[526] in SIPB bug reports
Re: One more thing....
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun May 14 01:44:32 1989
Date: Sun, 14 May 89 01:44:18 EDT
From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan I. Kamens <jik@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Cc: bug-sipb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, sipb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Jonathan I. Kamens's message of Sun, 14 May 89 00:20:14 EDT,
Reply-To: tytso@athena.mit.edu
I hate to continue this flame war by mail, but since it will be
impossible for me to be at the meeting on Monday (LSC permanent pass
meeting), let me speak my peace now.
First of all, most of those people agreed early on, before Stan and I
raised some problems with your proposal. You attempted to answer those
objections, but on one else was given a chance to give their opinions
about the flaws in your proposal. Thus, I believe your claim that we
had reached a "SIPB policy decision" to be rather premature. (Is there
such a thing?) In addition, you didn't even breathe a word to any
mailing list after the objects were raised that you had single-handedly
declared the period of discussion over and that you were going to
implement your proposal.
Is the SIPB really going to be into restricting access to sources? Are
we going to censure anyone who transmits information we don't think is
"appropriate"? I hope not. If I had offered to go and find a version
of xscreensaver from the net, would you have been so incensed? Is the
SIPB starting to regulate the actions of its members? I hope not.
Jik, jik, believe me, I've been there before. I *worked* on the X10
version of xscreensaver. Back then, SIPB attempted to keep the sources
of xscreensaver private. It failed miserably. It just doesn't work.
In any case, the case may be academic. Tom Copetto now has a copy of
the sources. *And* he has access to a locker with substantially more
than the 600k quota that you assume everyone has. I suppose I won't
have to give a copy of the sources to Ron; he's made my point for me.
I won't belabor the arguments that have already been made against your
changes to xscreensaver, but I think they deserve to be listed once
more:
* It makes SIPB into a fascist organization. You've already
started dictating what members can and can not do. It means we have to
be fascist with sources. Sort of makes us hypocrits, when we've been
pressing other people (NeXT, Apple) for an open source policy.
* It's not fair for people with private workstations. Remember
SIPB != Athena. The users of public workstations are not the only
people we provide software for. For example, media-lab used to receive
the SIPB locker as well (which is why everything is compiled for
/usr/sipb). Your changes certainly would not be appropriate for them.
(Although granted I don't think they've updated their software from us
in a while.)
* It encourages people (such as Tom Coppeto) to keep private
copies of xscreensaver around, thus fragmenting our control of what
people run. Don't assume that MIT students are dumb. They aren't.
* Because of the above, it doesn't work! After all of these
disadvantages, it doesn't do anything but provide bad PR and spread
dissention.
The most distasteful part of this is that your arrogance about the whole
thing --- your arrogance about not giving any notice that you had
considered the discussion closed; your arrogance in how you presume to
speak for SIPB. If I thought your views reflected the views of SIPB I
would have left this organization a long time ago.
- Ted
P.S. I suppose that if you were in charge of Kerberos you would have
used xor encryption and then persecuted anyone who had the audacity to
copy the sources or who tried to make a replacement program which broke
your inadequate implementation?
