Submitted by “It seems that the recent announcement about the release of open source software from yellowTAB was quite missunderstood. That announcement started quite a lot of trolling in the community. I didn’t feel there was much to buzz about though; it was just an official release of source code from applications being in ZETA. Nothing more, nothing less. I saw comments saying “They have to because of the GPL” or “They are trying to make PR to cover them not respecting the GPL for 2 years…” Obviously some people talk about things they don’t know.”
The GPL trolls don’t belont to the BeOS community.
Do I need to back this up? The BeOS community is one of the most friendly, open and open-minded, non-zealous bunch of computer nerds you can ever find. Haiku, the largest and most important open source project in the BeOS community, is BSD, not GPL. The very few open source apps that are, in fact, GPL, are developed by people that are NOT zealous about the license.
Any negative mods this post receives is from the GPL trolls. They’re not many, but they are vocal.
Any negative mods this post receives is from the GPL trolls. They’re not many, but they are vocal.
Isn’t that comment a tad offensive
[actually all the positive mod-points are from Mac-zealots and Windows-trolls. They are many and they are extremely vocal and controls the mind of the moderators and are 8 yards tall, with big clunky feet, and jaws of steel to bite us all when we’re not nice]
There are more issues beneath the surface than you relay here, but true. The BeOS world is a friendly world, but not everything is perfect. There has been some controverses around YT, whether or not this has been fair.
Well, you can argue it until death but the fact is that they DO HAVE to release the source code of their programs that are derived from GPL software. It is a condition of the license; its not up to discussion. If they want to give source on a demand basis only or whatever, that’s OK as long as they abide by the terms of the freaking license.
Geez… Sometimes I wonder why some people always bring this hatred over the GPL. The code is there and it’s up to you to use it or not, but if you decide to use it, then follow the terms of its creator, otherwise look elsewhere. YES, IT IS THAT SIMPLE!
Want to use that amazing GPL’d library but don’t want to release your code as GPL as well? Well, then look elsewhere for a BSD-like licensed replacement. We wish you good luck while you’re at it. Honestly.
I do understand that the small and vocal minority of GPL-zealots can be annoying sometimes, and I agree that most of those bitching have never written a single line of code in their lives and are doing it only to raise the noise, but they do have a reason at the very least.
DeadFish Man
I thought they didn’t have to release it…I thought they only had to give it out to those who asked.
Accroding the GPLv2:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
Yellotab and Haiku aren’t GPL, but the GPL trolls will always invade message boards. OSNews has become swamped by GPL trolls
Well, one might claim it has become swamped by anti-GPL trolls
One can claim a lot, and it’s usually not true, mind you.
Besides that, there is quite a bit of LGPL-licensed code in Haiku. And apparently also some GPL-code. The latter one seems problematic to me, considering the reasoning for choosing the MIT/X11 license for most of Haiku.
Also, I am sure if a person releases their code under the BSD licence, I am sure they’re actually quite proud of the fact, if their code is chosen to be part of a large product – a little, “look, my work is so good that even [corporation] saw fit adopting it”.
I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’d feel pretty proud – screw ‘giving back’, if all you’re interested as a developer is control over your project, you’re better of keeping the damn thing proprietary – regardless of what you think, your version will be forked, mutated, changed etc. regardless of which licence is used
I could care less that they have put up the source to most of these open source apps. It is nice, in the sense they are respecting the gpl, and other various licences involved. However, I would like to seem them release the source code to things like, their branch of Open Tracker, (they haven’t to my knowledge) which would genuinely give back to the community. They don’t have to distirbute it’s source as it is not gpl, but it seems like it would be a gesture of good will.
There is a lot of GPL-code in Zeta. There are some 3rd party tools to Zeta (mostly GNU-tools), and several of these are GPL’ed.
Do you really need SUCH tracker?????????
It will be evil’s gift. Or devil’s gift.
This piece of code is what kills all BeOS feeling.
Zeta is slow. Slow. SLOW. ZETA IS REALLY SLOW at 768 MB RAM Athlon 1700 GeForce2 with this Tracker.
And BeOS is blazingly, superfast at same system, even BeOS Dano, on which Zeta is based.
I’m very sorry, but this is trend I most dislike in nowadays software, be it Gnome, KDE or WinXP – “coolness” at price of slowness.
Zeta isn’t BeOS, YT CEO’s was right when he told it.
To avoid all this vicious and undeserved criticism from these evil GPL zealots, why don’t they just remove all the GPL software from their OS?
I keep hearing about how amazing BeOs is. Surely they don’t need all this shitty GPL software do they?
Apparently BeOS has incredible multimedia support. That would still be the case if they removed XVid and Mplayer and all the other GPL media software wouldn’t it?
Surely they could remove CUPS and SANE without impacting the printing & scanning capabilities of the OS?
YT must have the resources to write replacements. Or is it in fact the case that the above is all bullshit and their OS would be an unusable piece of crap without GPL software? If so, it might be a good idea for the BeOS zealots to stop whining.
I know you’d all prefer to use a completely proprietary OS, but the fact is that there aren’t enough people who give a shit about BeOS to support that. So you’re stuck relying on free software. Bad luck.
The truth always hurts, but if you all mod this down fast enough you can probably forget it.
If I’m understanding the original article, YellowTab *has* been complying with the terms of the GPL contract, and thus the fuss by GPL zealots is just meaningless static, or maybe they were unhappy that before it was available on the website, they had to request the source directly from YT, or something.
But there’s also a general feeling that everybody ought to release everything, which really is nonsense. YT is a company out to make money. If they don’t make a profit, they go out of business, their people will have to look for jobs elsewhere, and there will be no more Zeta.
The Haiku people are doing the open source OS (but mostly under BSD license, I believe, not GPL), not YT. I expect that YT will increase their use of Haiku as it matures, and maybe even do a full-blown distribution of Haiku, but I could be wrong–YT may want to continue with proprietary software, or a mix of proprietary and open source–it’s their decision.
Most of Haiku is MIT/X11-licensed (not BSD-license, though they are very alike).
But quite a bit is LGPL-licensed. I haven’t found anything GPL, but I haven’t read all the licenses. I’ll leave that to people who care more about it than I do.
One thing that makes me wonder about Haiku’s choice of licence… Being MIT/X11, so that other companies can use the code without contributing back, doesn’t that mean we could see massive fragmentation of Haiku?
As in, Linux has it bad enough with the hundreds of slightly different distros, but at least when one distro changes something, the others can follow suit if they wish (because it’s GPLed).
Whereas with Haiku, I can envisage 10 Haiku ‘distros’ with their own closed modifications, leading to binary incompatibility and packaging nightmares for developers and end-users.
It’s a worst-case scenario, yes, and I’m not advocating the GPL (there could be a better way), but I’d hate to see a promising project like Haiku go all scrappy and messy when it gets big — as companies try to cash-in and make their own slightly incompatible versions…
Well, as I understand the mind of Alex and Michael, the whole idea is to open up for proprietary versions of Haiku.
So fragmentation is almost the goal, one might say.
They just can’t use the Haiku-name as far as I understand.
You can say like mmu_man with piece of faith of hypocricy, don’t know, that it is always was possible to reuest sources from YT.
And it was always possible for YT to absolutely ignore those requests.
“Who knows what happens with those e-mails?”
So, truning those sources diffs public seems in this situation only good way to satisfy GPL-requirements
Can’t say I like the idea of a fragmented Haiku. I’d like them to see them take a very strong stance on their name and associated specifications, as is done with OpenGL. I want one Haiku. The best Haiku. A Haiku that’s well managed and doesn’t drift or add bloat.
If someone wants to build their own Haiku source derived nightmare, I don’t think they should be able to claim Haiku as part of the name. Haiku compatible, maybe, but only if it supports Haiku 100%. Anything beyond this and Haiku should force them to shut down.
If Haiku loses focus by allowing its identity to be watered down, we’ll end up with the nightmare the Linux crowd are tring to piece back together, and I don’t want to see that happen. I want Haiku to get it right first time, as putting the genie back inthe bottle is hard.
There is on this board a post made by Anonymous (IP: 198.152.150.—) which is modded -3. While a bit harsh, this
post still has a point. Read it for yourself.
I am quite amazed to see a whole bunch of readers calling anyone who care about the GPL, a GPL zealot or a GPL troll, yet at the same time modding down the only post contrary to their views. Oh! Talk about hypocrisy.
Ok, let’s see how quickly you can mod this down to -5…
…it’s composed primarily of trolls and people who like to flame (including some of the mods) and always has been. Welcome to the internet. You show me a nice polite forum, and I’ll show you a forum where nobody goes.
A little off-topic (but the previous thread is really a little too old, now)… For those wanting to try the Zeta 1.1 LiveCD on Virtual PC or similar emulators, it’s really quite simple: double-click zetaboot.img, thus activating the disk image; then, from there, copy boot.img to the same Zeta LiveCD folder as the other images and rename zetacd.img to zetacd.iso; create a new virtual machine, start VPC and capture boot.img as the floppy disk and zetacd.iso as the CD – and voilà, Zeta starts without problems! If you want a bigger screen resolution, hit the space bar at the beginning and select a safe video mode. Personally, I tried it on Mac OS X 10.4.2 and Virtual PC 7.0.2.
… OK, back to the GPL discussion (which I think is a good thing, if properly used)… 🙂