Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2002 15:39:57 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>, chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Real UNIX history (was: Congrats to Brett Glass for new BSD hist Message-ID: <3DA4B03D.5DA6A396@mindspring.com> References: <20021009171351.A17992@papagena.rockefeller.edu>
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Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > > > Remind me again -- why was there a flap, across all three BSDs, about > > > Darren Reed's "no modification" licensing of IP Filter around a year > > > ago? He never tried to charge for it, did he? What was that fuss > > > about? > > > > I don't understand the relevence of the question. > > The relevance is to the meaning of the word "free". In the context of > the BSDs, I always understood it meant "freely redistributable" > including the possibility of modifications/bugfixes. AT&T's code was > not. Yes, it was. This seems to be the root of the misunderstanding. The orignial Western Electric license did not have a covenant requiring non-disclosure. The source code was, in fact, disclosed publically, both by UNSW (the Lyon's book) and by UCB. > > This was a problem because the ipfilter code was in a security > > critical area, where an OS which incorporated it would need to" > > be able to provide timely and accurate fixes to problems. > > It would have been a problem even for a non-security-critical > component. It is even a problem if bugfixes are allowed but the code > has other, eg patent-related constraints, see for example Theo de > Raadt's posting on the OpenSSL/Sun issue: > http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?threadid=3291 That's Theo's problem; what you are talking about, at that point, is editorial control. There's lots of code that meets that limit. The main problem most people had with it is that imposition of the editorial control meant additional latency and disagreement as to what constitutes a security fix. DJB has a long and glorious history of defining away things in qmail and djbdns that most people would consider to be "bugs", and want patches incorporated to "fix". > The OpenBSD people have a rather lengthy document on their copyright > policy: > http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html > > Perhaps FreeBSD's policy is different, but I always understood not. Luckily, this is FreeBSD-chat, not OpenBSD-chat. 8-). If you are looking to me to defend Theo's imposition of policy decisions, you are looking in the wrong place, and on the wrong list. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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