Re: What is the forum's policy on blatant software license abuse?
This may be the case, but it is just as capable of doing some serious damage, as this example of a dodgy compiled sgminer binary shows:
{Trojan source elided}
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=719526.0 - and demonstrates perfectly everything that the cgminer devs want to avoid, and I believe what PatMan was trying to highlight. Of course, the majority of users here would never download anything from an unofficial source, let alone use it - yet here we all are running Bitmain software with known security holes in the miner software thinking everything is fine & dandy?! So although you, or anyone else for that matter, may not agree 100% with what PatMan says (which isn't surprising, given the length of it
), I think your description of it being a "deluded rant" might be a little OTT, even though it was said in a joking fashion.....still, he took it well 
I'd hazard a guess that 90% of noobs don't know how to use a MD5 checksum, let alone a decompiler to check what they just downloaded, they just "trust" that it's OK. If every manufacturer abides by what ever terms of the software license, and users were all made aware of the importance of Free & Open Source - the chances of the above happening would be drastically reduced, that's for certain.
While I understand (and commiserate) with your argument, I don't think that this is what being "open source" is all about and what was the main thought of ckolivas, kano and the quoted portion of PatMan's message that I ridiculed.{Trojan source elided}
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=719526.0 - and demonstrates perfectly everything that the cgminer devs want to avoid, and I believe what PatMan was trying to highlight. Of course, the majority of users here would never download anything from an unofficial source, let alone use it - yet here we all are running Bitmain software with known security holes in the miner software thinking everything is fine & dandy?! So although you, or anyone else for that matter, may not agree 100% with what PatMan says (which isn't surprising, given the length of it
), I think your description of it being a "deluded rant" might be a little OTT, even though it was said in a joking fashion.....still, he took it well I'd hazard a guess that 90% of noobs don't know how to use a MD5 checksum, let alone a decompiler to check what they just downloaded, they just "trust" that it's OK. If every manufacturer abides by what ever terms of the software license, and users were all made aware of the importance of Free & Open Source - the chances of the above happening would be drastically reduced, that's for certain.
I understand that ckolivas is (or was) also a Linux kernel developer/committer and he must have heard and read the arguments within the Linux community about the "bag-of-drivers" enabled/disabled with the preprocessor macros. So I'm not going to repeat that discussion here. Linux, like almost every other operating system designed after the end of sixties, has a concept of loadable driver module, and nobody is seriously discussing getting rid of that technology.
{ Small aside: if anyone is going to use the word "plugin" to describe "loadable driver module" I'm going to ridicule him for complete lack of understanding of hardware }
Obviously I cannot speak for ckolivas and/or kano; and I cannot know their goals in life and in developing cgminer under GPLv3 in particular. I just hope that they understand the progress of technology and they never ventured to be nothing but a Cerberus guarding a bag-of-drivers. I know that within the Linux community there's plenty of wanna-be Cerberuses and that subset has spilled over here, or into crypto-coin mining in general.