Please bear with my rants
and do remember that, since english is not my native tounge, my command of
this language is
suboptimal.
I think we must stop the infringement. However that is done is irrelevant to
me as long as it stops.
I do think changing the licence is difficult/impossible to do from a
practical standpoint due to the sheer volume of contributors/copyright
holders
which in many cases might be "difficult" to track down and contact.
Apart from the infringement of the code I do feel there is something more
important at stake:
the ethereal community.
I belive, even if it is very low volume, ethereal might be the only existing
community(outside of ietf but many important protocols are never studied by
ietf)
where protocol implementors meet and share information.
A very good example that makes me happy to witness is the voip and telco
signalling subcommunity within etheral where people from several disjoint
communities
(vendors) help out and resolve decoding bugs or clarifying the standard. Low
volume but still.
Second example I want to point to is the CIFS subcommunity within
ehtereal-dev where different politically and organizationally dosjoint
communities actually share and contribute new knowledge about cifs. Also low
volume yes but then again cifs support in existing ethereal
is pretty complete.
I dont think there are any other places at all where these communities can
meet. (no shadow on snia) but the annual cifs conf is really a
place where different disjoint communities have internal meetings and keep
away from everyone else. thats how i experienced cifs2003.
The danger i see in not stopping the infringements is that these
subcommunities, low volume or small as they are, may loose their only reason
to exist.
If it is ok to only use and not contribute back or follow the rules why
bother participating?
Do we want to risk that the embyonic cifs/viop/ss7/etc subcommunities might
be destroyed?
I still ACK JMs post. the infringements just have to stop. Since they have
been stalling instead of dealing honestly willing to resolve the issue with
Gerald
maybe they have to be taught a lesson. As long as the infringements stop
immediately I am happy. The rest is irrelevant to me but I will agree and
support
whatever the consensus is.
In my view, stopping the infringements are
1, stopping immediately distributing the existing sw (and possibly
informing the customers why there will be a regression in functionality for
the next release or let them discover that themself)
or
2, release the sw fully under gpl and comply with the licence that way.
On top of that, Gerald is free to decide on the consensus and whatever other
actions he/the consensus seem fit and I will do and provide whatever he
needs in writing from my side to cover my contributions.
(although i will NOT change licence under which my contributions were
donated. Period. It was donated under GPL with my full understanding of what
GPL
means and will remain GPL. What licences others choose are their choice and
that is fine. My contributions are GPL)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Guy Harris"
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 8:53 PM
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] ClearSight update
> On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 01:35:55AM -0800, Guy Harris wrote:
> > I definitely want them to stop infringement;
>
> ...especially given that they have a typical EULA with its usual
> restrictions, are making such a bogus claim about having "licensed"
> Ethereal, and have been stalling us on this.
>
> > presumably opening the source of Analyzer isn't the only way
> > that they could do that - they could also perhaps run Ethereal
> > "at arm's length" rather than linking it into Analyzer, and I
> > wouldn't *require* them to open the source *if* they're willing
> > to change it not to link Ethereal code in;
>
> E.g., if they could make a native-Windows-GUI version of Ethereal that
> can act as an out-of-process OLE agent (or whatever it's called), so
> that their application can drive the Ethereal GUI, I'd *personally* be
> willing to accept that - as long as, of course, *all* the code for that
> version of Ethereal were made publicly available as GPLed code.
>
> If the consensus is to say "GPL Analyzer or else", however, I'd be
> willing to go along with that.
>
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