On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 08:31:46AM -0500, Todd Young wrote: > FACT: > 1) Contrary to rumor, there is no "backdoor" to Smoothwall. That's correct, I did not say there current is, I said there was. > 2) In March of 2002 Richard Morrell of Smoothwall accused IPCop of > violating the GPL with respect to Smoothwall's v0.9.9 distro. I'm hereby accusing you of being a mindless troll. It must be true, because I said so. The world is also flat. > MY OPINION: > I believe Richard Morrell. He would not have gone public with his > accusation if he did not believe it. Since that time, IPCop may have > mended their ways, I really don't know. BUT, I view their original > actions as distasteful and therefore I will NOT support their > distribution, nor will I recommend it to anyone I know. My god, I find it so distasteful that the Smoothwall people would take GPL products (such as the linux kernel, squid, apache, *) and package it into a product and call it their own! They got it for *FREE*, that means they have to give it back to the community for *FREE*. It's not fair to get it for free, then say 'nope, even though we got it for free, it's ours NOW, and you can't do anything with it'. The IPCop people felt they could improve on a *FREE* product, this conflicted with Smoothwall's business interests (to release a 'free' version that's stripped down, and charge for the good things) so they chose to release their own version that they were free to hack away on and add things to without the artificial restraints of a persons business interests. This is how the GPL is meant to work, don't like it? Stop using it. > ANOTHER THOUGHT: > Support contracts, for open source applications and operating systems, > is what will drive open source into the business environment. This can > be shown to be true by RedHat and SUSE's success. The difference is that they both contribute back to the community, and RedHat's free version is exactly the same as the version they sell. The version they sell simply comes with a support contract. > Let's all just agree to disagree. Having problems defending your logic errors? You started this thread. -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list