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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 Who knows how long it will be until we find that distributions will be riddled with "holes" from out of date non-free-for-commercial-use software? "
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
*I* am not saying anything. The guy who sent in the comment said it all. There is no "article" here in the sense of linking to MSNBC or CNN, just an ongoing discussion of potential importance to open source and/or free software developers and users, many of whom regularly read and post to Slashdot. If software licensing issues aren't your cup of tea, that's okay. Different people have different interests. :)
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.
At that point the distro's will come from outside the US. Possibly from Japan or China (Turbo-Linux?) Could be as bad a the auto-import problem. From our point of view.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's why if you live in the U.S. you click on the "No, I'm not in the US" button (if there is one) for encryption laws. Sort of like the "Do not enter if under 18" signs. That or buy from outside of the country so the distro won't be crippled by anti-encryption laws. As if the feds will notice if you run the wrong damn OS.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
"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