Bluewhite64

[Chess]

I don't know all the details of the brouhaha, but as far as I understand it, I don't think anyone was complaining that B&W was violating the GPL or that he couldn't fork Slackware or Slamd64. I think the allegations were centered around copyright infringement and fairness.

As to the copyright issue, I believe the developer of B&W had either removed Patrick Volkerding's and/or Fred Emmott's names in the copyright lines of certain SlackBuild scripts used to compile the official and/or Slamd64 packages, or added his own name as additional copyright holder when there were no visible changes to the scripts. I think he has fixed that and put their names back in.

As to the "fairness" issue, I think the problem was that he was going around telling folks (and in the Tuxmachines interview) that B&W was the first 64 bit port of Slackware, which was not true. Furthermore, I believe the concern was also that he made it seem that he had put in all this work to create the B&W distribution when in reality he was just using all of Fred's scripts without adding anything new. The acknowledgment on the B&W info page concerning Fred's work is recent -- the B&W developer added it after all this came out.

So, while the B&W developer has apparently resolved the immediate issues raised by the community, I think there's still some question as to why he did those things in the first place and whether that says anything about the project itself.

That's about the extent of my knowledge about it. I have not fully investigated these allegations, so what I am relaying here could be completely untrue. However, this story has come from enough corners of the Slackware community -- and come from respected Slackware developers and users -- that I tend to put some truth in it.

[Tsuroerusu]

I don't know all the details of the brouhaha, but as far as I understand it, I don't think anyone was complaining that B&W was violating the GPL or that he couldn't fork Slackware or Slamd64. I think the allegations were centered around copyright infringement and fairness.

The GPL is a document talking about copyright, so removing the name(s) of the author(s) from copyright notices in source files is a GPL violation.

As to the copyright issue, I believe the developer of B&W had either removed Patrick Volkerding's and/or Fred Emmott's names in the copyright lines of certain SlackBuild scripts used to compile the official and/or Slamd64 packages, or added his own name as additional copyright holder when there were no visible changes to the scripts. I think he has fixed that and put their names back in.

That's what I mean.

[Chess]

FWIW, Fred Emmott has released Slamd64 12.1:

http://slamd64.com/

[Chess]

And yeah, sbopkg is great, it makes installing extra software much easier. My only question is, is there a way for sbopkg to tell me if there are updates available? Reading the changelog is a bit of a chore.

I just committed an update to the SVN repository for sbopkg that now allows the user to check for available updates to packages installed from SlackBuilds.org. You can either pull the SVN repo from the Google Code page where sbopkg is hosted, or you can just download the SVN version of the sbopkg script itself directly from the web-based SVN browser here: http://code.google.com/p/sbopkg/source/ ... bin/sbopkg and run it separately.

Testers appreciated.