OpenBSD et al, New Zealand: Booze, Linux Conf, KapCon

[tcpip]

Organised Theo de Raadt to speak at VPAC at the conclusion of the OpenBSD hackathon. Apart from discussing the work that the various developers did at the network hackathon, there was also discussion on the OpenBSD approach ("we don't care what people use it for... but I hear some people are using OpenSSH"), various forks and divergence in the BSD code. It has also led me to spend some thinking about the difference between various copyleft licenses (of which GPL is the exemplar) and permissive licenses (such as the BSD license). The latter, I believe, can be appropriated by proprietary licenses, whereas the former ensure the same freedoms are preserved in derivative works.

Since the OpenBSD conf have taken the silver bird to Wellington, where I certainly hope to catch up with a number of people of that fair town. Purchased four bottles of Moet & Chandon, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, a bottle of Talisker, two bottles of NZ vodka, a bottle of Disarro, a bottle of Chambord, and some Frangelico at New Zealand's very generous duty free. Staying at the former Waterloo Hotel, with its dilapidated deco style. Have made it to Linux Conf (where I am typing this) and where I'll be spending the following week. Interested in the game programming miniconf. Have discovered that KapCon is on as well next weekend, so will take the opportunity to go to that as well.

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Veuve Clicquot, you say? Someone clearly has a taste for the classics. But champagne aside... there's such a thing as a proper NZ vodka? I've got to say I'm intrigued by the very concept. In fact, I have an odd difficulty visualising it. But that's what makes it appealing.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Someone clearly has a taste for the classics.

I certainly fall in the category of 'old European' :)

I have horrible memories of New Zealand vodka in the eighties; since then things seem to have improved. I picked up a couple of bottles of 42 Below with feijoa, primarily for my partner because she's a vodka fan. Look forward to a taste.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Will look forward to seeing you at KapCon!

Unfortunately, I can't take the time off work go to LCA, but I might see if I can catch up with some of the attendees at social occasions. I suspect my son (ferrouswheel) will be there though

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That would be excellent. I'm hoping sometime during the week to organise a gathering of my not-insubstantial collection of Wellington people so we consume that vast quantity of champagne I've purchased.

Besides, I turn 42 in a couple of day, if I need an excuse! :)

[amphigori.livejournal.com]

Oh, yay! Kapcon! Will be good to see you there. I haven't seen you but the one time nearly 6 years ago. :D

[luciusmalfoy.livejournal.com]

Hahwhat you're in town! LOL

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

You either think ideological purity, or usefulness, are more important in software licences. I've always been a pragmatist - it surprises me not at all that you tend to the ideologue. There are plenty of cases in which the copyleft licences simply render the use of the software impractical, which for me seems to undermine the point of open sourcing it in the first place.

[beagl.livejournal.com]

Definitely interested in helping you with that champagne. :)

[beagl.livejournal.com]

Fuck licenses, I release my writing and code into the public domain. I don't want to own it or be responsible for it, I just hope people find value in it.

[mr-orgue.livejournal.com]

*joins the YAY KAPCON crowd*

Look forward to seeing you again!

[fluffyblanket.livejournal.com]

Amid the plethora of initials the only thing I can understand is
Moet & Chandon, and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot !
: D

[loic.livejournal.com]

You see, I find ideological purity vs usefulness falls the opposite way with permissive vs copyleft licenses. The strong advocates of BSD licenses I know talk about freedom in very libertarian terms. For me if you're going to be developing software as a community activity it's pragmatic and useful to agree on a set of inclusive social norms and expectations.

I think license preference is ultimately about what your ideology is and what you find useful rather than choosing ideology over usefulness. If you're more on the communal, socialistic end of things a copyleft is more likely to seem pragmatic, if you're more on the libertarian end of things then BSD or public domain is more likely to seem pragmatic.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I quite get that there are ideological arguments either way for copyleft or BSD.
But I think if you are arguing about whether copyleft or BSD style are pragmatically better for the community, I think as soon as your argument is about the value to the whole community you are already in ideological territory. When I'm talking about pragmatic value, I'm talking about only value to a generic individual programmer, and copyleft can make code reuse impractical for some projects. Copyleft may well be the better pragmatic choice for the community as a whole (or not, I'm sure there are pro-BSD arguments to be made there too) - but value to the community as a whole is an ideological goal (albeit a laudable one).

[loic.livejournal.com]

I guess the value of community is an ideological question as is the kind of community you want. The BSD operating system community is a lively dynamic one, but their community values are different from those of the Linux community. BSD community members have more liberty to chose to share some of their code and keep some of it proprietary. I can see how that community attracts people of certain ideologies whereas the Linux community attracts different kinds of people.

What I find most interesting is that while both copyleft projects (eg: Linux, MySQL, GCC) and non-copyleft projects (eg: FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, PHP) have been successful, it seems to me that copyleft projects have been adopted and embraced more by big business than the equivalent non-copyleft projects.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Kim says Thursday might be good. :)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Describing my position as 'ideological purity' is rather loaded. I am very much interested in the practical effects (after all, the general philosophy I adhere to is called formal pragmatics), and in the long-term I consider that there is problems with the BSD-model licenses; I may be wrong on this as I haven't thought about it too deeply, but I can see good open work being done then a proprietary stack being added. In the longer term I am sure you can see how that can be problematic for open development.

I would be interested in hearing how copyleft licenses have been a problem in your experience.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, that falls into the permissive license stack, rather than the copyleft versions. Maybe the 2-clause BSD license. Part of the idea would be to provide some legal protection to yourself (e.g., "This comes with no warranties" etc). As mentioned my preference is to the copyleft licenses.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Perfectly good things to understand :)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Aye, it's been a very long time indeed! So you're in Wellington atm? I thought you were in ChCh? Silly me.

Come to the house of beagl and kim on Thursday　：）

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Ｉhad no</i＞ idea it was on until I picked up a couple of books from Arty Bees (Fringeworthy and Human Occupied Landfill). Awesome to discover that it was on whilst I was over here...

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I've got a back burner project at the moment where I am altering a BSD licensed library to work with some vendor specific interfaces, and if it was a copyleft licence I either couldn't do it, or would have to at least start clarifying licence conditions before I even started coding, which for a variety of reasons might probably kill my project before I even got started. If it was something where I was under a clear NDA, then absolutely copyleft would mean I would avoid that library for this project, which given there only seems to be a single open source library that does what I need, would probably kill the whole project for me.

There are certainly cases in which good open source work is done and then proprietary elements are added. I think pragmatically when this happens it is clearly a win for code-sharing, and making the life of coders easier, the basic goal of open source -- and while I can see *arguments* that that could be a problem in the long term for open development, I think once you start considering long term sustainability as a goal you are already in the realms of the ideological, and once you start claiming one model or the other is better for sustainability on relatively limited actual data (and a lot of supposition), you are very clearly taking an ideological position.

There are plenty of arguments either way for copyleft vs BSD - I'm not arguing that either is better in the long run, because that gets me into a big ideological argument with which I'm not particularly keen to engage (not because I don't have a position, but because it gets into lots of speculation from limited data very quickly). Rather, I'm arguing that the arguments for copyleft over BSD all basically take the form of long term community benefit (and are thus ideological and a bit speculative), while some of the arguments for BSD over copyleft make it preferable from the point of view of the coder actually using the library to build stuff. If I am a coder who wants to simply wants to build something, there are cases when I would use a BSD library but not a copyleft one, there are no cases where I would use a copyleft library but not a BSD one, thus BSD licences have higher pragmatic value. Whether the loss of that pragmatic value for ideological goals of community utility is a separate argument, as is the argument about whether copyleft actually achieves the higher community sustainability it sets out to achieve.

Now, you know me - just because an argument is ideological doesn't mean I think it is wrong. But I do think that arguments that rely on the ideological arguments while ignoring the short term pragmatic ones are intrinsically suspect.

[kimeros.livejournal.com]

Yes, we'd love to see you and Luke here.

61A Pembroke Road. Anytime after 6.00pm

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I quite agree. Licencing rules are intrinsically about the sort of community you want to have, and the rules you choose will change the sort of community you have.
One way of expressing my 'pragmatic' issues with copyleft might be this - sometimes copyleft forces you to consider your relationship to the community, and to make technical decisions based on it, when you may not want to, or may not want to do it yet. BSD licences do so far less. Just in the last 5 minutes, I've read a mailing list thread for a potential collaborative project with several people saying they just won't participate if it is copyleft, and some arguing that simply on the basis that they don't want to have to care about those issues that early in the project.

THe point that copyleft projects seem to have got more big business adoption is an interesting one. Limited sample space, though, and I'd be not so sure about some of it. And it is certainly an argument that gets rapidly complicated. For one thing, there is all the BSD licence code that is simply incorporated into commercial OSes (eg Mac OS X) rather than distributed as a separate OS product. For copyleft people, this probably represents the failure of the BSD licence, for BSD people, the success of the BSD licence.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering whether with a GPL or similar version of copyleft software one could not write hooks and callbacks for a thin glue that attaches to a vendor specific requirement..

When it comes to the long-term effects, I think I'll have to do the economic modeling. That will probably clarify my thoughts and make their expression easier.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Of course you can write hooks and callbacks for a vendor specific requirement, providing the vendor has appropriate requirements. Sometimes this will be practical, sometimes not. And also providing the appropriate licence allows it for your intended use (LGPL is usually fine for that sort of thing, GPL not always).

I think in general I'd be fairly suspicious of economic modelling. I suspect simplistic economic modelling would say that there is no incentive to fork a GPL project, for example, but it happens all the time.

And in the real world, of course bits of software with differing licences are often intimately linked (look at WebKit, BSD with crucial parts in LGPL, for example), and the economic incentives are often complicated to work out (open sourcing WebKit seemed a very different decision in 2005, than it does now after the iPhones release when it is the major source for mobile browser code, for example), there are multiple economic effects to be considered (is Apple losing competitively by allowing its mobile browser rivals easy access to good code, or is it protecting itself from other browser code introducing compatibility problems?).

It is also interesting to consider that the GPL has in the past gained community value from enforcement against (either mistaken or dishonest) bad actors, such the WRT firmware issue. Another wrinkle for the modelling - users who either irrationally don't understand the licence conditions, or gamble they won't get caught violating them.

In practice, I think the licence distinctions are not as crucial as either ideological side says they are, anyway. Both ideological stances, as is usual, oversimplify to make their case. I like BSD because it bugs me less, and I think the copyleft ideological case isn't as strong as adherents claim. But it would certainly be interesting for someone to do a good job of the economic modelling.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Of course you can write hooks and callbacks for a vendor specific requirement, providing the vendor has appropriate requirements. Sometimes this will be practical, sometimes not.

Cool. I'm not entirely barking up the wrong tree then :)

I suspect simplistic economic modelling would say that there is no incentive to fork a GPL project, for example, but it happens all the time.

Simplistic economic modelling operates with ideal assumptions. For starters this would be time dependent which simple models don't account for. Given a payment-for-service orientation, I can certainly think of a number of reasons that forking occurs both in permissive and copyleft licenses.

But it would certainly be interesting for someone to do a good job of the economic modelling.

*nods* I think I'll start with a Walrasian auction...

[amphigori.livejournal.com]

Oh thank you both! But I'll be madly finishing my Kapcon game, Kapcon costumes and preparing to host some of the Aucklander's flying down. :D

[amphigori.livejournal.com]

Nope! I've only been to ChCh once, really. Once and a half.

I'm furiously trying to finish my Kapcon game - first time writing or running a game for a con (or, really, a game full stop). I've got pre-con nerves!

Are you coming to pre-con drinks on Friday? 7pm former location of Syn bar.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh noes! Guess I'll see you at KapCon instead. Probably *won't* be going to the pre-con drinks, but we shall see...