Wim Godden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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...
As has been said several times already, get a CVS client and download the sources using the anonymous account. > 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. Idaya do own software rights to FreeVSD. They have prior art to the usage of the name and the work. DSVR signed an agreement back in April 2000 to grant them this.. What they don't own this any contributions made by persons who do not work for Idaya who have not signed an appropriate copyright assignment. But those mods can be removed, if there are actually any. > > > 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. So then you take Idaya to court, and get them to prove that they don't distribute any of the modifications that you believe are in the code. It could be expensive. To my knowledge virtually all submissions by users on this list have not been accepted into the source tree. Probably because the copyright issues haven't been sorted out. > > > > 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. Just to clear the issue up, I work for DSVR and the opinions expressed in these mailings are my own. The decisions of Idaya are nothing to do with me. I'm arguing the issue because I think you are wrong. > 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... I think it is more to do with not having the time or inclination to write such documentation. Certainly that is the reason why I won't explain it. Plus I don't want the hassle of the follow up questions, which usually amounts to: Please write full documentation or an RPM script to set up a full clustering solution for me because I don't want to do any of the work myself. Even with casual scan through the history of this list, you can attribute more questions to setting up Apache, PHP, MySQL or Postgres, or some IRC bot or some other crap like that than there is anything about FreeVSD itself ! Setting up a clustering solution is a non-trivial task and I don't see why such stuff should be documented by the FreeVSD project. If you want to do it, then study the depths of the various clusting solutions around and see whether they truely suit your needs. Most are only useful for CPU intensive work, such as weather modelling. > > 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. That's just silly. If I installed a Red Hat linux system for a customer and after a few days Emacs broke. They what do I say to the customer ? "Oh sorry, one of the emacs programmers hasn't got a clue what he's doing. It's not my fault, blame them !". Yeah, I'm sure the customer would be happy. Surely there's the concept of a support contract or something similar ? Where you fix the problems that are raised by your customers. You can't expect the community to fix them, becuase they may never trigger them. > Then again, no company is going to start using ProVSD without it being proven to >work. > And so far, it simply hasn't. New software comes out all the time. People buy it and try it. FreeVSD has been proven to work in the field since March 1999. ProVSD includes extensions to FreeVSD, it should therefore be able to count on the reliability of FreeVSD. And people should realise this. > 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. Well why should anybody guarantee this ? It's Free Software and it comes with "NO MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR PURPOSE". > With FreeVSD, making it more reliable is something we could do > ourselves. Yeah, but are you going to even try. Or are you just going to sit there and compain that there's no documentation and so you don't have a clue how it works. You aren't going to stand any chance of making the system any more reliable unless you know how to read and understand source code. Which you seem to either not be able to achieve, or even want to attempt. Understanding FreeVSD is only a tiny part of understanding why there are reliability problems with the system. > 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). Fine. That is your decision at the end of the day. But by the end of reading your reply I seem to get the impression that you don't want anybody to make a profit out of the code you write. Hmmm. I've seen this argument somewhere before. > Good luck with the project... Thankyou. Regards, Nick. ------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
