Contributed by jacek on from the dept.
To be fair, GPL-licensed software is hideously difficult to use in embedded applications, because of the requirement to release changes to the original code, which businesses do not what to do.
Sitecom and others would have much less headaches, if they used BSD-licensed software, such as pf. Hmm... could this be a good time to lobby hardware firewall manufactures to use OpenBSD/pf in their products?
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By Michael (163.252.218.98) on
So...why do we care? Warm fuzzy feelings.
--Michael
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By Daniel Hartmeier (62.65.145.30) daniel@benzedrine.cx on
The worst they could do besides not giving any credit would be claiming they wrote it all themselves. But even that wouldn't violate the license (but possibly a law about plagiarism or fraud), assuming the copyright notice and conditions are reproduced and provided in some form invisible to almost all users. If it's reproduced and provided, someone can extract it and disprove their claims of authorship convincingly with that. Bottom line, the restrictions are so unobstrusive to commercial business practices, that there's no incentive to violate them, really.
All of this is perfectly fine with me, of course. :)
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By Anonymous (68.148.237.224) on
My concern is if a company doesn't respect Open Source, be it the GPL, they don't deserve Open Source software, especially the BSDs.
I imagine if there's a violation, you guys most likely will make it an awareness issue not involving court injunctions. I am basing this on Dale Rahn's unpaid work with Pegasos. My sympathies to Dale Rahn.
By Simon (217.157.132.75) on
That companies who produces wireless equipment and firewalls uses Linux code seems a bit weird, I guess they just got caught in the Linux hype.
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By James Holmes (142.161.30.213) on
I think there is a place for both BSD and GPL licenses. BSD is good for code that you want published widely and used without any strings attached. On the other hand GPL is good for things like compilers because your goal might be to produce something that must remain under the control of the public at large (if you want it to be portable across systems).
However I think that it is truly unfortunate that the BSD licence isn't used more, because I've occasionally been disappointed when things like a better implementation of math function xxx was written in the GPL and I've been forced to write my own implimentation. This is a very counter productive way of working and programmers should be aware of this consequence of using the GPL.