Comment Articles

Strife and success in the land of open source

Stephan Somogyi AnchorDesk

Published: 11 Jun 2001 15:59 BST

But even as various storm clouds formed, thundered, emitted rain, and then blew away, a much quieter success became apparent for the open source community, one which recalcitrant hardware vendors would do well to learn from.

The ipf tiff
As best I can tell, the whole disagreement around ipf and its license started when Darren Reed, the author of ipf, made a seemingly innocuous change to the license that ipf is released under. The act of changing the license drew attention and further scrutiny to it, and OpenBSD's Theo De Raadt concluded that the new license was not, in fact, an open source license, thus putting it in direct opposition to OpenBSD's licensing requirements.

After clarification from Reed, it seems that the license never was open source, and that ipf's inclusion into OpenBSD and the other *BSDs was probably ill-advised in the first place.

Unfortunately, this is the point when acrimony started. The gist of Reed's position is that it's his code and he can do with it what he pleases. Fair enough. However, Reed became clearly perturbed when De Raadt made the licensing problem public and subsequently removed ipf from the OpenBSD source tree.

The OpenBSD project has a history of making hard decisions like this and then delivering real alternatives. Investigation is already underway to determine a suitable ipf replacement for OpenBSD, though no plans have yet been set in stone. That said, code talks, and OpenBSD has spoken quite eloquently in the past.

License audit
Reed says he is in discussions with both the NetBSD and FreeBSD core developers with the intent of figuring out a way for those projects to continue using ipf if they want to. However, since Reed has stated his unwillingness to change ipf's license -- which is entirely his prerogative -- it's far from clear to me how NetBSD and FreeBSD can in good conscience use ipf given that the constraints of its current license are known.