08.30.07
Still No Respect… OpenSUSE Forum vs the FSF and the GPLv3 Again
“Never forget where you came from”
There’s not much love for the FSF, especially when the direction one takes is deviation from freedom while at the same time building upon freedom. O’Reilly and Web 2.0 may be one example of this. Google is another. Novell is taking SuSE down a similar route and even its community (OpenSUSE) shows little or no respect to required defenses against looming threat.
One thing that a friend of mine has noticed about the SUSE forums is they never lose the opportunity to trash the FSF. Here they go again…
“One of the funniest things I recall about copyrights and licensing is when Sun put their copyright in the shell script /bin/true. It used to be just an empty file.because by default an empty shell script will return true.”
“I just looked at /bin/true, and it’s worse now. It’s a binary compiled from C code with help option and can display version and copyright information, thanks to the FSF.
”
As my friend says, “I don’t suppose they will produce a citation as to where the FSF forced Sun to compile /bin/true and include copyright information.”
Here is what he calls the “FUD Detector”:
01. Invent a non-existent problem
02. Blame the FSF
If anybody reads these forums or participates in the OpenSUSE project, consider this a request for a citation. Where does it say that the FSF forced SUN to do anything?
Again, as my friend puts it, “It seems to be whatever the subject, someone comes up with ‘yea if only for the FSF doing so-and-so’. This [is a] quote in a thread titled ‘Gplv3 Arrives, But Nobody Seems To Care’.”
As another example from the forum, consider this:
“Funny, but when I first read the FSF rant this morning about the iPhone,” [says elsewhere]
No love for the Free Software Foundation, after all it has given for free? This is the expected response from Novell shareholders, but not from active contributors, so it’s rather disappointing.
In other news, SugarCRM brings to light what is probably the largest GPLv3-licensed program so far.
Version 5.0 will be licensed under GPLv3, where previously the company used its own Sugar Public License, which was a derivation of the Mozilla Public License.
From the press release:
SugarCRM Inc. has said that Sugar Community Edition 5.0 beta is ready for download and testing by the Sugar community. Sugar Community Edition 5.0 is being released under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3), a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation.
The thread in the OpenSUSE forum was titled “Gplv3 Arrives, But Nobody Seems To Care”, but some beg to differ. GPLv3 is growing very fast (and too fast for some company’s comfort).
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.