Yes, I mentioned a bug in Linux, but that's no big deal -- all nontrivial software has bugs. Linux has a lot of good technology in it.
The reason why we don't use Linux except on a test machine or two, as I mentioned above, is the GPL. There really is a serious risk of contamination of one's code. And the last thing we'd ever want to do is support the GPL's agenda of spite and malice. We believe that open source should be exactly that: open. To turn it into a weapon by denying the full use of it to one group of people -- developers -- is mean-spirited. There should be no room for such unethical behavior in the open source community.
We recognize that, as Linus himself has said, the fact that Linux is licensed under the GPL is an accident of history. (Linus saw the GPL on GCC -- and, not realizing what Stallman's agenda was or that there were better alternatives, put it on Linux.) Linus himself develops commercial, closed-source software, and therefore I do not think he would have knowingly adopted a license which was intended to hurt commercial developers. But Richard Stallman's rhetoric, which is intended to obscure the true intent of the GPL, apparently was effective. The rest is now history.
Linus frequently states, in public speeches, that he dislikes the anti-commercial sentiment he sees among GPL supporters. But he has no way of reconsidering his decision. (This is another problem with the GPL: it locks itself in irreversibly.) The best he can do is ride the tide and preach against such malice. The trouble is that the GPL has a destructive mechanism built in. Even if you have the best intentions in the world, you do damage by propagating the GPL or GPLed code.
In any event, as for the attack goes: FreeBSD does hold up better than Linux under bandwidth-based DoS attacks. Some Linux machines do seem to crash under such assaults. (I'm not sure if all do; we didn't do an exhaustive test. However, our lab machine did crash, and others on the 'Net also reported crashes in response to the most devastating version of the stream.c exploit.) However, if the upstream router is swamped, the OS can't solve the whole problem. If packets can't get through, the site will still appear, to the outside world, to be down.
...to get up in the middle of the night and go all the way to the lab to answer your question? Especially when the machine is now set up for a different test? In any event, I believe it was Red Hat 5.1. Since we're primarily concerned with BSD UNIX and do not contribute to GPLed code (We believe that the GPL is fundamentally unethical and that it would therefore be unethical to do so), we tried Linux to compare the systems' reactions to the DoS -- not to debug Red Hat. We noted the problem and moved on.
You might find that some of the other folks who have reported crashes under stream.c can help you more, since I'm sure that some of them have systems that are still running as they were.
I'm not the only person who has reported Linux kernel panics in tests using stream.c. Other similar problems were reported on Bugtraq and elsewheere.
Apparently, you're so much in denial about the notion that there could be a bug in Linux that you've felt compelled to resort to name calling and personal attacks when one is mentioned.
By hurting others, you mean not letting them take my code, close source it, and sell it?
First of all, programmers who build on BSD-licensed code are not "taking" it. It's still there, for all the world to see and use. What's more, because the functionality of that code is already availble for free, they can only make money from a derivative work if they add substantial value. And all the money they do make will be the result of the functionality they added. Thus, they haven't "taken" anything from you. They've created value and deserve to be rewarded for that.
Hrm. You have a weird defination of hurt...
No, it's quite a normal definition of hurt. If you offer the code to anyone in the whole world to use as he or she pleases except a developer, you're playing a vicious game of "keep-away" with that developer. You're destroying the market for the functionality by making it available for free. At the same time, you're asking the developer to reimplement it before forging ahead. This is, indeed, hurtful. It holds developers back by requiring them to reimplement the wheel needlessly instead of making forward progress. And it deters standardization by requiring them to create and use a different code base. Not good.
it's my code.
In that case, why use it as a weapon to hurt people?
If the little guy wants to challenge the big guys, how about he offers to pay me to write code for him? I could use the cash.
So could he! Unfortunately, once you've given the code away to everyone else, it's not fair to ask him to pay for it. He can't make money off it, since its market value is now zero. So, you're asking him to pay for something which he cannot get his customers to pay him for! He's starting out "in the hole," and that's not fair.
But he can't run off with my code and hide it.
He can't hide it -- not if you've published it. He can only keep his improvements. (And that's fair; they're his improvements and his only way of making a living.) Nor can he "run off" with it. It's still there for anyone to use.
I don't see how failing to let someone else close-source code I wrote is either unethical or immoral.
Again, see above. They can't "close-source" your code; they can only decide to keep theirs.
Failing to do things for other people with no reward isn't unethical in any system of ethics I can think of. Certainly not mine.
Well, in that case I think you'll agree that programmers should not be forced to publish their work for free. But this is what the GPL tries to do.
However, what the people who take the code (no matter what their size) of BSD programmers, close source it, and give them no credit,
Actually, the BSD license allows the author to ask for credit. Ironically, this is something that Richard Stallman vehemently opposes. He's opposed to authors' rights -- not only for code, but for books and music, too.
while they are acting 'ethically' (because they were give permission to, however remotely), skirt the edges of morals in my book.
Again, the author can ask for this. But the trend is toward not doing so. Under the BSD or MIT X licenses, it's not required; the code has virtually no strings attached. Which is what open source should be about! The GPL is an attempt to turn open source -- which is otherwise a good thing -- into a weapon designed to hurt programmers. The motivation: pure spite and malice. This is not a good thing and is certainly not ethical, and so we should oppose it.
Installation has been accomplished primarily through compromises exploiting known sun rpc vulnerabilities.
Hmmm. Some systems which I administer at a client's site have been scanned lately -- apparently in an attempt to see if RPC was running. (It wasn't.) The address from which they were scanned was 212.31.197.10. Could this be a clue to the attackers' identity?
No, I'm not. In his more candid moments, Stallman states his intentions loud and clear. You may have seen him in "propaganda mode," in which he makes vague, warm fuzzy claims about "freedom."
Here are two quotes from Stallman -- spaced 14 years apart! -- which show that Stallman's intention is, and always has been, to hurt programmers via the GPL.
The first comes from Stallman's "GNU Manifesto," in which he says, explicitly, that his intent is to sabotage commercial developers and limit their career prospects so that they could make no more money than starving graduate students. In 1984, Stallman wrote:
"For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers worked at the Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than they could have had anywhere else. They got many kinds of non-monetary rewards: fame and appreciation, for example. And creativity is also fun, a reward in itself.
Then most of them left when offered a chance to do the same interesting work for a lot of money.
What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned."
In short, enraged that some of his colleagues were leaving the lab to pursue a commercial venture, he sought to sabotage them as a way of discouraging anyone from doing this in the future.
Stallman's more recent writings, speeches, and interviews confirm that this malicious intent still exists 14 years later. Here's what Stallman said when interviewed by a reporter for Forbes magazine:
[Stallman] retaliated [against the computer scientists who left the MIT AI Lab to form Symbolics] by sabotaging his former colleagues' sophisticated commercial programs for powerful computers, singlehandedly hacking up his own versions and giving them away. "They accused me of costing them millions of dollars," he says. "I hope it's true."
(For the full text of the article, see http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0810/6203094a.htm. )
Thus, we can see that the GPL is a tool of spite. Its purpose: to attack commercial programmers and software businesses, and to reduce programmers' salaries to those of starving graduate students.
Now, I don't know about you, but I believe that to attack one's colleagues and hinder their progress out of spite and malice is unethical. Thus, I believe it's unethical to use the GPL. I hope that, now that I've told you some parts of the story that you may not have heard, you'll reconsider your stance regarding the GPL.
The person you're hurting most, when you use the GPL, is the little guy -- the programmer who does not have the bucks to hire programmers to reimplement the code. This was Stallman's intent: to destroy programmers' prospects for success. He has said so, repeatedly.
Advocates of the GPL tend to invoke the bogeyman of large, evil corporations just spoiling to use your code. But if you buy this argument, you'll in fact be hurting the little guy who might challenge the big ones.
It's unethical to participate in an agenda whose purpose is to hurt others -- especially out of spite. Therefore, you should not use the GPL.
It is better to get a supported OS that actually has the backing of a responsible corporation.
Let's see.... Which OS would that be? Not Linux; the GPL disclaims all warranties, so, as you say, "If it's broken, that's your tough luck, sucker."
How about Windows or NT? Well, Microsoft can hardly be considered a responsible corporation, and their End User License Agreement disclaims all warranties as well. So, you're SOL if it breaks too. (Come to think of it, all commercial OSes -- even those from more ethical companies -- disclaim all warranties.)
So, we're back to BSD as the best choice, since it's open source and not encumbered by the GPL as Linux is.
And the support is actually pretty good, if you've ever tried the mailing lists.
Had they not been running FreeBSD, they actually might have crashed. But FreeBSD is remarkably resistant to network DoS attacks, and this resistance has recently been further strengthened.
The system that panicked outright when attacked by stream.c was a Red Hat box, one of the lab machines. We keep it mainly for testing and so that we can support users; same with NT. We use BSD (FreeBSD and OpenBSD) for all production systems, both because they're better under load and to avoid GPL contamination of our work.
Interesting how NOT ONE of the posters who has slammed FreeBSD has signed his name. That's probably because Yahoo's problems had nothing to do with FreeBSD, and the trolls know it.
Freebsds own servers have been crashed for over a week. Mail service was completely shutdown by hackers who broke into freebsd.org and trashed the system.
Bull. The mailing lists are active and working fine, and there has been no interruption of service. The above is a libelous troll.
Recent tests with an exploit called "stream.c" -- which creates the same sort of denial of service situation -- showed that some Linux servers crashed when confronted with so large a flood of packets. But FreeBSD, while it did slow down, did not crash -- even if stream.c was tuned to cause the maximum possible amount of havoc on the network.
FreeBSD also has two special kernel options -- ICMP bandwidth limiting and TCP/IP RST restriction -- which can help with some DoS attacks. (No OS can do anything about a swamped pipe, of course, but if it knows how to throw away bogus packets and does not fall into the trap of trying to respond to them all, it'll be in much better shape. And, of course, it should never crash.)
I've seen some trolls in this discussion that suggested that FreeBSD was somehow responsible for Yahoo's woes. In fact, the opposite is true. If I'm going to get hit by TFN or Stacheldraht, I'll want a FreeBSD system -- probably the most recent version on the FreeBSD-stable development branch -- not NT, MacOS, or Linux. In our tests -- and we did a bunch of them when stream.c hit the streets -- it held up the best.
One reason that attacks such as Stacheldraht, Trin00, and TFN are possible is that ISPs are failing to monitor their networks and backbones for outgoing packets with spoofed source addresses and incoming packets with impossible ones. If addresses were validated at the router, it would not be easy to mount a distributed DoS because the packets causing the problem would be easily traceable to their sources, and the attackers could be shut down.
Likewise, anyone with a system connected to the 'Net must take responsibility for its security. A machine that's wide open to being "rooted" is an "attractive nuisance;" it is innocent by itself but incites trouble by facilitating abuse. The "white hats" on the 'Net should be proactive and stay one step ahead of the "black hats" in this respect. They should be walking down the Internet's virtual streets rattling doorknobs, and if they find one unlocked, they should tell the owner of the house, "See here; your house is unlocked. This is not good." This is far better than having a thief slip in later.
There's nothing wrong with a cute or fantastic costume. You'd probably be absolutely horrified by the much more revealing costumes that many women -- often self-described geeks -- design for themselves and wear at science fiction conventions. And I doubt that you'd be willing to accept the notion that no one is forcing or paying them to do it, or that it's all in good fun.
If you have no sense of fun, there's no use trying to explain this to you. But virtually everyone at both computer and science fiction conventions takes such costumes in the spirit in which they were intended, and the wearers generally get many compliments. As the daemon girls at the BSD booth all did.
Actually, I nominated the original FreeBSD Daemon Girl (who showed up at the New York LinuxWorld in a skin-tight latex body suit) for "Best Dressed." Several times, in fact. But she was, for some reason, left off the ballot.
It's sad to see that the FSF won an award for "most deserving charity." Not only is it not a charity (since it does not specifically help the needy or means-test its benefits, as an actual charity does), but it was also far and away the richest candidate already. What's more, it releases code under the GPL -- for the explicit purpose of hurting commercial programmers. A group whose stated purpose is malicious should not be rewarded.
The one big tragedy that may come of the popularization of Linux is the spread of the GPL.
The GPL deters standardization by creating an unnecessary and harmful split between open and closed source. It is already hurting the trend toward standardization brought about by the BSD-licensed, freely reusable TCP/IP stack that brought us the Internet. We may soon live in a fissured world: the GPL on one side, commercial programmers on the other.
It didn't have to happen this way. But because Linux was unfortunately licensed under the GPL, the battle lines are already being drawn. And, as usual, it's the little guy -- the small programmer trying to make a decent living -- who will be caught in the crossfire. The GPL will prevent him from leveraging and improving upon publicly available code to make money, while large software houses such as Microsoft will shut him out of commercial markets.
And, as usual, innovation will lose.
Those who favor open source need to wake up and realize that the GPL hurts their cause. In fact, it does not even meet the requirements laid out in the Open Source Definition, because it discriminates against a field of endeavor: the creation of commercial software. The OSD explicitly states that this sort of discrimination disqualifies a license from being a legitimate license for open source.
By making code available to anyone except the commercial developer to use as he or she wants, it excludes and damages this group. Which is the express intent. RMS had, and has, a grudge against commercial developers and wanted to undermine their work and destroy their markets and livelihoods. That's why the GPL came to be in the first place.
The GPL is, actually, worse than a baseball bat. A baseball bat has a positive use. The GPL is solely a way of transforming open source into a weapon of spite.
"If I have a baseball bat, it is mine, not yours. Therefore, I can swing it wherever I want. If it happens to hit your head, too bad. It is still my bat, not yours. Don't complain about what I do with it.
In that case, it would follow that information about a Linux-oriented event, such as the Beanie awards, would not be "news" either.
Your attempt to exclude BSD is mean and spiteful. These are two traits commonly seen in the Linux community, I'm afraid -- though thankfully not in everyone.
I see: in other words, developers who do not wish to be coerced by the government to give away their work are "free" to twist in the wind.
This, in a nutshell, is a problem with the GPL. Its purpose is solely to hurt commercial programmers, and its agenda is one of spite and malice. Again, it is not ethical to attack people in this manner.
The reason I oppose the GPL, as I've stated many times before, is not due to any form of "bigotry" but because the GPL is fundamentally unethical. Sensible people will readily agree that it is unethical to damage others and attempt to destroy their livelihoods and business prospects out of spite. This is what the GPL was explicitly designed to do, and in fact what it is doing.
I do write good and readily available open source code; however, I also want to promote ethical behavior. Hence my desire to raise awareness of the origins, mechanisms, and effects of the GPL.
Of course, simply stating that people should avoid the GPL and GPLed code isn't sufficient; one must also present them with a feasible alternative. This is where the BSDs come in. Besides being excellent work in their own right, they also provide a viable alternative to the (unfortunately) GPLed Linux. So, happily, the goals of discouraging use of GPLed software and promoting BSD UNIX coincide. I do both.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason why we don't use Linux except on a test machine or two, as I mentioned above, is the GPL. There really is a serious risk of contamination of one's code. And the last thing we'd ever want to do is support the GPL's agenda of spite and malice. We believe that open source should be exactly that: open. To turn it into a weapon by denying the full use of it to one group of people -- developers -- is mean-spirited. There should be no room for such unethical behavior in the open source community.
We recognize that, as Linus himself has said, the fact that Linux is licensed under the GPL is an accident of history. (Linus saw the GPL on GCC -- and, not realizing what Stallman's agenda was or that there were better alternatives, put it on Linux.) Linus himself develops commercial, closed-source software, and therefore I do not think he would have knowingly adopted a license which was intended to hurt commercial developers. But Richard Stallman's rhetoric, which is intended to obscure the true intent of the GPL, apparently was effective. The rest is now history.
Linus frequently states, in public speeches, that he dislikes the anti-commercial sentiment he sees among GPL supporters. But he has no way of reconsidering his decision. (This is another problem with the GPL: it locks itself in irreversibly.) The best he can do is ride the tide and preach against such malice. The trouble is that the GPL has a destructive mechanism built in. Even if you have the best intentions in the world, you do damage by propagating the GPL or GPLed code.
In any event, as for the attack goes: FreeBSD does hold up better than Linux under bandwidth-based DoS attacks. Some Linux machines do seem to crash under such assaults. (I'm not sure if all do; we didn't do an exhaustive test. However, our lab machine did crash, and others on the 'Net also reported crashes in response to the most devastating version of the stream.c exploit.) However, if the upstream router is swamped, the OS can't solve the whole problem. If packets can't get through, the site will still appear, to the outside world, to be down.
--Brett Glass
You might find that some of the other folks who have reported crashes under stream.c can help you more, since I'm sure that some of them have systems that are still running as they were.
--Brett Glass
Apparently, you're so much in denial about the notion that there could be a bug in Linux that you've felt compelled to resort to name calling and personal attacks when one is mentioned.
--Brett Glass
First of all, programmers who build on BSD-licensed code are not "taking" it. It's still there, for all the world to see and use. What's more, because the functionality of that code is already availble for free, they can only make money from a derivative work if they add substantial value. And all the money they do make will be the result of the functionality they added. Thus, they haven't "taken" anything from you. They've created value and deserve to be rewarded for that.
Hrm. You have a weird defination of hurt...
No, it's quite a normal definition of hurt. If you offer the code to anyone in the whole world to use as he or she pleases except a developer, you're playing a vicious game of "keep-away" with that developer. You're destroying the market for the functionality by making it available for free. At the same time, you're asking the developer to reimplement it before forging ahead. This is, indeed, hurtful. It holds developers back by requiring them to reimplement the wheel needlessly instead of making forward progress. And it deters standardization by requiring them to create and use a different code base. Not good.
it's my code.
In that case, why use it as a weapon to hurt people?
If the little guy wants to challenge the big guys, how about he offers to pay me to write code for him? I could use the cash.
So could he! Unfortunately, once you've given the code away to everyone else, it's not fair to ask him to pay for it. He can't make money off it, since its market value is now zero. So, you're asking him to pay for something which he cannot get his customers to pay him for! He's starting out "in the hole," and that's not fair.
But he can't run off with my code and hide it.
He can't hide it -- not if you've published it. He can only keep his improvements. (And that's fair; they're his improvements and his only way of making a living.) Nor can he "run off" with it. It's still there for anyone to use.
I don't see how failing to let someone else close-source code I wrote is either unethical or immoral.
Again, see above. They can't "close-source" your code; they can only decide to keep theirs.
Failing to do things for other people with no reward isn't unethical in any system of ethics I can think of. Certainly not mine.
Well, in that case I think you'll agree that programmers should not be forced to publish their work for free. But this is what the GPL tries to do.
However, what the people who take the code (no matter what their size) of BSD programmers, close source it, and give them no credit,
Actually, the BSD license allows the author to ask for credit. Ironically, this is something that Richard Stallman vehemently opposes. He's opposed to authors' rights -- not only for code, but for books and music, too.
while they are acting 'ethically' (because they were give permission to, however remotely), skirt the edges of morals in my book.
Again, the author can ask for this. But the trend is toward not doing so. Under the BSD or MIT X licenses, it's not required; the code has virtually no strings attached. Which is what open source should be about! The GPL is an attempt to turn open source -- which is otherwise a good thing -- into a weapon designed to hurt programmers. The motivation: pure spite and malice. This is not a good thing and is certainly not ethical, and so we should oppose it.
--Brett Glass
Hmmm. Some systems which I administer at a client's site have been scanned lately -- apparently in an attempt to see if RPC was running. (It wasn't.) The address from which they were scanned was 212.31.197.10. Could this be a clue to the attackers' identity?
--Brett Glass
No, I'm not. In his more candid moments, Stallman states his intentions loud and clear. You may have seen him in "propaganda mode," in which he makes vague, warm fuzzy claims about "freedom."
Here are two quotes from Stallman -- spaced 14 years apart! -- which show that Stallman's intention is, and always has been, to hurt programmers via the GPL.
The first comes from Stallman's "GNU Manifesto," in which he says, explicitly, that his intent is to sabotage commercial developers and limit their career prospects so that they could make no more money than starving graduate students. In 1984, Stallman wrote:
In short, enraged that some of his colleagues were leaving the lab to pursue a commercial venture, he sought to sabotage them as a way of discouraging anyone from doing this in the future.
Stallman's more recent writings, speeches, and interviews confirm that this malicious intent still exists 14 years later. Here's what Stallman said when interviewed by a reporter for Forbes magazine:
(For the full text of the article, see http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0810/6203094a.htm. )
Thus, we can see that the GPL is a tool of spite. Its purpose: to attack commercial programmers and software businesses, and to reduce programmers' salaries to those of starving graduate students.
Now, I don't know about you, but I believe that to attack one's colleagues and hinder their progress out of spite and malice is unethical. Thus, I believe it's unethical to use the GPL. I hope that, now that I've told you some parts of the story that you may not have heard, you'll reconsider your stance regarding the GPL.
--Brett Glass
Advocates of the GPL tend to invoke the bogeyman of large, evil corporations just spoiling to use your code. But if you buy this argument, you'll in fact be hurting the little guy who might challenge the big ones.
It's unethical to participate in an agenda whose purpose is to hurt others -- especially out of spite. Therefore, you should not use the GPL.
--Brett Glass
Let's see.... Which OS would that be? Not Linux; the GPL disclaims all warranties, so, as you say, "If it's broken, that's your tough luck, sucker."
How about Windows or NT? Well, Microsoft can hardly be considered a responsible corporation, and their End User License Agreement disclaims all warranties as well. So, you're SOL if it breaks too. (Come to think of it, all commercial OSes -- even those from more ethical companies -- disclaim all warranties.)
So, we're back to BSD as the best choice, since it's open source and not encumbered by the GPL as Linux is.
And the support is actually pretty good, if you've ever tried the mailing lists.
--Brett Glass
--Brett Glass
--Brett Glass
--Brett Glass
--Brett Glass
Bull. The mailing lists are active and working fine, and there has been no interruption of service. The above is a libelous troll.
--Brett Glass
FreeBSD also has two special kernel options -- ICMP bandwidth limiting and TCP/IP RST restriction -- which can help with some DoS attacks. (No OS can do anything about a swamped pipe, of course, but if it knows how to throw away bogus packets and does not fall into the trap of trying to respond to them all, it'll be in much better shape. And, of course, it should never crash.)
I've seen some trolls in this discussion that suggested that FreeBSD was somehow responsible for Yahoo's woes. In fact, the opposite is true. If I'm going to get hit by TFN or Stacheldraht, I'll want a FreeBSD system -- probably the most recent version on the FreeBSD-stable development branch -- not NT, MacOS, or Linux. In our tests -- and we did a bunch of them when stream.c hit the streets -- it held up the best.
--Brett Glass
Likewise, anyone with a system connected to the 'Net must take responsibility for its security. A machine that's wide open to being "rooted" is an "attractive nuisance;" it is innocent by itself but incites trouble by facilitating abuse. The "white hats" on the 'Net should be proactive and stay one step ahead of the "black hats" in this respect. They should be walking down the Internet's virtual streets rattling doorknobs, and if they find one unlocked, they should tell the owner of the house, "See here; your house is unlocked. This is not good." This is far better than having a thief slip in later.
--Brett Glass
Maybe Stallman would consider it to be "hoarding" water.
--Brett Glass
If you have no sense of fun, there's no use trying to explain this to you. But virtually everyone at both computer and science fiction conventions takes such costumes in the spirit in which they were intended, and the wearers generally get many compliments. As the daemon girls at the BSD booth all did.
--Brett
It's sad to see that the FSF won an award for "most deserving charity." Not only is it not a charity (since it does not specifically help the needy or means-test its benefits, as an actual charity does), but it was also far and away the richest candidate already. What's more, it releases code under the GPL -- for the explicit purpose of hurting commercial programmers. A group whose stated purpose is malicious should not be rewarded.
--Brett Glass
The GPL deters standardization by creating an unnecessary and harmful split between open and closed source. It is already hurting the trend toward standardization brought about by the BSD-licensed, freely reusable TCP/IP stack that brought us the Internet. We may soon live in a fissured world: the GPL on one side, commercial programmers on the other.
It didn't have to happen this way. But because Linux was unfortunately licensed under the GPL, the battle lines are already being drawn. And, as usual, it's the little guy -- the small programmer trying to make a decent living -- who will be caught in the crossfire. The GPL will prevent him from leveraging and improving upon publicly available code to make money, while large software houses such as Microsoft will shut him out of commercial markets.
And, as usual, innovation will lose.
Those who favor open source need to wake up and realize that the GPL hurts their cause. In fact, it does not even meet the requirements laid out in the Open Source Definition, because it discriminates against a field of endeavor: the creation of commercial software. The OSD explicitly states that this sort of discrimination disqualifies a license from being a legitimate license for open source.
--Brett Glass
The GPL is, actually, worse than a baseball bat. A baseball bat has a positive use. The GPL is solely a way of transforming open source into a weapon of spite.
--Brett Glass
"If I have a baseball bat, it is mine, not yours. Therefore, I can swing it wherever I want. If it happens to hit your head, too bad. It is still my bat, not yours. Don't complain about what I do with it.
--Brett Glass
Your attempt to exclude BSD is mean and spiteful. These are two traits commonly seen in the Linux community, I'm afraid -- though thankfully not in everyone.
--Brett
--Brett Glass
This, in a nutshell, is a problem with the GPL. Its purpose is solely to hurt commercial programmers, and its agenda is one of spite and malice. Again, it is not ethical to attack people in this manner.
--Brett Glass
I do write good and readily available open source code; however, I also want to promote ethical behavior. Hence my desire to raise awareness of the origins, mechanisms, and effects of the GPL.
Of course, simply stating that people should avoid the GPL and GPLed code isn't sufficient; one must also present them with a feasible alternative. This is where the BSDs come in. Besides being excellent work in their own right, they also provide a viable alternative to the (unfortunately) GPLed Linux. So, happily, the goals of discouraging use of GPLed software and promoting BSD UNIX coincide. I do both.
--Brett Glass