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RedHat's Solution to Pseudo-Free Software Problem.
Christian Winebrenner writes "RedHat seems to have seen the new licensing terms on rdist (background story: Pseudo-Free software...) and decided that the best solution to the problem is to recommend that users DOWNgrade to the previous version. Their RH 6.0 errata page offers the solution of ditching rdist 6.1.5 in favor of 6.1.0. Who knows how long it will be until we find that distributions will be riddled with "holes" from out of date non-free-for-commercial-use software? "
Roblimo is screwing up the slashdot format. I think he is trying to say something in the above article but I don't get it. Where is the link to the article?
Richard Stallman recognises lots of non-GPL software as free software, what would make you think otherwise?
GnuFree is not "true" free. It's viral. But you're right that it would be good to create free alternatives to all proprietary (including GNU) software. Fortunately, it looks like they've lost the LGPL fiasco.
Perhaps they're just tired of people trying to steal their work.
I always thought the LGPL was one of the Green lisenses! And what about Java and Javascript -- don't somebody own that? Are they free? Shouldn't we all switch to free languages instead?
What LGPL fiasco is that? You mean that it doesn't infect unrelated work, so it's considered a failure if infection is the goal? It's still free software, though. What's the problem with it?
suse *are* playing nice. you just don't get to steal their stuff. otherwise, they would die and be forked and divergent and loose.
Paranoia. You got it. Take some pills, make it go away.
SUSE states their earning and suddenly they are a corporate evil incarnate, looking to "undermine" the RedHat IPO. And they don't "proprietarize everything they can".
Eek! At a glance this looks like it isn't DFSG free. But Debian has it in main. I'd file a bug, except that I'm not confident enough about licenses :) [ I'll probably do it tomorrow anyway :) ]
Daniel
Except for the sole copyright owner of the program which can change the license on a GPL program anyway.
Life isn't black and white. Neither are licesnes (adding one more shade isnt enough).
Just from my knowledge, you *CAN* use mysql for free in a commercial environment. You just can't sell it as a part of your product. Now if this is in the 'red' category, people might get the complete wrong idea. They will think they can not use it in a commercial environment for free.
Reguarding Linux, you can have proprietary modules which means putting it in the yellow category again gives the wrong impression.
While a simple color scheme for licsense would be nice, its not pragmatic.
It is my impression that this is not necessarily true. You can improve it all you want without having to "share" it as long as you do not redistribute it at all. This allows you to make in-house changes but not be bound to share your changes with anyone. If you do choose to redistribute your changes though you must do so using the GPL. This is a very important nuance of the GPL IMO.
If you think this is bad, I'm waiting for "US distributions" that are riddled with even bigger holes, like down-level SAMBA and who-knows what other oddities.
You know, kind of like the encryption situation.
If UCITA passes, and if software patents march on with the stupidity that they have been, the "US distributions" of Linux will start to look like Swiss cheese (no slurs meant to the Swiss, their cheese is supposed to have holes.) in order to avoid legal problems.
The big problem I see is whether there will be enough volume left everywhere else to have viable decent Linux distributions, and how much we'll be able to interoperate.
If the license was old .. Why do RedHat revert to an OLDER version of your software that has a BSD license.
You are simply not trustworthy and just waiting for the opportunity to make a killing by changing the license and how your software works. Your moral is in parity with Microsoft.
What a scam.
"they choose not to as it's not free" you write. That's not true. It's just not GnuFree or better.
Dont' be dense. The GPL is a restrictive, coercive, invasive license that infects other people's code with a virus that isn't supportable under copyright law. Yellow is the best is deserves. Personally, I give it an orange. BSD is green as green gets.
The GPL is *not* designed to protect anyone. It's designed to spread the RMS virus as rapidly and extensively as possible. WAKE UP!
SUSE is doing the world a favor. It's a much more robust distribution than Redhat. You're asking them to let Redhat steal the installation mechanism they devised. You're out of your mind.
Oh jeez...
I wouldn't call the BSD license more free than GPL. If others can copywrite the changed source code and remove it from me (ie, restrict my freedom) than the BSD license is less free than GPL.
:-)
GPL ensures the maximum freedom for my code, no one can ever remove that freedom from anyone else.
GPL is more free than BSD
Why the hell do you care what people do with the product of their own efforts? Why does everyone want everything for free, especially the work of others!?
It's not the ABILITY to share code. It's the expectation to steal others' work. It's communism, and it's evil. SET YOUR SOFTWARE FREE!
And now for the REAL slashdot effect: "Speak the truth, but keep one foot in the stirrups."
Nothing you can do can make BSD software non-free. You're a liar. Even if you add your own extensions, the original is still free.
You're absolutely right - the BSD license ensures this.
However, the BSD license allows proprietary/closed/non-free distribution of derivatives; this is what the GPL aims to prevent. Remember SunOS, BSDI, OSF/1, MacOS X?
You're a liar.
About what? The FSF and GPL are quite explicit about their intentions - that GPL'd software must be redistributed with source. Where's the inherent dishonesty?
If you/your company decides to modify GPL software for your internal use/advantage, you're free to do so. If you'd like to sell your modified software for a lot of money, you're also free to do so. The only stipulation is that if you redistribute, you include the source.
An honest day's pay for an honest day's work.
What about non-economic renumeration of the development community that made the original? Isn't modifying free software and redistributing binaries akin to getting a free ride off of benevolent developers? Now _that_ sound like welfare!
This communist propaganda is a rot in our community, and it must be burnt out.
This laissez-faire, solely-economics-driven, free-market, Libertarian, Milton-Friedmanesque, no-tax/pro-corporate-welfare, pollution-denying, 'social-Darwinism' Right-Wing drivel is a rot in our community, and it must be burnt out.
Notice how silly that statement was? Notice how silly yours was? So there!
~Bob (forgot my password)
die die die
fornicate
die die
666
Be fair. SuSE isn't just "packaging free software". 1) They write very useful, complex pieces of software themselves (SaX, yast). 2) They have a very good support policy. 3) They support free software developers.
1) And RH doesn't write software themselves?
2) Does RH doesn't exactly have a *lame* support policy...but I just can't see the point in calling tech support for Linux for most of the people here. Besides Linux is really flexible, and also hell to support. I don't even expect good support any more from big companies I buy software from like IBM or M$. Tech support, as a general rule, sux. Plus good support *policies* != good support.
3) Boy, SuSE must be the only company in the Linux world that supports free software developers. Yup, uh huh.
Give me RH any day over SuSE.
Uh...a stricter GPL? What on earth would that *be*? "If you use my software you agree a) never to use non-GPL software again and b) to release all software you write under GPL"?
Since I don't know anyone that would *use* the support, I'd say the money goes to a) media, b) accompanying documentation (I guess this is legal), and c) the *service* provided in packaging and shipping the software.
LGPL = green/yellow stripes?
How about polka dots? Zig-zags?
I don't really like the color idea. Okay, we need simplification, but that's too simplified. Maybe we could use blue and green instead of green and yellow, so there's no underlying advocacy of silly things like BSD licenses (how are they different from public domain, anyway?)
Wow. You sure are belligerant.
My view is that everyone in the world should by default be compensated for their work. Period. If you sweep streets, you should be paid for your efforts. They have that right.
Anyone that wants to give something away is going above and beyond the call of duty. It's *their* choice, a gift to the rest of the world. It's most laudable -- but certainly not a requirement.
Complaining that someone chooses not to give you their work for free is simply stupid. Even those authors that have written free software themselves don't have that right to complain -- just because they chose to give away their software doesn't mean that they can force their choice on others.
If someone writes software up to version 3.3.3 and then starts releasing future versions under a non-free license, *they have that right*. They have given you *thousands* of man-hours of work. If they want to charge for some future work, I certainly think they're being reasonable -- kind in fact -- they have given you a wonderful gift earlier, after all.
As for your assertation that the programmer was just trying to get market share, then move people to a commercial scheme....you're being silly. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that you moved to the program because you considered it a good piece of software. Fine. When you moved, you moved to version 3.3.1. *That version of the software was good enough to get you to use it*. Now, the author comes out with further work, and it isn't free. There is *nothing* keeping you from continuing to use 3.3.1. If you want more out of the software, you can quite happily start your own fork and do your *own* work, blessing the original author for the thousands of hours he has put in to build you a code base. Screaming at him for not choosing to work for another few thousand man-hours on the software to give you a chunk of free software is dumb.
And there is *no* comparison to M$ (I assume you're talking about the free MSIE, which will someday cost people). M$ *never released the source code to MSIE at any point*. So, people get interested in MSIE, but when the HTML standard changes a bit, and they need to upgrade, they *can't* do their own work and fork out. In essence, they now must buy a commercial version, paying not only for the code added since the move to a commercial license, but *also* for the code they thought was free originally. If MS drives Mozilla into the ground, then charges for MSIE, they would be to blame. The rdist guy is not.
Ask a common guy on the street whether something he gets without paying for is free. He'll say yess. Sounds like a "commonly accepted" definition to me. Maybe not among the small OSS croud. But "commonly accepted"? Sure.
We need a really smart Perl script that can remove this. It's not bad yet, but the AOL crowd (no offense to those of you that are on a level with Torvalds or Stallman and choose to use AOL, but everyone knows who I mean when I use the term "AOL crowd") is getting worse, and I can see an open forum like /. going downhill...and it'd be nice to have something in place *before* stuff gets bad.
I'm getting a bit tired of reading all the comments here stating that "Red Hat is doing the right thing" and "Red Hat is watching the free status of their distribution unlike some other distributors".
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MORAL!
Red Hat is simply removing the package because it's ILLEGAL for them to distribute it. They could actually get sued for doing it! This is nothing different from what any other company would do in their situation to avoid trouble. The only other legal option would be to contact the author and get a special license (which might alert him to their license infringement or cost them a substantial amount if he was gready). Then it was simply easier, cheaper, quicker and safer to revert to a slightly older version.
Don't get me wrong, I like Red Hat just as much as the next guy and believe that they are a company with strong morality. It's just that this single incident has nothing to do with protecting the community from semi-free software (at least not foremost). It's about protecting themselves from trouble.
/Tord
While I'm not going to say you're lying (heh, it was kinda funny though ;-), I think there is one flaw with your arguement:
"Actually, it's the advocates of BSD/X11-style licensing who want to steal the work of others"
and
"That's theft, pure and simple."
It isn't *theft* because the developer has allowed it. By using BSDesque licenses they are saying that you can go ahead and resell, etc. If this bothers you, obviously you shouldn't use GPL, I can certainly see why GPL may be the more reasonable of the two...
...but I still prefer BSD, simply because it is closer, in spirit, to how I feel. I couldn't care less if someone took code I'd written and sold it; to be honest, it is creating the software that I enjoy, not the finished product.[1] GPL cannot protect my interests--my interest is writing code, not releasing software. With that in mind, there is no functional difference between GPL and the alternatives, so I choose the one I am most comfortable with.
-jcl
[1]: As you may have guessed, this dedication to my work results in more than a little software that is either 1) never completed because I get bored, or 2) in no shape for public use because I was feeling 'creative'. Even better protection than GPL!
The smartest thing to do would just have been to make a code fork and releasing a rdist-pro with features a commercial user would pay money for.
.... to any project unless the license is GPL. Why should I help these shareware authors in making money?
The BSD version could still be around with security and bug updates.
These versions would of course have shared a lot of code.
If something like that had been done, there had been no complaints or missunderstandings.
Magnicomp obviously had no such intentions. They had another agenda. I once thought RMS was a nut with his ideas about free software but now I know different.
I will never contribute patches
You're twisting the facts around to make greed look like a virtue and generosity a vice. It's our own software which we are trying to protect, from the parasites who would love to get rich replacing our free software by their own proprietary ripoffs. Copyleft protects *our* software gifts to the community from those who "want everything for free, especially the work of others."
Magnicomp is simply acting like the average drugpusher. Almost free or very cheap from the start and when you get hooked it's getting expensive.
Most software we use is community produced and if they use GPL or BSD it doesn't matter. It's the community that matters. Just be careful with non community projects.
No, this is really really simple. They are not being asked to allow Red Hat, or anyone else, to "steal" their installation mechanism. They are being asked to let Red Hat, or anyone else, *use* that software, modify it to taste, redistribute it etc. Just like Red Hat let SuSe use, modify etc their stuff, just like Linus and the rest of the kernel team let SuSe use etc the kernel.
You just don't get this free software concept, do you?
Linus himself believes in proprietary software. He hopes to get rich off it at Transmeta. He has never objected to commercial versions of Linux, or proprietary software built for Linux. You are violating the wishes of the Creator.
Being "more free than GPL" is hardly challenging.
Not a free (free to use, but not Gnu free) license, but people like it and use it, thus RH includes it. RH's principals do not extend to things that can effect market share...
You always have the original BSD versions, still free. There's a lot more commercial use of BSD and BSD-derived systems than you seem to realize. Better that than Mr Bill.
GPL leads to GnuGree code.
BSD leads to free code.
Your choice.
The LGPL fiasco on gnu.misc.discuss. It turns out that all libraries are only LGPL'd, not GPL'd.
Having many version of Linux breeds healthy competition. Competition is natural. We're made to compete. We've made to win. You cannot stop that. It's a basic instinct. That's why there are more versions of Linux than of BSD. More players means more versions.
The Redhat install tool, glint, is written in python. Python is not truly free software. It's not under the GPL, so someday could become proprietary. The glint program should be recoded in gcc so it has purity of spirit.
This "no fee" thing is so evil. Why must people require that others remain poor?
That's why we have "free" for normal people on the street, and "GnuFree" for, well, you know.
And what criteria do you plan to use?
"Flaming someone to Hell" is an effective lobbying technique? Curious.
If there are interfaces to GNU code in the program, then the program is GPL'd. Richard has made this very clear. It doesn't matter who does the link, or where.
Python is GNU software.
Every time I come across these academically inspired licences that require that credit be given where it is due, and it seems onerous initially, upon correspondence with the author, it's far less than it appears. Perhaps this is the same.
This is important to make sure that people who begin using something as free software can still continue to use it (and their own enhancements to it) if they decide to switch operating systems or distributions.
If Linux one day becomes obsolete, and is superseded by a compatible system, it would be very unfortunate for people upgrading to the new system to have to seek special permission to continue to use the old software they used to use on Linux...
One must not be more royalist than the King.
I'm always reading Linus' quoted something like "he who writes the code gets to choose the license", but too many of the posters above seem to think that should only apply to coders who start from scratch. It usually takes as more effort to add or modify 1000 lines of code of an existing program than it does to write 1000 lines of code from scratch. Why do they have so much problem allowing modifiers to control their own intellectual property? They're really confused about this "freedom" thing. They want the software to be free (which means closed modifications can't be distributed - I've forgotten why that's called "free"), but don't want the coder that creates modifications to be allowed to choose the license for his work. Seems inconsistent with Linus' pronouncement. The modifiers work should be as free as he wants it to be. THAT's the freedom that should count. That used to be the way Unix coders thought about each other. I'm sad to see the Linux world is so different, with everyone crying "you have to share with me or I won't share with you". Babies.
Actually, I remember him being kind of wary of the first commercial distributions.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking Penguin (1995),
;)
Hmmm... I can do that.
int prime;
printf("factors of prime number %i: %i %c", prime, prime, '1');
Where's my patent!?!?!
Suggest that you take another look at the packages contained in Slackware 4.0, I'll bet that you will find even fewer questionable packages there than you will in RedHat.
I find it amazing that the same people who put down the GPL/LGPL will suddenly scream if something becomes available that is not 100 percent free.
Free Beer (no cost/open source) = Good for one drink, then your empty. Can't modify original recipe, stuck with one flavor.
Free Recipe (GPL/LGPL) = Good for lifetime of Free Beer. Can modify recipe to suit ones taste buds.
You can take all of the free beer that you want, I'll take the recipe.
I think the biggest problem is with the "use the Software on the computers which you own or lease" part. This means that a student can not use rdist to sync up his work between the computer in his dorm and the a workstation in the lab's University since he is neither owning or leasing the computer in the lab.
As more and more commercial products based on
...
Linux come into the market, this becomes
fantastically important. Many of these systems
will be made up of a hoge-podge of programs, some
GPL, some BSD, some with the author's wierd non-
commercial licence. They break down into three
categories:
GREEN: BSD Licence. Do whatever you want.
YELLOW: GPL. Use it, but if you improve it, you
gotta share.
RED: You can't use this in a commercial product
without reading the fine print.
Don't know wher LGPL fits in.
Some categorization (check me guys):
GREEN
BSD and family
TCL
Python
PostgreSQL
Yellow:
Linux Kernel
GCC
GlibC
RED:
rdist (bummer!)
MSQL
MySql
It is crucial that people understand what goes
where and what you can do with each part.
Look folks, people are making money wit Linux.
This is great, but as a consequence the Lawers
are out there, licking their chops. We've got
to be carefull.
-- cary
I really admire Red Hat. Red Hat and Debian are the only two distributions with this strong a policy towards free software. Red Hat is the only commercial distribution with this strong a moral stance.
It's stuff like this that makes me really annoyed at people who make the Red Hat/Microsoft comparison. I mean people are buying SuSE, a distribution that is known to use underhanded tactics (undermining the Red Hat IPO), proprietize everything they can, and act generally sleazy to avoid the new Microsoft of Red Hat. In the meantime, Red Hat is one of the only two really ethical major distributions.
I'm the maintainer of cxhextris for debian and this seems to have slipped through by accident. It'll probably be moved to non-free RSN and I'll then contact the author and see if the license can't be fixed.
see shy jo
The trouble with BSD-licensed code is that someone can modify it a little and then hide the source from then on. If the code no longer maintained or whatnot, the original BSD-licensed copies of the code can die out, leaving only the proprietary licensed code left. With GPL, even if the code is modified, it can't be made proprietary. Even if the code ceases to be maintained, if there is at least one copy of the code around, even if it's modified, it's still free.
Basically, the freedom of BSD-licensed code is more contingent on the maintainers of the code keeping it free.
Posted by Synsthe:
:I installed it many times and everything just
:plain annoys me, from the installer to the stupid
:X only control panel. Hmm, so I have to do some
:remote administration... Too bad, gotta have X.
For the record, I'm not a RedHat fan either - I use Debian. However, this argument is pretty baseless - You aren't required in any way to use that control panel tool to administer a RedHat box.
:And if you don't like it, don't buy or download
:it. Use RedHat and never ever use Civ:CTP,
:Borland's software (if they do it), Codewarrior,
:or any other piece of useful software that isn't
:specifically GPL'ed.
This part I have to agree with - I've witnessed far too many people whine and complain about software simply for the reason being that it's not free. Get over it - some things just weren't meant to be that way, and being that way doesn't make them any less useful. If you're going to pick at software, atleast find some valid reasons.
I think this is one problem out of a few that the Linux community faces right now; they're too busy fighting amongst themselves over stuff like this, instead of putting that energy to something useful. There are people who are so elitist in their views that they don't consider distributions like RedHat or suse, etc, to be Linux simply because they're backed by a company of some kind.
That's just silly I think. It's still Linux, and disregarding items simply for a commercial background is more trouble than it's worth. Quite simply, if you don't want to support the company for whatever reason, than don't - other than that, let people choose for themselves what they want; it's still Linux after all.
Okay.. slided a tiny bit off topic there with that last rant. =)
--
Mark Waterous (mark@projectlinux.org)
But you can hit F1 in the Redhat Installer and get the description of the package.
Have you ever tried it?
SuSE is legally entitled to not play nice, but they will suffer in the marketplace.
--
If they are worried about people 'stealing their work' they should consider getting into another line of work. Kinda wierd to have a company in the business of packaging free software worry about code reuse.
Fortunately they aren't as clueless as you make them out because they DO share quite a bit of code, and someday one would hope they get smart enough to realize that being anal about the installer only hurts them. Sure every install of Mandrake is a RedHat sale lost, but it is another machine in the RedHat 'camp' as opposed to a SUSE or Caldera user.
Democrat delenda est
Ask him what "land of the free" means or what a "hacker" is.
/mill
Just because the "common guy" have chosen to blur the difference between "free" and "gratis" I won't.
MSIE is gratis and gcc is free.
Maybe Richard Stallman was right in insisting
that the only true free software was under
the GPL?
We should start projects to recreate all
partially free software in GPL or BSD licensed
form, and _keep_ it that way.
Even with a BSD license, the code isn't really
locked up -- no free code release can ever become
non-free -- at worst, someone else can release a new version under a new license -- I've never been able to see how the software suddenly becomes no longer free when this is done...
XV is still included in RH. Thats an "unregistred" version.
It's incredible that people cannot just choose the GPL or BSD licence variant that fits their needs the best, when they after all do create open source software.
Of course, perhaps they don't want people to use their stuff, and that's fair enough, it's too bad when the software is good and could benefit a lot of people, but it's fair enough if someone wants to prohibit others from using their creations.
Now someone may say that by choosing a licence that doesn't permit commercial use, binary distribution, or a licence like the rdist one, doesn't prohibit people from downloading the software themselves. Well it doesn't completely prohibit people from using it, but it does make the better software a second choice (or last resort), when so much other good software has a licence that allows a company like redhat/suse/... to back it.
Ironically, it may be the companies that will start a lot of the GPL projects in the future. We'll have anti-commercial shit^H^H^H^Hdevelopers changing their licences into ``everyone can use this software, but not if you use it in a way so that you make money'', or whatever, and the commercial parties will be left to write real Free software using GPL or similar.
Please post to debian-legal@lists.debian.org and ask them to look at it.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
By the way, I don't run the license-discuss mailing list. I just dominate it :-)
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Red Hat made a mistake in this case. It was their policy to not put this kind of software in their distribution, and one package slipped by. We all had some fun razzing them, but this was never a controversy - we knew they'd revert to another version of the package.
We also had fun exploring the alternatives to the problem package, there were at least two of them, at least one of which was much more powerful and both had no questions about their licenses.
In other words, this is no big deal. It's nice to note that Red Hat did the right thing, though.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
dear god!
redhat spent $2.2 million on development last year. cygnus did a fair amount of development last year. so did suse. and caldera. and the debian developers. and the samba team. and the apache team.
the old rdist has an acceptable license. we fork. it's that simple.
less hand wringing, more code. more clue, less talk.
sheesh.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
It is not untrue, just because you choose to deny commonly accepted definitions of free. It's not free according to the FSF definition, not free according to the DFSG, not free according to OSI, and definetly not free by the BSD definition. These are all definitions of free that are used in the Linux and BSD worlds.
I think you've missed part of the point. They can distribute the software now, but they choose not to as it's not free. That part seems to be unresolvable without you permitting general for-profit distribution, which you appear not to want to. (While I accept you're decision, I would ask you to extend Linux to include Hurd and BSD - for one thing, Debian would like to include it, and that includes Hurd.)
but this is an important issue, and I would like to publicly voice my support.
Red Hat often gets a lot of flack (is it deserved ???), but everything I have seen of them they are truly commited to giving back to the community:
sure, all these things helps them in the long run, but as long as it is a too way road then its great.
Federico
Face it, commercial distributions that hop on the Linux bandwagon are keen on making money.
What does RedHat actually care that stuff they distribute is free ?
Only image: they want to appear as the good guys.
But there is a compromise at work! They have to include MORE bells and whistles than the opposition, while still looking like they endorse free software.
So mistakes like these are going to be made...
Because checking licenses and cataloguing stuff as free/restricted/commercial is not a priority for them.
Likewise, making sure everything is secure and hole-free is not a priority either.
If you want this to change, the only way is to act responsibly, like flaming them to hell each time they `forget' to check... and stop whinying and insisting every stupid new gadget gets included in the distribution.
Huh... wait a second. What am I doing ? asking a bunch of linux lusers to act responsibly ? naaaww. Linux is succesful, so you get the disgruntled Zin95 nincoocoomps. Good luck handling them.
Yeah sure... start projects to recreate all partially free software.
Talk is cheap. *Acting* on it is ways better.
Like, use rsync, which is free, and start contributing to it so that it handles rdist-like features better.
SUSE ditributes commercial programs or at least they did in 6.0. I use Redhat now. They just had a directory called commercial or something. This is where they put software like adobe acrobat reader, and some other utilities that were not free or had odd liscences. Redhat can do the same thing. Heck all distros can. Just have a directory that is for non GPL/BSD/free software.
One thing nice about the suse installation is that it used to gie you information on each package by pressing one of the F keys or something. This was the same as rpm -qpi command that told you the vender and the liscense and other such information.
It would be nice if Redhat would add one thing to there installation. That woud be the ability to tell what a package is before installing it. Right now you have basically groups and sublists.
Only 'flamers' flame!
I wonder whether we'll see more of the course taken by my neighbors at Tripwire here in Portland, as described in this article. They have taken what was becoming an accepted and widely specified standard "free" security program, wrapped it up in a proprietary package and repositioned it for a corporate market supposedly "uncomfortable" taking on such a program. This orphans the many sites using tripwire, and encourages splitting the code trees on other similarly situated programs to avoid this outcome in the future.
I think the open source model is strong enough to withstand this sort of dynamic, but it's something to keep an eye on.
-------
Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
I feel that you are too quick to jump to conclusions. I feel that there is insufficient information available to attribute ANY intention to the author, and fee any degree of certainty about it.
OTOH, that's just talking about his intentions. The effect is that this is another license that needs to be understood if the software is to be used. There are good alternatives that don't require this. So there is no sufficiently good reason to use it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The problem here is that this concern has more than one dimension. You are trying to spread them out along a line. If you want to use the color metaphor, you will probably need at least the color wheel, and possibly the entire spindle (vertical for a light-dark axis).
Things out near the edge would be more pure representations of their attribute. Things more central would be more of a mixture. (Where do you put the Netscape License? The Java Community License? The...)
I suppose that in this scenario verticality (light/dark) would reflect the degree of "threat" used to enforce the claim, where darkest could be things like Delta Tao's license (was): "We'll think nasty things about you (if we can be bothered)", and brightest would be like some of the offerings the inquisition came up with: "Your soul will be tortured forever, but just to be sure you know what we mean, here's a sample."
(It's probably good that the end-points be beyond the likely scope of actually encountered events)...Delta Tao made that difficult!
Then after you place each license you could look up it's CMYK number (or RGB or HSV, depending on your preference) and try to figure out what this meant. But similar things would be chunked together!
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Ask a common guy on the street whether something he gets without paying for is free"
Even if there wasn't the problem of free speech and free beer this program is not free in both case.
It's not free speech because of the reasons given by the others posters.
And it's not free beer in all case. For non-profit use it is free beer but for profit use it is not free.
So this software is free only in specific conditions that you must check before using it. Ask a common manager if this software is free. He may say yes until he got a suit because he used it in a case where it is not free any more.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
How does adding the extra wording help?
The end user of the distribution is still precluded from doing commercial work with your software.
And what about non-linux (*BSD) distributions?
Will you include them?
yes BSD style is 'more free'
however The GPL ensures that it stays free, BSD doesn't have the forever free clause
I am willing to concede my freedom to lock up code, in echange for nobody else being able to lock it up.
I've recently been made aware of the discussions on this site regarding the licensing terms of RDist. It came as a bit of a shock to learn about the trouble with our RDist license agreement.
I have always been a free/open software supporter and have always intended to make sure RDist was freely distributable by all like minded groups. This definetely includes all the Linux distributions both free and for-profit. The trouble is, the license agreement was originally written long before Linux rose to it's current stature.
After reviewing our RDist license agreement I can easily see where there's a problem with the Linux groups. So I have updated the RDist License Agreement to clearly state it's fine to distribute as part of any Linux distribution.
I welcome any and all feedback on this and other topics.
- mike