Re: FSG Packaging Summit in Berlin

2007-01-04 Thread Andrew Saunders

On 1/4/07, Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> There is a wide spread feeling (if you read LWN.net) that a lot that
> happens in Debian today isn't made public.

I'm boycotting feeding any useful information to LWN anymore until they
retract their latest blanket insult of all DD's and stop being so biased.
YMMV.


Could you pretty please elaborate on this a little bit? It'd be most
interesting to hear your views on LWN's Debian-related coverage in
detail. Perhaps a blog post, should you consider it too off-topic for
-devel?

Cheers,

--
Andrew Saunders


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: looking for the article with a graph of the relations between maintainer scripts

2006-09-25 Thread Andrew Saunders

On 9/26/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Can any one point me to the article with a graph of  the relations
of the various maintainer scripts?


Sounds like you're after
http://women.debian.org/wiki/English/MaintainerScripts - the page was
mentioned in http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/07/ and Margarita
Manterola's the author.

Cheers,

--
Andrew Saunders


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: congratulations to our ftp-master team

2005-12-15 Thread Andrew Saunders
On 12/15/05, Thomas Bushnell BSG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> If there is a serious risk that these people would so blatantly
> disregard our constitution

That certainly seems to be the case, judging from the discussion that
followed Bdale's "Structural Evolution" Debconf5 talk[1] - here's a
transcript of the relevant portion:

: One of the concerns that we've seen crop up
periodically over the years is that we can refactor the project
leadership as much as we like but it's not going to do a lot of good
if not everybody feels like they are part of the governed. And there
are areas in the Debian Project that are vested with authority that
predates the constitution. I've spoken with some of these people (and
they've made postings over the years) - and they're not comfortable
exactly with the idea of, say, the possibility of a madman DPL, for
example. And I'm not sure that these same historical roles will be any
more comfortable with a different thing. You know: "We've been doing
this for ten years now. You can change the constitution, you can put a
board in there, you can put a person in there... Do what you want, but
in the end this work's still got to be done." There's no benefit to
them in recognising...

: So there're a couple of fundamental things that come
to mind when we start talking about this. One is that I think
organisational structure - good organisational structure - very rarely
does anything to guarantee success, but if you get the wrong struture
it really can impede progress and success. That's sort of one idea.
And the other one is that - it's been my observation that, every time
I personally have ended up in the situation where I've started to
think I was indispensable (and believe me, it's happened at various
times in my history) - when something finally forced me to realise
that that wasn't true, things in general sort of picked up pace and
moved better as a result. And so there is this sort of trade-off, I
think, between motivating participation and how you actually sort of
keep from getting stuck in a rut or something. So... I don't know that
I have any more brilliant ideas than that.

[1] 
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/debconf5/mpeg/2005-07-16/08-Structural_Evolution-Bdale_Garbee.mpeg

--
Andrew Saunders



Re: Licenses for DebConf6

2005-11-14 Thread Andrew Saunders
On 11/14/05, Henning Makholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I case you hadn't noticed, there was a major _difference_ in opionons
> about how "software" was to be interpreted. The editorial
> clarification in 2004-003 removed the confusion by avoiding the
> ambiguous word "software"

Unfortunately not. :-(

The GR's author explained[1] that both the DFSG and the SC required
clarifying, but that in the interests of simplicity the necessary
changes would be dealt with in separate GRs. Thus, 2004-003 clarified
only the SC. Until his follow-up GR amending the DFSG is proposed and
passed, the ambiguity will remain.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/07/msg00435.html

--
Andrew Saunders



Re: iso2mirror

2005-11-02 Thread Andrew Saunders
On 11/3/05, Blars Blarson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I submitted a patch to apt-move to do this to the Debian BTS.

Does it also provide the "symbolic links only" functionality the
parent poster mentioned?

--
Andrew Saunders



Re: glibc and PaX issue

2005-09-06 Thread Andrew Saunders
On 9/6/05, Grzegorz Bizon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Anyway, I just wonder what is wrong about grsecurity

For starters, the upstream developer claims [1, 2] to engage in the
morally reprehensible practice of selling 0-day exploits he finds in
competing products to blackhats. This also casts doubt on the
trustworthiness of his *own* code, since any undiscovered (read: not
publicly disclosed) vulnerabilities/holes/etc in Grsecurity are a
potential revenue stream for him. Not that my opinion carries much
weight, but I personally feel that this massive conflict of interest
means that Grsecurity should never be supported by Debian in any way
whatsoever.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/111437/ - "Does RedHat buy exploits for
their own code? If so, how much would RedHat pay for information on an
information leaking vulnerability in SELinux for a physical, local
user? I've sold all my Exec-Shield exploits (that still work!),
otherwise I'd offer those as well ;\"
[2] http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2004-03/1315.html

-- 
Andrew Saunders



re: Grsec/PaX and Exec-shield

2003-11-04 Thread Andrew Saunders
On Tue 4 November, spender wrote:

> I've spared you your precious time and gone ahead and done this for
> you.

You might have a better reception if you dropped the attitude.

Anyone reading the thread will quickly form the opinion that maintaining
PaX within Debian would likely require frequent interaction with people
like yourself{1}, Tiago Assumpcao{2} and Peter Busser{3}. On the other
hand, maintaining exec-shield would involve collaborating with people
like Ingo Molnar. From reading your respective posts, I know which I'd prefer...

{1}
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200311/msg00076.html
- Arrogant arsehole. Professes not to care if users get rooted, and
would apparently withhold security vulnerabilities he discovers in
competing projects in order to further the ends of the one he himself
prefers.

{2}
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200311/msg00090.html
- Paranoid loon who believes the exec-shield ITP is part of some
sinister RedHat conspiracy to take away our freedoms. 

{3}
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200311/msg00158.html
- Wants to ensure that Adamantix will have an edge in security over
Debian in the future. Claims he "would very much like to see that this
project [Adamantix] serves no purpose anymore, because some or all of
its ideas ended up in other (more mainstream) distributions"
(http://www.adamantix.org/motivation.html), but started the distro
before even looking into the possibility of working within Debian. Later
opted *not* to become a Debian subproject when approached by the DPL.
Yet still has the audacity to berate others for not doing enough to get
PaX into Debian!




Re: If Debian decides that the Gnu Free Doc License is not free then I will be honored to join Stallman and the FSF in the not free section of your distro

2003-04-23 Thread Andrew Saunders
On Wed, 23 Apr 2003 22:46:24 +0400
Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> persons like me 
> are concerned that vendors will strip all information about who wrote 
> ReiserFS out except for copyright notices that none of their users
> will see, slap their brand identity onto it, and ship, depriving me of
> all credit for my work on their product. 

We seem to have slalomed across from talking about documentation to
about code, again. Ok.

Whilst I'm not personally advocating taking and re-branding code
(especially if its against upstream's wishes) the "ripping off" that you
speak so vehemently against isn't quite so bad as it may appear. In
fact, it can often be very advantageous to a project.

One could argue that if the "thief" had been unable to re-brand the
code, they never would have used it. If they had to have a prominent
notice advertising "We did not write this, Hans Reiser did" (only 24
times as long) every time their application started, they wouldn't touch
the code with a barge pole. Thus, the code is now in places where it
wouldn't have been before. This means greater penetration, albeit by the
back door.

"Depriving you of all credit" is an exaggeration. There's always going
to be some recognition gained. They cannot remove the copyright notice,
as you say. And again, since the code would not have been used at all if
large, blatant credits were a requirement, the alternative is zero
recognition because they would have done something else instead. They
might gain _more_ reputation from their immediate user-base than you,
but you still gain. And the more clueful hacker types will be the ones
who will read the copyright notices, anyway, and most probably come and
seek you out on their own.

Additionally, having taken the code and rebranded it, a prudent person
is highly unlikely to want to go to the trouble of maintaining the
codebase on their own. Even if they're being especially selfish and
don't want to contribute anything back, they'll definitely file bug
reports on any problems that they or their users find, because they'll
want them to be fixed. Again, net gain through increased testing.

Please note, I don't say that your view is invalid, merely that there is
an alternative view that seems to be quite widely spread. The above
involves sacrificing some very prominent visibility to the users of
those that do accept the more onerous licensing terms, in the hope of
garnering greater penetration, utilisation and development of the code
in the long term. 

> Look at how many companies ripped off squid.

And yet, to the best of my knowledge, Squid have not changed their
license to prevent this recurring in the future. I wonder why?