Fortigate making Iperf3 proprietary - is this allowed by the licensing?

[dchard]

Sorry to ask a question like this in here, but I am f*cking furious:

https://community.fortinet.com/t5/FortiGate/Technical-Tip-Unable-to-connect-to-the-iPerf-server-hosted-by/ta-p/358783

Is this allowed by the licensing of Iperf3? A commercial company can take it, rape it, make it incompatible with the existing client base, and get away with it?

[bmah888]

Thanks for bringing this up.

I Am Not A Lawyer, but my lay opinion is that under the terms of the iperf3 license (can be found in LICENSE), which is a version of the BSD license, Fortigate can basically do what they're apparently doing. Basically the intent is to allow people to do what they like with the code, and that includes making a proprietary version of it to be used in commercial products, if that's their desire.

That having been said, it's probably somewhat misleading for them to claim iperf3 functionality/compatibility if they have an iperf3 server that cannot be used by a stock iperf3 client. Personally, as someone who's participated in the open source movement for a long time, and who cares about interoperability, I feel is suboptimal from a community standpoint.

Disclaimers: These are my opinions only, and not those of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California, the United States Department of Energy, or the Energy Sciences Network.