XBian's Koenkk Replies To the XBian/RaspBMC Flap

New submitter juenger1701 writes "Xbian's developer Koenkk has posted a reply to the code stealing accusations mentioned here Friday." In response, Sam Nazarko of Raspbmc has replaced his earlier complaint, "on the agreement that XBian participate with compliance of the GPL." Koenkk makes the case that his project has always complied with the GPL.

Comments

Youngins.

[girlintraining]

Koenkk makes the case that his project has always complied with the GPL.

Many moons ago, when the internet was young and fresh, and wild UNIX admins roamed freely, there was a thing called Usenet, and on this thing called Usenet, was a relatively new problem called Spam. And much of this Spam came from a particular ISP. And as Usenet back in those days was a community-run entity, there was much discussion about how to resolve this problem. E-mails sent to the ISP were met with silence, or with "not our problem." And the Spam continued. One day, after there had been a much-heated debate, a vote was held, and it was declared the ISP (AT&T), would be given the ultimate punishment: The Usenet death sentence.

It was rarely carried out, and even the elders recall only a handful of times when an ISP had earned its place amongst the killfiles of the wild UNIX admins of old. And so the call went out: At midnight, the killfiles would be updated, and AT&T would be purged henceforth from the world of Usenet. And word of this spread, and yet the giant still slumbered, refusing to do anything. And it was seen that the death sentence was good, and so all waited for it to come to pass.

Suddenly, in the final minutes of the final hour, an e-mail appeared from the beligerant ISP! It read, simply, "We do not have a problem, and we are working as quickly as possible to fix it." And thus was it seen for the first time on the internet how corporations deal with these sorts of problems. And ever since, whensoever a cry went up in an internet community that called for the end of access for a corporation, thus has been the response... by tradition, only uttered in the final minutes, of the final hour.

Re:Youngins.

[jd]

Actually, USENET was middle-aged when those Utah lawyers posted the first mainstream spam. (And the more serious crime was their publishing a book on how to exploit the Internet to harvest personal data and spam them.)

AT&T should have been terminated, not just by USENET but by the MBone and maybe even some of their Tier 1 peers. Not just until they did something, but permanently. Some crimes should not be forgiven, and AT&T's actions then have cost the world on aggregate since that time (bandwidth ain't cheap, neither is storage) far more than the market value of AT&T. This was anticipated and widely expected to be the outcome of AT&T's negligence. Sometimes, the best option is to cut your losses and run, and AT&T was definitely a loss.

Today, such action would serve little purpose. Spam, which is essentially economic cyberwarfare, has become too widespread. You can't dig it up by the roots, there are too many of them. It will require action on a far larger scale. System admins, network admins and ISP admins alike will have to become the largest gang of herbicidal maniacs ever gathered in one virtual spot. Exterminating botnets, the ultimate weed, will require a change in attitudes. Provider agreements must make spamming grounds for terminating Internet access. System admins must monitor their systems more rigorously for evidence of compromise. Network admins must stop assuming they can just get away with a trivial spam filter then ignore the problem. Spam is a reduction of service, rather than a denial of it, but then in a DDOS, so is each individual component of that attack. Network admins wouldn't be caught dead regarding components of a DDOS as something they can just ignore. Same's true here.

Re:Youngins.

[Anonymous Coward]

UDP was threatened several times, always successfully, and always against ISP's who refused to act against the most egregious, documented, and demonstrably illegal abuse. As an old spam hunter, I don't remember one against AT&T. I vaguely remember the one against UUnet, which is not the same company. And lord, do I remember netcom.com, which doesn't show up on the Wikipedia entry for Usenet Death Penalty, probably because they saved themselves at the last possible moment by tweaking their NNTP servers to include the ISP of the posting host. (They were hosting a lot of forged cancel messages for discussions on alt.religion.scientology in the mid 90's, and a lot of bulk spew designed to keep people from reading anything from Scientology critics. I bet that one made the lawyers nervous!!)

Re:Youngins.

[houstonbofh]

One day, after there had been a much-heated debate, a vote was held, and it was declared the ISP (AT&T), would be given the ultimate punishment: The Usenet death sentence.

It is Usenet Death Penalty, or UDP. And I remember the UUnet vote, and the Compuserv vote, but not ATT. (Also some odd little ISP in Michigan, if I remember right. That one went through, and is not mentioned anywhere for some reason.) Anyway, tinc. :)

Complication of making a distribution

[Bruce Perens]

Making a distribution is more complicated than just making it work technically. There's a substantial amount of work in making sure that you're complying with all of the licenses, both in software that you just distribute, and the software that you write but combine with other people's work.

So far, the communications I see on this issue don't come from people who appear to understand all of what they're required to do. And the licenses used by these folks on their own work aren't even close to Open Source.

I think this community needs to go back to the Debian core it started with, and add to that whatever optimizations and installers are necessary without the crayon licenses.

Re:Jesus Christ.

[aliquis]

My first reaction was whatever it was a Chinese project.

(I still don't know and the website didn't explained what it was but I googled it instead.)

source code must be provided

[Anonymous Coward]

For GPL and LGPL licenses the source code must be provided by the _distributor_, it doesn't matter whether you modified it or not.

malware

[citizenr]

All I got from that reply was :

"We dont have source code for the installer, we dont know whats in it ergo we are not breaking any licenses. Maybe theres a pot of gold inside, or a MALWARE and a botnet , we dont know, we dont care, we only distribute this binary lalalaa"

Yes someone owns GPL code

[kawabago]

No you can't just take it and use it any way you like. Your obligations are fully spelled out in the license so there is absolutely no excuse for Koenkk not complying, particularly after being reminded of the obligation. His actions say all there is to say. If he keeps talking, he'll just make it worse.

Re:Yes someone owns GPL code

[sumdumass]

The installer is not released under the gpl. That is where the supposed code dispute came from. It's a bit difficult to follow as they keep changing posts and crap. But my understanding was that because they used the same USB library that is freely available in some tool kit under a non-gpl license to format flashdrives, that one team assumed they stole their code, changed some file names and the splash image and passed it off as their own. They are now claiming that was a mistake.

Re:Yes someone owns GPL code

[drinkypoo]

"The following components of Raspbmc are licensed under this agreement: ... Any other Raspbmc scripts, such as build scripts and helper scripts which are not sourced from an alternative source."

It is very clear what this means. Any source code of which Nazarko is the sole copyright holder is covered by this license.

It is very clear what this means. The installer in question is a binary. Any scripts that it loads may be covered by this license, but the binary is not. Further, it is clear that "source code" is not mentioned in the text which you pasted.

Again, the agreement in question does not address the issue of the license of the installer at all. Does anyone (as a coward with no name, you are not anyone, so no more from you thanks) actually know what license covers the installer? This license agreement never mentions it by name or by allusion.

Re:Jesus Christ.

[sumdumass]

Xbian and raspbmc are competing distributions of operating systems for the rasbery pi .(you can google rasbery pi).

Well, I say operating systems but they seem to be more or less flash utilities and scripts to change some settings and load debian linux from a debian repository somewhere. The quip seems to be over the installer program in which something was claimed to have been copied without attribution to the copyright holders or provisions in the GPL for redistributing the source.

Both projects seem to be run by kids which is really evident if you caught any of the back and forth banter over the last couple of days. I'm not really sure why this makes the front page of slashdot. Maybe I borked some settings or something.

Re:Jesus Christ.

[tibit]

While I don't think that projects run by kids are anything to scoff at just because they are run by kids, indeed there's some degree of immaturity shown in the response page on xbian.org. The response repeatedly shows that the author is wholly ignorant of how copyright laws work. Namely that the installer author is the only one responsible for compliance. Those xbian folk seem to have no clue that if they redistribute, it's on THEM to comply. I think evein I knew that back in the 90s, without otherwise having a clue about copyright law, from nothing more than reading the fine license (GPL) and associated narrative (FAQs, mailing list posts).

Re:No changes were made; + pointing to source now!

[drinkypoo]

If you are really that obsessed with getting it from them because technically maybe it requires them to put it on there own servers you have a serious problem.

Well, GNU has a serious problem with people not putting it on their own servers.

The only thing that might have made this an issue is if they got the source code from a party which does not distribute it publicly and then linked to it.

Wrong, and also wrong. See above link.

Actually having the source code published is NOT required.

And, wrong again. But don't take my word for it, follow my link above and let the FSF explain it to you in a FAQ that you should read before making such idiotic statements, whoever you are besides a coward.

Re:Jesus Christ.

[hairyfeet]

Lets see if I get modded down again like I did last time I asked this...WTF is Xbian? What does it do, what is the difference between it and the other and WTF does the other do?

All I can figure out is it has something to do with Raspberry pi from the title, which is a niche product so this is niche software that runs on a niche product...is it REALLY so much to ask for to have a fricking "about" link in TFS?

Re:Jesus Christ.

[Billlagr]

It's a modified Linux distro for the RP, but it sets up as a media center - "Raspbmc is a minimal Linux distribution based on Debian that brings XBMC to your Raspberry Pi. This device has an excellent form factor and enough power to handle media playback, making it an ideal component in a low HTPC setup, yet delivering the same XBMC experience that can be enjoyed on much more costly platforms" It/they are supposed to be simple, no-brainer installers that give you a ready to go media center without lots of faffing around. Xbian is a 'competing' distro.