23. Shooting yourself in the foot

Shooting yourself in the foot is not unsual in the OSS world. If it's not the future Debian Project Leader trying to delay the next stable release as a sign of rebellion, it's Ubuntu breaking after a system upgrade. Or it's Eric S. Raymond leaving Fedora after 13 years, for that he cannot stand the alleged "incompetent repository maintenance" that «will condemn Fedora to a shrinking niche in the future.» This only makes sense when you find that ESR joined the Freespire leadership board, so that joining the Ubuntu camp was only logical. And shameful.

The first major fork that bewildered me was the incredible story of X.org being born out of XFree86, for a change in the license of XFree86 4.4.0 that was considered incompatible with the GPL.

The XFree86 Project license 1.1 added the requirement that a proper acknowledgment ("This product includes software developed by The XFree86 Project, Inc (http://www.xfree86.org/) and its contributors") either in the documentation, or in the binary itself, "in the same place and form as other third-party acknowledgments". This was considered by the Free Software Foundation as a the BSD-like advertising clause that makes the license incompatible with the GPL.

The claimed license incompatibility was just the final straw in a strange history of stagnation, restricted access of the developers to the CVS (only a core team of 15 had commit rights), culminating with a vote on the self-disbanding of the Core Team, effective immediately!

A few distros have forked XFree86 from an older version (Debian Sarge is using it), but we are practically using X.org now.

Another example of a severe self-shoot is the forking of cdrkit out of cdrtools, which was a result of Debian Bug #377109.

The root cause was the decision of Joerg Schiller to change the license for cdrtools' build system under the CDDL instead of GPL. Sun's CDDL is an OSI-approved free license, but (as we all know) GPL doesn't mix with anything else.

By following the long thread of comments on the Debian Bug #377109, we can notice that Joerg Schiller has some excellent points every once in a while. For instance, he is showing that Debian's own Social Contract says at section 9 that a license (here, the GPL) should not force the contamination (here, of the CDDL-licensed build system with the GPL license). If Debian would follow the strict GPL interpretation, then Debian would need to call the GPL clearly non-free because it then would violate the DFSG Section 9.

I don't know of any impartial attorney of law to have examined the compatibility of the GPL with Debian's Free Software Guidelines, as they seem to contradict each other in such cases.

Furthermore, Joerg has raised one more legal objection, after «a 1.5 hour phone conference with the lawyer who created the CDDL and the Solaris chief engineer»: a European Author has the right to create more legal combinations than a US Author has. This is a result of the archaic US Copyright law. As per the German Copyright Law (which applies to Joerg's licensed work), «the GPL cannot go beyond the boundaries of copyright law. If, according to copyright law two works are independent, then the GPL has nothing to say about it. ... Schilling is claiming his Makefile, because it is a full program, is an independent work. That means the GPL is irrelevant until you prove it is not an independent work.»

The joys of having GPL as the most used open-source license, instead of BSD, MIT, CDDL...

And now, a very practical shooting: very recently, Olivier Blin from Mandriva has witnessed how Apache 2.0 managed to self-indict a DoS! While a bug in the respective build of the 2.6.17 kernel is not excluded, isn't that nice to know that Apache 2.0 is able under certain circumstances to shoot itself with a Denial-of-Service? (Slackware comes with Apache 1.3.37, and OpenBSD comes with Apache 1.3.29).

Not to mention the latest quiz: Are GPLv3 and Apache 2 incompatible?