Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 09:33:27 +0100 From: Mark Murray <mark@grondar.org> To: Paul Robinson <paul@iconoplex.co.uk> Cc: FreeBSD Chat <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: RMS says: "Use BSD, for goodness sake!" Message-ID: <200306300833.h5U8XRig084782@grimreaper.grondar.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 30 Jun 2003 09:02:52 BST." <20030630080252.GK57378@iconoplex.co.uk>
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Paul Robinson writes: > On Sat, Jun 28, 2003 at 02:57:10PM +0930, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > > > I note that most of the discussion on this topic was by people who > > are not central to the FreeBSD project. > > That's because the people central to the project have better things to > do with their time than look at what the actual effort is to remove > GPL code `from the base of FreeBSD. For those of us that looked the > answer was "not much". Sorry if you think that's a useless answer, but > personally I found it quite revealing. Care to submit patches? > > As you know, few people are as zealous as you are about wanting to > > rid the project of GPL'd code. > > That's not the issue. As far as I, and a hefty percentage of the rest > of the user base are concerned, BSD is about choice, not political > ideals. I should have the choice of running a completely non-GPL > BSD. I can do that - I can run Open, but I'd much rather run FreeBSD, > particularly when the effort is as small as we've identified it really > is. Actually, you have the choice to change the code. The rest is at the whim of the developers doing the work. > > We've said it before: provide us with a good replacement and we'll > > consider it seriously. Go ahead. I would *really* like to see a > > replacement for gdb, for example. > > There are at most half a dozen apps that require the retention of > the current GPL implementation. The rest can either be rm'ed (nobody > uses them), replaced with BSD licensed versions, or moved out to > ports. Awk can be moved to non-GPL just by MFC'ing a change already > in -CURRENT. The effort to do all this is relatively small. I'd do > it, you wouldn't notice, but I don't (as you know) have any ability > to make those changes. But why the hostility towards doing it? I > know this has the whiff of a bikeshed about it, but to me it makes > sense. Perhaps I'm missing something... We are not going to remove POSIX-mandated stuff, which means we can't just "rm" stuff. As for the rest of it, folks have their own priorities. Speed/efficiency is one of them, and folks tend to go for that over licensing zealotry. If a BSD-licensed app is a drop-in replacement for a GPL one (in a practical way), then of course folks will be interested in using it. Until then, the GPL/BSDL issue is NOT the trump card. > > Most people in the FreeBSD project don't see things quite like that. > > Agreed, they don't. I don't. But when a BSD can be made GPL-clean with > the exception of a compiler and debugger, and others are already doing > so, I don't see what the reasons are for retaining GPL code when it > makes sense for as much of the base to be BSD, as is possible.... As an exercise, I replaced our man(1) with OpenBSD's. It fell very short in the features that our current man has. If you want to do something useful, you may want to fix that. M -- Mark Murray iumop ap!sdn w,I idlaH
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