Presumably at some point SCO will be selling their own Linux distribution, adding value by bundling some or all of their existing commercial products on top of a Linux rather than Unix core distribution.
If that's the case, you are faced with either building a new distribution from scratch, or choosing an existing one on which to base your work:
If you've chosen to to adopt an existing distribution, which one and why?
If you're planning to build your own, what lead you towards that decision?
Of course, you could just take to selling you're products onto some or all of the existing distributions. If that's the case, would you expect to cover all the distributions, or would you be tempted into an exclusive deal with one vendor, or perhaps one vendor per region?
If you must post this sort of thing, perhaps you should follow a couple of rules:
1) Precis the article so that people don't need to go and have a look.
2) Don't include a link, put it in as plain text so that people have to decide to cut&paste it to read the article.
Otherwise sites like this have a strong incentive to post drivel like this in order to leverage the slashdot effect to generate loads of hits and thus raise their advertising revenue.
A reasonable precis might have been:
Three so called experts reveal their incompetence by advocating Security through Obscurity. Their opinions are thouroughly rebuffed by
Malcolm Beatie who runs the the e-mail systems for Oxford University, among other things, and so can be assumed to know about defending systems from bright students.
If you really must read the article, it's here http://www.silicon.com/...
Re:If only I could SSH --- You can
on
SSH v. SRP
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· Score: 5
Check out mindterm (a Java SSH implementation) and PuTTY (a Free Windoze Telnet/SSH)
You seem to have the purpose of the patent system back to front. The idea of patents is to encourage the dissemination of ideas and techniques.
Before patents, people used to keep their ideas secret, and so they were often lost to society, or repeatedly reinvented. A patent is an exchange in which an inventor publishes their ideas in exchange for the exclusive right to exploit them for a limited time period.
That time period should clearly be set short enough so that the idea is still of some value by the time the patent expires, otherwise the exchange is unfair. That's one of the biggest problems with applying patents to software.
Luckily European patent offices have some sense, so we don't have to put up with this sort of silliness (w.r.t. software).
For many inventions, the boundaries between blatent copy and new innovation are reasonably clear cut. If, for example, I were to register a patent for a fork (you know, you eat with them) and then someone came along and added an extra tine and bent it at a slightly different angle it would still be a fork - they couldn't register a patent for it and would be violating my patent if they didn't own a licence.
If only this were true.
Unfortunately, patent law more often comes down to the relative quality of the patent lawyers.
If yours was particularly good, you'd probably be able to show everything from toothpicks to garden forks to be in violation of your patent. If you were less lucky, they would probably only have to paint the handle to avoid your patent.
I saw a patent for window lintels once that was a) totally incomprehensible to a mere mortal (i.e. I was only vaguely aware that it was related to walls after reading it twice), and b) apparently very good.
It was written for some people that had modified another patented design by changing the ends of the lintel from being square to being slightly angled.
The other people's patent was also totally incomprehensible, but pretty poor, given that such a trivial change circumvented it.
To add insult to injury, the trivial change that was introduced solely to avoid the patent actually made the lintels stronger and lighter:-)
A Boycott is likely to be seriously damaging to Amazon's future business, since chances are that any customer that switches to one of their competitors, will stay away even when the boycott is over.
Presumably it would be sensible for any Amazon shareholders reading this to sell their shares as quickly as possible, before the traders pick up that Amazon are going to be in trouble.
In fact I'm tempted to indulge in some bear trading (i.e. sell some shares I don't own)
You can check out their stock price to see if it continues to fall when trading opens today.
I'll believe that the day Debian officially apologizes for removing kdelibs
The copy of kdelibs that was removed claimed (in it's copyright file) that it included some code that was GPLed. IIRC it turned out that the same code was also available under the LGPL, so this was actually a bug in the copyright file, but given that the copyright file did say that at the time, it was a reasonable thing to do. You'll find that Coolo has recently uploaded a new kdelibs package, which is presumably just delayed in Incoming for the normal admin-bottleneck reasons that means that ``new'' packages often sit in Incoming for a few weeks. I'm not sure what there is to apologise about.
Anyway, how does the allegation that we were precipitate in our actions towards kdelibs imply that we are without principle?
I really cannot comment about RedHat's position on this, but it does strike me (as an outsider) as being somewhat inconsistent.
The situation with the commercial distributions is different to Debian. If the owners of one of these companies decides that the chances of a legal case being successfully brought in relation to this is so small that it can be ignored, then they are only betting their own money (and I think that they are on a fairly safe bet, so that's fine).
If one of the Debian developers makes the same decision, they are betting the money of all the owners of the Debian mirror sites, and all the CD Vendors. Debian doesn't exist as a legal entity, so if anyone gets sued it will be us as individuals. We're measuring the risk using a different standard, which probably explains the different decision.
Of course, there is also the feeling that the KDE developers have sinned against the GPL, by misapplying it as they have, which probably explains why Debian developers are not being more pragmatic about this. This is a largely emotional response, which is another reason why you'll not persuade the Debian developers to change their minds.
On a personal use basis, I agree with you, and I have pointed people at the KDE web site so they can pick up the Debian packages that they can find there.
Putting those files on our servers is a different matter though. By doing that, I'm claiming that I have the right to redistribute it, and I'm also making that decision for anyone who owns a mirror of the Debian archive. I don't think I have the right to do that, and I will not put up with someone else trying to make that decision for me (i.e. I'll exclude those files from the UK mirror if someone tries it prior to their licenses being fixed).
It pretty simple. If they care whether Debian distributes KDE, they'll fix their license. If they don't then APT allows Debian users to list the KDE site as one of their package sources, and not notice the difference, so there's no real hardship to anyone that wants to use KDE.
You're not going to get a compromise out of the Debian developers on this one, because Debian doesn't attract people who are willing to compromise their principles. That's all there is to it.
If that's true, they can just change the license to a valid one, right?
So any time they want to do that, Debian will end up distributing it. That's how legal contracts work.
Would you sign a contract to work for me for the next ten years, for no money? How about if I told you that I didn't mean what the contract said, and that I'd actually be paying you 10,000 pounds a month? Would that make you sign?
I think perhaps you'd want the contract changed to reflect my claimed intentions.
I do hope that you are not suggesting that we should ignore people's licenses.
Last time I looked at the KDE source, it was licensed under the GPL. If that's changed, fine, good, it's about time, but I think you'll find that they've still not actually changed it.
OK so if you read the GPL, you'll find that it conflicts with the Qt license, and that it insists that you not distribute GPLed software under these circumstances.
[BTW, the QPL makes no difference here. a) it conflicts with the GPL as well, and b) Qt is not yet under the QPL anyway]
Yes, that's right folks. Debian doesn't distribute KDE because the KDE developers asked us not to (in the code, by using the GPL).
Rumours that the KDE team are going to fix the license are very encouraging, but unfortunately we're talking about a legal contract here, so it's what the contract says that's important, not what the person that hands you the contract says.
N.B. I have nothing against KDE, or Troll Tech, or the QPL, or non-free software or people choosing any license they like for their own work.
I do have something against being told to distribute software without a valid license. People who call for Debian to ignore the KDE license problem are asking me personally to distribute something that I have no license to distribute (I own the UK mirror).
OK, so I know that the KDE crew have no intention to sue me for illegally copying their software, so why am I worried about it?
I'm paranoid. How about if someone evil bought Troll Tech, for the sole purpose of killing the Free Software movement by suing each and every one of us for illegal distribution of Qt?
I like the GPL, and so I don't like it when it's mis-applied, because I think that allowing that to pass might tend to dissipate the power of the GPL.
Cheers, Phil.
Re:How can I stop lying, when I didn't start lying
on
FreeBSD at COMDEX
·
· Score: 1
The GPL requires that you give away your family jewels.
The only reason that one might be bound by the GPL, is if you've taken some GPLed code, and taken advantage of the fact that it was GPLed, so the family jewels in question are not yours.
The family jewels analogy doesn't work on several fronts, the main one being that by giving them away, one doesn't lose access to them. By giving them away under the GPL, the jewels one keeps in the safe actually get more valuable as they are enhanced by the people that they've also been given to.
That makes it impossible to sell software in the tried and true fashion
RedHat would seem to show the lie of that statement.
Even if that were not the case, appealing to people on the platform of tradition in an industry that is fueled by change seems like an odd stance to take.
by which all other intellectual property is produced and sold
Not all other IP is necessarily sold this way (i.e. scientific research) so your case that it is essential for such work to be sold in this way, for it to be done at all, is flawed.
The GPL effectively prohibits such profits, and thus destroys the incentive a company might have for investing in the initial development.
You seem to be saying that the companies that currently work on GPLed software cannot exist.
You'll be proving that Bumble Bees cannot fly next.
You are also missing the point that a company that decides to use GPLed software will be able to stand on the shoulders of giants, whereas the conventional software producer may well find themselves reinventing several wheels. This gives the GPL company the opportunity to bring their product to market more quickly, and establish themselves.
One is only bound by the conditions of the GPL if using other people's software in the first place. You are perfectly free to write all that software again, and license it in whatever way you like, but if you decide to use another's IP, I'd hope that you (being a supporter of conventional licenses) would agree that you are bound to abide by the terms under which that IP is distributed.
If that happened with medicine, we'd have no drug companies. And no drugs.
This is patently untrue, since pure scientific research is regularly funded by industry.
It is also irrelevant because drugs are protected by patent (or industrial secrecy), not copyright. These patents expire much sooner than copyright on software, which means that the drugs companies have a much more limited period of protection than is offered by copyright on software, and yet they survive quite happily.
How can I stop lying, when I didn't start lying?
on
FreeBSD at COMDEX
·
· Score: 1
Feel free to quote the clause in the GPL that you feel supports your claim that the GPL supposedly prohibits the act of selling software.
If you actually have such a clause in mind (which I very much doubt) then I'll attempt to explain your misinterpretation of it.
Freedom is the right to own your code, the right to do with your code whatever you damn well please.
and this.
The GPL states that you must give your code away upon request
only to people that you give/sell the binaries to.
that your code must be under their license
only is you've elected to take advantage of the fact that someone else has published some code that made your life easier than writing the same code from scratch.
It is like free beer
There is nothing stopping you from taking GPL code, modifying it, and selling the resulting binaries to your clients. The GPL says nothing about the amount you must charge for binaries.
In other words, every point you have tried to make is unfounded, or flawed in some way. Perhaps you should try reading the GPL some time.
and set up an ftp, http, tftp or whatever server on the machine, giving access to the source.
Either that, or if you are making an installation CD to go with it, just include the source on that.
Doing anything else may give people an excuse to accuse you of violating the GPL, which will do your company no good.
It's not as though a source CD is going to cost you anything significant, so if you don't do that, or something as good, it gives the definite impression that you are being disingenuous.
Any developer smart enough to contribute to the Solaris or Linux code base is smart enough to figure out the differences between the SCSL and GPL.
Smart enough, yes. Well informed enough, sadly not always.
Take as an example the (obviously smart) authors of KDE, who failed to spot the subtle nuances of the interaction between GPL and both the old and new Qt licenses.
Note, I'm not criticising either the GPL or the KDE developers, just pointing out that misunderstandings of licensing subtleties are not only possible, but also often extremely painful to fix retroactively.
Therefore, being aggressively vocal about pointing out the shortcomings of the SCSL is entirely justified if it means preventing a similar situation arising in future.
You had an unfounded objection to something. I explained why it was unfounded. What more point do you require?
You are still clobbering the original program with another completely different one.
Given that the two programs in question are branches of the same source tree, and that OpenSSH is intended to be a drop in replacement for ssh-nonfree, characterising them as completely different is ridiculous.
Perhaps you should actually check out debconf before criticising it.
As it happens you could easily run it under expect, but since one of the main objectives of debconf is to allow Debian to do non-interactive installs, doing so would not be a particularly bright thing to do.
Neither will OpenSSH be (on the official USA CD anyway). Not until the USA develop a sensible crypto policy --- your point is ?
Some kind soul has made it available on a site outside the US where there are no legal problems. HTH.
Oh dear. Your talking to one of the ``Kind Souls''. Doh!
OpenSSH is not fully compatible with SSH as it does not support all the encryption algorithms. Please RTFM.
And this has affected you has it? I doubt that very much, but if so, please report a bug. I'm not saying I'll be able to fix it in this case (for obvious reasons), but it'll be amusing to hear what weirdness you've indulged in to actually notice the missing algorithms.
If debian never distributed ssh (which comes as a surprise to me, given that I've been maintaining it for over two years) then why are you complaining that it overwrites the old package?
Why does Debian decide to BREAK the user's system by RENAMING packages?
If OpenSSH has broken your system, please report a bug, and I will endeavor to resolve your problem.
If on the other hand you are just being an idiot, please shut up and stop wasting our time.
The package tells you exactly what is going on using the shiny new debconf tool to put a nice dialog box up to ask you if you want to continue, or give you the chance to install ssh-nonfree instead.
Coerced:
As the Debian maintainer of both ssh (OpenSSH) and ssh-nonfree (the non-free ssh) I can tell you that the decision was mine. (I did check that nobody from the OpenSSH team minded)
My decision was based on the fact that Debian does not consider non-free software to be part of the distribution, so if there is a free and a non-free implementation of a package, the free one gets the name because its actually part of the distribution.
I've got nothing against ssh-nonfree (otherwise I wouldn't have maintained a Debian package of it for years) and I really appreciate the fact that Tatu wrote it, and allowed us all to use it. It just happens to be non-free, so the DFSG free alternative gets priority in our case.
Slashdot Mirror
... Stallman; it's his license and he decides what restitution its violators should make
Utter Bollocks!
It is the author of the code that has rights under copyright, not the author of the Licence that the copyright holder chooses to use for their work.
Presumably at some point SCO will be selling their own Linux distribution, adding value by bundling some or all of their existing commercial products on top of a Linux rather than Unix core distribution.
If that's the case, you are faced with either building a new distribution from scratch, or choosing an existing one on which to base your work:
Of course, you could just take to selling you're products onto some or all of the existing distributions. If that's the case, would you expect to cover all the distributions, or would you be tempted into an exclusive deal with one vendor, or perhaps one vendor per region?
Cheers, Phil.
1) Precis the article so that people don't need to go and have a look.
2) Don't include a link, put it in as plain text so that people have to decide to cut&paste it to read the article.
Otherwise sites like this have a strong incentive to post drivel like this in order to leverage the slashdot effect to generate loads of hits and thus raise their advertising revenue.
A reasonable precis might have been:
Check out mindterm (a Java SSH implementation) and PuTTY (a Free Windoze Telnet/SSH)
You seem to have the purpose of the patent system back to front. The idea of patents is to encourage the dissemination of ideas and techniques.
Before patents, people used to keep their ideas secret, and so they were often lost to society, or repeatedly reinvented. A patent is an exchange in which an inventor publishes their ideas in exchange for the exclusive right to exploit them for a limited time period.
That time period should clearly be set short enough so that the idea is still of some value by the time the patent expires, otherwise the exchange is unfair. That's one of the biggest problems with applying patents to software.
Luckily European patent offices have some sense, so we don't have to put up with this sort of silliness (w.r.t. software).
For many inventions, the boundaries between blatent copy and new innovation are reasonably clear cut. If, for example, I were to register a patent for a fork (you know, you eat with them) and then someone came along and added an extra tine and bent it at a slightly different angle it would still be a fork - they couldn't register a patent for it and would be violating my patent if they didn't own a licence.
:-)
If only this were true.
Unfortunately, patent law more often comes down to the relative quality of the patent lawyers.
If yours was particularly good, you'd probably be able to show everything from toothpicks to garden forks to be in violation of your patent. If you were less lucky, they would probably only have to paint the handle to avoid your patent.
I saw a patent for window lintels once that was a) totally incomprehensible to a mere mortal (i.e. I was only vaguely aware that it was related to walls after reading it twice), and b) apparently very good.
It was written for some people that had modified another patented design by changing the ends of the lintel from being square to being slightly angled.
The other people's patent was also totally incomprehensible, but pretty poor, given that such a trivial change circumvented it.
To add insult to injury, the trivial change that was introduced solely to avoid the patent actually made the lintels stronger and lighter
A Boycott is likely to be seriously damaging to Amazon's future business, since chances are that any customer that switches to one of their competitors, will stay away even when the boycott is over.
Presumably it would be sensible for any Amazon shareholders reading this to sell their shares as quickly as possible, before the traders pick up that Amazon are going to be in trouble.
In fact I'm tempted to indulge in some bear trading (i.e. sell some shares I don't own)
You can check out their stock price to see if it continues to fall when trading opens today.
I'll believe that the day Debian officially apologizes for removing kdelibs
The copy of kdelibs that was removed claimed (in it's copyright file) that it included some code that was GPLed. IIRC it turned out that the same code was also available under the LGPL, so this was actually a bug in the copyright file, but given that the copyright file did say that at the time, it was a reasonable thing to do. You'll find that Coolo has recently uploaded a new kdelibs package, which is presumably just delayed in Incoming for the normal admin-bottleneck reasons that means that ``new'' packages often sit in Incoming for a few weeks. I'm not sure what there is to apologise about.
Anyway, how does the allegation that we were precipitate in our actions towards kdelibs imply that we are without principle?
I really cannot comment about RedHat's position on this, but it does strike me (as an outsider) as being somewhat inconsistent.
The situation with the commercial distributions is different to Debian. If the owners of one of these companies decides that the chances of a legal case being successfully brought in relation to this is so small that it can be ignored, then they are only betting their own money (and I think that they are on a fairly safe bet, so that's fine).
If one of the Debian developers makes the same decision, they are betting the money of all the owners of the Debian mirror sites, and all the CD Vendors. Debian doesn't exist as a legal entity, so if anyone gets sued it will be us as individuals. We're measuring the risk using a different standard, which probably explains the different decision.
Of course, there is also the feeling that the KDE developers have sinned against the GPL, by misapplying it as they have, which probably explains why Debian developers are not being more pragmatic about this. This is a largely emotional response, which is another reason why you'll not persuade the Debian developers to change their minds.
On a personal use basis, I agree with you, and I have pointed people at the KDE web site so they can pick up the Debian packages that they can find there.
Putting those files on our servers is a different matter though. By doing that, I'm claiming that I have the right to redistribute it, and I'm also making that decision for anyone who owns a mirror of the Debian archive. I don't think I have the right to do that, and I will not put up with someone else trying to make that decision for me (i.e. I'll exclude those files from the UK mirror if someone tries it prior to their licenses being fixed).
It pretty simple. If they care whether Debian distributes KDE, they'll fix their license. If they don't then APT allows Debian users to list the KDE site as one of their package sources, and not notice the difference, so there's no real hardship to anyone that wants to use KDE.
You're not going to get a compromise out of the Debian developers on this one, because Debian doesn't attract people who are willing to compromise their principles. That's all there is to it.
Cheers, Phil.
Oops.
I'd missed the fact that Qt2 has actually been released now, and is so now (as you say) under the QPL.
Sorry about that.
KDE is still linked against Qt1 though (or have I missed that announcement too ?)
KDE is written from scratch.
If that's true, they can just change the license to a valid one, right?
So any time they want to do that, Debian will end up distributing it. That's how legal contracts work.
Would you sign a contract to work for me for the next ten years, for no money? How about if I told you that I didn't mean what the contract said, and that I'd actually be paying you 10,000 pounds a month? Would that make you sign?
I think perhaps you'd want the contract changed to reflect my claimed intentions.
I do hope that you are not suggesting that we should ignore people's licenses.
Last time I looked at the KDE source, it was licensed under the GPL. If that's changed, fine, good, it's about time, but I think you'll find that they've still not actually changed it.
OK so if you read the GPL, you'll find that it conflicts with the Qt license, and that it insists that you not distribute GPLed software under these circumstances.
[BTW, the QPL makes no difference here. a) it conflicts with the GPL as well, and b) Qt is not yet under the QPL anyway]
Yes, that's right folks. Debian doesn't distribute KDE because the KDE developers asked us not to (in the code, by using the GPL).
Rumours that the KDE team are going to fix the license are very encouraging, but unfortunately we're talking about a legal contract here, so it's what the contract says that's important, not what the person that hands you the contract says.
N.B. I have nothing against KDE, or Troll Tech, or the QPL, or non-free software or people choosing any license they like for their own work.
I do have something against being told to distribute software without a valid license. People who call for Debian to ignore the KDE license problem are asking me personally to distribute something that I have no license to distribute (I own the UK mirror).
OK, so I know that the KDE crew have no intention to sue me for illegally copying their software, so why am I worried about it?
Cheers, Phil.
The GPL requires that you give away your family jewels.
The only reason that one might be bound by the GPL, is if you've taken some GPLed code, and taken advantage of the fact that it was GPLed, so the family jewels in question are not yours.
The family jewels analogy doesn't work on several fronts, the main one being that by giving them away, one doesn't lose access to them. By
giving them away under the GPL, the jewels one keeps in the safe actually get more valuable as they are enhanced by the people that they've also been given to.
That makes it impossible to sell software in the tried and true fashion
RedHat would seem to show the lie of that statement.
Even if that were not the case, appealing to people on the platform of tradition in an industry that is fueled by change seems like an odd stance to take.
by which all other intellectual property is produced and sold
Not all other IP is necessarily sold this way (i.e. scientific research) so your case that it is essential for such work to be sold in this way, for it to be done at all, is flawed.
The GPL effectively prohibits such profits, and thus destroys the incentive a company might have for investing in the initial development.
You seem to be saying that the companies that currently work on GPLed software cannot exist.
You'll be proving that Bumble Bees cannot fly next.
You are also missing the point that a company that decides to use GPLed software will be able to stand on the shoulders of giants, whereas the conventional software producer may well find themselves reinventing several wheels. This gives the GPL company the opportunity to bring their product to market more quickly, and establish themselves.
One is only bound by the conditions of the GPL if using other people's software in the first place. You are perfectly free to write all that software again, and license it in whatever way you like, but if you decide to use another's IP, I'd hope that you (being a supporter of conventional licenses) would agree that you are bound to abide by the terms under which that IP is distributed.
If that happened with medicine, we'd have no drug companies. And no drugs.
This is patently untrue, since pure scientific research is regularly funded by industry.
It is also irrelevant because drugs are protected by patent (or industrial secrecy), not copyright. These patents expire much sooner than copyright on software, which means that the drugs companies have a much more limited period of protection than is offered by copyright on software, and yet they survive quite happily.
Feel free to quote the clause in the GPL that you feel supports your claim that the GPL supposedly prohibits the act of selling software.
If you actually have such a clause in mind (which I very much doubt) then I'll attempt to explain your misinterpretation of it.
Freedom is the right to modify the code
GPL gives you this.
and keep your modifications.
and this.
Freedom is the right to own your code, the right to do with your code whatever you damn well please.
and this.
The GPL states that you must give your code away upon request
only to people that you give/sell the binaries to.
that your code must be under their license
only is you've elected to take advantage of the fact that someone else has published some code that made your life easier than writing the same code from scratch.
It is like free beer
There is nothing stopping you from taking GPL code, modifying it, and selling the resulting binaries to your clients. The GPL says nothing about the amount you must charge for binaries.
In other words, every point you have tried to make is unfounded, or flawed in some way. Perhaps you should try reading the GPL some time.
and set up an ftp, http, tftp or whatever server on the machine, giving access to the source.
Either that, or if you are making an installation CD to go with it, just include the source on that.
Doing anything else may give people an excuse to accuse you of violating the GPL, which will do your company no good.
It's not as though a source CD is going to cost you anything significant, so if you don't do that, or something as good, it gives the definite impression that you are being disingenuous.
It seems you need to read this: Free as in Free Speech
Any developer smart enough to contribute to the Solaris or Linux code base is smart enough to figure out the differences between the SCSL and GPL.
Smart enough, yes. Well informed enough, sadly not always.
Take as an example the (obviously smart) authors of KDE, who failed to spot the subtle nuances of the interaction between GPL and both the old and new Qt licenses.
Note, I'm not criticising either the GPL or the KDE developers, just pointing out that misunderstandings of licensing subtleties are not only possible, but also often extremely painful to fix retroactively.
Therefore, being aggressively vocal about pointing out the shortcomings of the SCSL is entirely justified if it means preventing a similar situation arising in future.
Nice to be appreciated :-)
Then what is the point??
You had an unfounded objection to something. I explained why it was unfounded. What more point do you require?
You are still clobbering the original program with another completely different one.
Given that the two programs in question are branches of the same source tree, and that OpenSSH is intended to be a drop in replacement for ssh-nonfree, characterising them as completely different is ridiculous.
This is madness and I'm sorry you don't get it.
LOL
Perhaps you should actually check out debconf before criticising it.
As it happens you could easily run it under expect, but since one of the main objectives of debconf is to allow Debian to do non-interactive installs, doing so would not be a particularly bright thing to do.
SSH is NOT distributed on the Debian/GNU CD.
Neither will OpenSSH be (on the official USA CD anyway). Not until the USA develop a sensible crypto policy --- your point is ?
Some kind soul has made it available on a site outside the US where there are no legal problems. HTH.
Oh dear. Your talking to one of the ``Kind Souls''. Doh!
OpenSSH is not fully compatible with SSH as it does not support all the encryption algorithms. Please RTFM.
And this has affected you has it? I doubt that very much, but if so, please report a bug. I'm not saying I'll be able to fix it in this case (for obvious reasons), but it'll be amusing to hear what weirdness you've indulged in to actually notice the missing algorithms.
Perhaps you should try using the software, before complaining about it.
If you find a real, non-ficional non-FUD-based problem, please report a bug.
Debian never distributed the SSH package anyway.
If debian never distributed ssh (which comes as a surprise to me, given that I've been maintaining it for over two years) then why are you complaining that it overwrites the old package?
Why does Debian decide to BREAK the user's system by RENAMING packages?
If OpenSSH has broken your system, please report a bug, and I will endeavor to resolve your problem.
If on the other hand you are just being an idiot, please shut up and stop wasting our time.
Cheers, Phil.
no warning:
The package tells you exactly what is going on using the shiny new debconf tool to put a nice dialog box up to ask you if you want to continue, or give you the chance to install ssh-nonfree instead.
Coerced:
As the Debian maintainer of both ssh (OpenSSH) and ssh-nonfree (the non-free ssh) I can tell you that the decision was mine. (I did check that nobody from the OpenSSH team minded)
My decision was based on the fact that Debian does not consider non-free software to be part of the distribution, so if there is a free and a non-free implementation of a package, the free one gets the name because its actually part of the distribution.
I've got nothing against ssh-nonfree (otherwise I wouldn't have maintained a Debian package of it for years) and I really appreciate the fact that Tatu wrote it, and allowed us all to use it. It just happens to be non-free, so the DFSG free alternative gets priority in our case.
I hope that clears things up.
Cheers, Phil.