FreeBSD's Executive Director Calls For Linux + BSD Devs To Work Together

[Volta]

ryao

What stops those 'abusers' from following the rules of GPL license? Killing bad drivers saves people. Is it a good thing? I would take their driving license back. However, it seems you prefer being hypocrite.

[Volta]

They are using Gentoo Linux for Gaikai. Gentoo is the result of Daniel Robbins being inspired by FreeBSD ports.

That's why Gentoo is so popular, oh wait. Seriously, you said this as it would be an only merit of FreeBSD - inspiration to Gentoo.

[bison]

pf, capsiculum and netmap are interesting.

I would find Linux with a BSD userland interesting. Sort of the inverse of GNU/kFreeBSD.

[DebianXFCE Jr]

Any examples? I know some large companies were or are using *BSDs, but I've been in the IT sector for 20 years now and none of my customers ever used FreeBSD. It's always Linux and Windows.

What about some NAS solutions?

[ryao]

Netmap is available on Linux, pf is slow.

Netmap is from FreeBSD.

Do you have numbers for your pf is slow claim? As far as I know, FreeBSD's pf isn't worse than iptables. Unlike OpenBSD's pf, FreeBSD's pf is mulithreaded. They should both be slow compared to something based on VPP though.

[ryao]

At least for correctness, people should read what both sides have to say

The X Window System Trap

I think this is only a partial view of the situation. None of these groups ever talk about the possibility of the software being used in mission critical environments where failures cause deaths. This is less likely with graphics. However if a display freezes that is being used to show important diagnostics (say on a nuclear reactor), suddenly, the graphics code *will* matter. You only hear about such things from those concerned with system reliability. Anyway, copyleft does reduce usage and when that reduced usage can come at the expense of human life, I do not think pushing for it is a very good idea.

It is likely never the guy who got in the way of using copyleft who ends up dying because of the decision in a situation where OSS would have prevented deaths. For example, Toyota's sudden acceleration issues that killed people occurred in part due to horribly buggy proprietary software. They are not allowed to use copyleft software there due to federal regulations. Here avoiding OSS meant using something inferior and people died. It is not clear if they would have lived had copyleft OSS been used, but any OSS (copyleft or not) would have been better than their horrible code. :/

[ryao]

That's why Gentoo is so popular, oh wait. Seriously, you said this as it would be an only merit of FreeBSD - inspiration to Gentoo.

Gentoo is extremely popular if you consider Chrome OS (a Gentoo derivative) and CoreOS (a ChromeOS derivative) to be part of Gentoo's userbase. They are certainly part of the Gentoo family of Linux distributions. Anyway, FreeBSD does plenty of good things and is used in plenty of places. Sony's Gaikai and Netflix's OpenConnect are two off the top of my head. Juniper's network switches are another famous place where FreeBSD is used.

By the way, saying that about Gentoo is inviting a similar comparison to be made between your distribution of choice and Windows.

[ryao]

ryao

What stops those 'abusers' from following the rules of GPL license? Killing bad drivers saves people. Is it a good thing? I would take their driving license back. However, it seems you prefer being hypocrite.

A number of people died from automotive sudden acceleration. It had nothing to do with them being bad drivers. The vehicles randomly went out of control as if the gas pedal had been floored and the brake pedal was ineffective at stopping them. The brakes were destroyed trying to stop an engine at full throttle when it happened at high way speeds. People in other vehicles could have been killed too. You have a sick mind if you mean to suggest that those deaths were a good thing. Such failures can kill anyone, including you.

By the way, people using/putting OSS software under licenses other than the GPL was what was claimed to be abuse. I had been replying to that. Asking what stops people "from following the rules of [the GPL]" when the GPL is not involved is nonsensical. Also, the L in GPL stands for license. saying "GPL license" does not make sense. You are effectively writing the word license twice.

[johannesburgel]

What about some NAS solutions?

I only know of FreeNAS. And in my perception its alleged importance is *way* overblown.

[chocolate]

You said:

"FreeBSD and the GNU operating system are incompatible, and the only way to collaboration is to move FreeBSD to GNU GPL."

That is not true. First, the GNU operating system is not relevant because it is kept on life support as an organ donor for others, so I am just going to refer to it as the GNU project. Second, the GNU project includes a X11 licensed component called ncurses:

https://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/ncurses.html

The GNU project has copyleft components, so you can tell them that they are "completely missing the point of the GNU GPL" too.

By the way, I would greatly prefer that well made software be used in critical systems where failures can cause people to die. Between a permissive license and a copyleft license when the designers of such systems are adverse to copyleft licenses, I prefer the permissive license. In automobiles for example, copyleft software licenses are banned by US federal law prohibiting manufacturers from making it easier to modify certain vehicle systems. If people's deaths from things like sudden acceleration could have been avoided by having OSS under permissive licenses, then using permissive licenses is a good thing. When "abuse" keeps people from dying, "abuse" is a good thing.

Excuse me, but it reads like a bunch of FUD. Of course a software license does not take precedence over a country's jurisdiction. So if there's a law in place to not let you tamper with a piece of equipment, the GPL itself wouldn't be legally problematic, and practically speaking the hardware could refuse any build not signed by the producer. Letting people skip the software reverse-engineering part shouldn't have anything to do with a system's reliability and security in its whole.

And it seems like you are deliberately mixing absurd scenarios to make an invalid point in favor of permissive licenses, when obviously the user you quoted just wanted to point out that, as a user, when you come in possession of a piece of software you should always be entitled to its source code, and permissive licenses don't add any certainty towards that goal, because they let producers distribute a closed derivative work. This was clearly intended as a matter of principle in the context of the article, and it doesn't prevent the existence of permissive licenses for use in a critical system.
Edit: new posts popped up while I was writing this, and I now understand your personal position better. At first I thought you favored permissive licenses because they let producers close the software. Now I understand that, if the choice comes down to copyleft versus permissive versus (probably buggy) third-party proprietary software, and copyleft is excluded a priori by the producers, then it's good to have quality permissive software as an option. I apologize for my wrong assumptions. This is an interesting approach to the matter that deserves further discussion.
What follows is the rest of my original response.

But the automobile example is interesting. You talk about people's tampering with their own hypothetical performance-enhancing libre software being too risky, but what about hypothetical backdoors in a piece of proprietary firmware? People could die from irresponsible driving in the former scenario and from (remote, even?) third-party tampering of the same nature (or worse!) in the latter. Perhaps this reads like FUD too, but nowadays it's more plausible than ever.
It would be ideal if somehow the entirety of the software could be verifiable by the end user with respect to a self-reproducible build, without being able to modify it. For that to happen, the end user must still be granted access to the source code.