Re: Subject: Re: RADIUS 2? (fwd)

bem@cmc.net
Mon, 23 Sep 1996 14:00:32 -0700 (PDT)

>
> On Mon, 23 Sep 1996 bem@cmc.net wrote:
>
> > As a programmer, I'd prefer to see the Livingston RADIUS implementation
> > GPL'd.
> >....
> > Has any thought been given to GPL'ing it? It does look like a win-win
> > situation to me.
>
> It's a win for the users...but I think Livingston's position is that they
> don't want to pay a staff of programmers to produce code for their
> competitors. Why should Computone, Ascend, Cisco and others benefit from
> Livingston's work?

Well, Computone, et al, would be forced to keep the 'This Software Written
By Livingston, Makers Of Fine Servers' in it unless they did a rewrite.
Any 'way-cool-new-features' they added would have to be reported back to
Livingston, with code provided: so Livingston would be farming out the
enhancements in effect.

> OTOH, what will happen to all the freely available enhanced radiusd's?
> Will it be legal to distribute diffs at least rather than modified code?
> That way, for example, if ESVA radiusd migrated to the 2.0 base code, the
> diff to make ESVA-2.0 from plain 2.0 could be distributed, though the
> actual ESVA-2.0 source could not.

Ick.

> "Free Software" is generally good for the users, but hard to make much
> money from. Try telling Microsoft or Sun they should GPL their OS's or
> environments.

Yes, but Livingston has made precisely as much money from RADIUS as MS
has made from IE, or Sun has made from Tcl/Tk, etc (and those aren't even
GPL'd). Sun has made a good chunk of change selling OpenWindows, which is
just-another-hacked-X-server.