Re: [PLUG] the challenge (temp)

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 12:11 AM Steve Litt via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> Seriously, check out https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86
> and then contemplate whether this is the kind of project you'd want to
> be associated with, even as just a user.
>

I do find it amusing that BSD and Gentoo have managed to annoy
upstreams enough that they're being directly targeted in license
agreements.  Depending on how things are implemented it is a bit
questionable whether they could actually enforce that requirement if
non-conforming binaries aren't being distributed.  Then again, based
on the Oracle Android lawsuit that found that APIs /might/ be
copyrightable, if nothing else such an action would probably make a
lot of lawyers wealthy and probably result in a ruling that nobody
ends up liking.  (An appeals court found APIs copyrightable, the
Supreme Court sided with Google but was ambiguous on that particular
point finding it moot in that case.)

Neither BSD nor Gentoo seem to want to package Pale Moon so we
probably won't get to see this argued out anytime soon.  BSDs stance
on system libraries and upstream branding appears similar to Gentoo's,
which isn't much of a surprise since they have similar package
managers/repositories.  Back in the day Gentoo only adopted the
Iceweasel branding when users set a flag to make a
binary-redistributable system (if the browser was on any Live CDs then
it would have used the Iceweasel branding there).  Gentoo's general
policy at the time was that it distributes unmodified sources, along
with patches/scripts/etc, and since the patching happens on the user's
system and no further redistribution occurs, there was no need to have
a license to distribute the resulting modified binaries (which would
not comply with the trademark license).  It seems that Pale Moon
doubled down in their license agreement language, though as I said it
is questionable whether it could be enforced as long as no
redistribution of the trademarked material is happening.  (When
licenses are particularly harsh on redistribution Gentoo simply
disables mirroring and fetches everything directly from upstream.
Back in the day this meant installing Java required users to click
through a website, download a tarball, and stick it in the distfile
cache themselves.)

I get that upstreams don't like bugs caused by using libraries they
didn't bundle.  I don't think that the trend towards bundling a copy
of every library on the system, and even more recently bundling a copy
of the entire OS with every application, is an ideal solution...

-- 
Rich
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