XBian's Koenkk Replies To the XBian/RaspBMC Flap 63
New submitter juenger1701 writes "Xbian's developer Koenkk has posted a reply to the code stealing accusations mentioned here Friday." In response, Sam Nazarko of Raspbmc has replaced his earlier complaint, "on the agreement that XBian participate with compliance of the GPL." Koenkk makes the case that his project has always complied with the GPL.
Complication of making a distribution (Score:5, Interesting)
So far, the communications I see on this issue don't come from people who appear to understand all of what they're required to do. And the licenses used by these folks on their own work aren't even close to Open Source.
I think this community needs to go back to the Debian core it started with, and add to that whatever optimizations and installers are necessary without the crayon licenses.
Re:Youngins. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, USENET was middle-aged when those Utah lawyers posted the first mainstream spam. (And the more serious crime was their publishing a book on how to exploit the Internet to harvest personal data and spam them.)
AT&T should have been terminated, not just by USENET but by the MBone and maybe even some of their Tier 1 peers. Not just until they did something, but permanently. Some crimes should not be forgiven, and AT&T's actions then have cost the world on aggregate since that time (bandwidth ain't cheap, neither is storage) far more than the market value of AT&T. This was anticipated and widely expected to be the outcome of AT&T's negligence. Sometimes, the best option is to cut your losses and run, and AT&T was definitely a loss.
Today, such action would serve little purpose. Spam, which is essentially economic cyberwarfare, has become too widespread. You can't dig it up by the roots, there are too many of them. It will require action on a far larger scale. System admins, network admins and ISP admins alike will have to become the largest gang of herbicidal maniacs ever gathered in one virtual spot. Exterminating botnets, the ultimate weed, will require a change in attitudes. Provider agreements must make spamming grounds for terminating Internet access. System admins must monitor their systems more rigorously for evidence of compromise. Network admins must stop assuming they can just get away with a trivial spam filter then ignore the problem. Spam is a reduction of service, rather than a denial of it, but then in a DDOS, so is each individual component of that attack. Network admins wouldn't be caught dead regarding components of a DDOS as something they can just ignore. Same's true here.
Re:Jesus Christ. (Score:5, Interesting)
While I don't think that projects run by kids are anything to scoff at just because they are run by kids, indeed there's some degree of immaturity shown in the response page on xbian.org. The response repeatedly shows that the author is wholly ignorant of how copyright laws work. Namely that the installer author is the only one responsible for compliance. Those xbian folk seem to have no clue that if they redistribute, it's on THEM to comply. I think evein I knew that back in the 90s, without otherwise having a clue about copyright law, from nothing more than reading the fine license (GPL) and associated narrative (FAQs, mailing list posts).
Re:Youngins. (Score:3, Interesting)
UDP was threatened several times, always successfully, and always against ISP's who refused to act against the most egregious, documented, and demonstrably illegal abuse. As an old spam hunter, I don't remember one against AT&T. I vaguely remember the one against UUnet, which is not the same company. And lord, do I remember netcom.com, which doesn't show up on the Wikipedia entry for Usenet Death Penalty, probably because they saved themselves at the last possible moment by tweaking their NNTP servers to include the ISP of the posting host. (They were hosting a lot of forged cancel messages for discussions on alt.religion.scientology in the mid 90's, and a lot of bulk spew designed to keep people from reading anything from Scientology critics. I bet that one made the lawyers nervous!!)