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?"

Comments

Re:No posts thus far - an omen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't count on it, son.

Every time something like this comes up...he turns it into something good. His reputation grows, and the idea of quality software over Every Imaginable Feature spreads.

I doubt there will be an OpenBSD replacement for Apache. However, Theo knows one thing most people forget: you can whine and moan all you want, but when you accept the product, they win. However, if a few teams stand up and say, "This is NOT acceptable, we will NOT tollerate it", maybe something can change. XFree86 has managed to marginalize themselves, and convinced themselves that a whole lot of nothing:
http://www.xfree86.org/distro-support.html
consti tutes "community support" for their license fiasco. Maybe Apache is next.

Re:No posts thus far - an omen?

[Brandybuck]

It sounds to me like they are just taking steps to ensure they don't introduce a more restrictive license to the base system.

Reading through the Apache 2.0 license, I cannot find anything that is more restrictive than before. It's actually less restrictive in some areas, in an attempt to be compatible with the GPL. The two major differences are:

1) Legalese. The original BSD-like Apache license was quite loose in its wording. This scares the crap out of most corporate lawyers ("OMG, there's no clause imdemnifying us against jaywalking!"). So the new license has been tightened up with lawyer-friendly language.

2) Patent license. The old license was a copyright license. It didn't cover patents. The new one does. You're gaining rights as a user with this.

I really don't understand what OpenBSD's problem is with this. It's a free license. It's a "copycenter" license. It's unrestricted and unencumbered. I suspect this is about politics more than any actual license terms.

This s about Patents and it is a strange complaint

[m_evanchik]

Reading the comments at undeadly.org, it seems the big beef is with a clause that covers patent issues of any code as well as copyright issues.

Basically, the clause says that if you have any patent claims to the code that you contribute (or is it just use? I'm not sure.) then you irrevocably grant license to others for those patents and if you sue , then you can't use Apache.

I'm unsure as to how this is a bad thing. Most "free" software licences were written before software patents were a big issue, and therefore only deal with software as a copyrightable, and not a patentable entity. Just as software code must be updated to deal with new operating enviroments, so legal licensing code must be updated to deal with a changing legal enviroment.

The new clause forces patent holders to play nice as well as copyright holders.

Would it be better to encourage lawsuits over patent issues?

Whom to complain to?

[gtrubetskoy]

You know whom to complain to.

I hope he means the US and EU governments here. Had there been no software pattents under incredibly lax oversight with the subsequent abuse thereof, the Apache Software Foundaton wouldn't be forced to write this clause into the license.

Re:So what?

[geirt]

Secure:
It goes to great lengths to protect the web server machine against attacks and breakins from other sites.

Well, you shold try to google for thttpd security . It has a security record which makes Windows 95 look pretty good.