Because of
violations of the BSD license the MicroBSD project has been completely removed from the internet, and all MicroBSD users are asked to remove it from their computers.
Because of
violations of the BSD license the MicroBSD project has been completely removed from the internet, and all MicroBSD users are asked to remove it from their computers.
Their initial announcement was made less than one year ago. Despite this, there were many strange claims by MicroBSD developers and users on OpenBSD mailing lists, about how various new OpenBSD features had been in MicroBSD “for 2 years.”
It seems that MicroBSD was almost the personification of non-professionism, replacing tens of thousands of OpenBSD copyright notices with MicroBSD ones. Even whats left of them now, namely http://www.microbsd.net/, is almost comically full of spelling and grammar errors.
This was a very strange episode in BSD history… I personally never tried MicroBSD, and don’t know anyone who did, so I don’t really know its merits as an OS.
By the way, here is a prominent example of one of their strange posts on an OpenBSD mailing list:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=104433364101126&w=2
gotta love us all, mankind is just great.
All the BSD license asks for is due credit in the damn sourcecode,
but no, even that’s too expensive. They had to spend time creating patches to
remove the credits. It’s nice to see that open source
software licenses are enforced correctly, and MicroBSD being removed.
Personally, I just can’t wait for the release of ClosedBSD ( http://www.closedbsd.org ). It’s been almost a year without an update, and I really would like to have the final full-featured version on the floppy. There’s no simpler way of configuring a home internet server which resides in the closet that no one touches!
ever heard of Freesco (i think thats what it’s called), seems like basically the same thing, but based off linux. I know a PC User Group who switched their gateway to that, spent quite a few months without anyone ever needing to touch it.
I searched OSNews for MicroBSD stories… and found a review of the latest released version of MicroBSD:
http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/2002/09/Features39.html
Incredibly enough, the review actually raises more questions than it answers.
quite an impressive feat…. the bsd style licence allows you to do practlically ~anything~ with the code as long as proper credit is given
this is the equivalent of running a furniture store and tearing the tags off of the matresses “just because”
Yeah, I know… my eyes glazed over in disbelief at the words ‘violations of the BSD license’. I stared at it and wondered ‘is that even possible!?’. Apparently it is, if you work hard and lack reasonable intelligence and common sense. Good grief.
As far as im aware FreeSCO is actually a Linux based replacement for Cisco IOS. It runs on a few models i think. I tried it ages ago on one of our Cisco 2500’s
It is a shame they violated the license in this way, it took a lot of work to violate it. Work that was so misdirected, it is a wonder they where not crucified sooner. I do however think they should have carried on with the project and adapted to the license restrictions. Oh well, not being a BSD user myself this is of little consequence to me. FreeSCO is quite impressive. Currently using it on my gateway, i have grown to love it “Throw it in a closet and forget it” about sums it up.
OK, I guess I’m not fully seeing what they did wrong. Did they take openBSD code and just change who made it and said it was theirs? is that the deal? That explaination giving didn’t make much sence to me.
Anyways good to see they did a “our bad” and did the right thing. Course going away completely seams rough, but then again their name had been tainted. For whatever they did, does anyone know if it was a group action or was this the act of one person doing something and ruining it for everyone?
Based on past experience with “Outback Dingo,” the project’s lead, I’d certainly lay the blame for this at his feet. He’s a great self-promoter and marketer to PHBs but falls down when he has to do technical stuff beyond integrating existing solutions together. The last company he was at was in fact somewhat notorious for–under his guidance–claiming their rackmount PC running FreeBSD was running a proprietary “FreeBSD-based OS” when the only difference was changing the login message. What happened with MicroBSD sounds a lot like his standard operating procedure.
To be blunt, if technical ability were dynamite, he wouldn’t have enough to blow the butt off a bumblebee.
OK, I guess I’m not fully seeing what they did wrong.
They violated the license. People need to respect authors’ wish of license.
Did they take openBSD code and just change who made it and said it was theirs?
Yes and why the earth did they waste the time on it? Why can’t they do something better such as improvement the code rather than change each copyrights?
is that the deal?
Yes, it’s deal when they took the code without agree the license. It is no respect.
settle down. I wasn’t question what’s so wrong about this. I just wanted to know exactly what they did. The linked peice really didn’t say much, or at the very least didn’t mean much to me. I fully agree with the idea if you violate a License you have done wrong.
It seems what what they did was search for ‘OpenBSD’ and replace it with ‘MicroBSD’. Not very clever, but I think the best way to deal with the matter would be to send a quiet e-mail to the people in charge, asking them to fix it.
Public slagging should be the *last* resort.
–Jon
They performed a global search/replace on the project names. Nobody cares that they forked the OpenBSD project for their purpose… the problem is that they removed credit, where credit is required per the BSD license.
Theo and Dingo did exchange a series of emails, but they kept the information private. Theo only went public to ask for the community’s input on how the matter should be pursued. The “slagging” came from the community… they (we) tend to get lathered up pretty easy. 😉
-fp
A BSD License violation. Didn’t see that one coming.
Red Hat won’t let anyone use the name even though the work that it is based upon open sourced. Even the name Linux is trade marked but it freely used to describe the OS. Seems to me that the owner of the Linux trade mark ought to force Red Hat from using the word Linux too.
Sheeze. I can buy a spark plug that goes on a Ford and sell it as such. Copyright laws are out of step with the real world. No other government provided protection is so out of whack. Time for some common laws on property and copyright.
“Public slagging should be the *last* resort.”
This is Theo you’re talking about.
Linus Torvalds owns the Linux trademark and he makes a decent amount of cash on it from companies like Redhat.
…MicroBSD violated the OpenBSD copyright. Period. All the rest is blahblahblah
MicroBSD violated the OpenBSD copyright. Period. All the rest is blahblahblah
Yes, obviously. No one wants to know if they did it on purpose, why they did it, if it was a search & replace mistake, if it was going to be fixed before a release, if the developers had planned to cancel the project prior to this, etc. All blah blah.
In English at least, ‘licence’ is a noun and ‘license’ is a verb.
–Jon
Not according to m-w.com and dictionary.com:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=license
However, licence is an alternate spelling for the noun in British English:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=licence
We Americans speak English too.
[sigh…]
how sad. Someone cpying other’s work… Anyway MicroBSD DESERVES IT.
Freeso is pretty sweet, I used it for quite a while. But, it’s not under development anymore (or at least it wasn’t as of last november)….
>Not according to m-w.com and dictionary.com:
> http://diction ary.reference.com/search?q=license
> However, licence is an alternate spelling for the noun in British >English:
> http://diction ary.reference.com/search?q=licence
In my dictionary it has ‘licence’ for the noun, with a reference to the American spelling ‘license’. The word is derived from the Middle French word ‘licence’.
I only made the point because the original follow up suggested I spelled it incorrectly, whereas it seems both are acceptable.
It appears both spellings are correct for the verb form.
> We Americans speak English too.
There are a number of differences in the way words are spelled and pronounced.
–Jon
Linus Torvalds owns the Linux trademark and he makes a decent amount of cash on it from companies like Redhat.
Nonsense. I doubt Linus has made a single cent as a direct consequence of owning the Linux trademark, and he sure as hell doesn’t charge Linux distributions for its use.
Excuse me, but isn’t Microsoft violating the BSD license?
Why is the community going after one of it’s own projects instead of Microsoft? They clearly are violating BSD license.
Linus probably doesn’t make money directly from Linux, but he probably gets paid for speaking engagments, his book, and his job at trasmeta (probably hired him for his popularity).
Red Hat had to stop allowing Red Hat as a distro being sold under that name by others, however, mandrake 9.0 still says Red Hat if you use sndconfig (or something like that). So you can stil distribute software with the Red Hat name, but just not an entire distro (aside from reselling the boxed version) and call it red hat. the problem was people were buying cd’s from cheapbytes and calling Red Hat for support. This probably could have been handled differently (and hopefully will be). Perhaps they could have instead at install ask for a reg ID for support and explain if it was downloaded or copied or from cheapbytes (anything beside the boxed version) that support would be extra. I don’t blame them for the approach they took, but it wasn’t the best solution.
I believe Freesco is still in development. They’re working on .3.0. Their website is out of date (THEY DIDN’T MAKE BACKUPS AND HAD A CRASH!!!!)
checkout freesco.sourceforge.net as they just release .3.1
Copyright is something an author gets automatically when they produce a work of some sort. Someone else has no right to copy or distribute that work. That’s what licenses are for. The author places a license on the work that allows certain things to be done to that work such as copy and/or distribute. The BSD license explictly says the files either source or binary must retain the license when they are distributed.
I think its funny that people have nothing better to do than to sit there and look through lines of credits. Public slagging is unacceptable I dont care if they ate their first born, it should be used as a last resort. Now you have embarrassed somebody that all he was trying to do was make a little niche for himself, but that has always been the problem with the BSD guys, you guys totally walk around half-cocked looking for a fight, instead of contacting him and asking him to please change it back and telling him its unacceptable you start flaming. Im glad Linux is winning and not BSD because you people need to learn to grow up.
Sif GNU people don’t jump on GPL violations.