[Beowulf] All Your BASH Are Belong To Us

[Joe Landman]

On 08/11/2011 01:40 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

> It's really depends on a corporate/organizational commitment to open
> source to institute processes to keep all this stuff straight.  (and
> we won't even get into "open source" vs "able to redistribute")

There are profoundly incorrect views running around out there, as to 
what "open source" means.  I had someone tell me that GPLv2 prevented 
distribution of binaries (it doesn't).  I've watched people slap 
additional legal bits in conflict with GPL onto GPL source.

I don't want to say "its a mess" but I do want to say that "there is a 
profound need for a very simple statement of what is and isn't allowed 
by each license."  Including what is involved in altering licensing.

While these are more or less amusing and some won't really result in 
court cases and precedents, there is at least one effort that has some 
nice potential to test GPL.  See the zfs on linux systems. c.f. 
http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue

I can't imagine this will end well for any company shipping this, in 
source, build script, or binary form.  CDDL aside, Oracle's got some IP 
claims they could file, as well as other things.  I can't believe that 
shipping NetBSD binaries with Oracle IP inside would end well either.

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics Inc.
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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