the same UNIX side. On the other hand, these little family squables can be extremely entertaining and productive, don't you think?

Happy hacking, Linux people We FreeBSD folk will just occassionally poke you fat penguin folk in your huge butts with our tridents every now and again so you don't get too comfortable in that oh so hot spotlight. ;)

Here is an interesting quote from Pedro F. Giffuni, at deamonnews


"I arrived, however, to two important conclusions:


1.the GNU Public License will not save the world,
2.there shouldn't be a universal license; different situations require different licenses."

Both Joe Drew and Pedro F. Giffuni are very biased towards their favorite license in their discussions.
I think it is very shortsighted to think that all software should be licensed under one system, whether its GPL, or BSD.
Authors have the freedom to choose whatever suits their needs or desires, as long as they have a clear idea of what they want for their code's future. How can GPL or BSD be better and more "right" than the other when they both have very different purposes?

There is well written essay by a BSD style license advocate in http://www.daemonnews.org/199906/gpl-e vil.html.

There's a pretty good article discussing some of the short-comings of GPL in this month's daemonnews from the view of *BSDers.

It seems to me like the main difference between the two licenses is that one gives you enough freedom to screw yourself over, while one tries to protect you from that, even if it seems like it is infringing a bit on the freedom you'd want as a developer. It seems like that's the source of a lot of anti-GPL angst.

Why hasn't a bios maker put this feature in before?

One of its developers (a NetBSD guy, you can read an Interview with him on daemonnews) dropped some words in a mailinglist about this:
IIRC he said some had it in the past and he fears they may be put it back in what would probably kill this product.

Restrictively Unrestrictive: The GPL License in Software Development

It is my opinion that the General Public License is not so much about ``keeping free software free'' as it is about forcing us to accept the extreme Communistic political philosophy of Richard Stallman and others at the Free Software Foundation. The very spirit of the GPL is to attack the very concept of Capitalism and individualism. There is no concept of intellectual property under the terms of the GPL. Your hard work is no more your property than everyone else's.

This last bit simply is not correct. As an author you retain *all* rights of the software you wrote. Remember, it's copyrighted to you as the author. You (as the author) can even make modifications and sell those as a proprietary product (example: sendmail). The paragraph above is mainly political diffamation; the author closes his eyes before the facts.

Here's the email I wrote a week ago when I first read this article. It says mostly things other people have said in these comments, but not entirely.

RMS responded to the email and said, "It is clear that the article you're commenting on was completely confused."

It is my opinion that this article is not, in any sense, a good article. It consists almost entirely of acrimonious accusations and misstatements of fact that can generously be described as gross misunderstandings.

I am willing to have this comment posted as a Slashdot article if the Slashdot gods see fit to do so.

(This is with regard to http://www.daemonnews.org/199905/gpl.html .)

It appears that much of your article was based on misunderstandings of the GPL. I hope you are willing to post a retraction of those parts of your article.

[ Rob: You are welcome to post this on Slashdot if you like. ]

You write:

The clause about "output from the Program" is confusing and rather open-ended. It says that if a GPL'ed program generates output that may be used as a program, then the output is also GPL'ed. This would apply, for example, if using a parser generator such as ``flex'' or ``bison'' (the GNU equivalents of ``lex'' and ``yacc''). However, this curiously does not seem to apply to binary or object code generated by the GNU compilers, such as ``gcc''. Overall, I'm not sure about this clause of the license, and if I'm missing something here, please enlighten me. At any rate, the last sentence causes the most confusion, as it is completely non-specific.

This clause confused me for a while, too. What it says is the opposite of what you think it says: it says that the output is not GPLed simply because it came out of a GPLed program.

So flex and bison output, along with gcc output, is not necessarily GPLed. However, sometimes it is, specifically when the output is part of the program itself. For example, bison output with the default bison parser skeleton is a work based on the bison parser skeleton, which is part of bison. (Recently an exception was made so that bison output with the default parser skeleton was not GPLed, but this was the case for a long time.)

So you see -- it depends on what the program does. ;)

You could have written to the FSF for clarification before writing the article.

This says that if you include non-GPL code in your program, you do not have to release that part of the code as GPL, provided that you distribute that part of code separate from the rest of the program! If the GPL and non-GPL code are distributed together (as is most often logically the case), then the non-GPL code's license, if any, is automatically null and void (may in some cases be illegal) and the entire work is now GPL-infected.

No, the GPL cannot magically null some other software license. What it can do is permit you to distribute code licensed under the GPL. What this clause says is that you cannot distribute code licensed under the GPL as part of another program unless the whole program is distributed under the GPL.

So if I link Emacs's buffer-handling functions into a proprietary text editor, I am not permitted to distribute that text editor unless I license that text editor under the GPL. This seems like a reasonable restriction to me; RMS wrote those buffer-handling functions so people could use free software, not so proprietary-software makers could make money off of him.

What the "distribute them as separate works" thing means is this.

The XML parser Expat is licensed under the GNU GPL so that it can be linked into GPLed programs. However, if James Clark (Expat's author) wanted to incorporate Expat into Mozilla, he can license Expat under the GPL-conflicting Mozilla Public License as well. Indeed, if he wants to link Expat into some proprietary XML editor, he doesn't have to GPL that XML editor, either. That's because Mozilla and the hypothetical proprietary XML editor would not be "part of a whole which is a work based on the program" -- where the program in question is not Expat, but some other GPLed program that uses Expat.

Make sense?

This clause reeks of political extremism, and is not entirely true. When a program or work is released under a license, this means that you are in effect licensed to use the program. If this is the case, then you are not the real owner of your code, the Free Software Foundation is! Particularly when it comes to controlling the ``distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program''. After all is said and done, the only part of this work that you actually own is the Copyright itself. And that copyright is subject to the terms of this license. Essentially this is the rudimentary philosophy of Communism, in which you can create something, but you only own it as much as everyone else owns it.

As explained above, this is not correct. You are always free to license your code however you see fit, but if you want to link your code with GPLed code, you need to license your code under the GPL. That doesn't keep you from also, say, licensing your code under the BSD license, or the MPL.

Also, I think you are mistaken about communism; copyright law is not a child of capitalism, but of feudalism.

And yet again, stating that you cannot change the license of a GPL'ed program once it has been released under GPL.

You'd be amazed how often people have tried to do this (with software they didn't write!)

Remember, though, the GPL provides rights only to users of the software; the author can do whatever they want with it, as explained in section 2.

It also states that you cannot further license the program or modify the GPL in any way.

Right. That is, if I have a big juicy piece of code released under the GPL (say, GNU Emacs) and I want to make a KDE version, I can't add a clause to the beginning of the GPL that says, "As a special exception, this code may be freely linked with the Qt library."

Of course, if I wrote the code, I can license it however I want.

This sounds much like a Microsoft-style license, in which your actions determine your acceptance of the license. In other words, you don't need to sign anything to be under the control of this license, all you need to do is modify or distribute the program (in the case of Microsoft, merely use the program).

Actually, you don't even need to modify or distribute the program to be under the control of the GPL. You just need to exist.

In copyright law, certain rights are reserved for the author of a work, including the rights of first sale and copying. The author is allowed to license other people to do these things in restricted ways or in unrestricted ways.

When an author decides to use the GPL, that means they are granting everyone in the world a license to use their software under certain conditions -- whether everyone wants to use it or not.

Microsoft's shrink-wrap licenses are probably not valid because you already bought the software from Microsoft or a Microsoft retailer, which implicitly grants you some rights, before agreeing to the license.

More political extremism: if you cannot distribute the program in FULL compliance with the GPL, then you cannot distribute it at all. This is nothing more than anti-competitive, anti-capitalism restrictions.

Anti-competitive? Anti-capitalist? How?

If I license you the right to print my poem, but only in a magazine, not in a book, then you are not allowed to print it in a book. I don't think that's "anti-competitive" or "anti-capitalist" at all. It's just copyright law. If I license the general public the right to reproduce my software documentation in electronic form, but not in paper form, then you are not allowed to distribute it in paper form -- even if it's about cryptography and the courts say you can only distribute it in paper form, not in electronic form. This provision of the GPL is no different from these examples; indeed (as it says at the top of section 7) it is redundant.

A rather interesting twist: if part of the license doesn't hold up in the law, the rest of the license still applies. Not sure of the legality of this, and could be up for debate...

This "severability" term is standard in agreements written by one party. Your credit-card agreement, the airlines' terms of passage, and your bank agreements all contain essentially identical terms.

Also note that there is a separate, but similar license known as the LGPL or ``Library General Public License'' which covers software libraries. It places the same general terms and conditions on library code as the GPL places on program code. It seems the LGPL was intended to clear confusion in whether a program must be GPL'ed if linked with GPL'ed libraries. Surprisingly, this does not appear to be the case.

The LGPL was intended to provide more liberal licensing terms than the GPL for certain libraries, so that proprietary programs could be linked against free libraries rather than proprietary libraries.

There are also libraries released under the GPL; for example, readline. You are not allowed to distribute code linked against these libraries unless that code is also licensed under the GPL.

The LGPL is not a clarification of the GPL for libraries; it is a separate license. You're not the only person to make this mistake; to clear it up, the FSF recently renamed it the "Lesser General Public License".

It also places the same restriction on any software that is derived in any way from a GPL'ed program, thereby infecting the derived work with the GPL.

No. In particular, it doesn't restrict software that is output from a GPLed program (unless that software is itself a GPLed program for other reasons; for example, GNU cc includes some GPLed .y files that can be given as input to bison, producing some software as output. The output software is GPLed in this case.) or software that doesn't contain parts of a GPLed program.

Once GPL'ed, the code, or any derived work, can never be released under any other license from that point on, no matter how many cycles of modification it has undergone.

The author can release it under as many other licenses as their little heart desires. You just can't release copies of someone else's code -- or a program incorporating someone else's code -- under a non-GPL license.

It is my opinion that the General Public License is not so much about ``keeping free software free'' as it is about forcing us to accept the extreme Communistic political philosophy of Richard Stallman and others at the Free Software Foundation.

This is grossly inaccurate; RMS is not a communist. As far as I know, the other folks who work for the FSF aren't, either.

But how does the GPL force you to accept anything? It doesn't even force you to accept the GPL. You are welcome to freely choose to violate the GPL and get sued, or follow the GPL and receive its benefits.

The very spirit of the GPL is to attack the very concept of Capitalism and individualism. There is no concept of intellectual property under the terms of the GPL.

Intellectual property is contrary to the spirit of capitalism and individualism. (Unless you're a socialist who thinks the spirit of capitalism consists in the exploitation of the weak by the strong; intellectual-property law does that quite well!) Thomas Jefferson was opposed to intellectual property. You can't get much more individualist than that. ;)

[under the GPL] Your hard work is no more your property than everyone else's.

This appears to stem from a misconception that the GPL restricts the rights of software authors. I mean, in a sense, it does; to use the GPL is to grant to everyone in the world the right to use your code under certain terms. You no longer have the freedom to prohibit people from using your code unless they pay you a license fee. But you still own the copyright, and you can license the code to people under more liberal licenses if you want. (You can even license it under more restrictive licenses, but people might just go download the GPLed version instead.)

Indeed, Richard Stallman himself would prefer that we recognize the Linux operating system as ``GNU/Linux'' instead, because of the fact that almost all of the code is GPL'ed.

This is a misconception. RMS wants people to call it GNU Slash Linux because the OS consists largely of code written by the GNU project. IMHO, he is mistaken; I don't think Linux should be called that, because it consists mostly of code written not by the GNU project, or for Linux either, for that matter.

[RMS wrote to correct me about this: "Actually, neither of those is the reason. The reason is that the system in question is largely the GNU system."]

In fact, it should be contested over its shaky sense of legality in these matters. I'm not aware of any court cases involving the GPL so far, so we have yet to see what will happen when such an issue arises.

The lawyers who have read the GPL seem to think it will hold up. We'll have to see it tested in court; I suspect that will happen this year or next year.

In summary, despite the disadvantages in certain instances, most open source software licenses contribute to the growth and technological and artistic development of software and computer science in general. Both licenses that have been considered here fall under this category, and as such should be considered a valuable resource and a great achievement for the intellectual development of the scientific and technological communities as a whole. Open source software is all about the sharing of ideas and concepts.

Hmm, I mostly agree. But I thought open source software was about reducing the cost of software development by having your customers fix all the bugs for you ;)

An interesting, and to some developers, central point of the difference between Linux and the BSD unices is that BSD is not under the GPL. This can become a very political issue if pushed to the wall. There's an interesting article about these issues in the latest issue of Daemon News , which is a publication well worth reading if you're interested in BSD.

Some would say that the absence of the GPL is one of the features of BSD.

An interesting, and to some developers, central point of the difference between Linux and the BSD unices is that BSD is not under the GPL. This can become a very political issue if pushed to the wall. There's an interesting article about these issues in the latest issue of Daemon News , which is a publication well worth reading if you're interested in BSD.

Some would say that the absence of the GPL is one of the features of BSD.

Usenix provided funding for the releases. See the news column in the May 1999 issue of Daemon News .