peter@wonderland.org (Peter Galbavy) writes:

Once I thought the GPL a virus and evil, but with the recent profiliation of previously free software becoming hijacked and used for profit *and still claiming to be the definitive source for the software* is getting tiresome. gated and X11 are two examples of this. What next ? How muuch of >your< code is being sold by others claiming to own it ?

all of it. the amazing part is when folks remove the copyrights and authorship credits, even though the copyrights just specify that the copyrights shall not be removed and that i not be sued -- there are no other restrictions in rtty, bind, cron, or even my little libraries like bitstring and avltree. i've twice now been hired as a consultant by companies who were, unknowingly it seemed, including my code in their products after editing out the original copyrights and credits. (in one case i was paid to fix a bug in code the payor didn't know was originally mine.) but you know what? i'm flattered. all that hype about how commercial grade code can only come from strong engineering companies with good funding, real management, and so on -- and there's my code at the heart of a couple of products i won't mention here, with my name ripped out. seeing my code used in this way just tells me that i don't charge enough when i'm out consulting. and for the record, i still think the GPL is very evil. and also for the record, we're commercializing BIND since i'm no longer able to fund it out of my own pocket (my pocket is now empty) and we ended up not getting the kind of donations we needed as a nonprofit. while i'm committed to keeping a freely redistributable version and to shipping source code, i've got to be realistic about my mortgage payment and the lack of speed and quality of BIND's evolution when it can only get worked on by volunteers. in that sense i very much applaud what the merit folks have done with gated, and what the sendmail,inc. guys are doing with sendmail.

I think we should now disappear, since this is NANOG and this thread is not quite an operational issue. Yet.

as a coauthor of RFC 2010 and as the specific author of section 2.1, i don't agree. reference implementations with widely reviewable source code are THE reason that the internet can be "operated" at all. -- Paul Vixie La Honda, CA "Many NANOG members have been around <paul@vix.com> longer than most." --Jim Fleming pacbell!vixie!paul (An H.323 GateKeeper for the IPv8 Network)