NetBSD

[Master of Reality]

I was wonderin' if anyone has used this? Im not sure if i should just dl the i386cd and then see if i can download all the packages and such, or if i really need to burn any of the packages cds in order to be able to download anything

[Void Main]

I have but NetBSD is not a free/Free Linux distribution so it does't fit in any of the topics on this site.... Sorry.

[Master of Reality]

oh yea... i knew there was a reason i didnt post it earlier

[Void Main]

Just don't let it happen again. :)

[Calum]

i just don't understand why GNU is allowed here but BSD isn't.

This is a linux site and Linux distros have more BSD software in than GNU does (assuming GNU uses all the GNU versions of stuff for which there is perfectly good Berkeley software already).

sure, linux distros are estimated to be about 27% GNU,but how many percent BSD are they? not sure but i suspect it is roughly the same.

edit: and the BSDs are freely available too, in a similar way to how perl, Xfree86, sendmail etc are.

[Void Main]

i just don't understand why GNU is allowed here but BSD isn't.

Ummm, because I want it that way? :) I just want this site dedicated to free/Free Linux/HURD based distros. And I want to limit it to freely downloadable distros. I don't know if you remember back to when I first started this site I said I wanted to keep a narrow focus to try and keep the traffic under control (as well as the content). I don't want it to be an "everything" site.

I don't allow Windows, I don't allow BSD, I don't allow Windows, I don't allow OSX, I don't allow Windows, I don't allow Lindows, I don't allow Windows, I don't even want commercial Red Hat on here. I really didn't even want SUSE on here because it wasn't downloadable in ISO form and Yast is proprietary. Lastly, I don't allow Windows. I am a fan of the GPL because it ensures source stays open once it is placed under the GPL (unless you are SCO, then all licenses and laws are out the window). I do not care for the BSD license because the source can be used and closed up (even M$ does this). The source is not Free. It is true that some of the software included with most Linux distros are licensed under the BSD license. But BSD and the BSD license are two different animals. Just like Linux and the GPL are two different animals. Even some software written specifically and exclusively for Windows is placed under the GPL. I would be extremely cool if all softare was licensed under the GPL but I can't have everything.

For work I actually had to go through and list every different license included in a Red Hat distribution along with any other open source package I use for legal risk assessment. You would probably be surprised at the number of different licenses that included software falls under. You might also be surprised that not as much as you might think falls under the BSD license (there is a lot of BSD-LIKE licensed software but not specifically under the BSD licenses). You will find most of these licenses in most Linux distributions (and then some when you start looking at certain Perl module licenses):

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/

I am about to change the Red Hat/Fedora category to Fedora only, and I am seriously considering removing SUSE since Novell bought them, and they were already on the fence, but we'll give it some time to see how things pan out.

So basically it's a bandwidth thing, I'm on cable and have limited upload bandwidth. If this turns into a high traffic site then things will get really slow, like they were today when I was allowing people to get Fedora from me via bittorrent. If you look at the Cacti graphs you will see I have a very handsome 2.5Mbps of download bandwidth but only around 200kbps upload (the upload, or outgoing bandwidth is much more important for a web site). Now, if I can talk somebody into picking up the tab on the T3 (or even a T1) into my house I would be more than happy to add a BSD forum. :) Hell, for a T3 I would even add a Lindows forum (well, I wouldn't sell out that easily).

Now having said that, if he would have posted that message in the "Lounge" rather than the "Other Distributions" where it's clearly marked under the title that it's for "GNU/Linux/HURD based distros" I probably would have let it slide without saying a word. But m0r's been giving me a hard time lately so I thought I'd give him a hard time back. :)

[Calum]

fair enough, it's your site, but thanks for giving me a full answer like that!

if it were me though i wouldn't have any hurd either under those rules. but it's not me, it's you.

[Void Main]

Huh? Unlike the kernel known as Linux, the kernel known as Hurd is 100% GPL (at least I believe that to be true).

[Calum]

i know, just that i personally think that hurd is just as out of place on a linux forum as *bsd is (perhaps more, since there is as i said some bsd stuff in a normal linux distro), but as i said, that's just me, and as you said, it's your forums.

[Void Main]

But I guess this is really more of a pro GPL site than it is a pro-Linux site. I am more interested in the Freedom part. Yes there are a few overlaps here and there. I want there to be as much guaranteed Free code out there as possible. More Free, less proprietary. BSD is more like public domain code than it is Free code. It can be included in proprietary software and the source does not have to be released with said proprietary software, thus working against the open source effort IMHO (source code forced into slavery). The GPL does not allow this to happen. I am not so much a fan of GNU as I am the GPL itself.

And regarding your thoughts about the amount of software under the BSD license. I just did a package count on my main desktop that I just upgraded to Fedora. I have a lot of software installed on it, 1040 packages to be exact. Of those 1040 packages, only 67 packages show up with the "BSD" license, 4 more show up with "BSD/GPL dual license", 1 shows up as "BSD/GPL", 1 more shows up as "GPL/BSD", and 2 show up with "GPL or BSD" for a total of 75 packages that use the BSD license either all or in part. There are a few more that use "BSDish" or "BSDlike" licenses but not many, and they really don't use the BSD license anyway but some other home-brew license that happens to be similar to the BSD license.

I think you were under the impression there is more software than there is in the typical Linux distro licensed under the BSD license. Some people incorrectly attribute Apache and XFree86 as using the BSD license. Maybe that's what you are thinking as well...

The rpm commands I used for this are:

Total installed RPMS:

Code: Select all

$ rpm -qa | wc -l


Get the BSD licensed software installed:

Code: Select all

$ rpm -qa --qf "%{LICENSE}\n" | grep -i bsd | egrep -v "ish|like|style" | sort


Count it:

Code: Select all

$ rpm -qa --qf "%{LICENSE}\n" | grep -i bsd | egrep -v "ish|like|style" | sort | wc -l


Print package name and License only:

Code: Select all

$ rpm -qa --qf "%{LICENSE} - %{NAME}\n" | grep -i bsd | egrep -v "ish|like|style" | sort


Here is my list (some of which didn't come with my distro):
http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/files/misc/bsdpkgs.txt

And looking at that list I see there are some things I need to remove as they will never get used.

Of the above list of software there are only a few that I heavily depend on which I am thankful for. But that is a far cry different than BSD the kernel, the distribution.

Now, since I'm counting I might as well do it up right. Let's take the popular distribution Fedora Core 1. I just ran some numbers on it:

• Fedora Package Count: 1,466
• BSD or Partial BSD package count: 112 (7.6% of the total number)
• Full Fedora Installed Size: 3,716,309,703
• BSD Installed Size: 205,116,458 (5.5% of the total installed size)

Now as mentioned before some of the BSD packages I used in the above counts are actually dual licenced with GPL so it appears that the amount of code included with Fedora that uses the BSD license is somewhere less than 5.5%. I only counted the 3 install disks and not the 3 SRPM (source) disks. I'm sure the percentages are roughly the same since the source disks are just the source code for the binary disks. On the other hand, the BSD license does not require that the source be distributed with the binaries so it is entirely possible that the 3 SRPM CDs are 100% GPL, but I don't believe that to be the case.

If you are interested I got the installed sizes by querying/summing the "SIZE" field in the headers of the RPMS in question sorta like:

$ x=0;for i in `cut -f3 -d':' bsdsoftware.txt`;do ((x=x+i));done;echo $x

Now remember, just because someone chooses to use the BSD license and not the GPL does not really warrant attributing that software to the BSD distributions or group. Take PostgreSQL for instance. They are really a project all on their own. They did choose to use the BSD license rather than the GPL but PostgreSQL did not come about because of the BSD distributions.

On the other side of the house, here are the GPL numbers:

• GPL, LGPL, or dual/multi licensed package count: 990 (67.5% of the total number)
• GPL LGPL or dual/multi licensed installed size: 3,660,988,456 (98.5% of the total installed size)

Of course you'll notice that the percentages of GPL and BSD licensed packages add up to over 100% but that's because there is some overlap. The dual licensed software is included in both figures. Also the actual amount of GPL/LGPL software is surely less than the above numbers would indicate. Take the Mozilla packages for instance. There is some GPL code included with those packages so the GPL is listed in the License along with the Mozilla license and others. We all know that a very small amount of GPL/LGPL code percentage-wise makes up the Mozilla packages so that has to be taken into my non-scientific analysis.

At any rate, I think you would have to agree that your 27% figure is extremely low, and you are under the impression that there is far more BSD code in the average Linux distro than there really is.

[Void Main]

Heh heh, I just realised we've been through all of this before, almost exactly:

viewtopic.php?t=66
viewtopic.php?t=120

But don't forget to comment on my previous message, I put a lot of extra effort into that one to keep this off-topic thread going. And to think I actually closed this topic for a few minutes. I unlocked it right away because locking it made me feel dirty and cheap.

[Calum]

i really appreciate all that, because in my opinion you fully explain your preferences as to what goes and what stays on this site. now i look around, the forums here don't seem to explicitly say linux (if they ever did).

and yes, i was generally thinking of all the more or less public domain type licences. also i suppose i am swayed by the idea that "important" packages were under these licences. as you say, like X and so on. I did think apache was GPL though, or had a GPL like licence. but X and Perl i thought were more public domain ones, and so on.

However it is clear to me that you have looked into this thoroughly, so don't take my comments as disagreement, because you have thoroughly backed yourself up and told me some stuff i didn't know into the bargain.

[Void Main]

I'm really surprised that you don't have the same feeling toward non-GPL code. I remember you very strongly supporting RMS, GNU, and the GPL at one time. I would just never put my open source code under a non-GPL license. I couldn't stand the thought of M$ taking it, altering it slightly, making it proprietary, and profiting heavily from it, taking all rights away from the end user and locking them in with it. To me that would be the ultimate slap in the face. I can't stop others from licensing their code that way though as dumb as I think it is.

[Calum]

i do completely agree with you!
when we thought that the openopen thing (openopen.org and openopen.cjb.net for those who don't know) was going to do something, i proposed that all the stuff we wrote (promotional stuff and so on) would be FDL licenced. as a result we have a repository of literature (at openopen.cjb.net/files if anybody wants to use it) mouldering away, but protected by the GNU FDL. anything i am involved in, i want it protected so it can stay free. i am thinking about similar licences for any music downloads i may make available.

but, some people as you say make up their own licences, choosing perhaps to be too generous to those who habitually bite (and more and more often, completely sever) the hand that feeds them, and my attitude is just a kind of realistic one i suppose. I don't see how a person couldn't just get, say, NetBSD and mix it with the choicest of GNU and GPL software and release the whole lot under the GPL. the BSD licence doesn't forbid that does it? i want to see a mainly GPL BSD release. and as far as i know, that would fit in here...

[Void Main]

I don't see how a person couldn't just get, say, NetBSD and mix it with the choicest of GNU and GPL software and release the whole lot under the GPL. the BSD licence doesn't forbid that does it?

I have seen that thought brought up before and I don't believe you can do that. The BSD License is amazingly short. About the only thing that it states is that the copyright notice must remain in place in both the binaries and the source (if you distribute the source that is). You'll even find the copyright notice in the Windows binaries that came from BSD (NSLOOKUP.EXE, FTP.EXE, etc) if you extract the text from the binaries (the "strings" command works great for this). I believe the only way for the code to be relicensed under the GPL is if the original copyright holder did this. And I don't believe you can "encapsulate" one license within another. Maybe it's technically possible to do it but I think it would be pretty crappy to do so without the consent of the copyright holder. If someone wants their code to be subject to rape, I suppose that is their prerogative.