GNU-Darwin: Three Years of Free Software Activism
JigSaw writes "The GNU-Darwin Distribution is a free BSD operating system and a popular source of free software for Mac OS X and Darwin-x86 users, but it is also a platform for digital activism. Founder Michael L. Love wrote an editorial speaking about the roots, goals, problems and just about everything about GNU-Darwin. Free Software is at the core of GNU-Darwin and also anything political that has an impact on digital and even rights. Is this the first truly politically oriented BSD OS?" Nope.
Seems silly such an article is written about "3 years" of free software. Since clearly this "free" stuff has been around for quite a bit longer.
I see Darwin as FreeBSD's little brother that just happens to have picked up a nice job working for a respectable corporation. The only reason why anyone really cares about this distro is because Apple does. Not that that is a bad thing.
The OpenBSD people HATE the GPL. The only GPLed package in OpenBSD is GCC... and that is slated for removal eventually.
When the maintainer of BSD's ipf pulled a 180 and changed the license to something more restrictive (I'm at a loss for details right now), the OpenBSD people told him to fuck off, and they wrote their own firewall, now known to everyone as pf. Pretty sad that it had to happen, since pf is now regarded as one of the best firewalls around...
I don't know why the fuck this douchebag and his GNU-Darwin hard-on are allowed anywhere near slashdot. Check his homepage if you want. He's a scientologist.
You were saying?
That wasn't a political decision, but a legal one. OpenBSD legally could not distribute IPF (because of the modifications they made). OpenBSD asked IPF to change the license, it was not changed, so IPF was dropped.
(Note: I am using the names of the projects as proper nouns)