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Update to RDist License Discussion

Posted by Roblimo on from the that-was-a-really-nice-gesture dept.

Dennis Heltzel writes "MagniComp just changed their license (again) to freely allow distribution with Linux Read the news here. I wonder if RedHat will do an errata to their errata. " (This change was posted today, 17 July, 1999.)

5 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. PR licensing by Ektanoor · · Score: 3

    In my opinion such kind of licensing is much worse than before. It would be better to have either a free open source licensing or a pure commercial one.

    In fact how can I use rdist in a heterogeneous environment? For example I have a network of several advanced workstations on Linux and some Solaris servers. So do I need to buy rdist just because I have such environment? What difference makes that I'm using one system and not another? This would look much like I would pay 50 cents on gas if I'm driving a Ford or 2,5 dollars if I use a Mitsubishi... It's nonsense.

    Such "advertising" "save-face" licenses should be avoided. Letting them on will lead us into a lot of bottlenecks. No one uses _ONE_ OS (no matter that one guy tries to lead us to it :) )

  2. Free version of rdist by zoulasc · · Score: 3

    Well, get ftp://ftp.astron.com:/pub/freerdist/freerdist-0.9. 0.tar.gz
    This version is based on Michael Coopers' rdist-6.1.3 with a *lot* of bug fixes (see ftp://ftp.astron.com:/pub/freerdist/ChangeLog), and still has the old nice BSD license, and will stay free.

    christos

  3. Sitll a problem: What about BSD? by crow · · Score: 3

    So you can distribute it for free as a part of a Linux distribution, but not FreeBSD. Ugh.

  4. I hope RedHat sticks to its guns by itp · · Score: 3

    I don't think that this license change is enough. This is not yet free software. What if I want to use it with FreeBSD, or GNU/Hurd, or whatever the next system I'm interested in is?

    This is not truly free software. Find an alternative package, or use the last version released under a BSD license. And I hope RedHat doesn't change their mind.

    --
    Ian Peters

  5. These guys need a little education, I think by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4
    Their new license is very clearly not conformant with the Open Source Definition. Certainly this won't get into Debian, I doubt Red Hat would be interested either.

    I'll try to get them interested in an OSD-compliant license. However, there are perfectly up-to-date versions of rdist that are real free software, and there are several good replacements for rdist, too.

    Thanks

    Bruce Perens

    --
    Bruce Perens.