The demise of MicroBSD

[Posted February 27, 2003 by ris]

The MicroBSD project has shut down following allegations of copyright violations from members of the OpenBSD project. The web site now contains only a letter of explanation, which is not likely to stay long. LWN introduced MicroBSD in the June 6, 2002 edition of the Distributions page. MicroBSD's 0.4 Mini and Full x86 release version were announced May 28, 2002. Many software projects come and go in a year, but few go out with this kind of fanfare.

This deadly.org article has a discussion with links and comments and plenty of recriminations. The short story is that OpenBSD accused MicroBSD of stealing code by changing instances of "openbsd" to "microbsd" in cvs source code. The MicroBSB crew has chosen not to argue these allegations, but to close shop and move on.

Reading through the comments it became clear not everyone seems to know what is and is not covered by copyright. OpenBSD's Copyright Policy is one of the least restrictive of all open source licenses. Giving proper credit for the code is really the only requirement.

Free software does not mean unlicensed software. The Open Source Initiative lists dozens of OSI Certified licenses. Most, including the GNU General Public License (GPL), are more restrictive than OpenBSD's Copyright Policy. Anyone leading an open source project needs to be aware of any licensing issues that go along with any code they use. It's not just the law, its polite.

Copyright violations are just an accident

Posted Feb 27, 2003 20:46 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Reading through the comments, I did not get the impression there was any misunderstanding of copyright -- just sloppiness. The MicroBSD/OpenBSD conflict seems to be a case of accidental copyright violation.

Someone attempted to change "OpenBSD" to "MicroBSD" in places in the code where it made sense, e.g. in a phrase like "You are reading code maintained by the OpenBSD project", and accidentally also changed lines that said "This code is derived from OpenBSD. Make sure OpenBSD gets credit for it."

When I look at how poor the communication is on the web page announcing the demise of MicroBSD, it is easy to believe the MicroBSD developers are that sloppy.