In today's open source roundup: Controversy rages around possible license violations by the developers of Remix OS. Plus: 4 questions to ask before open sourcing a project. And DistroWatch reviews Kwort 4.3. Did Remix OS violate the GPL and Apache licenses? Remix OS is an Android based desktop operating system. A recent post about Remix OS on the Linux Homefront Project blog charges that Remix OS has violated the GPL and Apache licenses. Pavlo Rudyi reports for the Linux Homefront Project blog: After the previous review of Remix OS I received a comment with interested information about Remix OS USB Tool. My small personal research found that Remix OS developers have a zero tolerance for the code licenses and work of other peoples. Minimum differences with UNetbootin! Just new icons and micro changes in GUI interface. Need more information and do not trust to your eyes? Not a problem – just unpack remixos-usb-tool-B2016011102.exe. Yes, it’s really rebrand UNetbootin that licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2 or above. Remix OS USB Tool distributes without the source codes. No information about the modified files. More at the Linux Homefront Project blog The report about Remix OS and possible license violations spawned a large thread on the Linux subreddit, and redditors there weren’t shy about sharing their thoughts: Timawesomeness: ”Remix OS has seemed bad ever since I first heard of it. This just confirms my feelings.” K1: ”Glad this came out. Wasn’t happy to see consoleos being crapped on while remix got a free pass for no reason. Also that did seem to be very close to unetbootin…” Arahman81: ”Well, RemixOS did something, ConsoleOS just relabelled Android-x86 and then ask them to fix some issues so he could take all credit.” Trish1975: ”I would much prefer that if a desktop based on Android ever was released, that all the local components are released under a FOSS license so the community would also gain something.” Directhex: ”Ignoring the violations issue, using unetbootin for anything is a great sign of extremely questionable thought processes, and I’d not want to touch any project advocating its use” 11mariom: ”I didn’t trust Remix OS at all from first news…” Funknut: ”I was sitting here trying to figure out how this OS is licensed to determine the validity of the article, but you’re right, the license comparability simply relies on how it might restrict its own source distribution, which might not even be defined in whatever license they’re including, so certainly making contact with the author to clarify would be the only way to determine in the case that a license does not clarify.” Shinjiryu: ”Sigh, why am I not surprised?” Einsidiler: ”I’ve heard the GPL criticised a lot for being “viral”, which really makes it impractical for libraries that you want more people to use. Though, that’s why LGPL exists, and other licenses are even less restrictive. For a full application, like UNetbootin, it isn’t really a problem unless you want to rebrand the application without saying that’s what you’re doing, which is a dick move and exactly what’s happening here.” EmanueleAina: ”…plenty of closed projects use GPL components: you can always call an external GPL program even from closed software. Many projects are under lesser strong forms of the GPL, like libc (which allows closed software to link to it), Java Classpath (which has a similar clause) or everything under the LGPL. All of them require you to share the source of the *GPL pieces you used, while non-copyleft licenses (eg. MIT or Apache) don’t require it. So yes, the GPL is “annoying” on purpose, as it really meant to make sure the freedom of the user to tinker with the software is not restricted.” More at Reddit 4 questions to ask before open sourcing a project Open source is all the rage these days, but not all projects should be open sourced. Opensource.com has four helpful questions to consider before you open source any project. Duane O’Brien reports for Opensource.com: One of the most common tasks in any company’s open source department is evaluating internal software to see if it would be a good candidate to give back to the community. When performing this task at PayPal, we found it useful to take each potential open source project through a vetting process originally framed by Danese Cooper that seeks to answer four primary questions: 1. Who cares? 2. Are we still using it? 3. Are we committed to it? 4. Can it be developed in one public tree? These four questions do not answer all concerns by any means. Any company will still need to evaluate the project against any intellectual property (IP) considerations they may have. A study of similar open source projects should be undertaken to make sure your effort is not duplicative. The project still has to make sense both for your company and for the open source community at large, but these questions can serve as a good starting point for the conversation and can help filter out projects that are non-starters. More at Opensource.com Kwort 4.3 review Kwort is a Linux distribution that is based on CRUX, and promises to provide a simple system geared toward advanced users. DistroWatch has a full review of Kwort 4.3, and laments the lack of documentation for this distro. Jesse Smith reports for DistroWatch: At the end of 2015, I reviewed Arch Linux. At the time I commented that Arch’s minimal and sometimes cryptic nature might not make it practical in many situations, but there are things I respect about Arch. Specifically, Arch keeps its users on the cutting edge of technology and, perhaps more importantly, the Arch Linux project has extensive, well written documentation. Running Kwort was a little like running Arch Linux, but with older packages and virtually no documentation. An experienced user may be able to get Kwort installed by following the on-line guide, but beyond that point there does not appear to be much we can do with Kwort. I was able to get a graphical user interface running, edit text files, play multimedia files and browse the web. But there was no image editing, no screen shot tools, no productivity suite and not even a working graphical file manager. This made running Kwort a very limiting experience and the lack of integration with VirtualBox did not help matters. My experience with the distribution was, at times, made more frustrating when I had to do things like drop to a command line to fix audio output or download the default software repository data. I’m not sure why repository data is treated as an add-on, it’s not as though Kwort is desperately trying to save space since the project ships with the Chrome web browser. I think my biggest frustration though, after having tried Kwort, is I suspect I am missing out on something, but simply do not know what because of the sparse documentation. There could be a great community repository of software or more useful tools or wonderful reasons for the design decisions made. However, I am not aware of them. For a distribution to be useful it needs, in my opinion, to either present its features in an easy to explore way (like Ubuntu) or it needs to have great documentation (like Arch Linux). Kwort, though it has merit in its lightweight nature, is not easy to explore and has very little documentation. Two factors I think will keep most users away from this minimal distribution. More at DistroWatch Did you miss a roundup? Check the Eye On Open home page to get caught up with the latest news about open source and Linux. Software DevelopmentOpen Source