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For OpenBSD, "No More Apache Updates"
joshmccormack writes "On June 6th Henning Brauer, an OpenBSD developer announced on one of the OpenBSD mailing lists that the version of Apache shipped with OpenBSD will stay with 1.3.29, due to Apache's license changes. There will be bug fixes, but no more updates. Discussion on blogs, websites and mailing lists on what's next bring up some interesting ideas and strong opinions. Difference of opinion and control have been catalysts to the growth of OpenBSD in the past. Will this be like the birth of pf in OpenBSD, or even the start of OpenBSD itself?"
From the OpenBSD perspective, you are completely missing the point:
GPL: OpenBSD does not consider the GPL to be a "free" license. Becoming more "GPL compatable" may be viewed as a benefit to the GNU and Linux people, but it is VERY much against the goal of the BSD projects. Restricting ANYONE'S use of a product is not a good thing in our mind.
1) "Legalese" is a bad thing. If you gotta get lawyers involved to understand it, it is bad. BY ITSELF, that's grounds for rejection.
2) When did software patents or anything regarding patents and software become a good thing (at least as commonly used)?
The new license is much longer and more complex. This is a bad thing (in a BSD advocate's view).
The BSD license is very simple: Start with the basic rights of a copyright holder, and release ALL of them except the right to identified as the author, giving the USER FULL RIGHTS TO DO BASICLY ANYTHING WITH THE CODE other than claim/change authorship or sue for dammages.
Use it. Imbed it. Give it away. Sell it. With or without source code. WHATEVER. Now...add extra words to the license: HOW CAN IT POSSIBLY GET MORE FREE? Anything you add is "taking away" rights. Anything you do to "protect" yourself is again, taking away from the potential userbase of a product.
The point of the GPL seems to be to keep Open Source software from getting utilized by commercial software vendors. That's a noble goal -- you work for free, you want others to be able to enjoy your work for free. But, you are saying the CODE is free, not the useage of it.
The Point of the BSD license is to get the software USED in any sense of the word. BSD authors would prefer that their good software be USED in commercial products, rather than having the commercial vendors writing more flawed, or incompatable, or alternative protocols.
Do you think Cicso would have put a GPL'd SSH into their products? Probably not: they'd have done their own management application, which would only run on Windows machines or a few Unixes, or stuck with telnet. GPL advocates would probably say that was a "victory for freedom of the code", as the (hypothetical) GPL-SSH code wasn't used to make a profit by the evil Cisco. BSD advocates would prefer that the code be FREELY USED by ANYONE, including Cicso, Microsoft, Sun, HP, Intel, Motorola, IBM, and anyone else. Restricting ANYONE, no matter how "evil" they are perceived to be by someone is very much against the point of the BSD license.
Debian doesnt distribute stuff based on if it is GPL compatible. It bases it on if the software is DFSG-free. After that is the question of linking and Debian always tries to follow the license of the software. That is where the stuff about the binary only firmware in the kernel came from along with the XFree86 stuf. The linux kernel is not distributable with the firmware and all the GPLed software that depends on xlib cant link against it under the latest XFree86 license.
"We Don't Need No Truthless Heros!" - Project 86
Back around 1995, development of the NCSA sort-of-free web server was starting to die out, and developers who had been producing a set of patches to the NCSA project decided to "fork" their development branch.
After the fork, the majority of development effort concentrated in the new "Apache" project, and the NCSA HTTPd died out about a year later.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.