Re: [libreplanet-discuss] libreplanet-discuss Digest, Vol 42, Issue 9

[Sergio Durigan Junior]

Hello Darren,

On Sunday, June 16 2013, Darren Breidigan wrote:

I really don't want to play the devil's advocate here, but...

> Even though SELinux is free to Linux so was the Horse at the gates of Troy.

Thanks for using a flawed analogy, that makes it much easier to explain
why it is absurd.

Are you deliberately using the word "free" meaning different things in
this sentence?  SELinux code is free, but in terms of freedom.  The code
is GPL, and I did find some concerns about patents (on LWN, posted on
2002).  I also found
<https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/selinux/2010-January/012046.html>,
which is an e-mail from an NSA guy explaining the patent issue, and
mentioning that the patents have expired.  Anyway, I couldn't find
anything more recent about the subject, and I really believe that the
Fedora/Red Hat lawyers examined everything carefully in this case.

The "Horse at the gates of Troy" was free, but in terms of "beer" (have
you ever heard such comparison?  :-}).  By the way, why do you think the
Troy Horse worked?  Exactly because nobody cared to inspect its
internals!  Couldn't be more symptomatic...

SELinux code is free for us to examine and decide whether it is good or
not.  Let's not make it a blind war against everything which has the
letters "NSA" somewhere in the name/description, this is just not smart.

Note, however, that I am not saying we should trust them neither.  But
in this particular case we are totally capable of examining the code and
deciding whether it is good or bad for us.

> It is also in the news
>
> http://news.softpedia.com/news/NSA-Has-Legitimate-Code-Running-in-Linux-Kernel-and-Android-361289.shtml

Yeah, the news...  I wonder what they'll say when they discover that
Microsoft contributed to the Linux kerne, or that the SVG format's
design borrowed some concepts from VML, a format developed by (guess
who?) Microsoft again!  Aren't we doomed?

-- 
Sergio