Slashdot Mirror
Gentoo/FreeBSD On Hold Due To Licensing Issues
Alan Trick writes "Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected.
The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good new is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed.
At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."
The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good new is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed.
At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."
I guess I'll just have to install Vista. [sigh]
not!
Hey, I'm not trying to troll here - I asked a serious question, and I'd like a serious answer, without being accused of trying to incite a flamewar.
And that is why the GPL is a gunpoint license. The irony here of course is that the fault clearly belongs to the authors of the start-stop daemon who failed to apprehend the meaning of the GPL license.
As in you can't use the source. At all. For any purpose. Well, sure, it's certainly predictable.
Umm... unless you license it. Then you may be able to use it and not redistribute. Try not to be deliberately obtuse.
And most proprietary projects are half-assed and under-staffed. It's endemic to the entire industry. At least with opensource you can discover it was half-assed before paying through the nose for a disconnected support number.
Most proprietary projects have a goal of being profitable, not simply being a distraction for some programmer who can't get laid or is too cheap to pay for software. Most open source projects are simply knock-off copies of successful commercial packages (ex. Photoshop -> Gimp) or just poorly written to start (ex. GAIM). There certainly isn't a lot of room for profit in developing a substandard product only when you have the free time.
Saying that interested customers can get together to support their own customization and support is just fantasy. Nobody in their right mind would assume that kind of liability.