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List:       ruby-talk
Subject:    Re: GUI With Ruby
From:       "Bill Kelly" <billk () cts ! com>
Date:       2007-03-15 2:45:31
Message-ID: 0aba01c766ab$edfe3850$6442a8c0 () musicbox
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From: "Chad Perrin" <perrin@apotheon.com>
> On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 10:22:30PM +0900, Eleanor McHugh wrote:
>>
>> What this all boils down to at core is this: both BSD and GPL folks  
>> are good, decent people. BSD folks like to give gifts to the  
>> individual developer whilst GPL folks prefer to give their gifts to  
>> the community of end-users - without the former the world would have  
>> a lot fewer clever developers, and without the latter we'd all be  
>> stuck with proprietary tools of dubious provenance.
> 
> I don't entirely agree with this.  The FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and
> other BSD-based OS projects prove that one need not exercise legal
> control over distribution to ensure that the open source code stays
> publicly available.  About 15,000 ports in the FreeBSD ports tree see to
> that, at the very least.

I don't see how that example would be applicable to the cases
of open source -> closed source that are plaguing the Quake II
community these days, though.

Quake II is ten years old this year.  id Software originally
released the "game" under a custom open-source license, while
keeping the "engine" private.  (Many years later, all of the
source for the game+engine was released under the GPL.)

The original custom open source license under which the 
customizable 'game' portion of the code was released, was not
very clear on whether the source had to be kept open for
modified/derivative works.

Personally, I think the GPL should be used sparingly.  But in
the situation the Quake II community now finds itself in, I
definitely wish the 'game' source had been released under the
GPL from the very beginning.

What we have now, are numerous game modification modules in
binary form, long abandoned by their authors.  Often we're 
simply unable to locate any current contact information for
the author to even ask whether they might now consider 
releasing the source after all this time; but in other cases
the authors have simply refused to release the source to
their mod--and keep in mind their code is a derivative work
of the original open source code.

So now we have situations like the following, where not 
only are there numerous little bugs in the mod code that
we would like to fix and features we'd like to improve upon;
but we have serious security vulnerabilities like the 
following that are being discovered:

http://secur1ty.net/advisories/002-Multiple_Vulnerabilities_In_OSP_Tourney_For_Quake_II.txt

And the above is an example of a mod where the author has
reportedly flatly refused to open the source.

So we're left with either enacting hacky workarounds to
mitigate the security flaws, or disabling key features of
the mod, or not allowing the mod to be played anymore at
all on our servers... or maybe hacking the binary--which
no-one has time for.

And yes--It's just a game.  So it's not like the end of the
world or anything... But still.  What a drag.

So anyway; I often avoid the GPL, but this is a very
non-hypothetical example where I've realized I really wish
the 'game' source had been released GPL from the very 
beginning.

From my point of view, we have a very concrete example
of a case where after a decade, it's become apparent that
a license that would have required the source stay open
would have been far preferable to one that allowed what
was originally open source to become closed source.


Regards,

Bill


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