Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 29, 2005 11:54 PM
Hi alandd,
Thanks for your post. It is great to see you posting about this (I am the dude with whom you discussed this issue on NF before). I do not post my warnings about Mepis out of some malignant intention towards Mepis or Warren, but because I believe that this issue needs to be raised in our community and with Warren himself. I got involved in all this after getting an official Mepis CD - I was comparing live-CDs at the time - only to find out much later that the product I had purchased was not free. I sent Warren a little email to which I got a long and angry anti-GPL rant and a categorical refusal to clearly state what license Mepis was released under. I had managed to anger the man just by asking for specifics! So I looked into this deeper and, sure enough, found out that Mepis is maintaining a deliberate ambiguity about its release scheme.
I do not think that this is acceptable. They should either make up their own, non-ambiguous, EULA, or clearly release their disto under a free license.
You can bet that Warren reads NF discussions about his distro - but he NEVER bothered to come here and dispel any confusion or clarify his position. As far as I can recall, ALL other developers or maintainers come here to clarify their position when some issue comes up. But not Warren.
So in the absence of any clear statement by Warren, or Roblimo for that matter who used Mepis for his books, we - simply community members - need to raise the issue and warn everybody about this problem. If we continue doing this, sooner or later, Mepis and Warren will come clean and this will be for everybody's benefit, and for Mepis' benefit in the first place.
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raising the issue until Warren comes clean
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 29, 2005 11:54 PMThanks for your post. It is great to see you posting about this (I am the dude with whom you discussed this issue on NF before). I do not post my warnings about Mepis out of some malignant intention towards Mepis or Warren, but because I believe that this issue needs to be raised in our community and with Warren himself. I got involved in all this after getting an official Mepis CD - I was comparing live-CDs at the time - only to find out much later that the product I had purchased was not free. I sent Warren a little email to which I got a long and angry anti-GPL rant and a categorical refusal to clearly state what license Mepis was released under. I had managed to anger the man just by asking for specifics! So I looked into this deeper and, sure enough, found out that Mepis is maintaining a deliberate ambiguity about its release scheme.
I do not think that this is acceptable. They should either make up their own, non-ambiguous, EULA, or clearly release their disto under a free license.
You can bet that Warren reads NF discussions about his distro - but he NEVER bothered to come here and dispel any confusion or clarify his position. As far as I can recall, ALL other developers or maintainers come here to clarify their position when some issue comes up. But not Warren.
So in the absence of any clear statement by Warren, or Roblimo for that matter who used Mepis for his books, we - simply community members - need to raise the issue and warn everybody about this problem. If we continue doing this, sooner or later, Mepis and Warren will come clean and this will be for everybody's benefit, and for Mepis' benefit in the first place.
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