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Re: Does Hebrew U. violate the GPL?




This message is cc:ed to the Israeli LUG, and I would request that you
respect that and leave them in the CC: on your reply this time.

On Sun, 28 Feb 1999, Alan Cox wrote:

> > of the GPL is unforgivable, I don't think that little remark at the end
> > was too funny. MOSIX is a military funded project, that for some
> 
> Well I think its extremely funny, precisely because of its sensitivities
> with the Israeli military. One thing to be aware in case it lost anything
> in translation is that in european english at least "aid organisation"
> quite specifally means people working to help _not_ terrorist groups. The 
> latter would indeed be far from funny whoever you happen to think is right.

well, the PLO is hardly the most scary organization in the area these
days (militant wing or not), but I still find the sugestion of using
world politics to push around academic development in the way you
sugested an extremely poor taste joke. it may be OK on some private
letter to a fellow anti-semite (I'm being sarcastic here, obviously) but
not on a high-exposure list like linux-kernel. Please keep your
political views out of public linux media in the future,
Thankyouverymuch.

> > I can assure you that me personally (and hopefully a few other people on
> > this list, possibly people who work on the project?) will compose a
> > hard-hitting open letter to HUJI if they don't find a legal solution to
> > this.
> 
> I have a little sympathy with HUJI on the military stuff. The US
> government did a panic 3 day close down of Beowulf if you remember
> before deciding "oh hell, we can't stop this anyway". And Beowulf
> while officially a NASA project appears to be correlate with some
> NSA project work beforehand, includes ex NSA (US secret service)
> staff and is tied in with defence projects on parallel data
> correlation having browsed the current DARPA project lists.

indeed it is yet to be seen what the future developments will be. Prof.
Barak afterall DID release a kernel runtime debugger and other things to
the Kernel core, and they still claim all their closed code distributed
as binary-only is wholly contained in one module and contains no
previously-GPL code whatsoever.

http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/txt_gpl.html

so until proven otherwise, I say we rejoice in the chance given to us by
HUJI's MOSIX project to explore new monster setups for our linux
networks, maybe try to immitate it, and certainly try to talk the powers
that be into releasing the sources.

last but not least, please remember that HUJI is by no mean representing
the people of Israel, the IDF or the Israeli government, although the
MOSIX project may project a little on HUJI's board's opinions about
mindshare and open source. let me also assure you that the Israeli LUG's
list, which is comprised of people from all sides of the politcal arena,
includes both Jews, Muslims and Christians (any Bahaiis here?), Israeli
and non Israeli (yes, also people from the west bank and non
Israeli-friendly north-African countries), is one of the least
politically opinionated mailing lists in Israel, I'm glad to say. This
thread was the second ever politicics-touching one on the list, and I DO
hope it's the last.

-- 
Ira Abramov ;  whois:IA58  ;  www.scso.com ;  all around Linux enthusiast 
                              --  "Of course Unix is a user friendly OS, 
                              it is just very picky about its friends..."