Resolving the licensing issues.

Jim Thompson jim at netgate.com
Wed Mar 1 23:00:54 UTC 2006


Rob Landley wrote:

>On Wednesday 01 March 2006 4:19 pm, Jim Thompson wrote:
>  
>
>>IANAL, but there are legal issues with this approach.   And yes, I
>>understand the trade-off in increased complexity for you and Erik .vs a
>>cleaner database and files full of bits of paper that will probably
>>never be used.
>>
>>Just don't... think you're completely in the clear, OK?
>>    
>>
>
>Let's see: legally, we're no worse off than the Linux kernel.  In terms of 
>actually writing and merging code, we're way better off than The Hurd.
>
>I'm pretty happy with this, actually.
>  
>
Well ya.  We're all happy with the situation or we wouldn't be 'here'.  
I'm not a big "hurd" avocate, just to be clear.  (And we're so far off
subject for this list that I suggest we take it off-list if you want to
dicuss further.)

>>This is the wrong list for this
>>    
>>
>
>Agreed.  Which is why I didn't respond to the rest of your message here.
>
>  
>
>>(*) not a big loss in terms of technical talent.  Close examination will
>>reveal that esr tends to "over claim" what he's contributed.  (Some of
>>the evidence is on the smallworks.com weblog.)
>>    
>>
>
>You are aware he's a personal friend of mine and that the server landley.net 
>is on is in his basement?  (Not that I agree with him on everything either, 
>but when you start bashing someone out of the blue who hasn't even been 
>mentioned in the thread, I tend to suspect a just a touch of bias.  Just 
>sayin'.)
>  
>
No, I'm not. 

Even if I was, my statements on the subject are public.   It took weeks
to get esr to change some of the claims he was making.  (the date of his
earliest involvement was mis-stated by 3-4 years, and he's not the
"single largest GNU contributor" (though he is somehwhere around #10,
and that is commendable.)

I do warn that the 'adhoc' approach avocated by esr and other "open
source" (.vs free software) promoters has some fairly serious pitfalls.

Jim



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