Today, the Libre Software community is threatened by companies that use Free Software Licenses. Those companies strictly respect the terms of the licenses, however the Libre Software Community feels betrayed. It seems an evidence, Libre Software is more than a matter of license.
The main idea is : it is important not only to give the bottle (license&&software), but also the wine (methods&&values) so that everybody can appreciate the great taste of freedom.
The body of the article is available at http://libroscope.org/article.php3?id_article=8.
Libroscope is a project I am on, and the team would really appreciate new contributors. That is the reason we would be delighted to have your feedbacks. We use SPIP as a collaborative tool, so feel free to email me to know how it works since it is quite a french-speaking oriented tool... however, it is fairly easy to use.
You can also read in the same idea: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_11/dafermos/index.html
...is a Publishing System for the Internet : http://www.uzine.net/spip. For all non-French speaking people : you'll find a pity this piece of software isn't internationalized, 'cause it's really worth trying and using it !
<quote> Those companies strictly respect the terms of the licenses, however the Libre Software Community feels betrayed. </quote>
Got an example? Who feels betrayed? Which companies "strictly respect" f/s licences, but "threaten" the community? How?
This lays in the slides :)
http://libroscope.org/doc/conf/lsm2002/slides-000.html
(examples @ slides 5) Since the demonstration was made oraly, I expect
you want some explanations.
Let's take United Linux. Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake are quite known for
respecting the license. But still, some of us feels uneasy without
exactly knowing what they are doing.
That is the point, United Linux aims toward being a standard, but
whatever the purpose is, it is a closed actors consortium, you have
strictly no way to contributes as a member of the community to the
building of this «standard». This is quite opposite to RFC way of
building standard...
Another example maybe VA. They have used the GPL license for they code,
but still there has been quite some difficulties for the contributors to
get help and clear information from the SF team.
But reading the
conditions of use are funnier :
In addition, each user's use of particular Services may be subject to specific guidelines or rules ("Service-specific Rules") posted from time to time and incorporated by this reference into the Terms and Conditions of Use (``Terms''). Use of SourceForge.net and/or its Services constitutes full acceptance of and agreement to the Terms; if a user does not accept our Terms, he or she is not granted rights to use SourceForge.net or any of its Services, as defined herein, and should refrain from accessing SourceForge.net and its Services.
</quote>.This lays in the slides :)
http://libroscope.org/doc/conf/lsm2002/slides-000.html
(examples @ slides 5) Since the demonstration was made oraly, I expect
you want some explanations.
Let's take United Linux. Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake are quite known for
respecting the license. But still, some of us feels uneasy without
exactly knowing what they are doing.
That is the point, United Linux aims toward being a standard, but
whatever the purpose is, it is a closed actors consortium, you have
strictly no way to contributes as a member of the community to the
building of this «standard». This is quite opposite to RFC way of
building standard...
Another example maybe VA. They have used the GPL license for they code,
but still there has been quite some difficulties for the contributors to
get help and clear information from the SF team.
But reading the
conditions of use are funnier :
In addition, each user's use of particular Services may be subject to specific guidelines or rules ("Service-specific Rules") posted from time to time and incorporated by this reference into the Terms and Conditions of Use (``Terms''). Use of SourceForge.net and/or its Services constitutes full acceptance of and agreement to the Terms; if a user does not accept our Terms, he or she is not granted rights to use SourceForge.net or any of its Services, as defined herein, and should refrain from accessing SourceForge.net and its Services.
</quote>.This lays in the slides :)
http://libroscope.org/doc/conf/lsm2002/slides-000.html
(examples @ slides 5) Since the demonstration was made oraly, I expect
you want some explanations.
Let's take United Linux. Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake are quite known for
respecting the license. But still, some of us feels uneasy without
exactly knowing what they are doing.
That is the point, United Linux aims toward being a standard, but
whatever the purpose is, it is a closed actors consortium, you have
strictly no way to contributes as a member of the community to the
building of this «standard». This is quite opposite to RFC way of
building standard...
Another example maybe VA. They have used the GPL license for they code,
but still there has been quite some difficulties for the contributors to
get help and clear information from the SF team.
But reading the
conditions of use are funnier :
In addition, each user's use of particular Services may be subject to specific guidelines or rules ("Service-specific Rules") posted from time to time and incorporated by this reference into the Terms and Conditions of Use (``Terms''). Use of SourceForge.net and/or its Services constitutes full acceptance of and agreement to the Terms; if a user does not accept our Terms, he or she is not granted rights to use SourceForge.net or any of its Services, as defined herein, and should refrain from accessing SourceForge.net and its Services.
</quote>.This lays in the slides :)
http://libroscope.org/doc/conf/lsm2002/slides-000.html
(examples @ slides 5) Since the demonstration was made oraly, I expect
you want some explanations.
Let's take United Linux. Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake are quite known for
respecting the license. But still, some of us feels uneasy without
exactly knowing what they are doing.
That is the point, United Linux aims toward being a standard, but
whatever the purpose is, it is a closed actors consortium, you have
strictly no way to contributes as a member of the community to the
building of this «standard». This is quite opposite to RFC way of
building standard...
Another example maybe VA. They have used the GPL license for they code,
but still there has been quite some difficulties for the contributors to
get help and clear information from the SF team.
But reading the
conditions of use are funnier :
In addition, each user's use of particular Services may be subject to specific guidelines or rules ("Service-specific Rules") posted from time to time and incorporated by this reference into the Terms and Conditions of Use (``Terms''). Use of SourceForge.net and/or its Services constitutes full acceptance of and agreement to the Terms; if a user does not accept our Terms, he or she is not granted rights to use SourceForge.net or any of its Services, as defined herein, and should refrain from accessing SourceForge.net and its Services.
</quote>.got a little problem..... did not wanted to flood the forum. :(
I agree with your point, but to some extent, the license helps that anyway. For example, you point out savannah.gnu.org is a fork of SourceForge. That's an excellent example of how the license encourages a company to adhere to the spirit as well as the letter. I was always nervous accepting cookies from SourceForge, but have no compunctions about accepting them from Savannah. And I know my project will never be eaten by Savannah, and I didn't know that about SourceForge.
The licenses, especially the GNU ones, are designed to protect the community against companies gone awry. I think they do their job admirably well. I think the main weakness of the BSD license is that it doesn't do that.
As for RedHat, they do not make me in the least nervous. Their bug system is open to all. Their programmers participate actively in community forums. They are excellent about contributing code back. As near as I can tell, they are a model Open Source company. It's their ubiquity, and the notion that they're a 'default' choice that makes people nervous. A lot of people worry about vesting too much power in any one company. They're right to be nervous, but I still think the GPL does a lot to protect us from RedHat becoming evil.
And, UnitedLinux makes me very nervous, for exactly the reasons you point out. Still, given the GPL, it's possible to ignore them if they won't play nice.
I think BSD license is hard core gamer/coder license : they sort of make the bet there methods/organization/community is so 'efficient' (world company TM) that firms can still try to fork or proprietarize their code they will have nothing.
For instance through the study of TCP sequence there are strong hints MS might have used BSD code for its TCP/IP stack. See here (it is really uncommon to have the same shape of attractors (cubic) for two different non linear phenomena).
However in the hypothesis CISCO/MS use BSD piece of code for their TCP/IP stack, do they have any advantage? No, since they don't update their product as often as BSD. For instance, if their stack was the BSD one, script kiddies would just have to use Well-Know Vulnerability Breaches of BSD TCP/IP stack to do a regular attack by IP spoofing or even try the man in the middle to break into MS computer.
They have what was once a good implementation of the TCP/IP stack, and now cannot insure the security of their OS at the net level.
They have the code so what? they don't have the methods, they are not able to adapt themselves as quickly as WE do. The day they will have the methods, I guess they will be less reluctant to use BSD or GPL.
My conclusion is linus said once have fun, BSDists seem to be fun too. Maybe, this is one of our secret methods.
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