Nick Burrett wrote: > > True, but not the other way around. They haven't said : we've added lots of source > > code to GCC, now we're going to make it closed source. And that's exactly what > > Idaya is doing now. > > Wrong. > > Idaya have added lots of changes to FreeVSD and kept it *Free Software*. > Idaya have created ProVSD which is based on FreeVSD with some > enchancements. > > FreeVSD is *still* Free Software. It *always* will be.
Allright, where can I download the latest version of this free software ? Oh right... I have to pay for the cd-rom... And furthermore : ProVSD is based on FreeVSD, so ... here comes GPL again... > > > Idaya needs a source of income. They should deserve some returns for > > > the work that they have input, otherwise they cannot afford to sponsor > > > the project. Then the project dies completely. > > > > Well, the people who founded Idaya should have thought a little more about what > > they were going to do with the company. Now they've founded a company, hoping to > > sell just the extra services for FreeVSD. Since that didn't seem to work, they're > > now violating GPL by creating ProVSD. > > Since they own the license to FreeVSD, they have the right to revoke > the GPL at any time. I think you're making a big error here... FreeVSD was not released under the GPL license... the CODE of FreeVSD was released as GPL. Idaya might own the name FreeVSD (which I don't believe they do), but they don't own the code. Parts of the code have been written by other people and released as GPL by those people. > Therefore they are perfectly entited to re-license ProVSD to whatever > they like. Yes, they must remove the code changes by developers who > have not signed a copyright disclaimer. But what grounds do you have > for suspecting that this has not already been done ? How can a developer check whether his/her code has been removed ? You can claim whatever you want to claim... That's the big problem : you're using other people's code and then you claim you've removed it. It might just as well still be in there, without their copyright information. Since it's closed source, we have no way of checking that. > > Well, I guess I'll find out real soon. I've thrown away the patches I made to > > FreeVSD in the past weeks and simply started from scratch now. If I'll open source > > it (that's an IF there, but at least I'm honest about it), it'll stay open source. > > Until you decide that there's no money in it. > > Writing a project for fun is great. Releasing a project and seeing > hundreds of people profit from your work, when you receive nothing > particularly significant in return is not so great. I repeat : you should have thought about that earlier... apparantly you just rushed in, hoping to earn a lot of money. And 2-3 years ago you would have been succesful, but now there's simply too many other (better known and proven-to-work) software available. Before you start a project (and certainly a whole company with this as core business), you should always check whether it will actually earn you enough money to survive. If chances are only 50%, you shouldn't do it. The trouble you're in now is the trouble you've created yourselves... And if people want to help out in development, like I did, you are more eager to turn away than to accept them. All I asked for was for a general structure of FreeVSD, so that I could understand how it was built. I need a system like FreeVSD, but I also wanted to change it for clustering purposes and to get 100% availability. Instead of embracing people, you tell them to get lost, because their questions are stupid. Well, so be it... What you may not realize yet, is that you'll now have to change the way your company works completely. You're no longer a company offering add-on services for a free project. You won't be able to say : "Oh, that's a bug in FreeVSD. Someone in the community wrote bad code.". If something goes wrong, you'll be to blame. If a company has 50 servers with ProVSD running and they crash, you'll be to blame. Then again, no company is going to start using ProVSD without it being proven to work. And so far, it simply hasn't. As a hosting company, we've studied the software and found it to be insufficient in terms of reliability. So we want guarantees that it will be made more reliable. With FreeVSD, making it more reliable is something we could do ourselves. With ProVSD, we don't have any control over the source code. And I simply refuse to make FreeVSD more reliable, as you can simply look at my code and rewrite it into ProVSD (you don't have to copy-paste code to actually use someone else's code). Good luck with the project... Wim ------------------------- The freeVSD Support List -------------------------- Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?body=subscribe%20freevsd-support Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?body=unsubscribe%20freevsd-support Archives: http://freevsd.org/support/mail-archives/freevsd-support -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
