On Oct 23, 2014, at 7:48 PM, Adam Thompson <[email protected]> wrote:
[Hmm... half of this doesn't need to be on-list. Sorry if I'm polluting. -Adam]
On 14-10-23 05:57 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:
I get that Jim rubs a lot of people the wrong way (myself included),
Darn, you’d think that sharing a last name would count for something...
Sorry, no. ;-)
Kind of in the same way Theo de Raadt rubs people the wrong way.
Wow. You just compared me to Theo.
I’m done.
Anyone want to buy a firewall company?
It’s either that, or I invoke Godwin’s law. (Or its corollary, “Thompson’s
Law”: That the thread is over once someone compares one of the participants
to Mr. de Raadt.)
(It’s left to you to decide who gets the eponymous glory.)
Mostly just idiots & newbies take offense. And it's mostly driven, I think, by
having your lifetime supply of tolerance for people who speak first and think
second be long-since exhausted. So as long as you don't start saying incorrect or
technically-invalid things, your audience sticks around. See closing comments,
below.
I think some people are waiting for “the other shoe to drop”. For us to take
the pfSense project in a direction similar to what happened with Vyatta.
Yeah... it's a possibility. OTOH, I'll point out that UBNT essentially forked Vyatta
(and renamed it "EdgeOS", IIRC) when Brocade started to close it all up. Not
that UBNT is a paragon of openness, either,
“either”? Wow. Strike 2. You probably don’t want to know that Jamie and I
nearly bought Ubiquiti from Mr. Pera, or that we let the company live when he
owed us a pile of cash.
I’m not going into details, but Ubiquiti did violate Vyatta’s license, got
called on it, and had to reverse direction for a bit.
but that's the benefit of the appropriate license - everyone can feel free to
copy (or fork!) pfSense from any of the multitude of places it lives online
right now, and feel free to burn it to archival WORM media Just In Case
Something Bad Happens To The Project.
As Jim pointed out, however, when you resurrect it (and somehow replace all the
infrastructure and developers in one fell swoop, *ahem*), you can't call your
new project pfSense. You can have an FAQ entry explaining how it used to be
pfSense, you can even leave the GIT, or SVN, or even SCCS repository up as-is
with the pfSense name throughout it, but as soon as you create a derivative
work: new project.
... pfSense is going closed source,
Technically, this could happen, but realistically, someone will probably fork
it. And that project will likely die out or remove itself from public
participation, as these things tend to do.
For that matter, remember that pfSense is (sort of) a fork of m0n0wall from a
decade ago in the first place. For different reasons, but nonetheless.
As if I didn’t know, had forgotten, or wish people would forget.
Just in-case you have forgotten, Netgate originally shipped m0n0wall on WRAP
boards, then cut-over to pfSense quite early after the fork.
and Jim Thompson is actually a blood thirsty, extra-terrestrial,
shapeshifting reptile.
Well, that explains a few things! <grin>
It explains everything, actually.
Finally, I think there is still a segment of the community who views me with
distrust because I put a license agreement and contributor agreement in front
of access to the source code for the pfSense project. We didn’t articulate
the reasons for doing this very well, and the execution when we did it wasn’t …
optimal.
I wasn't affected by that, and - AFAIK - neither were most of the people who
whine and cadge about a commercial entity being involved.
I don't recall what the license used to be, but clearly the current one is a
custom license that doesn't even attempt to follow the UCB/BSD license. As
long as ESF covered all their legal bases properly, they can do whatever the
f*** they want with the license. I can see how old contributors might not like
the new CLA, though. And I don't know of any project that has ever pivoted on a
license change this way ... optimally.
There is an agreement that allows access to the pfsense-tools repo. As
pre-requisite to that agreement, a contributor agreement must be in-place.
Once you have the code, you’ll find the license in the individual files to be
the same as it always was (mostly BSD 3 clause, but there are a smattering of
other files.) Doesn’t matter, you already agreed to the other license, that’s
the hack.
The license is non-transferable, but if you build and release a version
otherwise in compliance with the license, you must license your version under
substantially similar terms.
Ugh… were you around for the 2.1.5 release with the “Gold” menu
front-and-center (and the resultant shitstorm)?
Long before that, yes, but I think I managed to skip the affected versions by
accident, so I forgot all about it / never saw it myself. Since I've already
renewed my gold subscription once by now, clearly I wasn't one of the
shit-flingers in the shitstorm. I like getting paid for my work, too!
It’s funny how everyone thinks that all of this leads to my financial gain and
supports my cocaine and hookers habit. Normally, if I’m not at work (working)
or at home (working), I’m either sleeping, or I’ve gone out for a beer with my
lovely wife, where we talk about… work.
(Or wonder in silence what it must be like to work in the same place as Jim
Thompson.)
Can't be any worse than my last corporate job. In fact, would probably be
*much* better... I don't have to like you to respect you or work with/for you.
Conversely, I generally won’t hire people I don’t respect. This isn’t aimed at
you in retort, and I’m not stating that I don’t have respect for you.
Jim
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