The case of the unwelcome attribution [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
September 19, 2007

A couple of weeks ago, LWN examined the dispute with the OpenBSD project over the copyright notices placed in (and removed from) the versions of the Atheros wireless network driver intended for eventual merging into the mainline Linux kernel. At that time, the files with the improperly removed license text had never made it anywhere near the mainline repository and an effort was being made to fix the problem. It really seemed like the whole issue should end then.

So why does a perusal of the OpenBSD lists (and, often, unfortunately, linux-kernel as well) turn up gems like these?

The rights and recognition of one of our own developers (reyk@) have been molested, and all we've done as a community is to participate in useless flames and blog postings. Theo has thrown himself, once again, against the spears of the Linux community and their legal vultures in order to protect our software freedoms. How many of us can say we've done our part to defend truly Free Software?

-- Jason Dixon

In the case of Ryek's [sic] code, the reverse is true but instead of admitting the mistake and making the needed corrections, FSF has pulled out their lawyers in hopes of getting away with the theft. All of this is being done *intentionally* in hopes that no one will put up a fight.

-- J.C. Roberts

I am really disappointed by all this. I would have expected that once such a patch is suggested (let alone being committed to some public place) some senior/respected/responsible Linux person would tell them what they are doing is wrong. Right from the start. I now see this is not how things work around here.

-- Can E. Acar

One might well think that the whole issue is still open. In fact, much of the dispute has gone by the wayside. The files with the improperly removed copyright notices never were going to make it to the mainline. The allegations by Theo de Raadt that taking a dual-license notice at its word was illegal have been pretty well laughed off; the OpenBSD camp is no longer asserting that claim. In fact, there is really only one point of dispute left:

The OpenBSD developers do not believe that developers Nick Kossifidis and Jiri Slaby should have added their own copyright attributions to the file ath5k_hw.c. Those two developers, it is claimed, have not done enough work on that file to have earned any copyright claims there.

For this offense, the OpenBSD community continues to flame, threaten lawsuits, and more. It seems that the developers named above should simply add some original haiku to the opening comments so that their right to claim copyright to portions of the file would be indisputable. Even in the absence of bad poetry, these developers have done some small amount of work and will certainly do more to get the code ready for Linux inclusion. Threatening legal action as a way of keeping them from adding their own attribution to the file seems gratuitous.

Part of what is going on here may be a simple culture clash. It seems that, in the BSD world, the adding of a copyright attribution to a file is usually done with the permission of the existing copyright holders. For a developer to just patch an attribution can come across as being a bit rude. In the Linux community, instead, developers simply add a copyright if they feel they have done enough work to justify it. It is hard to come up with cases where these attributions have gone in without merit.

Eben Moglen's one public contribution to this conversation includes this paragraph:

We understand that attribution issues are critically important to free software developers; we are accustomed to the strong feelings that are involved in such situations. In the fifteen years I have spent giving free legal help to developers throughout the community, attribution disputes have been, always, the most emotionally charged.

That is clearly what is going on here - this discussion is certainly happening on a strongly emotional level. But it must be said that the most harsh language seems to be flowing in one direction: from OpenBSD toward Linux. This was also true when the situation was reversed and an OpenBSD developer was found to have improperly relicensed some Linux code. In both cases (and in others) there is a clear sense that the OpenBSD people feel wronged by Linux.

One might well wonder why this is the case. To an extent, OpenBSD developers may be following the tone set by that project's leader. They may be irritated by the licensing asymmetry: BSD-licensed code can be incorporated into a GPL-licensed project, but GPL-licensed code cannot be brought into a BSD-licensed project. Or perhaps they feel that their system has been unfairly upstaged by an inferior rival. Whatever the reason, there is a certain hostility emanating from that camp which is unpleasant to see.

It would be a mistake, however, to let the public flaming obscure the fact that Linux and the BSD variants have much in common. There is certainly no shortage of Linux proponents whose "advocacy" makes our community look bad. BSD will have people like that too. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, there is a great deal of good will, information, and code which flows in both directions. We are all working toward the same ends, and there are plenty of places where we can learn from the BSD communities. This incident will pass, and hot heads will cool - before, undoubtedly, heating up again on a different topic - but, through it all, free software will just continue to get better.

Index entries for this article
Kernel	Development model

to post comments

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 1:01 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (15 responses)

BSD has forked several times and Linux has not forked at all. I have thought this is probably in the license, specifically that the GPL makes it harder to keep your changes private, not that the public BSD variants have gone private, but you can have private BSD variants, so I suspect there are some, other than Max OS X and whatever Microsoft copied.

Seems to me that this forces Linux developers to get along more; they can't just get huffy and take their marbles home.

Or maybe this is all baloney. I don't claim to actually know what I am talking about.

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 1:50 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

Dunno about the license, but one reason is probably that, let's face it, the BSDs split up because the splitters didn't get along with the splittees.

One would almost expect the "not getting along with others" meme to continue, and bingo, that's exactly what we see happening.

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 2:00 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

Sounds about what I was thinking. I guess I am curious about whether the license attracts argumentative sorts, argumentative sorts decided on that license, or it is pure luck of the draw that attracted the argumentative sorts to BSD.

Maybe also a feeling of when will their time come, seeing as how one BSD variant was about to go public when AT&T sued them, and I know that colored my decision to go with Linux way back when. Maybe that set the tone for the frustration to follow, when each fork made it that harder for them to regain their rightful throne.

Eh well, it's not a topic worthy of a thesis.

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 2:54 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (11 responses)

Note that each of the *BSDs produces a full OS distribution in addition to working on a kernel, so saying that Linux has never forked while the BSDs have is not really a fair comparison.

Many Linux distros started as forks of existing ones (e.g. Mandriva from Red Hat, Ubuntu from Debian, Slackware from SLS, etc).

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 4:28 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] (5 responses)

Note that each of the *BSDs produces a full OS distribution in addition to working on a kernel, so saying that Linux has never forked while the BSDs have is not really a fair comparison.

That's a valid point, but isn't it the case that all three major BSD kernels (Open/Free/Net) have diverged significantly? I haven't followed BSD development in a long while, but my impression was that the kernel architectures were no longer compatible. If so (and I could well be wrong!), that would be a significant difference from Linux--I don't think there are any true forks of the latter, just different versions (chronologically speaking) and lots and lots of out-of-tree variants.

Greg

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 7:06 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (3 responses)

You are absolutely right. The BSD advocates like to say that there are "only" 3 (now 5, including DragonFly and Darwin) incompatible forks of BSD, while there are dozens in Linux. But the linux kernel is still the same. You can install the "vanilla" linux kernel in any linux distro and get a working system. Binaries will also run, as long as the dependent library versions are compatible. The BSDs have meanwhile forked into completely incompatible systems with not even a pretence of commonality. If they had agreed to keep a common API for userspace programs, it would have been much better. Ironically, they all implement a reasonably good version of the Linux API, so they can run Linux binaries, but not one another's binaries.

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 12:26 UTC (Thu) by eSk (guest, #45221) [Link] (2 responses)

I see the coupling of kernel and user space development, allowing the APIs to be developed in tandem, as one of the strengths of the BSD world. A common kernel API would have defeated this completely. I've never seen a good reason to have binary compatibility interfaces between the BSDs. Recompiling the applications in question typically works out of the box. The main reason for having Linux compability mode is that many applications are Linux-binary only (acrobat reader, flash, etc.) Without a Linuxulator there is no way to run these apps on a BSD box.

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 13:37 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I see the coupling of kernel and user space development, allowing the APIs to be developed in tandem, as one of the strengths of the BSD world.

I keep seeing this claim, but what is the benefit? Increased stability? Fewer bugs? Any interesting features that could not have been developed with a stable API? Apart from certain very specific programs like ps and top, I don't see why the userland needs to be developed in tight integration with the kernel. And in fact, with 99% of the userland, it isn't. Developers routinely update their kernels every day but go weeks or months without updating the userland.

I tried FreeBSD-current a little while ago. They still have problems with removable media -- if you remove it without unmounting (which is easy to do by mistake with a USB memory stick), you panic the system. This has been true for years. Check the long thread on freebsd-stable in July, where Warner Losh says it is a very hard problem to fix because assumptions that media aren't removable are hardwired deep into the system; basically he says don't expect a fix. Then someone points out that it has been fixed in DragonFly, and Matt Dillon says all they did was repeatedly unplug peripherals and analyse core dumps. End of thread -- no replies. DragonFly is impressive for what a small team can do, but it has too many warts to be a regular desktop OS for most people. I am keeping an eye on it, though.

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 22:22 UTC (Thu) by ajross (guest, #4563) [Link]

That's a commonly-made point, but I'm not sure it's really borne out by evidence. From my perspective, the kernel/userspace interaction layer is far *more* robust in linux than it is in BSD. Think about things like the module subsystem, udev, hald, sysfs, NetworkManager, et. al. In theory, the "tight coupling" between the BSD kernel and userspace layers would make this sort of thing easier, yet this is one of the areas where BSD, frankly, compares very poorly.

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 12:15 UTC (Thu) by eSk (guest, #45221) [Link]

True. The BSD in-kernel architectures are not completely compatible. Some porting effort has to be employed in order to bring code from one kernel into another one---depending on the extent and type of code in question of course. There's still quite a bit of code flowing in between the kernel trees though (just look at the CVS commit messages). Perhaps more importantly, one of the projects may have a completely new architetural design that is getting polished and reaching a mature state proving its usefullness before other competing solutions in the other projects get phased out in favour of the superior one. This is pretty much a win-win situation.

Sure, in the Linux world one may have out-of-tree variants attempting sort of the same thing, but these variants will for the most part want to be short lived and get merged into mainline to easy the task of keeping things up to date. On the BSD side, on the other hand, the forkers are more inclined to follow through with their ideas fully without compromise, not necessarily aspiring to having the code merged back at a later stage. This can often create more interesting and radical changes (e.g., DragonflyBSD).

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 6:56 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (4 responses)

> Note that each of the *BSDs produces a full OS distribution in addition to
> working on a kernel, so saying that Linux has never forked while the BSDs
> have is not really a fair comparison.

But distributions compete amically, and core developers move from one to another pretty often. You don't have let's-burn-bridges forks, or follow-our-leader-maximo-to-the-death distros (ok, except for Ubuntu, and it's not a technical leader). Linux distributions have been known to cooperate and even merge.

The BSD forking process seems a lot more extreme

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 22:25 UTC (Thu) by ajross (guest, #4563) [Link]

With all due respect, OpenBSD is precisely a "let's-burn-bridges" fork. It began when Theo was ejected from the NetBSD team following a complicated and only partially public flame war.

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 23:46 UTC (Thu) by sflintham (guest, #47422) [Link]

I may be naive, and I'm certainly no Ubuntu fanb0i (I run it, and although it is slick in its way, I have had a number of issues which have certainly made me doubt its reputation for a polished environment), but is Ubuntu really a let's-burn-bridges fork? I could certainly see it has some kind of 'follow our leader' quality, but does that really have a serious technical impact? Not trying to be awkward, just asking - while I run it I certainly have no strong emotional investment in it...

The license?

Posted Sep 21, 2007 6:34 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Ow, seems I wasn't clear - when I was writing about distributions, I was writing about Linux distributions, which seem a lot less antagonistic than the various BSDs

The license?

Posted Sep 27, 2007 12:02 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

>But distributions compete amically

Amically is a too strong term, otherwise instead of having each distro reinventing the wheel for its installation tool, configuration tool, etc we would have only a few of these tools with higher quality..

The license?

Posted Sep 20, 2007 20:59 UTC (Thu) by amikins (guest, #451) [Link]

Actually, I think it's the other way around. Linux forks all the time, and vastly more often than BSD forks. People branch off and do their own development on independent trees that may or may not track mainline at all. Frequently they mostly do, but contain some combination of patches that haven't made it to Linus yet. The trick is, this is a good thing, and intentional. The danger is not, and has never been forking..

It's the ease with which you can merge forks later, and that's the real strength of the Linux kernel development community. All of these forks of the kernel, and then the result gets filtered into the 'mainline' tree and released by Linus. It's the natural way for open source development to work, it's just been more clearly embraced by the development process. You can see this reflected in GIT's design.

The case of the unwelcome attribution

Posted Sep 20, 2007 2:10 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (10 responses)

I installed FreeBSD on an old laptop of mine and have been enjoying it quite a bit. I wouldn't replace Debian with it on my main computers because its packaging is inferior (IMHO of course) but it is a pretty nice system to play around with and I figured I'd make sure everything I wrote worked with it.

But I don't know after all this. I always saw BSD as being another branch of Free Software. One that, perhaps undeservedly, has never gotten as popular, but certainly was as valid. Moreover, I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of the Linux kernel and have been hoping that something like kFBSD would take off. But now I'm thinking that perhaps it's impossible to work with the BSD community in any kind of constructive way.

The case of the unwelcome attribution

Posted Sep 20, 2007 3:27 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (4 responses)

I went to grad school at Berkeley myself in the early 1990s (on the other side of the EE/CS divide, but I knew what was going on). I always found the BSD crowd to be a brilliant but also extremely unpleasant bunch, full of flame wars and personal attacks between developers, seeing conspiracy theories everywhere. This goes right back to the founding days, with the fights over 386bsd and BSDI.

But then, I have a low tolerance for unpleasantness. I recently unsubscribed from my local LUG's mailing list because the level of personal attacks got to be too much for me. Others have thicker skins and might not care, but I find it actively painful to see good people flailing away at each other.

The case of the unwelcome attribution

Posted Sep 20, 2007 4:20 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] (1 responses)

This goes right back to the founding days, with the fights over 386bsd and BSDI.

Heh...for some of us, the "founding days" would be considered to have happened more than a decade earlier than that. ;-)

Greg

The case of the unwelcome attribution

Posted Sep 21, 2007 6:33 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Of course I'm aware of how old BSD is, since I had a summer job in a lab that was running 4.1BSD on a Vax before the transition to TCP/IP. Yes, I'm an old fart, I used the Internet when it was only one day old (the Arpanet and connected networks became the Internet once it switched protocols on Jan 1, 1982).

I was talking about the founding days of completely free BSD; the Jolitzes did the first completely free BSD and BSDI did the first supposed USL-free but proprietary BSD.

The case of the unwelcome attribution

Posted Sep 20, 2007 8:24 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (1 responses)

Of course, watching some of the sausage get made on LKML, I'd say you'd have to have a pretty thick skin to be a heavy duty Linux kernel developer also.

The case of the unwelcome attribution

Posted Sep 20, 2007 11:00 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

This definitely varies on a project-by-project basis. The GCC development community (by dint of conscious effort, and with one or two exceptions) is notably collegial, but even it pales before the welcoming nature of the TeX community. Other free software projects manage to be abrasive enough to drive people away.

I think it's a cultural thing, probably initially derived from the email habits of the founding developers, but adjustable over time. Also, though, it might be something to do with the software's complexity/popularity tradeoff: both GCC and TeX are arcane enough that they have to actively attract developers to some degree (GCC because it's fiendishly complex, TeX because it's simply arcane :) ), while most parts of OS kernels are much less complicated.

Fractious BSDers

Posted Sep 20, 2007 6:10 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (4 responses)

It is certainly true that BSD has, at least since the late '80s, been subject to extreme personality clashes of the sort that make the great LKML conflicts seem positively tame. I am told that OpenBSD, for example, started after Theo cracked into the NetBSD repository he has just been shut out of, and backed out most of the patches he had previously committed. It is equally true that many of the people who work on a BSD are polite to a fault (at least in person), and tend to be a bit embarrassed by their colleagues' behavior.

I can see reasons for the the behavior. First and foremost, Linux serves as a common enemy that is much nearer to hand than Microsoft is to us; BSDers suffer more displacement by Linux than by Microsoft. Second, Theo acts in the role of a cult leader, so his followers are encouraged to froth as he does. Third, the real vitriol is by those people who don't really have much else to do, Theo aside.

In case it's not clear yet, there would have been no legal problem with applying the patches as posted, despite what Theo insists. The OpenBSD people should be thankful that the Linux people were so gracious as to bow to their wishes.

Fractious BSDers

Posted Sep 20, 2007 8:32 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (2 responses)

First and foremost, Linux serves as a common enemy that is much nearer to hand than Microsoft is to us; BSDers suffer more displacement by Linux than by Microsoft. Second, Theo acts in the role of a cult leader, so his followers are encouraged to froth as he does.

Indeed! It's actually rather sad to see a comment like this:

Theo has thrown himself, once again, against the spears of the Linux community and their legal vultures in order to protect our software freedoms. How many of us can say we've done our part to defend truly Free Software?

Murrh? OpenBSD defending Free Software from Linux? Yeah. The assumptions, mind set and meanings wrapped up in that are just mind boggling. In the grand scheme of things, we really ARE on the same side. This is like two siblings fighting with each other, when the real problem is the big bully next door.

Fractious BSDers

Posted Sep 20, 2007 15:37 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

It is their usual attitude: Linux (and other GPL software) is not really free because you don't have the basic freedom of turning it proprietary. But then when people take their code proprietary (or GPL) they complain loudly. Is it inconsistent? Not really; granting you the freedom to do something doesn't mean you think it is right to actually do it, at least in their view.

In a sense they are right. The GPL does not grant the freedom to go proprietary because of a conscious choice: it is a compromise. I think Stallman's way of thinking is more solid. First define the freedoms you think are desirable, then go for them, and try to avoid unsocial attitudes in the process.

The BSD approach works well for certain kinds of code. You can see the same arguments in Apache land (although they tend to be more polite), and their libraries are usually top quality. In other places it does not work so well, and OpenBSD seems to be one of bad ones.

Let me close this inane message with the inevitable cheap analogy. BSD is like a protestant religion: you are free to do as you wish, even if some actions are frowned upon (and others plainly wrong). GPL takes an approach more similar to Catholicism: it acknowledges human weakness and tries to help us stay away from them, while working with our strengths. And if still you sin, Father Moglen will approach you and let you confess your sins, and repent. While the protestants will condemn you to eternal Hell for having sinned; you have crossed the chasm and there is no way back. Which is indeed what we see in this case.

Fractious BSDers

Posted Sep 20, 2007 16:29 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

Yeah, I've always thought the dichotomy of how Linux is treated vs. how Microsoft is treated wrt. to BSD software was schizophrenic at best.

If you take a look at MS's initial set of TCP/IP tools, they're all the BSD tools. Sure, buried somewhere in all their documentation etc. is a copyright notice for the BSD stuff. "Yay, our name in Flyspec-3 lights! Woo!" But have you seen any of the updated source code? "Who cares, our name in lights! Who cares if it's on the back page of a manual nobody will look at, or buried in a README nobody will open? THEY KEPT OUR COPYRIGHT MESSAGE! YES! Viva la freedom!" *sigh*

So, we goof on the copyright message but leave the code and its changes out in the open. "Bad Linux. You messed up our copyright message. And we don't like your dual license. What if Microsoft wants a copy? You owe it to us to let them copy it again. At least they print our copyright message." "Dude... wait, what?"

I personally agree with you that Stallman's position is more consistent. "I will your give you this code with some restrictions. The restrictions are merely that whatever rights I grant you are transitive: I give you the code with certain rights and responsibilities. All I require is that you do the same for the next guy." Makes sense to me. You lose the right to hoard, in exchange for the generosity of others.

Eh, I think we're both preaching to the choir here.

Fractious BSDers

Posted Sep 20, 2007 9:00 UTC (Thu) by ernest (guest, #2355) [Link]

Apparently the BSD community has a tendancy to forget that their licence allows anybody from using and including BSD licenced code, even if the result is propritairy, without any need to contribute back. The GPL community seems to be much more aware of that fact, and so doesn't want their own GPL code to enter the BSD world.

As far as I can see, there doesn't seem to be any animosity towards the people behind the BSD licence within the GPL community, so it is so troubling that there is apparently such an outspoken animosity in the other direction.

Ernest.

The case of the unwelcome attribution

Posted Sep 20, 2007 10:18 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

I have never heard of this Jason Dixon, J.C. Roberts and Can E. Acar before this incident. Perhaps they are famous in BSD circles for their enormous contributions to the codebase.

More likely though they're just fanboys. Everyone famous has fanboys, there's no reason Theo should be any different. So it wouldn't really matter if Theo had just blindly asserted that Linus had been rude to his mother, or that Linux users smell bad. These fanboys would be out in force assuring everyone that Theo is right.

When a teenage idol singer releases a mediocre pop song that is panned by critics, her fanboys flood forums with praise for it. When a basketball player is arrested for drink driving his fanboys aren't going to wait for a trial, they "know" he's innocent right from the start.

We can't completely ignore Theo, his contributions are significant, his ability to shape the future considerable - but we can ignore his fanboys. Their opinions are the very definition of irrelevant. Let's have no more articles about this unless there's something worth reporting on.

The case of the unwelcome attribution

Posted Sep 20, 2007 11:15 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I'll admit that I thought for a moment that Can E. Acar was a pseudonymous troll, but a bit of googling revealed that he's been active in Turkish BSD circles for years.

(I wonder how much of this is culture clash? I have quite a few Turkish friends, and I've noticed they have a propensity towards argument-as-sport, including making enormous rhetorical flourishes for the sake of spurring on a good argument. I have this tendency too, so we get on quite well... but if you're not expecting it and think they're stating things they actually believe rather than playing perpetual devil's advocate, you can get thoroughly confused and annoyed.)

Correlations

Posted Sep 20, 2007 12:49 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] (1 responses)

No one seems to notice (and I've been buying OpenBSD releases since 3.8 for minor mucking about) the correlation between OpenBSD releases and these flamewars...

Correlations

Posted Sep 20, 2007 16:36 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

What, you're saying this is a really peculiar form of `advertising by appearing like nasty unpleasant people', on the `all publicity is good publicity' principle?

(maybe someone should ask MediaDefender's MD if he agrees with this aphorism. He's certainly had a lot of, um, unexpected publicity recently.)

The case of the unwelcome attribution

Posted Sep 20, 2007 21:56 UTC (Thu) by moxfyre (guest, #13847) [Link]

Thank you, Jonathan, for this excellent article!

It seems to me to be one of the most bizarre disputes ever in the free software community. A practice long considered to be legally acceptable (relicensing BSD code as GPL) is called into question, after a brief and quickly corrected mis-attribution mistake... and from there escalates into a full-scale FLAMEWAR.

As far as I can tell, Theo and the OpenBSD folks are the ones pouring most of the gasoline on this particular fire. Frankly, I don't understand how people who produce such excellent software can waste their time on this stuff.

Maybe after this is all over, you can write up a "Lessons learned" type article? Then again, this dispute is almost worth it for the entertainment value alone :-) Though I am sure the loss of developer time and cooperation is considerable...

FSF not involved in BSD/Linux license dispute

Posted Sep 21, 2007 23:44 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

The article should have pointed out that the following quote is false:

... instead of admitting the mistake and making the needed corrections, FSF has pulled out their lawyers in hopes of getting away with the theft.

There's no evidence FSF is involved, and FSF responded to the quoted post saying it is not involved.

I guess some people think the FSF is behind everything licensed under GPL. Or maybe someone quoted an FSF expert on GPL at some point in the discussion.

Angry BSD people

Posted Sep 25, 2007 19:58 UTC (Tue) by bluefoxicy (guest, #25366) [Link]

The FreeBSD camp has proven arrogant at times, but friendly enough; FreeBSD users are thick-headed BSD zealots, but pretty well-kept. The Linux camp also has proven arrogant at times, but friendly enough; Linux users are thick-headed anti-Microsoft zealots, but pretty well-kept.

As someone who's had numerous conversations with Theo himself, I can say that OpenBSD is lead by a man people avoid unless they want to be like him. If you disagree with Theo, you disagree with God; and Theo will immediately let you know, giving the largest smite for the most innocent inquiries. When Theo is wrong, he asserts that he's more popular than you because he invented OpenBSD and thus he's obviously right; then resorts to grunts to avoid actually arguing any more.

The problem is OpenBSD leadership drives away sane people and grows a small army of code-zealoting attack dogs.