At 05:04 29/05/01 +0200, Bernd Eckenfels wrote:
>On Mon, May 28, 2001 at 10:21:13PM -0400, Paul D. Robertson wrote:
> > That point is now obvious. Most licenses have a default deny policy,
> > modification was never had a permit line. It still doesn't have a permit
> > line, so the access list hasn't changed, it's just easier for those who
> > can't see the default deny at the bottom to figure it out.
>
>Depends on how you define "use source code".
My understanding of this story is:
1- you can modify the code for your use
2- you cannot redistribute modified code without permission of the author
So 2 is different from the usual BSD license, but after all everybody is
free to
chose the license that he likes.
For the 1st statement, dunno how things are in the US and other places, but
in .fr (and probably in most european countries), the autor can do nothing
about
this. Given that I downloaded the code freely/transparently, and it is now
sitting
in my hard drive, I can modify it, grep through it, patch it, convert it
into a jpeg,
... as far as I do all this in my small private world. As far as I have the
right to have
the code, I have the right to do whatever I want, but not distribute it to
the public
(including customers and so on, be it freely or for money).
> > It's his code, and his license, I'm not sure why everyone sems to want to
> > take them both away from him.
>
>Nobody wants to.
yes, the problem is not that people want to take the code, but people get
nervous about license stroies (just remember all those debates on whether
GPL is better or BSDL!). Open source people still fear the revenge of the
commercial world. So those who want to contribute to some code check
the license and this is legitimate (the author is also free to chose whatever
license he wants. so it's just a debate)
> If he will insis on his statement everybody will comply and
>i am sure projects like openBSD will have to kick the source out of the
>project.
My opinion is that we could stop the struggle by providing hooks in
the bsd code that make ipf completely external, so it would be a pkg/port.
> > * To me, the sentence "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms
> > * are permitted" clearly allows for modification of the source code...
> >
> > Doesn't seem to have a good basis for legal standing. It's not *clear* to
> > me that the specific license phrase equates modification with usage
>
>How do you use source code?
you can modify it for yourself. It is not clear that you can redistribute
the modified
code (this is the lacking part in the license).
Note that you can rewrite ipf! This is what many companies did with gnu code
(and this is what many gnu coders did with BSD code, but in this case this is
explicitly permitted according to my interpretation of the BSD license).
>What troubles me most is, that he uses a normal BSD advertising clause "do
>not remove the copyright". why is he doing it if in the first place
>modifications was never allowed anyway...
It is usual to have pseudo-repetitions, calirifications, over-statements,
... in legal
material. This makes you better in court, if the other guy claims he
misunderstood
a statement.
> > What's not clear to me is if fixing a bug isn't disallowed by the current
> > license, and that's more worrysome to me than if it's an official Open
> > Source application. A seperate section allowing local-only modification
> > would make this a much better license from my perspective.
>
>Actually those local only modifications are allowed in some countries for
>commercial software.. the question is, what is with non-commercial software
>:)
Note that you can also distribute "patches" provided they do not contain
portions
for the original code (unless they are usual code that was not "invented"
by the
author). so a script that takes the ipf src code and performs automatic modifs
(add some code after line 100 and so on) should be ok.
You can even have "normal" patches (ones containing portions of the orig code,
such those generated by diff) in many cases. People have distributed patches
for the FWTK in the past (an example can be found at
http://www.cih.com/~hagan/smap-hacks/).
So what we are talking about in my understanding is whether Darren allows
people
to redistribute a modified ipf. It seems that not and this is legitimate. I
also
understand that people at OpenBSD (or *BSD) may find this unacceptable, and
they
are also right! So the solution is a new ip filter?
cheers,
mouss
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