[Gllug] Opinions on Smoothwall and other firewalls

[David Damerell]

On Friday, 5 Oct 2001, Bruce Richardson wrote:
>Smoothwall has caused a lot of excitement on uk.comp.os.linux.  Not 
>because of the quality of the product - serious doubts have been raised 
>about its security - but because of the antics of the development team.  
>The lead developer is mentally unstable and childishly abusive.  They 
>recently tried to mess with the license in a way that would have broken 
>the GPL and violated the license terms of much of the open source code it 
>is based on.

In particular, they imposed (for some time) a condition that any
modifications you made to Smoothwall could be used and distributed by
them in any fashion they pleased.

This would, of course, enable them to make the project non-free at the
drop of a hat - of course, the programs written by third parties would
remain free, but they could pull a SuSE (Yast is non-free, and SuSE is
no use without Yast) and make every program they had written non-free
- and people who had submitted moficiation would be unable to stop
them by insisting that their patches were only for use under the GPL.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

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