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EU study recommends OpenBSD

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Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#81

Post by the_af »

weland wrote: post #57
jkyle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another free license solves only a small proportion of this problem. True, but with BSD I'm not sure you can view it as a problem to begin with since the license is explicitly designed to legally absolve the user of all obligation to do just that. If you desire monetary contributions be made, some kind of commercial license is the solution. If you desire modifications be contributed back, there are other licenses tha…

There are things in this world that are not a business.

Yes, but forget monetary/labor contributions. I think jkyle has a point: the BSD license is a "no strings attached" license, and so it can be chosen by people who presumably don't even want to promote the software, advertise the fact they are using it or campaign for more software like it. If Theo De Raadt finds this disappointing, maybe he should choose a different license?

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#82

Post by marcosdumay »

brudgers wrote: post #51
k-mcgrady wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't address conflicts of interest but it seems like they're fine with privacy: "[...] the use of open source computer operating systems and applications reduces the risk of privacy intrusion by mass surveillance. They seem to be touting that as a benefit, not a drawback.

When the same governments are funding signals intelligence gathering with one hand and open source software development with the other, there is potential conflict of interest, if not actual conflict. The NSA's role in weakening open source encryption standards was the result of the internal logic by which all intelligence organs typically operate irrespective of sponsoring state. The differences between the politics…

If there's one kind of entity that can finance attacks and the dissemination of defenses against those attacks without any kind of internal conflict, it's a government.

That kind of logic holds for individuals, corporations, and single organizations inside a government. But modern governments are explicitly designed to be internally conflicting, and that's universally thought as a good thing.

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#83

Post by erhardm »

I like OpenBSD. I like the spirit of the developers, which don't compromise on security. I like the simplicity of the OS, very good documented and very robust. They are prepared to break a ton of software to advance the state of security/correct code.

I would like to have OpenBSD on all my machines, but unfortunately their license don't have the "infectious" effect of GPL. From my limited understanding, their license[0] is not a philosophical license like GPL. Linux popularity spread because of the distributed development style(everyone developed in their own tree, Linus decided if it had enough value to get in his tree) and GPL.

Even if you don't care on the philosophy of GPL, you can't deny that it helped make a lot of vendors to publish(even if half-hearted) their code which eventually after some cleanup(3rd party or themselves) got into the Linus tree.

If OpenBSD would be GPL licensed, I could see a BSD which would be have all the bleeding edge features, but Theo's tree was separate, conservative on features but not lacking on drivers. Men can only dream.

I realize that FreeBSD is the bleeding edge of BSD land and I'm not trying to start a license flamewar, but a lot of companies, i.e. graphics, wireless cards, laptop manufactures don't have (good) working drivers for BSD land, at least not published code which goes back to the community.

[0] - http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/share/misc/lice...

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#84

Post by cwyers »

nitramafve wrote: post #46
cwyers wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL requires you to distribute source code in addition to binaries. If you don't distribute binaries (i.e. if you're running the code on your server farm only), then you don't have to distribute anything.

That is why some choose to license their work under AGPL.

That still only goes so far, though. If you're building a product on top of a database that's licensed with the AGPL, like Mongo, you have to distribute those changes.* If you build your Intranet site on Mongo, though, you don't need to distribute those changes in a way that gets back to upstream.

* I think. And I don't know if this has withstood the sort of court scrutiny the GPL has.

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#85

Post by adamrt »

dijit wrote: post #49

I love openBSD, it's implementation of certain things is slower (like networking), but it's so clean and well implemented. even if it doesnt' get to play with all the toys (like ZFS) it's what I'd love to default to for application servers/bastion server/firewalls etc; my only qualm with it currently is it's reliance of X11 for ports to work- I don't like install X11 libs on my servers wherever I can avoid it. :\

> my only qualm with it currently is it's reliance of X11 for ports to work- I don't like install X11 libs on my servers wherever I can avoid it. :\

Can you give a reference to this? I'm not doubting you, as I always install x11 anyway, I just didn't know this was still the case. I remember an issue with a lib in xbase.tgz a few years back that was required by lots of ports, but I thought they moved it to base.tgz.

Thanks!

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#86

Post by wosos »

rakoo wrote: post #55
belorn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you can from proprietary licensed modifications? FSF recommendation is that you use the same license as the project which you are contributing to. If you use a BSD project, contribute your patches under BSD. If its GPL, contribute under GPL. If you combine work under BSD and GPL and write modifications, contribute back the modifications based on what code you are doing modification for. The proprietary way is to…

That's not the point. Let me rephrase that: - one of GPL's cool thing is that it prevents proprietary software from including GPL'd code without contributing back to the community - Because BSD is not as strict as GPL regarding license derivation, GPL says "BSD is bad, you're allowing proprietary software to use BSD code without giving back" - Some people take BSD code, modify it and distribute modifications under GP…

One could argue that the they can get the GPL project, build over it too and distribute it.

Not much a comparison to proprietary software.

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#87

Post by feld »

erhardm wrote: post #83

I like OpenBSD. I like the spirit of the developers, which don't compromise on security. I like the simplicity of the OS, very good documented and very robust. They are prepared to break a ton of software to advance the state of security/correct code. I would like to have OpenBSD on all my machines, but unfortunately their license don't have the "infectious" effect of GPL. From my limited understanding, their license…

It depends on what you're after, but in some respects I think Dragonfly and NetBSD are bleeding edge in their own ways (filesystem, VM subsystem, networking)

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#88

Post by pyre »

jkyle wrote: post #4
s_dev wrote: post #2

Theo De Raadt always complained that many of the institutions that run and use OpenBSD don't contribute back. Good to see the EU at least acknowledging that its something that they should explore. They probably use it and its features more than they realise. I suspect there is a strong political motive as well behind being "technologically independent" after the NSA mass surveillance revelations. I like the sound of…

> Theo De Raadt always complained that many of the institutions that run and use OpenBSD don't contribute back. Sounds like he needs a different license then.

As we've seen with GPL'd code, many companies are happy to skirt the license restrictions if they feel that they can get away with it. How much money and effort would then need to be expended to enforcement of said new license for OpenBSD? How many companies would do a cost/benefit analysis of the likelihood of OpenBSD lawyers suing them, and even then ignore the license if they thought that it would be less expensive to risk a lawsuit?

"Change the license" isn't a silver bullet. Companies aren't machines that are fed licenses that they then obey like punch cards into an old IBM machine.

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#89

Post by madez »

javert wrote: post #28
s_dev wrote: post #2

Theo De Raadt always complained that many of the institutions that run and use OpenBSD don't contribute back. Good to see the EU at least acknowledging that its something that they should explore. They probably use it and its features more than they realise. I suspect there is a strong political motive as well behind being "technologically independent" after the NSA mass surveillance revelations. I like the sound of…

> an EU BSD fork Why fork it? That is completely stupid. Do you want to have the EU version of North Korea's Red Star Linux? Do you want to make it so Google doesn't work properly on EU BSD?

The EU is not North Korea.

A fork would make sense if the EU puts enough man-power into the project and they don't agree with the current leadership.

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#90

Post by pakled_engineer »

gillianseed wrote: post #48
s_dev wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point I think Theo is trying to make is in the open source world you simply have to expect that people will take code - put it under a different licence and modify it - restricting their ability to take back the modified code into OpenBSD. Typically OSS licences allow and tolerate "selfish" behaviour. I don't think I or he needs to back up this claim with examples.

>that people will take code - put it under a different licence and modify it Ok, although the 'take code and put it under a different license' is untrue, you can't re-license code unless you are the copyright owner, I gather that he means someone making modifications/enhancements and placing them under a license which OpenBSD can't use while remaining fully BSD licensed.

This happened when Apple adopted pf they added a few enhancements of their own but wrapped them in Apple's license so pf maintainers could not add the changes back into upstream pf.
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