RMS says: "Use BSD, for goodness sake!"

[Paul Robinson]

On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 05:51:43AM +0200, Pedro F. Giffuni wrote:

> The one GPL'd code that we include and that is more poisonous
> than any other is GNU readline. GNU readline FYI is a library
> but it is not covered by the LGPL but by the GPL (this was done
> on purpose) which means that any utility that uses it "borks"
> into GPL'd. 

OK, a bit of a backtrack here, but at least one person who has a better 
handle on dependancies within the project on GPL than me suggested readline 
wasn't used, and could be rm'ed with little effort or impact on FBSD.
 
Just to wrap it up completely, and kill this thread finally (I actually had
a sleepless night the other night because of this thread - well, mainly the
e-mail I got, so I for one look forward to it's death) I think it might be
useful to have a recap of the cycle it underwent:

- Somebody suggested RMS was making spurious claims about GPL, BSD, Unix,
etc. and that we may wish to clarify the FreeBSD position with regards to
the GPL code used. Perhaps, remove the GPL code? What would the impact be?  
Would it even be possible?

- A list was drawn up of code in 4-STABLE that was in base and GPL'ed. These 
were in /usr/src/contrib and /usr/src/gnu

- I noted there were only 35 or so apps, and several people agreed that all
but a few of them could probably get rm'ed, moved to ports, etc. if it
became policy for FBSD to remove GPL. This was a kind of "what will break if
I were to type 'rm -rf /usr/src/gnu; cd /usr/src; make buildkern
KERNCONF=mykernconf' ?" exercise. Not a policy decision - just a
clarification of the issues.

- Confusion reigned for a while over some apps (specifcially awk) where the 
removal would break things including POSIX compliance. Then somebody pointed 
out that in -CURRENT, awk is not GPL, it's one-true-awk which is BSD, so in 
this case, the argument was pointless. Next time, I'll remember to check 
-CURRENT and not -STABLE. :-)

- There was some discussion about porting some apps over from OpenBSD based 
on their non-GPL issues, but some work would have to be done to bring their 
version up to the FBSD specification (e.g. man)

- Everybody agrees that moving away from gcc is a nightmare

- I got lots of highly abusive e-mail off-list

To be honest, I think it's a useful exercise that got out of control because
of people's ideological or passionate beliefs. The impact in -CURRENT of
typing 'rm -rf /usr/src/gnu' is relatively low for most users who don't
write code. If you are developing, need CVS and gcc, you can already get it
all out of ports. For the typical web-server install, it wouldn't be
noticed. Well, ports would be useless, so you'd need to install Apache as a 
package, but that's no bad thing for most admins.

So, that's it really. You can have a GPL-free FreeBSD with some drawbacks. 
man won't have all the functionality you might use, you'll need to use 
tendra or the intel compiler (the latter having significant performance 
advantages over gcc) if you want to develop, and you might have a problem 
submitting patches or CVS'ing code. Some other stuff will disappear, but you 
can grab it out of ports if you need it.

But for a non-developer profile, GPL-free FBSD is something that doesn't 
need patches (I was very confused by the calls for patches - do you really 
want one for an rm? Crikey...) and can be put in place quickly.

On the bottom of my now rather extensive todo-list is to tinker with this
some more, and perhaps others will too - in fact I know others will too. I'm
certainly hoping that people will stop with the off-list flame fest (don't
move it on the list - just stop it), I can get some more sleep, the position
is clarified, and the goal of moving to GPL is something that is in the
hands of each individual admin, and with some work could be quickly made
into the standard for the project.

Finally, the issue for me here is not that the GPL is bad or wrong - it's
that BSD is better.

:-)

Now, DIE THREAD! DIE! DIE! DIE! <stabs mutt with pen>. I'd much rather talk 
about those laser-wielding polar bears for a bit.

-- 
Paul Robinson