Re: [OFF TOPIC] BK license change

Simon Fowler
2002-04-22T07:33:48Z

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On Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at 09:57:15AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Well, now seems like a great time to discuss this. Ha.
>
> It's come to our attention that commercial companies are abusing BK under
> the openlogging rules. To avoid paying for the product, they either put
> in no comments or obscure comments. That is a violation of the license,
> but good luck proving that they are doing it on purpose.
>
> The real issue is that we know from past history that companies make
> changes to GPLed software and then delay access to those changes as
> long as they can (the GPL allows for a "reasonable" amount of lag,
> whatever that is).
>
> The intent of the openlogging requirement was to allow people to work
> out in the open on free software, at no charge. The intent was never
> to allow people to work on free software without giving their changes
> back. I'm not commenting on people's rights to hide their changes,
> they can do whatever they want, but I *am* saying that we don't have
> support closed use for free.
>
> I'm considering a change to the BKL which says that N days after a
> changeset is made, that changeset (and its ancestory) must be available
> on a public bk server. In other words, put a hard limit on how long
> you may hide.
>
> The time period has to be long enough to cover security fixes, DaveM
> raised that issue. I'm thinking 90 days.
>
> Note: public server is not limited to bkbits.net. Any public server is
> fine, so long as it is stable, well known, and available ~95% of the time.
>
Does 'public server' imply that the server is running bkd for
anonymous access? I have several small projects under bk that I keep
in repositories that are accesible to people with an account on my
server, but not to anyone else - would this be a license violation?
(I have no problem with openlogging - it just encourages me to make
/intelligent/ checkin comments, or some approximation thereof)

I'd prefer not to have to run bkd on my server if I don't /have/ to.
Minimising the number of services available to be cracked, and all
that . . .

Simon Fowler

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