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For OpenBSD, "No More Apache Updates"

Posted by Hemos on from the the-end-of-an-era dept.

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?"

1 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No posts thus far - an omen? by xoboots · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    FOOL. The GPL does not restrict anyone from using GPL licensed code. It restricts the ability to hinder or encumber the code and that is the choice that users must make. BSD is free beer, certainly--no wonder corporations love to suck it up. GPL is free code--the code itself is free from the whims of its users. What is the difference? BSD derived code (which may be FAR more useful than the original sources) can disappear while GPL derived code can not. You're right about one thing: the GPL is *NOT* about user freedom while the BSD is. I suggest that the GPL is far more important to software as a result. I don't care whether CISCO or whomever makes money--I care that quality code remains in the community. (AND note, they can equally well make money with GPL'd code--they only have to share back their modifications. Is that really asking too much?)