They've hired lawyers, and consulted the community. The community's predominant concern was whether the new license (Apache2) would be compatible with GPLv2.
In the "We are now in this year" link, it's explicated how they consulted a gaggle of open source lawyers, determined the predominant belief was the new license was compatible with GPLv2. But they didn't stop there – they had a lawyer draft an addendum to really ensure that!
Not a good look. Fever swamp paranoia, and wishing ill on a series of people clearly trying to do well and address every concern.
Theo de Raadt said neither phrase.
Theo seems to agree with that person though, and "wishing ill on a series of people clearly trying to do well" certainly could apply to both parties in the email.
> > > What does the OpenBSD community think about the LLVM proposal to move
> > > to the Apache license?
> > >
> > > http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-September/104778.html
> >
> > If LLVM would move to the Apache 2 license, we would become unable
> > to use versions released after that change, and would be stuck with
> > version released before the change, just like we are stuck with
> > pre-GPLv3 gcc now. So it would be very bad for us.
> >
> > See http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html :
> >
> > Apache
> > The original Apache license was similar to the Berkeley license,
> > but source code published under version 2 of the Apache license
> > is subject to additional restrictions and cannot be included
> > into OpenBSD.
> >
> > In a nutshell, OpenBSD does not consider software released under
> > Apache 2 to be free software. At least not free enough for usGNU General Public License, GPL, LGPL, copyleft, etc.
The GNU Public License and licenses modeled on it impose the restriction that source code must be distributed or made available for all works that are derivatives of the GNU copyrighted code.
While this may superficially look like a noble strategy, it is a condition that is typically unacceptable for commercial use of software. So in practice, it usually ends up hindering free sharing and reuse of code and ideas rather than encouraging it. As a consequence, no additional software bound by the GPL terms will be considered for inclusion into the OpenBSD base system.
For historical reasons, the OpenBSD base system still includes the following GPL-licensed components: the GNU compiler collection (GCC) with supporting binutils and libraries, GNU CVS, GNU texinfo, the mkhybrid file system creation tool, and the readline library. Replacement by equivalent, more freely licensed tools is a long-term desideratum.
[edit] removed extra spaces to avoid HN's auto-formatter
I'll give you folks a hint: the specific quote dleslie responded to says that OpenBSD stuck with GPL2 version of GCC to avoid GPL3.
But, of course, this place being HN, people have attention span of an infant and forget the context by the time they catch something they'd like to respond to :p
> each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted.
GPLv3:
> Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.
The two licenses are definitely not identical on patents, but both are pretty clear that they provide protection to users from developers, insofar as the original code and any modifications downstream were licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. You're right that there's no copyleft, but that doesn't reverse the direction of the patent grant.
> If you convey a covered work, knowingly relying on a patent license, and the Corresponding Source of the work is not available for anyone to copy, free of charge and under the terms of this License, through a publicly available network server or other readily accessible means, then you must either (1) cause the Corresponding Source to be so available, or (2) arrange to deprive yourself of the benefit of the patent license for this particular work, or (3) arrange, in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License, to extend the patent license to downstream recipients. “Knowingly relying” means you have actual knowledge that, but for the patent license, your conveying the covered work in a country, or your recipient's use of the covered work in a country, would infringe one or more identifiable patents in that country that you have reason to believe are valid.
> If, pursuant to or in connection with a single transaction or arrangement, you convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work, and grant a patent license to some of the parties receiving the covered work authorizing them to use, propagate, modify or convey a specific copy of the covered work, then the patent license you grant is automatically extended to all recipients of the covered work and works based on it.
> A patent license is “discriminatory” if it does not include within the scope of its coverage, prohibits the exercise of, or is conditioned on the non-exercise of one or more of the rights that are specifically granted under this License. You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent license (a) in connection with copies of the covered work conveyed by you (or copies made from those copies), or (b) primarily for and in connection with specific products or compilations that contain the covered work, unless you entered into that arrangement, or that patent license was granted, prior to 28 March 2007.
To be honest if you're hostile to software patents in general (which I am, and the GPL sure as hell is), the part of the Apache 2.0 license's patent clause that prevents users from flipping around the patent claims seems like a non-issue.
(Because the way you phrased it implies this only holds for patent trolls).
No vendor ships that version anymore. I don't think modern Windows clients will even connect to it now (no working NTLMv2).
The ones who didn't want the GPLv3 (Apple) either wrote their own or purchased a proprietary third party server such as Likewise and were left holding a flaming bag of shit when EMC purchased the Likewise codebase and cancelled all existing support contracts. You'd think people would learn, but there are still vendors out there gambling on using proprietary third party SMB3 servers (hoping the same won't happen to them :-).