More and more the Open Source Initiative looks like a group (or should I say an individual) who is trying to wrest control of the free software/GNU-Linux/your moniker here movement, since only THEY (he?) really know what's good for the rest of us.
I have not been happy with some of the OSI's actions and with its organisational structure. But I know a potential improvement when I see it. This mailing list is. I urge those interested in free software licensing issues (e.g. the debian-legal subscribers and misc.int-property and misc.legal.computing readers) to join. License dissemination is best done in the open.
And now that work is done on reorganising SPI into an open and democratic organisation (join the spi-general list if you're interested), it will hopefully be able to manage the Open Source mark itself in the not too distant future.
Never any source code for these things. Why?
on
SETI@Home For Linux
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· Score: 2
My guess is that having the source for it would greatly increase the capacity of malevolents to send fake or distorted results back.
I wish I knew of a good counterargument. Suggestions?
First of all that attitude seems to permiate the Debian distribution from my standpoint.
Your standpoint seems to involve gross overgeneralisation. To some degree, this is an issue of "more catholic than the pope". Some Debian users (in my perception percentage-wise a lot more than Debian developers) have an urgency to show how l33t they are.
Second, making things difficult doesn't make them better.
Making things too easy doesn't make things better. The tricky part is to make easy things easy, while keeping it possible to do hard things.
Personally, I'm not particularly interested in fine-tuning the webserver (which I only use for dwww) or mail transfer agent (which I only use to submit the occasional bug report) on my system. Luckily, with Debian I don't have to be. apacheconfig and eximconfig take care of them. But Debian doesn't restrict me from finetuning what I'm interested in. For example, kernel-package simply eases building of (packaged) kernels, but it doesn't interfere with the fine-grained configuration.
Still, Pablo has a point (though there's a lot of gray between his black and white extremes). I like it much better when phrased the way I saw in a sig though: I don't reply to messages below some arbitrary mark. There's nothing l33t in that. It's simply a matter of choosing how to spend one's limited time.
I like helping users, but there's a limit to the amount of effort I'll go to (because I can help more users by spending that effort on e.g. improving my packages or packaging new stuff). TANSTAAFL; I'll happily point users to reading material, but I expect them to do their own reading.
AFAIK, Digital Unix is based on the original UNIX tree, meaning Compaq is probably paying a signficiant amount of money per copy of Digital Unix in license fees to the current holder(s) of the UNIX source.
If memory serves, SGI gave these costs as one of the reasons for sponsering Linux/MIPS development.
RMS is now responding on the freeness of the APSL. His extensive comments have not hit the spi-general webarchive yet, but should appear soon in the Apple and Open Source thread.
The trouble with it, like the current Apple and IBM license, is that it can easily be misinterpreted as free.
It's termed a "Copyleft", but to me "copyleft" always meant "GPL, or another free software license that uses copyright law to prevent hoarding into proprietary software". But NCL isn't a free license.
Look at what Stephen Williams says in his submission: Seems to be aimed at people who want to sell their free software. But software licensed under it isn't free software.
(2b) You MAY NOT distribute this work for profit as an executable or in object form either on its own or as part of a collection with other works without first establishing a distribution agreement with the steward for the work.
The license of a Debian component may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Software in the Public Interest, Inc.. See the US Patent and Trademark Office entry for "Open Source" (http://trademarks.uspto.gov/cgi-bin/ifetch4?ENG+A LL+3+921980+0+1+141168+F+2+2+1+MS%2f Open+AND+MS%2fSource (sorry, trying to make a out of it failed).
4) What has RMS said about the Freeness of the APSL?
Not much so far. RMS primarily communicates through email. In Aachen he told about getting RSI from coding; presumably he still suffers from this. He's being included in a thread on spi-general, so we'll learn of his opinion soon, I hope.
5) If I see one more/. article pitting ESR against BP, I am dropping BOTH and going with RMS. It's getting so that he is the only NON-crazy one.
Bruce isn't the only signatory. It's signed by the Debian project leader (the Open Source definition is essentially the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) with Debian-specific references removed), and the president of SPI. And while I have a lot of respect for RMS, he isn't without faults either (GPL v LGPL, not admitting to the reality that FSF gcc development is dead and succeeded by EGCS, attempts to micro-manage Debian when it was still an FSF project). Free software shouldn't be about egos, but about principles.
www.counterpane.com, Bruce Schneier's company, which hosts a lot of info on e.g. blowfish and the newer twofish cipher. (Twofish is an AES candidate)
NIST is working towards the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which is to take over DES' role as the US-government recommended shared key block cipher.
www.gnupg.org, the GNU Privacy Guard, a free alternative to PGP. (Currently rapidly approaching version 1.0)
Second of all, yes, somebody (Red Hat or Debian) must ship a free desktop.
Debian 2.1 ships GNOME (albeit a prerelease, as there was no release available before the start of the code freeze); Red Hat does so too (GNOME is in RH 5.2, right?).
It is very important to provide an unquestionably free desktop NOW. There is no time to waste. We have a parisitic company to fight. If they get control of critical libraries, Linux users will have lost their freedom.
I've been critical of Troll in the past, and I've been extremely annoyed by their dismissal of the importance of freedom. But since then, Troll have made what I think is a sincere effort at improvement in this area. They've worked on a DFSG-free license to be used for the forthcoming Qt 2.0, the QPL 1.0, and they've been quite responsive with regard to the input they've received from Debian's Joseph Carter.
Whatever Troll's failings in the past, in my opinion they deserve at least the benefit of the doubt for this change.
Let's worry over the remaining issue wrt KDE: is QPL 1.0 GPL-compatible, and if not, how do we get KDE to take licensing issues seriously, and get them to put in an exemption clause in their license to allow binaries of their code linked against Qt 2 to be redistributed (similar to how the LyX folks fixed the LyX license.
Until you start citing reasons why Red Hat isn't as good as SuSe or Debian,
Discussing the differences between distributions is difficult enough, without getting into which is better (or even if "better" means something in general).
In any case, if you're genuinely interested, there's a lot of material from debian users' perspective(s) in one of this months threads on the debian-user@lists.debian.org mailing list; see the archives.
Debian's dedication to free software, the openness of it's development model, the responsiveness of the developers, the flexibility of the package management system, the stability and integratedness of releases, the finishing touches (automatic menu updates for all window managers, automatic mailcap updates, handling of the slight incompatibilities between some Athena-using binaries and the various enhanced Athena libraries (e.g. neXtaw) through xaw-wrappers) etc. are what make it the right distribution for me to use and to work on, but choice of distribution is a case of YMMV.
The developers would most likely write the same stuff without Debian.
I can't speak for all of us, but in my case, I'd strongly doubt I'd have learned anywhere near as much about UN*X systems and free software development if I hadn't become involved in Debian development.
Cosider Alan Cox. He would have to work at a normal place if Red Hat didn't support him. His free time to hack would be more limited. Were he with Debian, he could only do half as much as he does now.
Being employed by a Linux distributor that's dedicated to free software is hardly the only way to spend a large amount of your work time developing free software. Consider Linus' position at TransMeta, independent free software consultants like Jim Pick, people working for companies like Cygnus, Cyclic and Signum, sysadmins and programmers in certain university and ISP environments etc.
Working for a commercial Linux distributor is but one way to pay a free software developer's bills.
Which Library do Distributions Use
on
Red Hat Backlash?
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· Score: 1
I suspect Potato will have a choice between them in installation if a kosher version of Qt is released by then.
QPL 1.0, the license under which Troll Tech will release Qt Free Edition 2.0, is a DFSG-free license.
But the problem with KDE's licensing is more subtle than that. Debian can't at the moment distribute KDE at all (not even as part of "contrib"), because Qt's license isn't GPL-compatible. (See the news item for details)
Even when we have a DFSG-free Qt, there is still the issue whether its license is GPL-compatible. If it is (I haven't seen an analysis of QPL 1.0's GPL-compatibility status, so I really don't know), KDE can be included in Debian's main. If it isn't, the licensing issue continues until KDE's licensing changes (e.g. by an explicit exception clause to the GPL allowing redistribution of KDE binaries linked against a QPLed Qt [1]), or the QPL is made GPL-compatible.
[1] A similar exception clause for non-free Qt would have made KDE suitable for contrib. Unfortunately, the KDE project refused to take the licensing issue seriously, and did not chose to fix it this way, unlike for instance the LyX developers. With LyX, there was a similar situation of GPL-ed software linked against a GPL-incompatibly licensed (binary-only non-system) library (xforms). The LyX developers explicitly added an exception to the GPL's requirements wrt. libraries, making it possible for Debian to distribute it in "contrib".
The only other distribution that is as free as Red Hat, Debian, is unable to really support Linux.
Would you care to explain what you mean by "support Linux"?
If you're referring to support Linux users, I'd strongly suggest you check out Debian's support options. If you're referring to having an unsurpressable urge to pay for support, check out the Debian consultants page.
If you're referring to supporting the development of Linux, I'd ask you to reflect on what a fellow Debian developer said: Debian supports free software development the old-fashioned way, by writing it. And of course there's the license lobbying/politics that got ncftp free, got Rocks'n'Diamonds free etc. And let's not forget where the first donation to GNOME development came from.
You sound like a case of "more catholic than the pope".
Perhaps you should read the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines it contains.
There are more free licenses than GPL and LGPL. (And if you refer to e.g. BSD-licensed code as "half-assed Open Source", you should include LGPL in that as it could encourage development of non-GPL-ed software).
In my book, there are valid reasons to use a different DFSG-free license than (L)GPL:
When contributing to existing code under a free license other than (L)GPL, e.g. BSD or public domain.
When writing documentation. The (L)GPL is for code. Documentation is quite different from code.
I happily put changes I made to public domain crypto code in the public domain and happily used the BSD license for a manpage I contributed to a BSD-licensed project, because that was the way in which I could improve that free software (more so than GPL-ing my modifications, and cutting them of from many in the development community involved. I used the FSF documentation notice (which is not GPL) for manpages I contributed to a GPLed project.
I use (L)GPL on new code I write myself, as I don't want to encourage proprietary software development too much.
I believe in respecting the license an author chooses for her code. When I believe an author should have chosen another license (e.g. because of lack of sufficient understanding of licensing issues (as is often the case with "non-commercial use only" licenses)), I don't think she should die, I try to reason with her.
If you don't like the license an author chose for his code, reason with him. It's going to get you much further than telling them to die. And if he doesn't change the license, you still have the freedom not to use his code.
Branden has been very busy getting X in good shape for slink; now that slink is almost released, he can start focussing on potato, and move to 3.3.3.1.
Vendors of IrDA stuff that aren't as closed minded as Toshiba might want to check this out. It's a nice way to show that you do care about the free software community.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an aptable staging area for the GNOME packages under construction:
deb http://www.debian.org/~jules/gnome-stage-2 unstable main
I have not been happy with some of the OSI's actions and with its organisational structure. But I know a potential improvement when I see it. This mailing list is. I urge those interested in free software licensing issues (e.g. the debian-legal subscribers and misc.int-property and misc.legal.computing readers) to join. License dissemination is best done in the open.
And now that work is done on reorganising SPI into an open and democratic organisation (join the spi-general list if you're interested), it will hopefully be able to manage the Open Source mark itself in the not too distant future.
I wish I knew of a good counterargument. Suggestions?
Your standpoint seems to involve gross overgeneralisation. To some degree, this is an issue of "more catholic than the pope". Some Debian users (in my perception percentage-wise a lot more than Debian developers) have an urgency to show how l33t they are.
Second, making things difficult doesn't make them better.
Making things too easy doesn't make things better. The tricky part is to make easy things easy, while keeping it possible to do hard things.
Personally, I'm not particularly interested in fine-tuning the webserver (which I only use for dwww ) or mail transfer agent (which I only use to submit the occasional bug report) on my system. Luckily, with Debian I don't have to be. apacheconfig and eximconfig take care of them. But Debian doesn't restrict me from finetuning what I'm interested in. For example, kernel-package simply eases building of (packaged) kernels, but it doesn't interfere with the fine-grained configuration.
Still, Pablo has a point (though there's a lot of gray between his black and white extremes). I like it much better when phrased the way I saw in a sig though: I don't reply to messages below some arbitrary mark. There's nothing l33t in that. It's simply a matter of choosing how to spend one's limited time.
I like helping users, but there's a limit to the amount of effort I'll go to (because I can help more users by spending that effort on e.g. improving my packages or packaging new stuff). TANSTAAFL; I'll happily point users to reading material, but I expect them to do their own reading.
Could this score info be included in the "user account" (and perhaps the "user info") pages please?
If memory serves, SGI gave these costs as one of the reasons for sponsering Linux/MIPS development.
RMS is now responding on the freeness of the APSL. His extensive comments have not hit the spi-general webarchive yet, but should appear soon in the Apple and Open Source thread.
It's termed a "Copyleft", but to me "copyleft" always meant "GPL, or another free software license that uses copyright law to prevent hoarding into proprietary software". But NCL isn't a free license.
Look at what Stephen Williams says in his submission: Seems to be aimed at people who want to sell their free software. But software licensed under it isn't free software.
"distribution" here of course refers to the "Free distribution" that #1 is about.
DFSG #2 are part of the reason why e.g. Pine and qmail are not DFSG-free. Debian has source packages of them in non-free (pine396-src, qmail-src).
This fails DFSG #1:
Software in the Public Interest, Inc.. See the US Patent and Trademark Office entry for "Open Source" (http://trademarks.uspto.gov/cgi-bin/ifetch4?ENG+A LL+3+921980+0+1+141168+F+2+2+1+MS%2f Open+AND+MS%2fSource (sorry, trying to make a out of it failed).
4) What has RMS said about the Freeness of the APSL?
Not much so far. RMS primarily communicates through email. In Aachen he told about getting RSI from coding; presumably he still suffers from this.
He's being included in a thread on spi-general, so we'll learn of his opinion soon, I hope.
5) If I see one more /. article pitting ESR against BP, I am dropping BOTH and going with RMS. It's getting so that he is the only NON-crazy one.
Bruce isn't the only signatory. It's signed by the Debian project leader (the Open Source definition is essentially the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) with Debian-specific references removed), and the president of SPI.
And while I have a lot of respect for RMS, he isn't without faults either (GPL v LGPL, not admitting to the reality that FSF gcc development is dead and succeeded by EGCS, attempts to micro-manage Debian when it was still an FSF project). Free software shouldn't be about egos, but about principles.
Unfortunately, too many signing keys for software distribution rely on massive key redistribution, instead of using the web of trust.
The code in Schneier's book is available at replay.com (which is in the Netherlands), at ftp://ftp.replay.com/pub/replay/pub/applied-crypto / .
Debian 2.1 ships GNOME (albeit a prerelease, as there was no release available before the start of the code freeze); Red Hat does so too (GNOME is in RH 5.2, right?).
It is very important to provide an unquestionably free desktop NOW. There is no time to waste. We have a parisitic company to fight. If they get control of critical libraries, Linux users will have lost their freedom.
I've been critical of Troll in the past, and I've been extremely annoyed by their dismissal of the importance of freedom. But since then, Troll have made what I think is a sincere effort at improvement in this area. They've worked on a DFSG-free license to be used for the forthcoming Qt 2.0, the QPL 1.0, and they've been quite responsive with regard to the input they've received from Debian's Joseph Carter.
Whatever Troll's failings in the past, in my opinion they deserve at least the benefit of the doubt for this change.
Let's worry over the remaining issue wrt KDE: is QPL 1.0 GPL-compatible, and if not, how do we get KDE to take licensing issues seriously, and get them to put in an exemption clause in their license to allow binaries of their code linked against Qt 2 to be redistributed (similar to how the LyX folks fixed the LyX license.
Discussing the differences between distributions is difficult enough, without getting into which is better (or even if "better" means something in general).
In any case, if you're genuinely interested, there's a lot of material from debian users' perspective(s) in one of this months threads on the debian-user@lists.debian.org mailing list; see the archives.
Debian's dedication to free software, the openness of it's development model, the responsiveness of the developers, the flexibility of the package management system, the stability and integratedness of releases, the finishing touches (automatic menu updates for all window managers, automatic mailcap updates, handling of the slight incompatibilities between some Athena-using binaries and the various enhanced Athena libraries (e.g. neXtaw) through xaw-wrappers) etc. are what make it the right distribution for me to use and to work on, but choice of distribution is a case of YMMV.
I can't speak for all of us, but in my case, I'd strongly doubt I'd have learned anywhere near as much about UN*X systems and free software development if I hadn't become involved in Debian development.
Cosider Alan Cox. He would have to work at a normal place if Red Hat didn't support him. His free time to hack would be more limited. Were he with Debian, he could only do half as much as he does now.
Being employed by a Linux distributor that's dedicated to free software is hardly the only way to spend a large amount of your work time developing free software. Consider Linus' position at TransMeta, independent free software consultants like Jim Pick, people working for companies like Cygnus, Cyclic and Signum, sysadmins and programmers in certain university and ISP environments etc.
Working for a commercial Linux distributor is but one way to pay a free software developer's bills.
QPL 1.0, the license under which Troll Tech will release Qt Free Edition 2.0, is a DFSG-free license.
But the problem with KDE's licensing is more subtle than that. Debian can't at the moment distribute KDE at all (not even as part of "contrib"), because Qt's license isn't GPL-compatible. (See the news item for details)
Even when we have a DFSG-free Qt, there is still the issue whether its license is GPL-compatible. If it is (I haven't seen an analysis of QPL 1.0's GPL-compatibility status, so I really don't know), KDE can be included in Debian's main. If it isn't, the licensing issue continues until KDE's licensing changes (e.g. by an explicit exception clause to the GPL allowing redistribution of KDE binaries linked against a QPLed Qt [1]), or the QPL is made GPL-compatible.
[1] A similar exception clause for non-free Qt would have made KDE suitable for contrib. Unfortunately, the KDE project refused to take the licensing issue seriously, and did not chose to fix it this way, unlike for instance the LyX developers. With LyX, there was a similar situation of GPL-ed software linked against a GPL-incompatibly licensed (binary-only non-system) library (xforms). The LyX developers explicitly added an exception to the GPL's requirements wrt. libraries, making it possible for Debian to distribute it in "contrib".
The only other distribution that is as free as Red Hat, Debian, is unable to really support Linux.
Would you care to explain what you mean by "support Linux"?
If you're referring to support Linux users, I'd strongly suggest you check out Debian's support options. If you're referring to having an unsurpressable urge to pay for support, check out the Debian consultants page.
If you're referring to supporting the development of Linux, I'd ask you to reflect on what a fellow Debian developer said: Debian supports free software development the old-fashioned way, by writing it. And of course there's the license lobbying/politics that got ncftp free, got Rocks'n'Diamonds free etc. And let's not forget
where the first donation to GNOME development came from.
- They don't GPL or LGPL everything they write
[...] Only Debian has a perfect record.You sound like a case of "more catholic than the pope".
Perhaps you should read the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines it contains.
There are more free licenses than GPL and LGPL. (And if you refer to e.g. BSD-licensed code as "half-assed Open Source", you should include LGPL in that as it could encourage development of non-GPL-ed software).
In my book, there are valid reasons to use a different DFSG-free license than (L)GPL:
I happily put changes I made to public domain crypto code in the public domain and happily used the BSD license for a manpage I contributed to a BSD-licensed project, because that was the way in which I could improve that free software (more so than GPL-ing my modifications, and cutting them of from many in the development community involved. I used the FSF documentation notice (which is not GPL) for manpages I contributed to a GPLed project.
I use (L)GPL on new code I write myself, as I don't want to encourage proprietary software development too much.
I believe in respecting the license an author chooses for her code. When I believe an author should have chosen another license (e.g. because of lack of sufficient understanding of licensing issues (as is often the case with "non-commercial use only" licenses)), I don't think she should die, I try to reason with her.
If you don't like the license an author chose for his code, reason with him. It's going to get you much further than telling them to die. And if he doesn't change the license, you still have the freedom not to use his code.
GNOME 1 debs are expected any day now; they'll be available in the "unstable" distribution on Debian FTP sites.
Branden has been very busy getting X in good shape for slink; now that slink is almost released, he
can start focussing on potato, and move to 3.3.3.1.
Vendors of IrDA stuff that aren't as closed minded as Toshiba might want to check this out. It's a nice way to show that you do care about the free software community.
The final draft of Bruce Perens' chapter "The Open Source Definition" is on-line, as is Eric Raymond's prologue ""The Real Programmers".
SPI == Software in the Public Interest;
OSI == Open Source Initiative.
The title has it correct: it's his resignation from OSI.