Hello Darren, On Sunday, June 16 2013, Darren Breidigan wrote:
I really don't want to play the devil's advocate here, but... > Even though SELinux is free to Linux so was the Horse at the gates of Troy. Thanks for using a flawed analogy, that makes it much easier to explain why it is absurd. Are you deliberately using the word "free" meaning different things in this sentence? SELinux code is free, but in terms of freedom. The code is GPL, and I did find some concerns about patents (on LWN, posted on 2002). I also found <https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/selinux/2010-January/012046.html>, which is an e-mail from an NSA guy explaining the patent issue, and mentioning that the patents have expired. Anyway, I couldn't find anything more recent about the subject, and I really believe that the Fedora/Red Hat lawyers examined everything carefully in this case. The "Horse at the gates of Troy" was free, but in terms of "beer" (have you ever heard such comparison? :-}). By the way, why do you think the Troy Horse worked? Exactly because nobody cared to inspect its internals! Couldn't be more symptomatic... SELinux code is free for us to examine and decide whether it is good or not. Let's not make it a blind war against everything which has the letters "NSA" somewhere in the name/description, this is just not smart. Note, however, that I am not saying we should trust them neither. But in this particular case we are totally capable of examining the code and deciding whether it is good or bad for us. > It is also in the news > > http://news.softpedia.com/news/NSA-Has-Legitimate-Code-Running-in-Linux-Kernel-and-Android-361289.shtml Yeah, the news... I wonder what they'll say when they discover that Microsoft contributed to the Linux kerne, or that the SVG format's design borrowed some concepts from VML, a format developed by (guess who?) Microsoft again! Aren't we doomed? -- Sergio
