Somewhat off-topic - the GPL v2/v3 debate, and Hobbit 🔗 link

As You may have heard, there is currently a rather intense debate
going on about the proposed new version 3 of the GNU General Public
License (the GPL).

Hobbit uses the GPL license - and specifically, it uses the current
version 2. A change to version 3 of the GPL therefore cannot happen
automatically - it has to be a deliberate decision by me (and anyone
else who has contributed code to Hobbit) to do so.

The proposed GPL v3 adds some rather troubling restrictions to the
license, especially when it comes to using GPL-licensed code in systems
that include various DRM (Digital Rights Management) mechanisms. It also poses some legal challenges to companies that obtain patents on
their work, which could very well mean that they would not be able to use GPLv3 licensed software at all.

I fundamentally believe that DRM and patents - especially patents on
computer software - is evil, and I would never buy anything that comes
with such restrictions on what I can use it for.

However, the GPL v3 proposal is too much of a "fight fire with fire"
agenda for me. Whether our society should permit patents is a political
discussion, not a software-development issue. So it should be handled
politically, not in a software license. DRM restrictions can be dealt
with simply through normal market mechanisms - if you dislike them, dont buy products that have them. Or make something that is better
and release it in an Open Source way.

I am not a lawyer, so I may have misunderstood quite what the proposed changes mean - but if I have, then several other software developers whose judgment I respect have also misunderstood them. Most notably, a large collection of the Linux kernel developers - including Linus Torvalds - strongly oppose the GPL v3 changes and have recently published a discussion document detailing why they believe these changes are wrong. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/448894
When the second draft of GPLv3 was published, Linus also participated
in a lengthy discussion explaining his views on the Groklaw blog. If
you're interested, see the (long) "DRM misunderstood" thread starting at
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060727140038810 and especially
http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20060727140038810&title=DRM+%26quot%3BMisunderstood%26quot%3B&type=article&order=&hideanonymous=0&pid=465791#c465845

All that just to explain my position: As far as I am concerned there will not be a change of license for Hobbit, at least not with the current wording of the GPLv3.

Just in case anyone cared.


Regards,
Henrik

I'll ask but I suspect I know what the answer is already: has anyone
done a port to the ARM platform yet? Specifically, I'm using a Intel
XScale PXA255 on a Gumstix (http://www.gumstix.com).

It's situations like this where autoconf comes in real handy. I imagine
I'll have to hack the entire configure "system" to get this working.

Any help/tips/pointers?

-Stoner

Jeff Stoner wrote:

There's a debian 3.1 ARM package on the download page...

=G=

On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 09:23:48PM -0400, Jeff Stoner wrote:

It's more of a question what OS is on these boxes. As far as I can
see from the webpage they are running Linux, so it really should
compile "out of the box" without any problems.

BTW, one of the systems I have here is an ARM-based NetWinder. See
http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit-cgi/bb-hostsvc.sh?HOST=rebel.hswn.dk&SERVICE=info

Hostname:	rebel.hswn.dk
OS:	Linux rebel 2.4.27-netwinder #1 Thu Sep 14 09:44:35 UTC 2006 armv4l GNU/Linux

It's a small box, but it handles DNS, DHCP, NTP and UPS-control quite
nicely for my home network.

autoconf is good, but I didn't use it from the start - and converting
code to use autoconf after it's been written appears to be very time-
consuming. So I try to write code that is portable instead. So far, it
has worked well :-)


Regards,
Henrik

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Henrik Stoerner wrote:

Confirmed. I have several ARM systems (zaurus and nslu2, both big and
little endian) and have not had any problems. Also it works just fine with
my powerpc (nintendo gamecube), mips (asus wl-hdd) and m68k (amiga)
systems, all running linux :)

-- 
Kolbjørn Barmen
UNINETT Driftsenter

On Tue, 2006-10-10 at 08:31 +0200, Henrik Stoerner wrote:

Except, I'm cross-compiling on a x86 system. I didn't install a compiler
toolchain on my device so I can't "./configure; make; make install". The
config scripts don't let me specify specific libraries - I have to hack
them apart so they use my ARM-compiled libraries, not the x86 system
libraries. Once I have all that in place, I can write a top-level
Makefile fragment and incorporate hobbit into Buildroot
(www.buildroot.org) which is used to manage development, from the
toolchain itself to the kernel and packages to building the root
filesystem for loading into flash.

It'll be a fun exercise. I'm starting with the client-only portion of
Hobbit, then I'll move on to the server. I can document the whole
process so others can benefit.

Some of reasons I'm using hobbit:
- I know you write good code
- Hobbit's channels is a unique feature that I really like
- I can completely replace the web interface

-Stoner