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Theo de Raadt gets 2004 FSF Award
Caligari writes "Richard Stallman, presents this year's award to Theo de Raadt.
"For recognition as founder and project leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects. Theo de Raadt's work has also led to significant contributions to GNU/Linux and other BSD distributions. Of particular note is Theo's work on OpenSSH. Theo's leadership of OpenBSD, his selfless commitment to Free Software and his advancement of network security, were cited by this year's award committee.""
Looking at past winners, no doubt they all deserve it .. but what about Linus Torvalds?
.. OpenSSH rocks. Theo de Raadt and everyone else who contributes to OpenSSH should be proud.
Is there a reason he didnt get this award?
That said
That's pretty cool of Stallman really. Showing respect and recognition to the importance of BSD, despite their mutual differences in ideology about what constitutes truly free software.
Previous winners of the Free Software Award * 2003 Alan Cox * 2002 Lawrence Lessig * 2001 Guido van Rossum * 2000 Brian Paul * 1999 Miguel de Icaza * 1998 Larry Wall Why he is no yet on the list?. May be because his public use of some proprietary software
Old joke.
o neoneoneone
The only reason that Stallman wants to call it GNU/Linux operating system is because calling it 'linux' is just to ambigious.
Linux is a kernel.
Linux is a OS.
Linux is a social movement.
All of it's meanings are used interchangably and unless you understand excactly what is going on in the discussion it makes it very hard for a lay-person to understand what is going on and causes needless arguements when somebody just wants to talk about linus and kernel developement and the other person wants to talk about Free and open source software in general but things that what the other guy is saying by saying 'linux'.
So by saying 'Open source software movement' or Free software, and then GNU/Linux operating systems, and then the Linux kernel is much clearer then going:
Linux, Linux, and Linux all mean three completely, but interelated things.
It's seems so obvious to anybody who remembers hearing 'Hi, I am Darel, this is my brother Darel, and this is my other brother Darel."
It's a 'Duh' just call it GNU/Linux and get over ourselves, but instead it's:
one slashbot:
GNU/Linux! WTF is that? Why don't we call it X.org/Apache/BSD/GNU/Linux!!!! RMS is a insane hippy! Fuck him!!! ARGHHHHHH!!!!
other slashbot:
ROLF-lololololololololololol!!!!!!1111
Don't forget folks, words mean stuff.
Unless your talking about Linux, then it can mean anything you feel like, from a social movement, to a specific kernel, to a business model.
... because NetBSD development was not free. Theo lost his access to the CVS tree. Read the email exchange, and you'll find out that's where the main problem was. ... because SSH was not free. OpenSSH started with the last release from Tatu Ylonen with a free licence. ... because the CVS people don't get the OpenBSD patches. For instance, CVS client/server is still not officially supported, even though that's what everybody uses. ... because NTP is thoroughly insecure, and NOT free. NTP is released under a variation of the ISC licence, which means it CAN'T be distributed freely.
In the CVS case, collaboration with the CVS team was impossible. In all other cases, it was a question of freedom. Those other projects had strings attached, Theo yanked the strings and had the balls to restart things.
BTW, thanks to NetBSD. If you hadn't forcibly taken out Theo, he probably wouldn't have done so much for free software. Starting his own project off NetBSD was probably the boldest move he's ever done.
Back then, there was no anonymous cvs access to the sources. You had to be a part of NetBSD inner circle to get access to the development sources.
All that was free was the released version. There was some amount of political control of information.
Reread the exchange between Theo and the other members of NetBSD-core. One persistent complaint from Theo is that he could no longer easily work on the sparc port, because he did not have access to not yet released code.
Let's put aside any re-definition of freedom by the FSF, OSI and whatever group of the month is running this show.
No, this is not free development. Theo was not free to see what was going on in NetBSD in a technical sense. He had lost control. And the people in netbsd-core used that power to try and get Theo to promise he would change his behavior.
Whatever you might think of Theo's attitude (yes, he can be a complete fucker sometimes), that's not freedom, by any sense of the world.
Now, look at the world today. All BSDs have open cvs trees. I think that would have happened, eventually, but I'm 100% certain Theo's decision to make sure OpenBSD CVS tree would be totally open to public scrutiny at all times has a HUGE role to play in that change.
You're overlooking two facts:
1) the "development" sources (NetBSD-current) were always available in NetBSD, on a daily(?) base, so saying Theo would have been restricted to releases is wrong. And
2) it was not able to just make a anoncvs-server for NetBSD then, due to the AT&T licensed code still being in there back then, which would have violated some people's rights. This was fixed later and NetBSD got its anoncvs server after that. And not because "oh, look what THEY have, we need that too now!".
Please stick to the facts when posting. If you don't know facts, research them.
Ok... I want to make a point here....
At one point I looked at the data and concluded that BSD was dying. I think that some people really think this and are not really trolling. The confusion comes in part due to a couple simple mistakes.
It is true that Netcraft has in the past indicated that *BSD is losing market share to Linux in at least the web server markets. However, these numbers are percentage based (regarding domains hosted) and probably don't represent an absolute decline. In fact, I suspect that the absolute number domain running on web servers running *BSD is probably currently growing but doing so slower than the market. This would fit with the observation that proprietary UNIX doesn;t seem to be in much of an absolute decline (with a few punctuations in the equalibrium) and that all such flavors are losing marketshare (percentage-wise) much faster than *BSD.
Secondly, because we are not seeing a mass exodus of the core developers from *BSD to Linux, I don't think one can ever say these are dying. Just as Microsoft can't kill Linux, Linux can't really kill *BSD. The only thing that can kill *BSD is, well, *BSD. More likely, we will see the licensing advantages that Linux offers disappear as proprietary UNIX and later Windows falls. At this point, Linux will still have some competative advantages, but we may see *BSD grow more rapidly once proprietary competition is eliminated.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
1) Most software projects that still exist are more successful than they were 15 years ago. An obvious example of a liberally-licensed project with GPL-licensed competitors is Apache. Apache has been so successful that GPL-licensed web servers are virtually ignored/forgotten. Vim is also licensed fairly liberally, and is far more popular than any of the GPL-licensed vi clones have ever been. There are numerous other examples.
2) That isn't a counter example at all. Without corporate backing, there would have been no open X code from which to build XFree86 or the X.org implementations of X. The same thing could be said of Mach, which in most cases required a lot of effort to make usable, but was nevertheless available to everyone because of a liberal licence.
3) FreeBSD was never a fad: mention of it outside of the technical media was virtually nil, where as nearly everyone with a computer heard of Linux (and most non-technical people I've spoken with think it's much better than it actually is). One reason companies like SGI and IBM donated code to Linux is the GPL, yes, because it prevents their competitors using that code, so is seen as a modest loss. However, the corporate backing that really mattered was when major firms decided to use Linux (and nothing would have stopped SGI, for example, contributing XFS to FreeBSD with a restrictive licence anyway). Linux achieved critical mass because of hype (during the 1990s, it was generally inferior to FreeBSD, for example, from a technical perspective), and it now benefits from the same sort of network effect as Windows, but on a much smaller scale. The licence really had nothing to do with that success.
Despite its popularity, Linux still isn't generally profitable, owing to the decision to licence it under the GPL. That's why, for example, SuSE had to get funding through acquisition by Novell. In the long run, hardware companies may be able to make money from it, if they're able to use it to remove the value of independent OS vendors (hence the interest of IBM, SGI, et al.), but it's unlikely that developing GPL'd software itself will ever be a viable business.
4) Yes, and open standards are, in general, what make open source software useful. If everything had to be reverse-engineered the way the Samba team have reverse-engineered SMB, progress would have been much slower. This is probably what would have happened if the reference implementations of the major Internet standards had been licensed under the GPL.
Or you could just use rsync over ssh instead:
And if the rsync dies, you just run the same command again.
Much less typing. :-)