From owner-freebsd-security Wed Jul 5 23:55:32 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org Received: from jason.argos.org (a13c249.neo.rr.com [204.210.212.249]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 080DD37B5ED for ; Wed, 5 Jul 2000 23:55:28 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mike@argos.org) Received: from localhost (mike@localhost) by jason.argos.org (8.10.1/8.10.1) with ESMTP id e666rnH22708; Thu, 6 Jul 2000 02:53:49 -0400 Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 02:53:49 -0400 (EDT) From: Mike Nowlin To: cjclark@alum.mit.edu Cc: freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SecureBSD (Was: Re: Firewalls and the endless story!) In-Reply-To: <20000705230111.D795@dialin-client.earthlink.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > > If I read the code, and then inadvertently use some concepts in my own > > code they can try and claim it as a derived work and do nasty things to > > me. > > You can't copyright a concept. So I ask, did they get some patents? I > did not see specific mention in the license of any new patents. Gotta love the GPL... Take this section, for example: 2.b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. With the previous sections in the license, it is saying that chunks of code from a GPL'd program, even if they're thrown in a blender and liquified first and then put into a non-GPL program, requires that the resulting work has to be GPL'd... Of course, what happens when I look at a GPL program, then a couple hours later, I put the following line into a program I release non-GPL: printf("%d %s\n", errno, strerror(errno)); ??????? Oops - that line was in the GPL program - I'm breaking the license terms of gnu-quake53 with my latest network monitoring program... This whole idea needs to be considered on a per-case basis. Sure, they (the FSF) can claim "derived works", but at the same time, you can come back and say "How can the FSF claim copyleft on code written from the RFC's?" (or whatever...) As far as I'm concerned, the GPL is a good concept (pun intended), but people get WAY too anal about the implementation of it at times. I love my Linux box, but I still do a lot of "sorry, no source code available" programming for clients on my other machines..... --mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message