Novell including Squid in "Border Manager Product"

 An issue has come to my attention that has cause me some concern. Over
the past two days I attended a Novell session called "TechShare". During
this set of seminars I found out that Novell is including a proxy cache in
it's border manager add on to Netware 4.11. I later found out that it
supports ICPv2 and cache hiearchies. This had me intrugued. After talking
to several Novell personal I fould out that their product was infact a
port of squid. It also included httpd accelleration..
 I was privlaged to see a demonstration of their Border Manager, in it's
current beta form. It includeds the proxy cache as an integral part of the
product.. They stated some stuff and rang off some figures about their
product knocking the socks of Netscapes Cache, and Microsofts.. I suspect
they were a little inflated but I wasn't too suprised. I must say however
the interfact to manage the cache was IMPRESSIVE... It was integrated into
NDS... Real nice.. Novell is up to some impressive things..

 My concerns are that:
                1) From what I can tell, Squid developers were not aware
                   of this.
                2) I fear they will not abide by the FSF licence that
                   squid is under.

 I am posting this here to find out if this has been discussed previously
and/or resolved. Please do not go attacking Novell for this.. If this is
really an issue then we should discuss it and work out a sane course of
action.. Not fly off that handle.. I'm just concerned they will take the
technoligy and make it proprietary. One of the less well versed Novell
people told me they invented Hierarchial caching.. However, the man who
actually knew something even gave out the nlanar web address.

[offtopic]
 Some of the new stuff Novell is doing is really neat.. They've ported a
java vm to the server console.. In order to run graphical java stuff when
nessassart they've ported Xfree86.. (Which I also saw running.. Though
64megs of ram was the minium for all that stuff as Netware currently
doesn't have virtual memory).. Someone there (I cannot recall who) told me
their new tcpip stack used the copy&checksum from linux.. Now, I think
it's great that a commericial enity is using this stuff, hopefully this
will make hierarchial caching wide spread.. But, are they following the
licences for the things they are using, and more importantly: Are they
contributing back to the community? (btw- their Xfree86 port displayed
approiate notification as per the GNU licence.. (is xf86 GNU licenced?) so
they might be intending to comply)

 Please dont start a war over this.. If there is a problem then it should
be handled by the squid developers (hopefully in another list for this
puspose).. If the developers dont know about this then I would suggest
they conctact the FSF.. I think is should be stressed that Novell should
NOT be stopped from this caching initiave.. They should just follow the
rules, and play fair... If they arn't I'm sure it's just an oversite as
this would be termendously bad press for them..

                                                Sincerly,
                                                Gregory Maxwell
Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 13:15:41 MDT