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<div>Can we bring back Dan Quayle?<br></div><div><br></div>
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On Wednesday, January 9, 2019, 11:42:53 PM PST, Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:
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<div>More fascinating open source istory from Rob Landley, who's a veritable<br>cornucopia of such things.<br><br>----- Forwarded message from Rob Landley <<a href="mailto:rob@landley.net" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">rob@landley.net</a>> -----<br><br>Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2019 18:31:45 -0600<br>From: Rob Landley <<a href="mailto:rob@landley.net" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">rob@landley.net</a>><br>To: <a href="mailto:license-review@lists.opensource.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">license-review@lists.opensource.org</a><br>Subject: Re: [License-review] For Approval: Convertible Free Software<br> License, Version 1.3 (C-FSL v1.3)<br>Reply-To: License submissions for OSI review<br> <<a href="mailto:license-review@lists.opensource.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">license-review@lists.opensource.org</a>><br><br>On 1/9/19 5:04 PM, Bruce Perens wrote:<br>> I have helped a large government lab and their legal counsel to do a license<br>> transition on Open Source with a big external developer community. We know well<br>> how to do it.<br>> <br>> XFree86 /forked /twice when license decisions prompted the developers to decide<br>> that their current management was an impediment to the project. It didn't<br>> destroy the project either time, it just made a particular organization<br>> irrelevant to its future.<br><br>I meant it destroyed xfree86.org, which is so dead the mailing list archives<br>went away (all the mailman links from <a href="http://xfree86.org/sos/lists.html " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://xfree86.org/sos/lists.html </a>are<br>404). The code survived, forked under new maintainership and a new name, with<br>many of the same developers and inheriting pretty much all the users.<br><br>Heck, you could view Linux as a fork of the minix develoment community: in 1991<br>comp.os.minix had a large backlog of patches that couldn't go upstream due for<br>IP/licensing reasons, Linus posted a new tiny kernel to the minix list, people<br>ported the minix extensions they maintained to Linux and Linus merged them, and<br>the existing developer base switched over en masse to the new codebase because<br>he merged patches and Tanenbaum didn't. That's why Linux went from zero to<br>hosting the majority of all websites in under 3 years: it inherited an existing<br>development community maintaining a large pile of mature feature patches, and<br>provided different license terms that those developers preferred.<br><br>That's the context in which the tanenbaum-torvalds debate happened (on<br>comp.os.minix, when tanenbaum came back from vacation at the end of January 1992):<br><br><a href="https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html</a><br><br>And then Linux got kicked of the minix usenet group and got its own mailing list<br>at the end of the year:<br><br><a href="http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1991.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1991.html</a><br><br>So Linux wasn't really quite entirely its own project for its first 2 years. (He<br>wrote it under Minix, used the minix filesystem, posted everything to the minix<br>mailing list... and swallowed the minix development community whole. And his<br>original motivation for writing his own kernel is minix's microkernel<br>architecture dropped characters using a 2400 baud modem so dialing into the<br>university microvax to _read_ the usenet archive didn't work reliably in minix.<br>And then needed to upload/download files, so taught it to read/write his minix<br>filesystem, and then he didn't want to reboot to ls/mkdir/rm when<br>uploading/downloading so taught it to run bash as a child process, and _that_<br>turned out to be 95% of the syscalls he needed to run gcc... "My terminal<br>program grew legs." - Linus Torvalds)<br><br>What is and isn't a new project gets a little... fuzzy at times. As an extreme<br>case, buildroot started life as the uclibc test suite (test uClibc by building a<br>uClibc toolchain and building packages against uClibc). It's first commit was in<br>2001:<br><br> <a href="https://git.busybox.net/buildroot/commit/?id=ffde94bd2ca2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://git.busybox.net/buildroot/commit/?id=ffde94bd2ca2</a><br><br>And I didn't create a buildroot mailing list and kick the traffic _off_ the<br>uClibc mailing list until 2006:<br><br> <a href="http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2006-July/012219.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2006-July/012219.html</a><br><br>By which point the buildroot traffic on the uClibc mailing list had essentially<br>steamrollered uClibc. (The 5 year gap between launch and forcing the popular new<br>thing to leave the nest was structurally really bad for the original project. To<br>the point buildroot added glibc support, and musl-libc arose to fill its niche,<br>and _then_ somebody on another continent stepped up and decided to maintain his<br>own fork of the dead thing, which I thought was really silly to do but it's his<br>time: <a href="http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/uclibc/2017-March/049251.html " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/uclibc/2017-March/049251.html </a>and now<br>there's a uClibc-ng which has nothing to do with uclibc.org, but _buildroot_<br>says it's the official uClibc now as far as buildroot is concerned... does that<br>make it the same project? I honestly have no idea! There's a sort of<br>frankenstein "it's alive, we recycled 60% of the parts, the lightning bolt<br>revived the corpse it last tuesday!" thing going on...)<br><br>Similarly, when Fabrice Bellard started adding multiple backends to his tinycc<br>project (so it could produce code for multiple targets), he essentially had it<br>generating x86 bytecodes and then converting them to other processors' machine<br>codes, and he went "wait, this would let me run wine on powerpc mac hardwar",<br>and the resulting project was QEMU which sucked all the _developers_ out of<br>tinycc (and thus the original project stalled hard because Fabrice wasn't<br>putting any more time into it, even though <a href="https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html</a><br>demonstrated _compelling_ todo items for the project that sadly never quite got<br>done because qemu ate all Fabrice's cycles)...<br><br>With tccboot and uclibc, loss of the original maintainer's time killed the<br>project (but other maintainers did new versions later, both of which are still<br>pretty darn moribund development-wise and a shadow of what it used to be, but if<br>people still _want_ to use that old thing they have an option).<br><br>With xfree86 and cdrecord, other people picked up the slack. Heck, Bruce and I<br>argued over maintainership of busybox, resulting in the project passing on to an<br>unrelated third party (Denys Vlasenko) who's done fine with it.<br><br>With xfree86->x.org an earlier maintainer came back, with cdrecord->wodim other<br>people stepped up.<br><br>Meanwhile, Google's boringssl is a hard fork of openssl that mostly removed<br>stuff and is deployed on an order of magnitude more devices than the original<br>version (due to android shipping a billion devices a year) but the original<br>still exists and is used! Is it a new project or not? Who can say?<br><br>tl;dr: what this license is trying to do with its "original developers" nonsense<br>does not match reality, even a little. (At least according to this hobbyist<br>computer historian's understanding.) It is _conceptually_ broken.<br><br>Rob<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>License-review mailing list<br><a href="mailto:License-review@lists.opensource.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">License-review@lists.opensource.org</a><br><a href="http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-review_lists.opensource.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-review_lists.opensource.org</a><br><br>----- End forwarded message -----<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>conspire mailing list<br><a href="mailto:conspire@linuxmafia.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">conspire@linuxmafia.com</a><br><a href="http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire</a><br></div>
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