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MicroBSD Is No More
TrumpetPower! writes "Recently there's been quite a row in the OpenBSD community over copyright infringement by the OpenBSD spinoff, MicroBSD. Many parts of MicroBSD would seem to be a wholesale search-n-replace of the two names...including copyright notices. As a result, MicroBSD has shut down. It's worth noting that, as of this story submission, the MicroBSD Web site is still up and running with no special notices."
We'll see about that michael... we'll just see about that.
Definitely a just punishment in this case, though.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Maybe MicroBSD can get help from Microsoft in the patent fight.
You'll note the "Get MicroBSD" links are all 404.
Apache/2.0.43 Server at www.microbsd.com Port 80
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Discussion continues on IRC: irc.microbsd.net #microbsd
www.microbsd.net has the anouncement.
The head of the MicroBSD project wrote to misc@openbsd.org last night that he had just finished removing everything from his site. Go ahead and check it out. Every link I clicked on microbsd.com gave me a 404. MicroBSD is dead. It is no more. They blatantly violated OpenBSD's copyrights. In fact most of MicroBSD was just:
$osname =~ s/Open/Micro/g;
.-.--
After reading the various links given, it looks to me like the MicroBSD guys had an idea, started working on it, one of their developers screwed up and changed come copyright info, people complained, the project wasn't going anywhere anyways, so it just stopped. Didn't look like there was willfull copyright infringment, and I'd like to believe that it really would have been fixed, like the micro guys said.
Don't attribute to malice what stupidity can explain (or whatever the exact quote is.)
www.MicroBSD.net has the following announcement:
The MicroBSD Project has Shut Down! All works have been removed.
To the OpenBSD developers, There was no intent to modify any copyright in the CVS tree. We have publically acknowledged the issue and have shut down this project. We apologize for the inconvience and commotion this has caused the BSD community. It was never our intent to be at odds with anyone in the community to start. All MicroBSD code has been removed from our servers. The web site will go away. The project will cease to exist. This decision is based on time, efforts involved, the lack of developers, and lack of interest. I personally do not have the time, nor am I inclined to continue with a project that has caused this much negativity in the community.
At the suggestions from various repected people in the industry who supported us, we are sorry. We feel it is not in the best interest of the project to continue its exitance. To those that opposed us from the start, We will just go away as you wish.
Specific developer(s) who committed files with those copyright violations were planning on rectifying the issues. Instead, I have decided to completely remove the source tree and all traces of code commited.
There is currently no CVS, cvsweb or downloads available due to a copyright issue being brought to our attention. We have ceased all development activity to address the issue and remove any violations from the cvs tree. This was an unfortunate oversight on our part, and was not intended to violate any copyright issues. We have taken pain staking measures to be sure to not modify/violate any copyrights. We assure you this copyright issue, was an oversight on our part and was not intentional.
In closing we simply ask the the community carry on as it were, and all person(s) with MicroBSD installed, Please remove the code, and install OpenBSD. We will be providing locations to the various apsect of code we had initially committed in features to get the project off the ground before we continued with our planned unique additons to the BSD community. As of now there will be no further contributions to the BSD community as a whole. In closing, Again we apologize for such oversights, and have removed all code.
.-.--
BSD is dead!
:-)
Appologies.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
That is the core of the BSD license, as long as you give credit where it is due ,you can do what you want with the code, including selling it.
So this doesn't really make since as a valid reason alone.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The concern was not that they had modified the code or docs, but the copyright messages. You are not allowed to simply re-assign copyright to yourself (under US and international copyright law).
This has nothing to do with licensing at all. You could put the code under the GPL, MPL, or any of MS EULA for Office, and you would still have the same problem. The only time you can take a work and assign copyright to yourself is if that work is in the Public Domain, which of course means that it has no copyright at all.
Hat's off to you. Winners never quit, and quitters never lose, but if you never win and never quit, you're just stupid
You know, when you steal something that is free to begin with, you have a problem.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
MicroBSD was an interesting project, and if we Slashdotters don't kill the server completely, it's interesting to look around. However, looking at the infighting and piss-taking on the mailing lists, it's still apparent that there BSD crowd makes problems for itselves.
Unfortunately there's too much of a "holier than thou" feeling amongst many BSD coders, but then again, getting rid of Matt Dillon (see earlier /. BSD story) won't help either. I want the BSDs to do well, but the community can be v. problematic...
Here's an example. After using Linux for several years, I gave FreeBSD a try and was very impressed by the solid kernel and coherent userland. There were a few things I couldn't fathom out though, like getting USB joysticks working, and asking on the mailing lists or similar forums always got the same kind of responses: "Go back to Linux if you want that", "FreeBSD is brill and doesn't need to support it" etc.
It's this zealotry, patronising attitude and belief that FreeBSD is the "one true OS" that is really damaging its acceptance. All OSes have their loudmouth advocates, but I've never seen anything like the hideous attitude that seems so common among FreeBSDers. And as said, it's all the more a shame because I was genuinely interested in the system and respected its good points.
And note that I specifically say FreeBSD - I've found that OpenBSD and NetBSD users realise that their OS isn't going to be ideal for all situations, and don't feel threatened by alternatives. It's the stuck-up FreeBSD zealots who think their OS is better than *everything* that are the real problem.
% man 1 banner
gives out: banner(1)
(can't paste it here, I get that lameness junk filter because of all those # characters).
There is fairly good circumstantial proof that it was intentional because of examples like:
Actually, these examples all seem like proof that it was unintentional.
Think about it. You want to fork a project, one of the first things you do is change the name. The simplest way to do that is with "s/OpenBSD/MicroBSD/g" - but oops, you forgot that this would also change all of the copyright notices.
This would explain every single one of your examples (case-sensitivity in the web and email addresses, and it wouldn't change any graphics, but it would change the alt-tag.)
It certainly seems unintentional to me. If they really had intended to breach copyright, wouldn't they have changed every text instance, and deleted stuff they couldn't change easily (like the OpenBSD logo)?
Whew -- for a minute I thought this was an article referring to a bizarre fallout with PicoBSD. PicoBSD is a neat little FreeBSD-on-a-single-floppy distro. Kind of an equivalent to Linux's admirable Leaf Project.
I hope GPL will be modified to require the source to be as easily available and featured as binaries and to be usable on it's own without any commercial software added on. Like Darwin distributions from Apple, not obscure changes that do not compile and do not explain what was done.
Yeh OK so maybe there was a bunch of search & replace but christ everyone needs to start SOMEWHERE.
Sure maybe someone did search and replace so they accidently replaced the copyright, maybe someone modified the copyright - what you need to realise is that there were many people with CVS commit and access and the founders probably didnt even look at the notices to check.
Its also notable that alot of openbsd stuff is in there so they havent just done a mass search and replace rebadge and re-release.
Obviously a rather fierce reaction was launched against the project to force them to act so abruptly, I don't see the problem with a polite "Excuse me you violated our copyright please fix it or we will XYZ" you should also reliase this is the open source community and events like this just shunt the initiative and creativity of people which shows a complete lack of maturity and disregard for the principles of open source and free software. It seems to be as if they were given no chance or time to fix the violations that existed and correct everything and felt forced to go away. Shame on anyone involved with that. You just crushed someone's dream.
To everyone in the MicroBSD IRC channel and all the developers regardless i wish you the best you were a great bunch of guys to hang with while it lasted and we'll chat again some time, i bet on it.
... mirror of the MicroBSD files/iso images, but after some of the antics performed by the MicroBSD "team", I removed it.
I liked some of the goals that MicroBSD had, but there were too many things I was uncomfortable with. There were "Anonymous" comments in various forums, giving praise and support to MicroBSD -- when in fact those comments were written by Outback Dingo. Failure to credit OpenBSD in any way when basically mirroring their source and customizing it (perhaps they've since added credit, but it was not originally so). The fact that the MicroBSD site was originally hosted on a "virtualhost" type server, provided by a volunteer, instead of being independently hosted.. not a big deal, but it still struck me as unprofessional.
In the end, although I liked the premise of MicroBSD, I just didn't feel comfortable with the way it turned out, and ended up removing the mirror.
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
The heart of the BSD license, IMHO, is the "advertising clause." It means that you can do whatever you want with my code, so long as you recognize that I wrote the code. What the MicroBSD project managed to accomplish was a wholesale ripoff job, intentional or not. The "work" at MicroBSD violated the only real restriction on the OpenBSD code, which is the advertising clause.
Theo has done a tremendous amount of work over the years, and arguably his work has contributed not just to the BSD community, but to the open source community as a whole. The man has principles, and he sticks to them. He is hard core. So, it really bugs me to hear people like you complaining about his whining when what he's really doing is standing up for his principles (and his code). I wonder if you feel the same way about RMS; He's always "crying" about the GNU/Linux designation...
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
Networking professionals and ISPs are often *BSD users. The security, stability, and performance of *BSD makes it an ideal choice in such roles. While Linux has made great strides, it is still not on a par with *BSD in many respects. Conversely, *BSD is certainly not as suitable for use on the average desktop.
One of the distinctive things to note about Linux is that its code base is rather distributed. The kernel comes from here, cc comes from there, and the $other_thing comes from somewhere else. The boundary between the base Linux OS and additionally-installed software is sometimes not very defined. The BSDs' code bases are organized differently, each BSD having its own (mostly) centralized, integrated code repository and build system. BSDs do include some "contrib" software (e.g. Less or OpenSSH) that comes from other sources, but contrib releases are still merged and adapted into the main repository. BSDs have a very definite boundary between what is the base OS and what is a third-party package, or "port".
Either way is a great way to structure an OS code base. However, the organizational differences do have some effect upon what is the best way to make a small or embedded version of the OS. With Linux, it's good to fork off a separate distribution, so that packages and a build system can be most effectively engineered. Granted, I never looked at MicroBSD closely (so I could be totally wrong), but that seems to be the approach they took. With BSD, however, it just doesn't make sense to do it that way. If I just wanted to recompile the entire FreeBSD OS, I would do this:
Yadda yadda yadda, similarly in the other BSDs. To expand from this, I could build a fully functional embedded system with a measly few hundred lines of sh(1) script. Note how this did not require me to create another, entirely separate open-source OS project. I just piggybacked on BSD's existing, highly-integrated code base and build system.To conclude: making it easy to make a small BSD is at most a minor job, easily (and best) doable within the fold of one of the existing BSDs. Forking BSD doesn't make sense for this.
And before someone flames me, let me say this: I prefer BSD, but both Linux and BSD make great small or embedded OSes. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. I don't wish to knock Linux; my only argument concerns the lack of necessity to fork BSD.
BTW, no puns intended by "forking BSD". :-)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.