Fink Maintainer Steps Down Due To GPL Infringment

DShadow noted that the Fink maintainer Christoph Pfisterer has resigned largely because of GPL violations by openosx and macgimp, as well as macosx.forked.net. There's definitely some tension between the mac world and the Open Source and GPL worlds. Certain amounts of culture clash are inevitable, but hopefully great projects like this will continue, and commercial vendors will be able to play nice without alienating developers. The good news for Macheads is that fink will continue just fine.

Comments

The GPL doesn't have an advertising clause

[bhurt]

It would be perfectly legal for me to grab a copy of the Linux source code, rip out all the credits as to who did what work, and release my new OS "Brianux". This would be reprehensible (and for the record, I have no intention of actually doing this, so save your flames)- but perfectly legal so long as I released the source.

Re:The GPL doesn't have an advertising clause

[ryants]

Well, there's no advertising clause, but there is this:

2 a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change

So you would be obligated to state in each of those files that you changed them, and when, which should make it easy for people to see what you did (and did not do).

Woooooah Nelly....

[cjsnell]

Before anyone starts bashing the macosx.forked.net guys, let's keep a few things in mind:

1) There's nothing wrong with charging for access to files. You pay your ISP, right?

2) Apex *is*, apparently, working to comply with the GPL. From what I've read in the past on his site, he works in the commercial fishing industry up in Alaska. I would imagine that his time to work on the site and the packages is limited.

3) Apex has been very helpful in the past on the forums hosted on his server. Lots of people have requested ports of software (some of which are difficult) and he has come through for them.

Chris

Title is false; make up your own minds

[rsfinn]

There is no evidence of any real GPL infringement here. I urge SlashDot readers, especially the kneejerk "GPL good, Apple bad" crowd, to read the conversations at the indicated links and make up their own minds:

1) OpenOSX appears to be distributing source code on their CDs, and now gives credit to fink on the MacGIMP CD web page.

2) Macosx.forked.net has also posted credit to fink on the home page web site, as well as indicating their intention to address GPL issues.

Apparently Pfisterer is irritated in part because they were slow to give fink credit; but as others have pointed out, that's not a GPL violation.

Following the other links he includes in his "resignation letter" suggests that he's quick to get irritated -- especially when people point this out to him (cf. the "abiword" thread). Perhaps there are other things going on in his life, and this isn't a good time for him to lead an open-source project. Fine. Kudos to him for leaving his ball behind instead of taking it with him.

But the article title ("Fink Maintainer Steps Down Due To GPL Infringment") is misleading at best. Even Pfisterer didn't make this claim.

Perfect example of why NOT to use the GPL.

[Fucky Badger]

The GPL license offers a very beautiful dream, free, unrestricted access to software for the people of the world. No doubt this would be great, free technology for people in the third world countries (including me) and no more gigantic monopolistic companies telling you where to go today. I also believed in that dream, however I tried FreeBSD because I wanted to see how the traditional UNIX was. I could have tried NetBSD but I simply had a contact with FreeBSD first. FreeBSD has only one distribution and, of course, includes many GPL'd programs, something that shows without doubt that BSD hackers don't "hate" the GPL as a general rule, in fact, there is a sense of respect towards of the code written by the FSF and any comment against the GPL starts a never ending flame war in the lists.

I then decided to follow my ideals, and some years ago I pursued some email with Richard Stallman (RMS for short) on three issues:

1) The Free Software Foundation should support the efforts against crypto export restrictions in the US. It was suspected some linux distributions were exporting this code but there was no official statement on this.

He (RMS) agreed that such restrictions were against the spirit of free software redistribution. He included a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the Free Software Foundation's site.

2)During our email, he insisted I should use the term GNU/Linux, something that sounded perfectly logical although somewhat uncomfortable. I then asked if I could use the term GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/AIX (I used AIX with a complete GNU development system since those parts were unbundled by IBM) since I was using GNU components that were much bigger and equally important (at least to me) as the kernel.

RMS responded on both cases with a clear " no".

3) I commented that, given the FSF's objectives, FreeBSD was doing a better job than Linux.

He (and no doubt many readers) was surprised by this affirmation and asked for an explanation. I reasoned that since the objective behind the FSF was providing free software, and Linux was being heavily commercialized while FreeBSD was not, FreeBSD was nearer to the objectives. In those days, the newly born Caldera's distribution had a lot of commercial goodies and their base distribution couldn't be downloaded anywhere, I also commented that no one could stop the companies like Caldera from gradually replacing free parts of GNU/Linux with commercial elements until they would effectively replace the complete OS (I also mentioned the linux emulation in BSD in another context). To this final point, RMS responded that the only thing we could do was write more free software.

Nowadays I personally think that Richard Stallman is a good person but he is confused (I hope he thinks the same of me when he finishes reading this article :), and I am not going to analyze the answers RMS gave because that is not the objective of this article. I arrived, however, to two important conclusions:

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

Re:I dunno...

[Samrobb]

Apple and proprietary developers have generally gotten along well with the BSD and gcc people as far as license issues go.

What?

Recently, maybe, but take a look at this link to a copy of the 1993 g++ FAQ:

Because the legal policies of Apple threaten the long-term goals of FSF, as well as the concept of free software, no support will be lent to efforts to port GNU software to Macintosh or other Apple hardware.

The FSF didn't end the boycott of Apple until 1995, and even then, they pretty much said that unless supporting MacOS was ridiculously easy, they wouldn't bother accepting patches because that might impact their effort to produce the "GNU operating system".

If you want a quick summary of the boycott, the reasons, and how the FSF eventually "forgave" Apple the same way he "forgave" KDE, you can check out this link. Frankly, I'm surprised that the FSF and Apple are managing to get along as well as they are; it speaks volumes about Apple's commitment, and about the way the FSF has matured over the years, as well.