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this is such a lame response.

so what if the article is *local rag* article and the user responds about a vintage, dare I say limey computer . I've seen/read many a US home computer user talk of Sinclairs, Amigas, bbc or acorns.

How about, 'never saw one of those machines', 'yeah i remember those amiga machines playing kings quest 2' .... no we resort to argumentum ad hominem .

nb: moderators: dont feed the trolls - this article is neither informative nor worthy of points.

I've been trying to figure this out, and it would seem that there is nothing in the license that stops you being able to legally give me a copy of (say) RHES, and for me to run that copy, with no access to up2date and no support contract. (Like a lot of the other posts say, I am the support - my only concern is having a platform that commercial software supports!)

The license seems to refer to the services that come bundled with the software, not the software itself. I believe that the JVM cannot be copied from the standard distribution but removing is trivial.

Interesting notes: to summarise, it's probably perfectly legal for you to copy me RHEL ES, however you would probably also have to provide me all the updates if I wanted them (which may violate your license to receive them). The big dollars is with regard to the updates, and I believe they are made publically available by SRPM - and even then, its probably also technically allowable for you to mirror all the update RPMs somewhere.

I installed Lotus Domino recently on a Debian server because I didn't trust the machine with a consumer Red Hat and it wasn't cost effective enough to get RHEL. I'd be very interested to hear if you can or can't just copy/mirror RHEL.

What SCO is trying to do is forever change the way Linux is licensed. They basically stated this in their conference call. They claim that Linux developers want to have their work protected and that the GPL is not really the way to go anymore. (at least if your SCO) Then, to top that off, they want to make their few lines of code worth more than the punch card it was written on! It's no wonder Microsoft paid for a license... It's the same kinda philosophy Micro-Soft came out with in 1976 in Bill's Open Letter to Hobbyists. It was just as misguided then as it is now.

SCO even went on to say that they would eventually target end-users as well. I guess they are taking lessons form the RIAA now too.

- Slew -

Fast-forward to 2003... The products are orphaned. They have been removed from the Corel Web site without a trace.

It's certainly true that they've been orphaned, but WP8 for Linux Download Personal Edition remains available at a large number of sites, listed in my WordPerfect for Linux FAQ. You can also find PhotoPaint9 (Winelib) tarballs, here and there, if so interested.

The open-source linux.corel.com site that contained Corel's WINE tree is gone.

Substantially all of the former linux.corel.com Web site remains mirrored on http://corellinux.com/. The Corelwine fork remains maintained, for now, by Michael Torrie at http://students.cs.byu.edu/~torriem/.

And no service packs for the Linux versions of these programs ever got released!

Torrie's third-party updates to Corelwine, the Fontastic server, and other support code are said to make WP9 for Linux almost acceptable, although I find WP8 generally superior in fundamental ways. Valentijn Sessink has contributed a third-party fix to the Filtrix date-rollover problem, and there are numerous Corel-issued fixes to little bugs at http://corellinux.com/.

Your point generally is well taken: The corellinux.com site even enshrines Corel's lastingly broken promise to post an "Update coming soon for Corel WordPerfect 8 for Linux/UNIX import/export filter issue", which failure Sessink eventually worked around for the user community's benefit without Corel's help. However, I just wanted to point out that many problems can be fixed to a significant degree, despite Corel having cast the entire thing to the winds.

Library-support problems for WP8.x on modern Linux distributions can be fixed, given varying amounts of determination. In extreme cases, you can install all needed libs from a tarball available for that purpose. My FAQ has details.

I suspect you'd find WP8.x much less frustrating than the lamentable WP9, especially if you acquire a copy of the WP8.1 Personal Edition -- the best release by far of WP for Linux -- still sometimes available (on eBay and other places) bundled as part of Corel Linux OS Standard or Deluxe Editions.

But the long term answer is to realise that proprietary codebases are prone to being here today, gone tomorrow, and to realise that AbiWord 1.9.1 is starting to look awfully good and cannot suffer that same fate. (OpenOffice.org Writer 1.1 beta 2 is useful, too.)

Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com

(I've amended the entry for MS-Exchange at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/groupware accordingly -- along with fixing errors or omissions in the entries for Kroupware, Novell Groupwise, SuSE Openexchange Server, and EasyGate Workgroup.)

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

• MS Exchange Server (server end; NT only), MS Outlook (client end; Win32, MacOS). Very limited support of open-protocol clients (IMAP, webmail?). Microsoft Corp. wants to sell you Exchange 2000, these days, but Exchange 5.5 is still very common.

• Lotus Notes / Domino (server end, Linux supported), Lotus Notes (client end; Win32, MacOS). Limited webmail access (iNotes).

• Novell Groupwise. http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/ Server end runs on either Novell NetWare 5/6 or WinNT. Client end is proprietary Win32 client or webmail. A native Linux client is under development.

• SuSE Linux Openexchange Server (formerly SuSE Linux eMail Server). Standard, good open-source components (Postfix, Apache, Cyrus IMAP, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL) preconfigured to work well with one another, plus a couple of proprietary components: YaST2 for graphical administration, and SkyrixGreen for integrated scheduling and group discussions (shared folders). Client access from any OS, including but not limited to webmail. A full-functional trial version (lacking only "maintenance") is available for US $20 at http://www.suse.com/openexchange/slox_eval_form.ht ml . Sites are known to scale well to at least 1,000 users per site. The largest deployment yet known (March 2003) is 1,900 users.

• Bynari Insight Server, http://www.bynari.net/ . Server end is Linux-based. Intended as a plug-compatible replacement for MS-Exchange Server, based on POP3, IMPA, SMTP, and LDAP, but also with full support for all the special, proprietary MS-Exchange Server RPC-based protocols for group discussion, scheduling, contact management, task lists, etc., when used with MS-Outlook clients. Review: http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6734

• Bynari InsightConnector, http://www.bynari.net/ . Extensions that load into MS-Outlook clients to let them perform MS-Exchange-type functions (scheduling, contact-management, public folders) without needing an MS-Exchange server, using only open-standard IMAP, SMTP, and LDAP servers, instead.

• Samsung Contact (formerly HP Openmail), http://samsungcontact.com/en/ . Server end can be Linux-based (or Solaris/AIX). Based on SMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP. Supports proprietary protocols for e-mail, scheduling, etc. native to Samsung's Contact client (which is available on Linux and Win32). Webmail access. Implements Microsoft's (documented, for a change) MAPI protocol for scheduling, public folders, offline folders.

• Oracle Collaboration Suite, http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/cs/ . Formerly Steltor CorporateTime, http://www.steltor.com/, until that firm's recent acquisition by Oracle. (That product is said to have emerged from Netscape Calendar.) Does IMAP, POP3, SMTP, E-mail, real-time conferences, voicemail, scheduling. Apparently implements all of the special, proprietary MS-Exchange Server RPC-based protocols for group discussion, scheduling, contact management,

See, here's another person who thinks stable and unstable are your only Debian choices. See also the earlier posts about stable servers vs less stable desktops. Nobody knows about the Debian testing distribution unless they hear about it from somebody else. Rather than write a long essay about how everybody needs to market Debian better, volunteer time to change Debian's web site to make the testing distribution more prominent. Then watch Debian's reputation change. The Debian testing distribution rocks.

<Airplane>So there.</Airplane>

one mua is enough for everybody.

Why have one when you can have 115?

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

BTW, what alteratives to BIND exist for Linuxand *BSD? I actually don't know and would like to know.

There are now a number of alternative packages that may have advantages for many deployments. E.g.:

MaraDNS is a general-purpose, fast DNS server package (doing recursive, authoritative, and caching roles, plus fully supporting zone transfers):
http://www.maradns.org/

pdnsd is a small caching-only DNS server with a disk-based cache, suitable for small networks and workstations:
http://home.t-online.de/home/Moestl/

Dnsmasq is a small authoritative and caching DNS server for a group of NATted / IPmasqued machines (optionally pulling names from DHCP leases):
http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/

DNRD is a small caching-only DNS server for NAT / IPmasq networks:
http://dnrd.nevalabs.org/

MyDNS is a MySQL-based authoritative and caching server (no recursive service) suitable for very large sites. In such roles, it's faster and more responsive than BIND9, even though the latter uses a RAM-based cache:
http://mydns.bboy.net/

ldapdns implements the same idea, except out of an LDAP database. Again, much faster than BIND9:
http://nimh.org/code/ldapdns/

GnuDIP is an authoritative server for Dynamic DNS:
http://gnudip2.sourceforge.net/gnudip-www/

NSD is a high-performance authoritative-only daemon:
http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/nsd/

PowerDNS (open source as of 2002-11-25) is an authoritative-only daemon with a modular structure supporting various back-end information stores such as SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle 8i, Oracle 9i, IBM DB2, and others via ODBC), BIND zonefiles and other file formats, and LDAP directories. Supports AXFR zone transfers.
http://www.powerdns.com/products/powerdns/

CustomDNS is a authoritative-only daemon for both static addresses and its variant form of dynamic DNS:
http://customdns.sourceforge.net/

lbnamed is a similar authoritative-only daemon for static and dynamic information, with a load-balancing multi-machine architecture:
http://www.stanford.edu/~riepel/lbnamed/

Posadis is another fast authoritative-only daemon:
http://posadis.sourceforge.net/

dents is another general-purpose DNS server, but is perenially unfinished, and is probably dead, at this point:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dents/

Pliant DNS Server is another general-purpose DNS server, although it may not support zone transfers:
http://pliant.cx/pliant/protocol/dns/

Yaku-NS is another small, fast general-purpose DNS server:
http://www.kyuzz.org/antirez/ens.html

Twisted Names is an authoritative and caching DNS server, written in Python:
http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/howto/names

Oak DNS Server is an authoritative and caching DNS server, supporting dynamic DNS updates and AAAA records. It's written in Python, and doesn't need to run privileged:
http://www.digitallumber.com/oak

dnsjava is a minimal, authoritative-only server, a resolver library, and a set of DNS utilities, all written in Java:
http://www.xbill.org/dnsjava/

Related:

FireDNS is a client library for DNS requests, with emphasis on speed and asynchronous processing. Written in C, and has low-timeout blocking functions. Can be used to relace standard libc resolver library functions like getbyhostname with much faster equivalent code:
http://ares.penguinhosting.net/~ian/

GNU adns is a resolver library for C (and C++) programs, and a collection of useful DNS resolver utilities:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/adns/

Proprietary packages include:

UltraDNS (UltraDNS Corporation)
djbdns/tinydns
ATLAS (Verisign)
BINDPlus (Information Network Eng. Group, Inc.)
Global Name Service (Nominum, Inc.)
NeDNS (Neteka, Inc.)

I maintain this list at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/dns-servers

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

But that's just it, my employer does not "give" me the binaries.

They do "give" it to you (English definition), just like they "give" you many tools, although neither employee nor boss expects him to keep permanent possession- but that's not the point. Office furniture, computer hardware- they're physical goods. Whoever bought them can transfer them wherever he wants, but there's no law against copying them, since that's impossible.

When giving software to employees, however, the employer will have committed an act of copyright violation, unless he abides by the license. And if the license is the GPL, that means that anyone with access to the binaries can freely spread them far and wide.

Imagine if someone from the corporate IT department is called to the witness stand:

"Fred, did you on the date of March 1st, distribute or cause to be distributed to your co-employees Carol, Betty, and Alice, the software labelled exhibit A, which you have already admitted contains substantial portions of the plaintiff's source code?"

Fred cannot honestly deny he "distributed" the code. Then the only question is, was he violating copyright when he did so? Or, in doing so, had he consented to the GPL? In the first case, "Go directly to punitive damages". In the second case, Carol, Betty, and Alice are free to pass out further GPLed copies to the 4 corners of the earth.

The software installed on the computer remains the property of my employer

It was never the property of the employer. It belongs to the author and copyright holder the entire time.

The employer had permission to use it under certain conditions. If the software was GPL, those conditions included never restricting anyone from sharing copies of the software.

And I'm envisioning a kiosk that would be set up in a public place to say give directions to anyone who wishes to use it. By the definition of user you are attempting to assert, I would.

No, because the kiosk user doesn't have access to the filesystem. An employee of a corporation does. Maybe not the end-user who runs the program each day, but the IT dept who installed it certainly does.

And anyway, the FSF is considering extending the GPL to ensure that the user is entitled to the source code even if he's using a program running on someone else's computer. That won't matter for a while yet, though. (An example of a license that moves towards this goal is here)

but I think the same case law that allows a software publisher to go after a business that has illegal copies of software installed on the businesses systems governs here.

That is a more general thing, and relates to the definition of incorporation. If a crime is committed by a person acting on behalf of a corporation, liablity will be assessed against the corp. as a whole, rather than against any person within it.

But, laws like that only shift around who gets punished for any particular offense. It doesn't change what things are illegal for a corporation to do, which includes everything a private citizen can't do, and more.

So in my example of Fred above, if he turns out to be guilty, the corporation will pay the damages, if he was acting under their orders.

but unlike djb, the mplayer group utilizes the standard GPL license (probably because they were too lazy to write their own crazy license) and seems to think they can utilize the GPL as a shield for protection of their illegal software.

in short, this isn't the first case of killer-app type software that is written by immature and/or wacky authors with questionable licensing terms (bitchx, qmail/djbdns, glftpd, vision-x, etc.)

if anything, their messages to debian-devel and the retalliatory flames are certainly entertaining reading.

Such callous attitudes towards end users and the "linux does not entitle you to a usable interface, so shut up and quit whining" mantra only further strengthen Microsofts hold on desktop computing and chase away people who want to make linux more usable.

That's an odd way to characterise the referenced essay, since that's not what it says. In fact, it actively encourages people who're crafting variant forms of the usual Linux distributions to meet the needs of particular user communities.

It says that computer users merely coming onto Linux mailing lists and newsgroups, and demanding that randomly selected Linux people "must" change their existing Linux distributions to meet the speaker's preferences simply doesn't work, and is likely to mostly get you politely filtered out and ignored. It says that, instead, you might want to look around and see if there's a different packaging of Linux that suits you better. And it makes a few other points about systems perceived as being "simple" usually are anything but that, and tend to just have their complexity better concealed than typical Linux people prefer.

That strikes me as being the simple truth. I doubt people who would otherwise "make Linux more usable" are "scared away" by hearing it -- in the unlikely event of their seeking it out. I suppose people wander across the page occasionally -- but you're really going a bit far out of your way to misread what I wrote.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Mr Moen, when his character is attacked in a public forum, has a right to defend himself. If I'm ever covered in Slashdot, I'll do the same.

Mr. Moen has the right to any opinion he wants and he should be able to express it.

That being said, I feel that Kernigheze such as Mr. Moen have effectively done more to crush linux on the desktop than Bill Gates ever could. Such callous attitudes towards end users and the "linux does not entitle you to a usable interface, so shut up and quit whining" mantra only further strengthen Microsofts hold on desktop computing and chase away people who want to make linux more usable.

I've certainly been known to tell people they "don't have to load Red Hat", if they seem to have picked up that impression and are asking my advice. For most people running desktop setups, if they ask, I tend to recommend Libranet, Lycoris Desktop/LX, Linux-Mandrake, or SuSE.

But I'm glad to help people with RH. I think three people at the last SVLUG installfest used my CDs of RH 8.0, and I duplicated a set on the spot for someone else. Currently, I also have ISOs of the post-8.0 "Phoebe" beta. A couple of days ago, I invited anyone interested to visit and make copies.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Subversion is indeed already a giant step better than CVS in all the areas where CVS was painful, while having a good migration path. Arch, OpenCM, and PRCS2 could be in the running, and Arch has that multi-repository support going for it. But I'd say Subversion is the best thing going as of right now.

I have a listing of all known SCM software for Linux at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/scm.html, in case it will help.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

But openoffice already HAS Access functionality, and it's relatively painless to setup.

it requires an external database, anything that can be used via odbc, basically. unfortunately, i don't think it handles access files themselves *yet*.
see here: on linuxmafia for more information on this topic.

ashridah

It is just not even close to true. Changes FOR YOUR OWN PERSONAL USE do not come close to the issues related to copyright violation.

John Cowan, in a post to license-discuss@opensource.org, said he'd looked into the language Bernstein quoted from the CONTU Final Report, and found it to be distortively selective. He furnished a more-complete quotation, arguing that it, with the full wording included, contradicts Bernstein's assertion.

Now, if you wish to argue with Cowan and his more-complete quotation of the legislative history, feel free to do so. I'd love to see you do that on license-discuss. But repetitive denials to Slashdot in all capital letters really don't qualify.

I DO prefer code open source code that can also be forked. But I do not think that is necessary for something to be FREE (as in GNU free)....

Well, the FSF doesn't agree with you, and never has. Read Stallman's "four freedoms" essay more attentively, and he specifically states there (in the FSF's standard definition, if you can call it that, of "free software") that free software must be freely redistributable in either source or binary form.

More to the immediate point than appeal to yet another authority figure, it seems perfectly obvious to me that the right to fork is an inherent quality of what anyone would logically mean by the term free (or open-source) software: Without it, the project effectively ceases to be maintainable, the moment its owner hangs up his hat. Free? Open source? I really don't think so. If open source is to mean anything at all, it can't encompass software that automatically becomes effectively a dead project the moment its copyright owner retired, dies, or switches to a different hobby.

"P.S.: I'm sure you'll be equally offended by http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/mtas"

Not really.

You could have been offended by the numerous examples detailed there of intellectually dishonest arguments typically put forward by (many, not all) DJBware fans -- which, curiously enough, have shown up in today's discussion, too. But if you aren't, then great.

The line was actually a running gag from my old long-vanished dial-up bulletin-board system, whose sign-off screen said "If you didn't enjoy this BBS, you'll probably be equally offended by any of these others", followed by a list of other recommended systems.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

First there was sendmail. Then qmail. Then, a long time later, other options.

Noted. But I'm talking about how DJB groupies tend to behave today. See for yourself: Look on the various Qmail pages. Read the Qmail HOWTO.

That might have been a reasonable excuse years ago. Today, it looks a whole lot like intellectual dishonesty: Beating up on monolithic Sendmail, especially in the usual fashion that fails to credit it for the major improvement of dropping privilege according to role, is a whole lot more facile rhetoric than comparing it against the similarly-designed Postfix (ne Vmailer) codebase.

First, there was BIND. Then, djbdns. And now, VERY recently, other replacements.

Actually, some (such as Dents) have been around for quite a long time. Most people were not aware of them until after I expanded my essay to include open-source alternatives to all the proprietary DJB packages. Which in turn I was motivated to do out of annoyance at Prof. Bernstein sending me belligerent e-mails essentially making legal threats (talking about my essay being "against the law" and containing "libel"). Funny how these things work out, isn't it?

I don't think proprietary is appropriate.

That's too bad, because that's what the word means. One key element whose absence makes us consider a package proprietary is not having the right to fork. Not having that possibility as a safety valve means that the package is at risk of becoming effectively unmaintainable if its copyright holder stops issuing new versions (and doesn't grant additional rights to fix the problem).

Prof. Bernstein is certainly under no obligation to grant such rights, and he's quite generous in granting those he does -- but the only fitting term for the result is "proprietary code".

DJB software provides the user ALL of the GNU freedoms.

That, sir, is simply wrong. Hmm, I don't usually pay a whole lot of attention to Stallman's "four freedoms" essay, since it's a bit too vague to be useful. I prefer the DFSG and OSD, generally.

However [rummaging through the FSF propaganda], Prof. Bernstein doesn't choose to meaningfully grant FSF freedom #4. To quote that essay: "The freedom to redistribute copies must include binary or executable forms of the program, as well as source code, for both modified and unmodified versions. (Distributing programs in runnable form is necessary for conveniently installable free operating systems.) It is ok if there is no way to produce a binary or executable form for a certain program (since some languages don't support that feature), but you must have the freedom to redistribute such forms should you find or develop a way to make them."

His software works dern well, and is free enough for anyone whose concern is getting their work done.

Until the day Prof. Bernstein hangs up his hat, at which point the projects basically become unmaintainable. (Maintaining a codebase solely through source patches against a legacy final-version source tarball wouldn't really be feasible for long.) And that is of course the prospect that hangs over users of all such software.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

First there was sendmail. Then qmail. Then, a long time later, other options.

Noted. But I'm talking about how DJB groupies tend to behave today. See for yourself: Look on the various Qmail pages. Read the Qmail HOWTO.

That might have been a reasonable excuse years ago. Today, it looks a whole lot like intellectual dishonesty: Beating up on monolithic Sendmail, especially in the usual fashion that fails to credit it for the major improvement of dropping privilege according to role, is a whole lot more facile rhetoric than comparing it against the similarly-designed Postfix (ne Vmailer) codebase.

First, there was BIND. Then, djbdns. And now, VERY recently, other replacements.

Actually, some (such as Dents) have been around for quite a long time. Most people were not aware of them until after I expanded my essay to include open-source alternatives to all the proprietary DJB packages. Which in turn I was motivated to do out of annoyance at Prof. Bernstein sending me belligerent e-mails essentially making legal threats (talking about my essay being "against the law" and containing "libel"). Funny how these things work out, isn't it?

I don't think proprietary is appropriate.

That's too bad, because that's what the word means. One key element whose absence makes us consider a package proprietary is not having the right to fork. Not having that possibility as a safety valve means that the package is at risk of becoming effectively unmaintainable if its copyright holder stops issuing new versions (and doesn't grant additional rights to fix the problem).

Prof. Bernstein is certainly under no obligation to grant such rights, and he's quite generous in granting those he does -- but the only fitting term for the result is "proprietary code".

DJB software provides the user ALL of the GNU freedoms.

That, sir, is simply wrong. Hmm, I don't usually pay a whole lot of attention to Stallman's "four freedoms" essay, since it's a bit too vague to be useful. I prefer the DFSG and OSD, generally.

However [rummaging through the FSF propaganda], Prof. Bernstein doesn't choose to meaningfully grant FSF freedom #4. To quote that essay: "The freedom to redistribute copies must include binary or executable forms of the program, as well as source code, for both modified and unmodified versions. (Distributing programs in runnable form is necessary for conveniently installable free operating systems.) It is ok if there is no way to produce a binary or executable form for a certain program (since some languages don't support that feature), but you must have the freedom to redistribute such forms should you find or develop a way to make them."

His software works dern well, and is free enough for anyone whose concern is getting their work done.

Until the day Prof. Bernstein hangs up his hat, at which point the projects basically become unmaintainable. (Maintaining a codebase solely through source patches against a legacy final-version source tarball wouldn't really be feasible for long.) And that is of course the prospect that hangs over users of all such software.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

He doesn't need to. djbdns doesn't have a license and doesn't need one: http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html

It would be more accurate to say that djbdns has the default licence that implicitly attaches to creative works by default application of copyright law -- in the absence of an explicit licence grant. The terms of that default licence, described by Prof. Bernstein mostly accurately (other than, according to John Cowan, those concerning modifications) at the URL you posted, are those of proprietary software, rather than open source. (Thus, any software instance issued without an explicit licence is proprietary by default.)

BIND 9 has had security holes.

Tell the whole truth, please: A BIND9 version was subject to one type of DoS attack. Sending a specific DNS packet to the daemon triggered that instance going into some sort of test mode where it performed an internal consistency check, effectively shutting it down.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Has Bernstein put permission to redistribute any patches against djbdns in writing? If so, then the license becomes roughly equivalent to the Trolltech QPL.

As Prof. Bernstein himself has pointed out, as a matter of copyright law, patches are considered analogous to commentary on the original work, and not as derivative works. Thus, the author of the original work has no claim upon them.

So, with a source-available proprietary software package like djbdns, you can end up with a quasi-free software ecology based around distribution of patches and compile-time modification. Inevitably, those patches end up being very seldom regression-tested against one another. Also, if the base package ever ceases to be maintained, continuing development via patch-distribution alone isn't really very practical. It would rapidly become such a hassle that I'm pretty sure the project would effectively die, at that point.

The fix for that problem is of course licensing that includes a right to fork. But that's possible only if the copyright holder is willing to grant that right, which Prof. Bernstein (for most of his project) is not.

That is not intended as a criticism of Prof. Bernstein (whom I admire for his dogged defence of crypto rights), nor of his software (even though I don't like or use the latter). It's just the facts of copyright law and licensing as I understand them.

Buggy? At least the vulnerability mentioned in the article does not affect most recent version of BIND 9.x.

Indeed. One of the most distressing aspects of Prof. Bernstein's flying squadron of groupies is their characteristic shading of the truth on well-known key issues. One of those issues is the vital distinction between BIND8 and BIND9, which by and large they're fully aware are distinct codebases following a from-scratch rewrite specifically to jettison the inherent unmaintainability of the legacy BIND8 codebase -- but they find it convenient to slur the new codebase with the old one's faults. Another is their characteristic refusal to compare the Qmail MTA against anything other than Sendmail -- when the obvious comparisons are Qmail/Postfix/Courier (all modular designs) and Sendmail/Exim (both monolithic designs where process instances drop privilege according to role). A third is their curious inability to ever say the words "proprietary" or "not open source", instead making excuses, changing the subject, and talking around that point.

(I'll hasten to add that Prof. Bernstein clearly isn't responsible for his acolytes' conduct.)

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Has Bernstein put permission to redistribute any patches against djbdns in writing? If so, then the license becomes roughly equivalent to the Trolltech QPL.

As Prof. Bernstein himself has pointed out, as a matter of copyright law, patches are considered analogous to commentary on the original work, and not as derivative works. Thus, the author of the original work has no claim upon them.

So, with a source-available proprietary software package like djbdns, you can end up with a quasi-free software ecology based around distribution of patches and compile-time modification. Inevitably, those patches end up being very seldom regression-tested against one another. Also, if the base package ever ceases to be maintained, continuing development via patch-distribution alone isn't really very practical. It would rapidly become such a hassle that I'm pretty sure the project would effectively die, at that point.

The fix for that problem is of course licensing that includes a right to fork. But that's possible only if the copyright holder is willing to grant that right, which Prof. Bernstein (for most of his project) is not.

That is not intended as a criticism of Prof. Bernstein (whom I admire for his dogged defence of crypto rights), nor of his software (even though I don't like or use the latter). It's just the facts of copyright law and licensing as I understand them.

Buggy? At least the vulnerability mentioned in the article does not affect most recent version of BIND 9.x.

Indeed. One of the most distressing aspects of Prof. Bernstein's flying squadron of groupies is their characteristic shading of the truth on well-known key issues. One of those issues is the vital distinction between BIND8 and BIND9, which by and large they're fully aware are distinct codebases following a from-scratch rewrite specifically to jettison the inherent unmaintainability of the legacy BIND8 codebase -- but they find it convenient to slur the new codebase with the old one's faults. Another is their characteristic refusal to compare the Qmail MTA against anything other than Sendmail -- when the obvious comparisons are Qmail/Postfix/Courier (all modular designs) and Sendmail/Exim (both monolithic designs where process instances drop privilege according to role). A third is their curious inability to ever say the words "proprietary" or "not open source", instead making excuses, changing the subject, and talking around that point.

(I'll hasten to add that Prof. Bernstein clearly isn't responsible for his acolytes' conduct.)

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

1. djb has too much control over the code he distributes
   
   djb's license leaves a lot to be desired See the linuxmafia djb FAQ for details.
   
   That site goes into much more extensive detail and says it better than I can here.
   
   
2. djb code is written in a very poor style.
   
   It is as if djb thinks white space is a non-renewable resource.
   
   HINT: Strange code style makes it harder to review for correctness.
   
   PROBLEM: Bind is no great pile of wonderful code either.
   
   
3. djb ego can be a problem
   
   If you ever have the unfortunate situation of disagreeing with djb, you know what I mean. Find a flaw and djb will argue with you until you give up in disgust.
   
   Yes: tinydns has flaws, but djb will argue that his code is the way things should work and it is the other hosts that have problems.
   
   HINT: What good is it to offer a reward for finding a bug when all you get is an argument in return?
   
   I'll refer you back to his distribution controlling licenses for another example.
   
   And if you EVER invent an algorithm, implement an idea, distribute code that djb things was his original idea ... well the EMail that you get from him is nothing short of amazing.
   
   HINT: If you are not willing to be an djb-acolyte, then you might as well forget it.
   
   
4. djb is too quick to pull out the lawyers
   
   It seems that ever since his US DoJ lawsuit, djb feels free to wield his lawyer stick to anyone who dares editorialize on his activity. I see that the linuxmafia folks have encounters his legalistic zeal as well.

dbj: You demonstrate that you have the ability to contribute to others very well. I only wish you were less controlling, open to constructive comments and easier to collaborate with ... you and others would benefit from a more gentle and less caustic approach to dealing with others.

1. djb has too much control over the code he distributes
   
   djb's license leaves a lot to be desired See the linuxmafia djb FAQ for details.
   
   That site goes into much more extensive detail and says it better than I can here.
   
   
2. djb code is written in a very poor style.
   
   It is as if djb thinks white space is a non-renewable resource.
   
   HINT: Strange code style makes it harder to review for correctness.
   
   PROBLEM: Bind is no great pile of wonderful code either.
   
   
3. djb ego can be a problem
   
   If you ever have the unfortunate situation of disagreeing with djb, you know what I mean. Find a flaw and djb will argue with you until you give up in disgust.
   
   Yes: tinydns has flaws, but djb will argue that his code is the way things should work and it is the other hosts that have problems.
   
   HINT: What good is it to offer a reward for finding a bug when all you get is an argument in return?
   
   I'll refer you back to his distribution controlling licenses for another example.
   
   And if you EVER invent an algorithm, implement an idea, distribute code that djb things was his original idea ... well the EMail that you get from him is nothing short of amazing.
   
   HINT: If you are not willing to be an djb-acolyte, then you might as well forget it.
   
   
4. djb is too quick to pull out the lawyers
   
   It seems that ever since his US DoJ lawsuit, djb feels free to wield his lawyer stick to anyone who dares editorialize on his activity. I see that the linuxmafia folks have encounters his legalistic zeal as well.

dbj: You demonstrate that you have the ability to contribute to others very well. I only wish you were less controlling, open to constructive comments and easier to collaborate with ... you and others would benefit from a more gentle and less caustic approach to dealing with others.

The linuxmafia article is also wrong on several counts.

Please let me know, and I'll fix them.

If you own a piece of copyrighted work, you can alter it for your own use legally.

John Cowan's analysis on license-discuss@opensource.org of the USA Copyright Act's legislative history suggests that modification is not among the rights automatically conveyed. The essay on my site links to a mirror of his analysis, so you're welcome to evaluate its merits for yourself. My only comment was that Cowan "convincingly disputed" Prof. Bernstein's assertion to the contrary. But whether you'll be similarly convinced is entirely between you, Cowan, and the legislative record.

You claim that there my essay is "wrong on several counts", but only cite only one particular on which you seem to disagree (without clearly stating why, other than that handwave about newspapers) -- not with me, but rather John Cowan. Are there other points, that you accidentally neglected to include? Please do detail them, when you have a chance.

As far as the other stuff, well, a large patch community is built around qmail and tinydns, and DJB is quite supportive. You get the source, and the ability to change it for personal use. And the ability to distribute patches to the source. Isn't that enough?

It's very generous, and commendable of Prof. Bernstein to grant that to the user community. In fact, it's about as generous as it's possible to be with proprietary software. Anyone who's content to become dependent on proprietary software might be very pleased with djbdns, qmail, tcpserver, publicfile, daemontools, and other similar proprietary-licensed offerings -- if they like the design (which I happen not to).

Funny how proponents of DJBware just seem completely unable to utter the word "proprietary". I wonder why that is?

Those of us who, other things being equal, prefer open-source code -- which can be forked in order to prevent the project from dying when its creator dies or loses interest -- will continue to prefer MaraDNS, BIND9, Posadis, CustomDNS, Yaku-NS, etc.

P.S.: I'm sure you'll be equally offended by http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/mtas. Enjoy!

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

The linuxmafia article is also wrong on several counts.

Please let me know, and I'll fix them.

If you own a piece of copyrighted work, you can alter it for your own use legally.

John Cowan's analysis on license-discuss@opensource.org of the USA Copyright Act's legislative history suggests that modification is not among the rights automatically conveyed. The essay on my site links to a mirror of his analysis, so you're welcome to evaluate its merits for yourself. My only comment was that Cowan "convincingly disputed" Prof. Bernstein's assertion to the contrary. But whether you'll be similarly convinced is entirely between you, Cowan, and the legislative record.

You claim that there my essay is "wrong on several counts", but only cite only one particular on which you seem to disagree (without clearly stating why, other than that handwave about newspapers) -- not with me, but rather John Cowan. Are there other points, that you accidentally neglected to include? Please do detail them, when you have a chance.

As far as the other stuff, well, a large patch community is built around qmail and tinydns, and DJB is quite supportive. You get the source, and the ability to change it for personal use. And the ability to distribute patches to the source. Isn't that enough?

It's very generous, and commendable of Prof. Bernstein to grant that to the user community. In fact, it's about as generous as it's possible to be with proprietary software. Anyone who's content to become dependent on proprietary software might be very pleased with djbdns, qmail, tcpserver, publicfile, daemontools, and other similar proprietary-licensed offerings -- if they like the design (which I happen not to).

Funny how proponents of DJBware just seem completely unable to utter the word "proprietary". I wonder why that is?

Those of us who, other things being equal, prefer open-source code -- which can be forked in order to prevent the project from dying when its creator dies or loses interest -- will continue to prefer MaraDNS, BIND9, Posadis, CustomDNS, Yaku-NS, etc.

P.S.: I'm sure you'll be equally offended by http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/mtas. Enjoy!

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

This is why running BIND9 instead of the djb stuff may be a very good idea.

Think what you like, but it was behind. If I remember right one of the packages that was behind was Mozilla. At the time Debian testing had 0.9.6 while 0.9.9 was out.

I do remember getting impatient for Mozilla 0.9.9 and the matching version of Galeon to clear package quarantine, and so just grabbed the .debs out of the "unstable" tree. Doing that was obvious, wasn't difficult, and wasn't a big deal. More to the immediate point, that was soon after the "testing" branch's launch, and there was only a crude quarantine heuristic of two weeks in "unstable" without replacement plus auto-building without error on all platforms. More recently, refinements to those heuristics have tightened up the unstable-to-testing quarantine propagation delay to typically 1-2 days.

Additionally, if you don't want to wait for quarantining and are feeling lucky, the new-ish (late '01?) apt "pinning" feature now lets one selectively grab packages from a more-current branch entirely within apt, without needing to download packages and "dpkg -i" them.

That is what I did and it barfed during the installer.

Now, you're being both vague and incoherent. Obviously, you don't mean an installer for "unstable", since you say you used an installer-of-your-choice and then adjusted sources.list to track "unstable". But you don't identify which installer -- an experimental prerelease one for 3.0/woody, or what, just that "it" (whatever "it" is) "barfed" (whatever "barfed" means).

Enough of that. All sorts of Debian installers, with X11-based front-ends (e.g., PGI), with ncurses-based droolproofing (Libranet) with Reiser/XFS/JFS/software-RAID/kernel-2.4.x/etc., are documented in my Debian tips collection. Use one in the future, and don't ignorantly complain there isn't one that works for your hardware (if the latter is minimally functional), since that strains credulity past its elasticity limit.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmaifa.com

Think what you like, but it was behind. If I remember right one of the packages that was behind was Mozilla. At the time Debian testing had 0.9.6 while 0.9.9 was out.

I do remember getting impatient for Mozilla 0.9.9 and the matching version of Galeon to clear package quarantine, and so just grabbed the .debs out of the "unstable" tree. Doing that was obvious, wasn't difficult, and wasn't a big deal. More to the immediate point, that was soon after the "testing" branch's launch, and there was only a crude quarantine heuristic of two weeks in "unstable" without replacement plus auto-building without error on all platforms. More recently, refinements to those heuristics have tightened up the unstable-to-testing quarantine propagation delay to typically 1-2 days.

Additionally, if you don't want to wait for quarantining and are feeling lucky, the new-ish (late '01?) apt "pinning" feature now lets one selectively grab packages from a more-current branch entirely within apt, without needing to download packages and "dpkg -i" them.

That is what I did and it barfed during the installer.

Now, you're being both vague and incoherent. Obviously, you don't mean an installer for "unstable", since you say you used an installer-of-your-choice and then adjusted sources.list to track "unstable". But you don't identify which installer -- an experimental prerelease one for 3.0/woody, or what, just that "it" (whatever "it" is) "barfed" (whatever "barfed" means).

Enough of that. All sorts of Debian installers, with X11-based front-ends (e.g., PGI), with ncurses-based droolproofing (Libranet) with Reiser/XFS/JFS/software-RAID/kernel-2.4.x/etc., are documented in my Debian tips collection. Use one in the future, and don't ignorantly complain there isn't one that works for your hardware (if the latter is minimally functional), since that strains credulity past its elasticity limit.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmaifa.com

I have tried the testing branch and I found it too behind.

That's absurd. The testing branch is newly introduced packages in the "unstable" branch that have passed automated package quarantining. It's as close as you can get to the bleeding edge without figuratively dying of blood loss.

Then I tried the unstable since many people said it worked for them. It wouldn't even install.

That's even more absurd: If you'd paid any attention whatsoever to the preceding conversation or to basically any Debian documentation at all, or so much as looked at DebianPlanet or asked a Debian user, you'd have known that you get onto the "unstable" branch by using any Debian-compatible installer of your choice, adjusting /etc/apt/sources.list to pull packages from "unstable", and then resynchronise to "unstable" using apt-get.

One of these days I may give the testing branch another try.

Before you do, read some elementary Debian documentation, or browse my collection of Debian tips: http://linuxmafia.com/debian/tips. (Note that it's grown in chronological order, so more-current material is closer to the bottom.)

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Mounting NTFS and resizing it are distinct problems. Since you mention it, there is a new-ish NTFS filesystem driver for Linux kernels, and it's reportedly more reliable than the old one, but you still have to watch out carefully for corruption problems after using it in read-write mode.

On the resizing front, though, there are more options than most people realise, and I've recently published the results of my research into that subject.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Non-destructive (will you backup?) NTFS partition resizing is in as part of the install, and that I must say is a great innovation!

But it's not an innovation: ASPLinux had it long before Xandros did.

To benefit the Linux community generally, and especially the open-source Linux community, I've started documenting ways to deal with the NTFS problem, here: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/ntfs

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

the first time i saw (and participated in) it

While you may be correct in your nitpicking of the previous posters use of terminology, didn't you know there is no such word as virii?


http://www.linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/

Clearly states
`By the way, the ill-informed lucubrations of a Slashdot writer to the contrary, there is no such word as "virii". The plural of this English word is "viruses". (The word was borrowed and redefined from the Latin word virus = slime, poison, or venom. In Latin, that is a 2nd declension neuter noun, whose nominative plural form is now unclear, since it seems that nobody ever used one -- and it doesn't appear to work like either a standard "-us" or "-um" noun, whose plural behaviours are known. In other words, it doesn't have a Latin plural, possibly because it was a mass noun rather than a countable one.)'

Corroborating information is available

here

There's a comprehensive list of Unix-related events and user groups at Rick Moen's BALE (Bay Area Linux Events) calendar: http://www.linuxmafia.com/bale/

Sometimes.

If netscape needs information to sell/share to it's partners so it can get more revenue and keep producing great products, that's fine. You don't have to use their browser. A more interesting question is that did you agree to it in the EULA?

I'm glad you asked that question. No, he did not.

I happen to maintain an archive of licence agreements for common proprietary Linux software, including the one for Netscape 6.1. It includes a clause that the "he Product may automatically send information relating to the download and install process to Netscape", but nothing about post-installation spying.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

5.2 already cost $40 for business use.

Nope.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Is any of this proprietary, or has RH managed to stay comeletely OS?

Red Hat has never been completely open source, but has been a leader in attempting to move in that direction, while still providing the functionality people want. For example, I believe Red Hat actually commissioned the creation of a graphics-manipulation utility good enough that they could drop the excellent "shareware" proprietary package xv without too much pain.

I see, at a brief glance, the following proprietary packages in 7.2's core two-CD set:

• Netscape Navigator/Communicator
• pine/pico

And that's it, I think. (I believe some of the boxed sets have proprietary supersets of the base set, e.g., adding Star Office 5.2.)

It would be a bit painful for some of Red Hat's customer base to drop either of those packages, at this point: Although one could substitute nano for pico, there's nothing but pine to make dedicated pine-lovers happy. And, although Mozilla is getting awfully good, in a few areas such as (ew!) Java support, it's not quite up with Navigator/Commuicator.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

(In all fairness to them, they do provide source alongside the pre-compiled binaries, so the security-conscious can audit the code and recompile.)

This reminds me a lot of a rant or two by Rick Moen of SVLUG fame. The main problem is sysadmin inexperience. Granted, you can still trash your own files (and lose all your user data), but the system will be safe. So just run untrusted executables as a different, non-privileged user, if you must run them at all.

(In all fairness to them, they do provide source alongside the pre-compiled binaries, so the security-conscious can audit the code and recompile.)

This reminds me a lot of a rant or two by Rick Moen of SVLUG fame. The main problem is sysadmin inexperience. Granted, you can still trash your own files (and lose all your user data), but the system will be safe. So just run untrusted executables as a different, non-privileged user, if you must run them at all.

(In all fairness to them, they do provide source alongside the pre-compiled binaries, so the security-conscious can audit the code and recompile.)

This reminds me a lot of a rant or two by Rick Moen of SVLUG fame. The main problem is sysadmin inexperience. Granted, you can still trash your own files (and lose all your user data), but the system will be safe. So just run untrusted executables as a different, non-privileged user, if you must run them at all.

I posted a brief note about Linuxworld on my own site a couple of days ago. The things that caught my eye?

1. Lots of embedded vendors showing off their stuff.
2. Ximian's great booth!
   Great presenters, interesting products, and a great looking booth. Impressed me enough that I built a new system just to play around with the Ximian desktop. The Linux desktop lives!
3. The Linux Bootable Business card session
   The folks from LNX-BBC.org put on a great session about bootable Linux CDs in general and their impressive LNX-BBC in particular.
4. Rick Moen's The Sysadmin's Secret Weapons session.

Which system did Ramen infect?

It attacked the brainstems of morons who had left notoriously insecure network-daemon software running unpatched for a year or more. That's what we call being too stupid to live.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

You want choices of IDE development environments? I've catalogued about a hundred of them for Linux. Mostly as an overkill counterargument for when I hear "There aren't any IDEs for Linux".

Oddly enough, I stopped hearing that bit of FUD about a year ago, about the time I added entry #40.

Never mind proprietary, inflexible semi-solutions like DigitalPaths's Palm Query App (which works only over the grossly overpriced Palm VII Internet-access service). Nor do you need the equally proprietary and inflexible AvantSlow (AvantGo). How about some open-source software, for a change?

Justin Mason's SiteScooper and David A. Desrosiers's Plucker are the options that come immediately to mind.

Both of those, and hundreds of other open-source packages, either for PalmOS or for other OSes working with PalmOS, are also carried in my repository of PalmOS open-source code and information.

This really is great news for the Palm, if for no other reason than the fact that it carries an open source license. As anyone who owns a Palm has noticed, there is a dearth of open and/or free software developed for it.

Dearth? There are hundred of such packages. There just haven't been well-maintained sites devoted to them. Most PalmOS software sites are clueless about licensing issues, and label packages "free" when they are proprietary shareware or crippleware. And most such sites don't even have copies of the listed software, so you find broken links to long-vanished Geocities pages, etc.

I'm building what I hope will be the right sort of site, on my main Linux box. There isn't yet any HTML, but there are complete index (ASCII) files, local copies of all offerings, and information on the licensing, the author credits, and the sites of origin. The collection thus far is at http://linuxmafia.com/pub/palmos/

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

The point: They All Suck. But Linux sucks less, at least based on my experiences. =)

It's not a secret that both have security holes; however, with open source systems, the security-related bugs tend to get fixed in finite time.

What is "dogma", then?

Dogma \Dog"ma\, n.; pl. E. Dogmas, L. Dogmata. [L. dogma, Gr. ?, pl. ?, fr. ? to think, seem, appear; akin to L. decet it is becoming. Cf. Decent. ]

1. That which is held as an opinion; a tenet; a doctrine.

2. A formally stated and authoritatively settled doctrine; a definite, established, and authoritative tenet.

3. A doctrinal notion asserted without regard to evidence or truth; an arbitrary dictum.

Syn: tenet; opinion; proposition; doctrine.

(Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913)

So: Dogma is an opinion handed down from above. Call me paranoid, but using "dogma" in this case smells of FUD-spreading - "The Linux Folks are Believers, and Taco is their Pope". Believe me, I have seen a lot of ugly MS trolls telling us what they think of "Linux Believers"... and I'm bored.

The fact, with or without opinions, is that Windows has showed itself to be less secure, or that security bugs have been fixed later than in case of open source projects (need I remind of OOB?).

Bah, get the hence, AC... =)

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