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Some updates inline and at the bottom.

The new Terms of Service of GitHub became effective today, which is quite problematic — there was a review phase, but my reviews pointing out the problems were not answered, and, while the language is somewhat changed from the draft, they became effective immediately.

Now, the new ToS are not so bad that one immediately must stop using their service for disagreement, but it’s important that certain content may no longer legally be pushed to GitHub. I’ll try to explain which is affected, and why.

I’m mostly working my way backwards through section D, as that’s where the problems I identified lie, and because this is from easier to harder.

Note that using a private repository does not help, as the same terms apply.

Anything requiring attribution (e.g. CC-BY, but also BSD, …)

Section D.7 requires the person uploading content to waive any and all attribution rights. Ostensibly “to allow basic functions like search to work”, which I can even believe, but, for a work the uploader did not create completely by themselves, they can’t grant this licence.

The CC licences are notably bad because they don’t permit sublicencing, but even so, anything requiring attribution can, in almost all cases, not “written or otherwise, created or uploaded by our Users”. This is fact, and the exceptions are few.

Anything putting conditions on the right to “use, display and perform” the work and, worse, “reproduce” (all Copyleft)

Section D.5 requires the uploader to grant all other GitHub users…

• the right to “use, display and perform” the work (with no further restrictions attached to it) — while this (likely — I didn’t check) does not exclude the GPL, many others (I believe CC-*-SA) are affected, and…
• the right to “reproduce your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality”, with no further restructions attached; this is a killer for, I believe, any and all licences falling into the “copyleft” category.

Note that section D.4 is similar, but granting the licence to GitHub (and their successors); while this is worded much more friendly than in the draft, this fact only makes it harder to see if it affects works in a similar way. But that doesn’t matter since D.5 is clear enough. (This doesn’t mean it’s not a problem, just that I don’t want to go there and analyse D.4 as D.5 points out the same problems but is easier.)

This means that any and all content under copyleft licences is also no longer welcome on GitHub.

Anything requiring integrity of the author’s source (e.g. LPPL)

Some licences are famous for requiring people to keep the original intact while permitting patches to be piled on top; this is actually permissible for Open Source, even though annoying, and the most common LaTeX licence is rather close to that. Section D.3 says any (partial) content can be removed — though keeping a PKZIP archive of the original is a likely workaround.

Affected licences

Anything copyleft (GPL, AGPL, LGPL, CC-*-SA) or requiring attribution (CC-BY-*, but also 4-clause BSD, Apache 2 with NOTICE text file, …) are affected. BSD-style licences without advertising clause (MIT/Expat, MirOS, etc.) are probably not affected… if GitHub doesn’t go too far and dissociates excerpts from their context and legal info, but then nobody would be able to distribute it, so that’d be useless.

But what if I just fork something under such a licence?

Only “continuing to use GitHub” constitutes accepting the new terms. This means that repositories from people who last used GitHub before March 2017 are excluded.

Even then, the new terms likely only apply to content uploaded in March 2017 or later (note that git commit dates are unreliable, you have to actually check whether the contribution dates March 2017 or later).

And then, most people are likely unaware of the new terms. If they upload content they themselves don’t have the appropriate rights (waivers to attribution and copyleft/share-alike clauses), it’s plain illegal and also makes your upload of them or a derivate thereof no more legal.

Granted, people who, in full knowledge of the new ToS, share any “User-Generated Content” with GitHub on or after 1ˢᵗ March, 2017, and actually have the appropriate rights to do that, can do that; and if you encounter such a repository, you can fork, modify and upload that iff you also waive attribution and copyleft/share-alike rights for your portion of the upload. But — especially in the beginning — these will be few and far between (even more so taking into account that GitHub is, legally spoken, a mess, and they don’t even care about hosting only OSS / Free works).

Conclusion (Fazit)

I’ll be starting to remove any such content of mine, such as the source code mirrors of jupp, which is under the GNU GPLv1, now and will be requesting people who forked such repositories on GitHub to also remove them. This is not something I like to do but something I am required to do in order to comply with the licence granted to me by my upstream. Anything you’ve found contributed by me in the meantime is up for review; ping me if I forgot something. (mksh is likely safe, even if I hereby remind you that the attribution requirement of the BSD-style licences still applies outside of GitHub.)

(Pet peeve: why can’t I “adopt a licence” with British spelling? They seem to require oversea barbarian spelling.)

The others

Atlassian Bitbucket has similar terms (even worse actually; I looked at them to see whether I could mirror mksh there, and turns out, I can’t if I don’t want to lose most of what few rights I retain when publishing under a permissive licence). Gitlab seems to not have such, but requires you to indemnify them… YMMV. I think I’ll self-host the removed content.

And now?

I’m in contact with someone from GitHub Legal (not explicitly in the official capacity though) and will try to explain the sheer magnitude of the problem and ways to solve this (leaving the technical issues to technical solutions and requiring legal solutions only where strictly necessary), but for now, the ToS are enacted (another point of my criticism of this move) and thus, the aforementioned works must go off GitHub right now.

That’s not to say they may not come back later once this all has been addressed, if it will be addressed to allow that. The new ToS do have some good; for example, the old ToS said “you allow every GitHub user to fork your repositories” without ever specifying what that means. It’s just that the people over at GitHub need to understand that, both legally and technically¹, any and all OSS licences² grant enough to run a hosting platform already³, and separate explicit grants are only needed if a repository contains content not under an OSI/OKFN/Copyfree/FSF/DFSG-free licence. I have been told that “these are important issues” and been thanked for my feedback; we’ll see what comes from this.

① maybe with a little more effort on the coders’ side³

② All licences on one of those lists or conformant to the DFSG, OSD or OKD should do⁴.

③ e.g. when displaying search results, add a note “this is an excerpt, click HERE to get to the original work in its context, with licence and attribution” where “HERE” is a backlink to the file in the repository

④ It is understood those organisations never un-approve any licence that rightfully conforms to those definitions (also in cases like a grant saying “just use any OSS² licence” which is occasionally used)

Update: In the meantime, joeyh has written not one but two insightful articles (although I disagree in some details; the new licence is only to GitHub users (D.5) and GitHub (D.4) and only within their system, so, while uploaders would violate the ToS (they cannot grant the licence) and (probably) the upstream-granted copyleft licence, this would not mean that everyone else wasn’t bound by the copyleft licence in, well, enough cases to count (yes it’s possible to construct situations in which this hurts the copyleft fraction, but no, they’re nowhere near 100%).

GMane has been down for a day or two, and flakey for a day before that. MidnightBSD’s laffer1 just linked the reason, which made me cry out loud.

GMane is really great, and I rely on the NNTP interface a lot, both posting and especially reading — it gives me the ability to download messages from mailing lists I don’t receive in order to be able to compose replies with (mostly) correct References and In-Reply-To headers. Its web interface, especially the article permalinks, are also extremely helpful.

This is a request for a petition to save GMane. Please, someone, do something! Thanks in advance!

As announced in the earlier wlog entry about server reorg I’ve now switched over most services from the soon-to-be-defunct eurynome to fish, with gecko2’s www.ig42.org providing the redirection HTTP vhost for hostname-less mirbsd.org requests (i.e. people who don’t know how this works) and, soon, fallback HTTP services should they be needed. (He’s trusted with the SSL key and certificate.)

This also involves switching SSH hostkeys for AnonCVS, unfortunately; I’ve taken the chance to generate a fresh key for fish. Look in /MirOS/ for the files (gzsig(1) signed) hostkeys.gz or (PGP signed) hostkeys.asc for a less-dependent source for the new keys.

I’ll have to add O_DIRECTORY support to open(2) for more security in cpio(1), pax(1), and tar(1). (Maybe I’ll also add O_CLOEXEC while there…) Today’s paxmirabilis will however pick this up as soon as it’s there and thus fail if it is not supported by the running kernel yet.

Morale: when upgrading to a snapshot take care of the kernel first (install and reboot), userspace second.

To be clear: this will affect the first -current snapshot to be published after today on /MirOS/current.

The MirBSD Korn Shell R52c was published today as bugfix-accumulating release of low upto medium importance. Thanks to everyone who helped squashing all those bugs; this includes our bug reporters who always include reproducer testcases; you’re wonderful!

MirCPIO was also resynchronised from OpenBSD, to address the CVE-2015-{1193,1194} test cases, after a downstream (wow there are so many?) reminded us of it; thanks!
This is mostly to prevent extracting ../foo — either directly or from a symlink(7) — from actually ending up being placed in the parent directory. As such the severity is medium-high. And it has a page now — initially just a landing page / stub; will be fleshed out later.

Uploads for both should make their way into Debian very soon (these are the packages mksh and pax). Uploading backports for mksh (jessie and wheezy-sloppy) have been requested by several users, but none of the four(?) DDs asked about sponsoring them even answered at all, and the regular (current) sponsors don’t have experience with bpo, so… SOL ☹

I’ve also tweaked a bug in sed(1), in MirBSD. Unfortunately, this means it now comes with the GNUism -i too: don’t use it, use ed(1) (much nicer anyway) or perlrun(1) -p/-n…

Finally, our PDF manpages now use the PA4 paper size instead of DIN ISO A4, meaning they can be printed without cropping or scaling on both A4 and US-american “letter” paper. And a Бодун from the last announcement: we now use Gentium and Inconsolata as body text and monospace fonts, respectively. (And à propos, the website ought to be more legible due to text justification and better line spacing now.) I managed to hack this up in GNU groff and Ghostscript, thankfully. (LaTeX too) Currently there are PDF manpages for joe (jupp), mksh, and cpio/pax/tar.

And we had Grünkohl today!

Also, new console-setup package in the “WTF” APT repository since upstream managed to do actual work on it (even fixed some bugs). Read its feed if interested, as its news will not be repeated here usually. (That means, subscribe as there won’t be many future reminders in this place.)

The netboot.me service appears to be gone. I’ll not remove our images, but if someone knows what became of it drop us a message (IRC or mailing list will work just fine).

PS: This was originally written on 20160304 but opax refused to be merged in time… Happy Birthday, gecko2! In the meantime, the Street Food festival weekend provided wonderful food at BaseCamp, and headache prevented this from being finished on the fifth.

Update 06.03.2016: The pax changes were too intrusive, so I decided to only backport the fixes OpenBSD did (both those they mentioned and those silently included), well, the applicable parts of them, anyway, instead. There will be a MirCPIO release completely rebased later after all changes are merged and, more importantly, tested. Another release although not set for immediate future should bring a more sensible (and mksh-like) buildsystem for improved portability (and thus some more changes we had to exclude at first).

I’ve also cloned the halfwidth part of the FixedMisc [MirOS] font as FixedMiscHW for use with Qt5 applications, xfonts-base in the “WTF” APT repo. (Debian #809979)

tl;dr: mksh R52c (bugfix-only, low-medium); mircpio 20160306 (security backport; high) with future complete rebase (medium) upstream and in Debian. No mksh backports due to lacking a bpo capable sponsor. New console-setup in “WTF” APT repo, and mksh there as usual. xfonts-base too. netboot.me gone?

My network at home is unstable. NetCologne suggests to switch to fibre network, but that only comes with a dynamic IPv6 address and NAT64; completely unsuitable to running a server. (I could arguably tunnel a static IPv4 address from a dedicated server to home, but that would completely foil my plans for redundancy.) So I may need an ISP (phone isn’t important) that provides me with connectivity where a static IPv4 (and, ideally, a static IPv6 /64 or /48 — but only if the reverse DNS gets delegated to me, otherwise that’s unusable) ends up at a device of my choosing (and not a plastic router which can then “forward ports”; I require full internet to end up at my own device).

HostEurope is relocating the other server, both physically and network-wise. Their plan seems fool-proof so far, though.

gecko2@ is decommissioning the server on which eurynome is hosted, shortly. This will also be no small amount of fun for everyone involved. Expect old links, SSH host keys, etc. to break. This explicitly includes /etc/ssh/*known_hosts.

During all those moves, I will downsize my DNS zones and change some entries, so that old or duplicate records will be gone.

I’ll likely generate and publish completely new hostkeys (both gzsig(1) and PGP clearsigned) once this is all over. The current gzsig(1) key is at the end of /usr/share/doc/README in any installed system. (Do note MD5 is considered insecure.) My current PGP key is 9031955E7A97A4FDA32B2B8676B534B2E99007E0 but this requires GnuPG, so check both.

My seeming inability to remember rarely-used “secure” passwords, i.e. those not fitting into my normal schemata, led to me not attempting to run a CA myself any more. While, thanks to rsc, we have an official certificate for www.mirbsd.org now, I probably will get StartSSL for “all” other systems (i.e. herc, as I appear to be downsizing), despite it lacking the SSL client purpose (important e.g. to SMTP). This shouldn’t affect anyone.

PS: I still hate Karneval!

Fearing loss of the server or the hard disc when reporting the hard disc issue I postponed that and created a snapshot (for i386) and a CVS repository snapshot and uploaded them first then backed up everything worthwhile on fish and created myself some custom rescue media.

(Some background info — this server is from 2006, and back then, they usually cost around 100 €, while this is partially sponsored. I was fearing stopping of the sponsoring or shutdown of such an old real iron hardware even though it works fine for my needs.)

Then I shut the server down and asked HostEurope support to check the HDD and, if possible, when replacing, put the old HDD into the second slot (I checked, the PowerEdge 750 has two of them). With a big German dedicated hoster that shall stay unnamed (it’s not the Uffline one), even with a RAID 1 you’re SOL because they refuse to just swap the discs, but I decided to try anyway.

So I put the request up in KIS and thought they’d do it during normal working hours (as off-hour work costs extra), but no more than four hours later, the HDD was checked as faulty, a new one (even bigger as they don’t stock 80 GB ones any more ☺) was put into the first slot and the old one into the second slot, and… oh well. The machine was booted into BIOS Setup, and I may connect with the DRAC III/XT (which needs a Java 1.4 plugin for MSIE, or telnet (not ssh), and whose password I forget due to unuse).

Some tricking around later I found out that their new netbootable rescue system (a Grml 2014.03 PONY WAGON) doesn’t work with my server, so I resigned to pay the 25 € to have someone boot it up with a Knoppix CD (uh-oh). After all, I just needed any system with which I could dd(1) the custom MirBSD installer ISO I previously made onto /dev/sda then boot into it.

To my surprise, I got an eMail telling me they had booted it with a Grml (not from network) and set it up so I could ssh(1) in… with the “initial password”. One eMail later I found out that this server predates passwords in KIS, and by now I’m in the process of restoring services by copying everything from the old to the new disc (only lost some directories under the anoncvs mirror from ocvs which is easily rsync’d right later)… ah, this completed during writing of this wlog/news entry.

In the end, this all worked perfectly fine, and I’ll be pointing the www RR back to fish after the bad disc was removed and everything has rsync’d back to my satisfaction.

I just got wd0a: uncorrectable data error reading fsbn style messages in dmesg(8) on the machine behind our website. This is rather unfortunate; it’s possible the website will be down for a while, depending on what service I’ll be able to get for the antique thing.

Update: it’s still there after a reboot; I’ll most likely ask the hoster for a hardware check early next week and take the website down durinf that.

izabera did make a good point in IRC the other day for why we will need to have two locales at the very least in MirBSD – C and C.UTF-8 (the latter being widespread enough by now, thanks to me, interestingly enough. He uses code which leads to unexpected results…

	$ generate() { tr -dc "[:alnum:]" < /dev/urandom | dd bs="$len" count=1; }
	$ len=10; echo $(generate 2>/dev/null)
	Ut流54Ȫf

… because tr(1) was the first utility I converted to Unicode, to explore possibilities and craft the OPTU encoding and, thus, “流” is, indeed, an alphanumeric character.

This implies two things: we need to change MirBSD libc locale functions back to support two charsets (and make setlocale(3) match), and mksh(1) should implement locale tracking (to change set ±U whenever one of the relevant parameters (${LC_ALL:-${LC_CTYPE:-${LANG:-C}}}) changes in the session; users could still set utf8-mode manually though). For this to not break anything, we’ll have to audit scripts in MirBSD though (usually adding export LC_ALL=C at their begin is enough, and we need this for portable scripts anyway) and remove all occurrences of #ifndef __MirBSD__ before setlocale(3) calls in applications. This will take a while.

Secondly, I opened an issue with POSIX about handling of the (deprecated, and for good reason) `-style command substitutions. The GNU autoconf texinfo manual gives good advice for portable shell scripts, and we all knew that foo="bar `echo \"baz\"`" wasn’t portable due to use of more than one set of double quotes, but my (and the yash authors’) reading of the standard (and mksh R52’s POSIX mode) make it set $foo to bar "baz" instead of the historic bar baz now, and I wish to get this clarified (and, possibly, the standard changed to match historic practice, as this breaks at least the Acrobat Reader 5 start script). Nothing has been decided yet (due to the holidays, I’m sure), but we got input from some other people involved in shell.

So, if any #!/bin/sh scripts break or behave weirdly with R52, you now know why. I’m waiting for an official statement.

The MirBSD Korn Shell R52 was published today. While there are still several known bugs, this is a release that primarily fixes lots of these, and, as with R51, we have no known regressions. Some of the itinerary for R52 has moved to R53 instead, as some bugfixes change the shell language and thus warrant a new major version, which is why this is not R51b, and they accumulated and could use some testing ;-)

This release has a nōnzero chance to break existing scripts that use some extension features – I had to quote some tildes in dot.mkshrc and a variable expansion in ${x/y"$z"} in MirWebseite (the $z) – twice!. As usual, test!

In less related news, a new release of the FixedMisc [MirOS] font is available (in BDF form and no conflict with the system Fixed [Misc] font); our CVS has the sources in bdfctool(1) format.

If you install the xfonts-base package from my APT repository you now not only get the FixedMisc [MirOS] type from The MirOS Project type foundry for the X Window System, but now also for GNU GRUB2:

Just add GRUB_FONT=/usr/share/grub/FixedMisc.pf2 to /etc/default/grub, make sure gfxterm is enabled (usually by commenting out GRUB_TERMINAL=console and removing the comment sign before GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480), run sudo update-grub and be happy at the next reboot.

The combining and Katakana characters depicted in the above screenshot are the result of manual grub.cfg editing and for demonstration (bragging) purposes only.

The RSS feed of my APT repository will also contain such news…

The MirBSD Korn Shell R51 was published today. This is a feature release clearly, but still something a lot of people would wish to use. It contains several known severe bugs, but they all are no regressions, i.e. they exist in R50f already.

This one is kinda an early release, as I wish to have those known issues all fixed, but the changes – both deep down and enduser-visible – already warrant people looking for breakages, plus it makes synchronisation with mksh-os2 easier.

mksh R52 will follow, as bugfix release, pretty soon. Itinerary:

• Fixes for as much of these known bugs as possible (code rewrites)
• Unicode 8
• New feature: print -a
• Fixes for bugs reported against R51
• Possibly more EBCDIC and OS/2 code synchronisation
• Maybe a dead useful debug tool…

Once that’s out, I’ll roll up the fixes into R50g, so that particular code branch is not dead yet either ☺

And afterwards, at least mksh(1)-wise – I have got a lot of other things on my plate after all – we can attempt getting EBCDIC and maybe OS/2 to a state where the code is included in CVS.