oksh

This code is so #FAIL… first they steal code from mksh and pretend it’s public domain (which it isn’t, mksh has a licence of its own), remove that with “All mksh code was removed because of license problems” (as if it were mksh’s problem). Now they have “it was ported to GNU autotools” which is just taking pdksh’s configure.in etc. and putting it there; not much own code to warrant changing the licence to GPLv3, eh? The own changes are funny too: replacing 「strlcat(editor, " $_", len);」 with 「strncat(editor, " $_", len);」 introduces a nice exploitable buffer overflow… this guy doesn’t even know what “porting to Linux” means. (And I still think he didn’t even add enough work of his own for copyright law to apply…)

Re: licence

> I deny them only the ability to make the

> code unfree.

What code? It's not as if you had written anything

sensible or contributed any material actually protected

by copyright law or Berne convention to the project.

Please also read about the ar5k vs OpenHAL case, where

the Linux developers agreed to place changes to BSD-

licenced files¹ under the BSD licence, since it would

be impolite otherwise, and only use the GNU GPL for

_new_ files they created.

¹) I know that OpenBSD ksh is not BSD licenced, but if

you were using mksh (again), this would apply, and even

so it's similar enough to be impolite.

Re: licence
I deny them only the ability to make the code unfree. The previous licenses made it even possible to make the whole thing closed source (i. e. propietary). With GPL this is not possible.

I repeat myself: Thousands of free software programmers make the same thing every day. They took code from software which is licensed under non-copyleft licenses and release their code under GPL or other copyleft licenses. In this sense I think the majority of free software programmers are "two-faced".

Re: licence
I'm not picking on you, I am pointing out the duplicity involved in your actions. You speak of freedom, while denying the people who's work you use the ability to benefit back. Because of how insignificant the work involved in your effort is, it really shouldn't be something that requires the GPL3 to protect it.

They cannot use your code, without giving up all the freedoms they granted you in the first place. I would call your actions two-faced.

Re: licence
So, they can use my code - if they license it under GPLv3. I don't understand your problem. There are thousands of projects using code released under a different license such as BSD and public domain before and then release it under GPLv2 and v3 and other even more restrictive licenses. I don't know why you picked this tiny project to vent your anger.