Slashdot Mirror
Hole in GNU GPL?
Public Apology
I posted this piece because I felt Faré raised some subtle but interesting ethical and legal points about the GPL that were worth discussion and clarification. I honestly did not expect to get flamed over my decision to post his submission.
I believe that software licenses and documentation, like software itself, should be discussed as openly and publicly as possible so that bugs can be exposed and repaired. However, words (especially legal words) are far more slippery than code. With words the question, "Is this a bug?" is often far harder to answer than it is in software.
But I was wrong to post this to Slashdot, which is obviously not an appropriate forum for discussion of subtle ethical matters, and it is apparent that any mention of even a hint of a possible tiny imperfection in the GPL does not belong here, and that anyone who dares to mention any such thing on this website must expect - and probably deserves - a series of harsh, even obscene, personal attacks instead of rational rebukes or comments.
Please accept my humble apology. I was wrong. I will try not to make the mistake of posting anything even remotely like this on Slashdot ever again.
- Robin
Update: 01/18 01:37 by CT :Another Public Apology I apologize for Robin's "Humble" apology. Robin posts many good stories on Slashdot, but sometimes when he gets flamed, he takes it very personally. The reality is that every author on Slashdot gets a big load of flame every day as part of their job. They get this for mistakes, misunderstandings, or just because someone had a crappy day. Those of us who have been at it for a long time just don't care any more.
I think Slashdot is a fine forum for arguing subtle points. I just think that when things like the GPL come into question, the hostile kneejerk reactions run rampant, and its a good idea to up your threshold a notch if you prefer a conversation to be a little more mature.
- CmdrTaco
It sounds like the BSD license doesn't have all these stupid problems. It is MORE free than the GPL in the fact that you can do WHATEVER you want with the software. It's not limited or tainted in a way that all derivative works of it have to be GPL'd as well. This is a GOOD thing and Linux should adopt this immediately. There's no reason why a company shouldn't be able to take Linux, add some nice commercial proprietary binary only stuff into it and then sell it. It is called the free market.
Ahh, but mom!! we just read the little boy who cried FUD last night, can't we read something else?
man is that flaimbate or what!
Even if there are loopholes or flaws in the GPL, it doesn't seem like a catastrophe to me. I can think of two reasons.
First even if you could take GPL'd code private, there are costs as well as benefits. You would lose all the other advantages of open source software, having to maintain your private version while the rest of the community might happily continue improving their software under some sort of BSDish licence.
But the main mitigating factor surely would be that there eventually would be a General Public licence V3 that would close these loopholes and flaws which most actively maintained free software would probably be licenced under.
If GNU's law has hole, then ms' law is also. and world is suck.
Right away.
I've been selling modified versions of open source projects for a long time now and not telling the buyers they can get the source for free. hehe. no one is going to catch me.
Now everyone drives everywhere and buys bottled water ... sad sad sad ...
When I look at bottled water on the shelf I feel the same way I do when I look at MS-OFFICE 2000 in a box.
PRESERVE THE GREAT LAKES!! FIGHT FOR WETLANDS CONSERVATION!! WRITE FREE SOFTWARE!!
Although I'm not an American and cannot attest to having read the constitution, from the various left wing, commy bastard, redder than red books I've read, the point is put forth that in the constitution corporations are not extended any rights that are given to citizens; the idea of corporations as such today was essentially not considered by the original framers.
I'd like to know how they became "Becker's drivers" since I've read that they were developed by an employee (Becker) of a company or organization contracted to NASA. I'd expect the copyright holder to be that organization or the company sub-contractracted to that organization, not an employee, nor even an independent sub-contractor to the company or organization. Actually, when the whole thing is financed by the US taxpayers thru NASA at federal facilities on federal computers, I think it should all be in the Public Domain, but the courts have allowed the feds to violate the intent of the US Code by letting their buddies outside the gov. grab copyrights which should be considered government works and thus not subject to copyright. Then companies like Be who help pay for the development of the stuff could use it.
Yeah ... kind of like buying one copy of Office2000 and letting everyone install it inside the "boundaries" of the company/home/circle of friends.
err no wait is that illegal? oh well everyone does it .... kind of like Americans smoking pot. I'm Dutch and pot use is legal here - no further comment on the multiple installs of commercial O$es ;-)
On your example of "distributing" commercial software within a corporation...the reason multiple licenses must be purchased in that case is not because it is being distributed within the company, it is because most commercial software licenses contain a specific clause stating that the software is licensed to be installed on *one* computer at a time.
That might be one reason, although then you run into the problem of having the software on one server and letting 500 people use it, which also is not allowed. But more to the point, are you suggesting that if IBM buys one copy of a program, and the license is invalid (let's say IBM buys the program in Germany where shrink-wrap licenses are invalid and hence IBM is not bound by the license), are you suggesting it can distribute a copy to each of its employees? Well, if that's the case, these corporations must be fabulously stupid to pay for so many licenses when they only need to buy one copy in Germany . . . .
Hmm, thinking about it, since most corporations would rather keep the millions of dollars they spend on software, I figure that maybe your interpretation is wrong and, in fact, an internal distribution would violate copyright law? Whether you want to argue it's unlawful distribution or unlawful copying, it doesn't matter, the point is you can't do it.
(Dont like this?GO DIE,whadda ya gonna do? spank me?)
No, I'm gonna moderate you as (-1, Flamebait), but I'm currently out of mod points.
Can we expect your patches to Slash and Backslash within 24 hours of the new code release?
No?
Hypocrite. Could you be any more selfish?
If he is your professor and does work for the FSF, he should know better than to refer to GNU as "Linux".
Bingo! Ferchristsakes. Is that all it takes these days to get a headline on Slashdot? I create my own bullshit controversy, report it myself, and Whamo(tm), instant open source DemiGod.
The whole argument is being put forward by someone who, ( it should be obvious if you actually follow the thread), has a particular wingnut agenda that he's pursueing *despite* being corrected in his grossly ignorant opinion. This should be most evident in his statement that he isn't just discussing the law but "the law as it should be."
His primary issue isn't even the GPL but rather that if someone hires him to do work that work becomes the property of his employer, not his, and that's just evil and his whole premise is based on this. I'm sorry, but if I hire someone to build me a deck the deck is mine. If I hire someone to write me code, the code is mine. It's the same damn thing. The employee is an *agent* of the employer. The company is the legal entity where license issues are concerned. If this were not the case *every* contract and license with *every* company would be "unenforcable." It's basic business law.
This whole thing dosn't deserve the bandwidth.
(1) How can the GPL-violating incorporation of code into proprietary software be detected? and
(2) If it is detected, what is the proper response assuming the company denies wrongdoing (which they always do)?
Do we just sit idly by, perhaps secure in the knoweledge that these people will "get theirs" in the afterlife in "GNU Hell"? Or do we act to protect our code?
Well, the problem is that there are people who would call up and bitch... they are idiots, but they exist.
Cmon Bruce... this type of scenario had been discussed here and there for a few weeks by numerous people not just this one ignorant guy.
I hadnt heard any good responses to it like i have here.
I think im more informed about the issue after reading this posting than before hand.
I would hate to think even minor threats to the GPL wernt worthy of a mention on slashdot.
bug1
I agree (with qualifications) that free software can be dangerous to the livelihoods of proprietary software makers. I substitute "proprietary" for "commercial" because I want to maintain a distinction between companies that make money from code directly (like MS) and companies that make money by adding value to free code (like Redhat). But it's ludicrous to characterize this as "mean-spirited" or "unfair." How can it be unfair to deny to proprietary software makers something to which they had no rights to begin with, namely, my GPLed code. I wrote it, after all, and I can license it or not to whomever I please. If it's "mean-spirited" and "unfair" of me not to license my code to them, how much more mean-spirited and unfair is it of them not to license their code to me, especially if their code is a derivative work of my own.
One of the most absurd claims made by GPL proponents is that there's some sort of "community" out there to which one is "giving back." In fact, that's not so. The GPL requires that one must give away one's code to everyone -- the entire world -- not just the authors of the code. And thus forfeit any chance to make an honest living.
Code licensed under the GPL is code given to the free software community. Yes, it is a broad and inclusive community, "a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net," but in many ways it's quite well defined (it's certainly disjoint from the world of proprietary software, for instance). And I flatly deny your contention that it's impossible to make "an honest living" out of free software. The coders at Redhat + Cygnus, and the scads of other free software programmers who were let in on the IPOs would certainly differ with you. But I suppose the stocks aren't an honest living in your estimation (in which case I wonder how you think the proprietary programmers are making their livings?). Well, I can still point to Aladdin. Not enough bucks, eh? Well, why do you think you're entitled to big bucks for doing programming work in the first place? Or, if you insist on making the big money in proprietary software, why are you entitled to my GPLed code?
Oh? I did not notice that Sun was having any trouble making money on UNIX systems. Nor IBM. In fact, both were (and are!) doing quite well.
Nonetheless, MS had successfully marginalized both companies and the Unix platform as a whole.
Not so; they can do it considerably more cheaply than that in most cases. But even if they were hurt that badly, it'd be a bad thing. Wasting money is never good.
Quite so. I'm not arguing that MS and its ilk must die. I'm saying that they may need to look at adapting to a new business model. A few million here, a few million there is the market's way of telling them that they're headed in the wrong direction. If they fail to take note, I wouldn't think of spitting on their grave. But neither would I blame the GPL for their inability to compete. To the contrary, the GPL affords them the opportunity at any time to work with the community, to cooperate, and make the software we use better.
And that is an unreservedly Good Thing for us all.
Rob, chill out. You posted an article that alot of peopel thought hadn't been background checked efficiently. That doesn't mean we hate you, it means we think you made an error in judgement.
After that "apology," I think I do hate him now. :)
We've all seen stories far worse than this one on Slashdot, yet for this one someone's asking for an apology? The story wasn't *that* bad to begin with, and it didn't look like Rob was getting that many personal attacks. Why the apology?
Because I'm a moron.
In a word, the alleged hole in question is bullshit. Comrade Stallman's right, the other guy's wrong.
is closed you just don't have any way of knowing what they are using"
Where do all these clueless posts come from?
If you've ever worked with RE (reverse engineering) or look at the
really GOOD disassembly/ debugger tools which are available for the
true hacker who doesn't have source you would know that it's not
really that hard to detect the "fingerprint" of a particular coder or
group of coders.
Sure, you can steal 10, 100, maybe even 1000 lines of code from a GPL
application and not get caught, but that's probably not too distant
from the fair use defense anyway. When it comes to stealing whole
libraries or modules of code it's not very hard to spot when someone
has been taking without asking.
Please. Not only it is VERY easy to "launder" source code algorithmically so that the exact same source code looks very different when compiled, laundering by hand ain't too difficult either. If the BeOS people had been even a little bit sneakier, they'd have gotten away with stealing Donald Becker's network drivers.
And yes, I know of several specific instances where large chunks of GPLed code were laundered in exactly this fashion, by people who knew what they were doing and had the specific goal of rendering their theft of GPLed code uproveable in a court of law. This happens a LOT behind closed doors, and if the perpetrators of these thefts are at all competent they WILL get away with it. Hell, part of getting a CS degree is learning how to launder other people's code and turn it in as your own
The secret is that software is always flawed, and that two pieces of
software with the same design, but different programming teams will
result in different bugs. If you see the same pattern of bugs in a
competitors product you know that they're "borrowing" your code.
Lots of really stupid burglars leave fingerprints behind too. That doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of smart burglars out there who wear gloves. Likewise, if I were to steal some GPLed code, you can be damn sure I'd fix all the bugs I found and even introduce a few new ones for the sake of beliveability. Sure, this takes a little more effort, but as you yourself mentioned smaller bits of code would probably fall under fair use. Theft and heavy laundering would only make sense for larger bits of code.
The difference is that even a burglar with gloves has to make off with a physical object, so you can tell that a theft has taken place. If someone successfuly steals GPLed code, however, the theft will forever remain undetected. And of course the true master thieves will usually leave a convincing fake behind to delay discovery of the theft for as long as possible...
Roblimo shouldn't apologize for this. This discussion should go on here. It's clear that the problem with the GPL is not really a problem. The GPL like the internet will interpret these kinds of bastardizations of the spirit of the GPL as NOISE and route around them as being irrelevant. If you make something free, someone should be able to make it un-free for their purposes, and we should be free to ignore it. The free code will not disappear. Changes not "distributed" need not be stopped.
The marginal cost of a copy of a bit is next to nothing. All the work went into the first copy, which is a clue that charging for every copy is not the appropriate business model. Pretending information is property (a euphemism for telling lots of people they can't have it, for no good reason) screws customers and hobbles the profession, just to prop up a few ill-conceived enterprises that demand income without work.
It's our labor that needs to be rationed, and that's what customers should be paying for- work for hire.
How can this be? We're telling proprietary vendors they can't reuse our work, which is exactly what they're telling everyone else! We even let them read and learn from our work, which is far more than any of them can be bothered to offer. If we're destructive, what are they? And why in the world do you think they deserve a subsidy from us?
Surely you mean "from mass-market software others are happy to hack without charging". I'm pretty sure several embedded system vendors have paid them to port the GNU toolchain, which is just the way it ought to work and one of the first signs a healthy software industry could emerge from this shambles.
Yes. The author of this 'opinion' misses the fact that according to British common and American law, corporations ARE individuals and are accorded all the rights and liabilities of individuals under law ... including the right to enter contracts, accept licenses, sue and be sued.
But they don't have rights like the 5th amendment.
incorporating is not that hard.
Fine. I certainly don't wish to appear overzealous, and I don't deny people the right to create and attempt to sell proprietary software. But please, quit whining that you're entitled to chase those dollar signs by proprietarizing my GPLed code. :-)
(I realize no such whine issued from your post, but the thread above is just full of this, and I couldn't resist.)
Why the need to apologize ? Slashdorks can't stand scrutiny well fuckem. This apology is not needed.
Robs "apology" can be shortened to 3 words: "Fuck You Slashdot"
How will any in-house software affect anyone in the market or otherwise if it's never distributed? I always thought the GPL protected free software authors from having some evil organization steal their hard work and call it their own, stealing market share and propogating Yet Another Non-Free Software Package(TM)? If nothing is distributed, then what's the big deal? The only people who can use it do so in private; the software can not be distributed unless the source code is at least offered, so it's never shared. No forks occur in development trees, nobody takes someone else's free software and makes closed-source proprietary millions off of it, blah blah blah.
I think lots of people here are once again waving the GPL Holy Doctrine around without much (if any) thought behind their actions. Read the damn thing and then decide what to do. I'm as much of a GPL fan as the next guy, but even I don't see any problem here.
If this guy is a troll, then all those idiots on debian-legal who raise legal "controversies" all the time are as much a troll as anything else.
I'd advise you to go take a look at the bugroff license mentioned in this article.
MODDERATE THE PREVIOUS COMMENT DOWN!!!
There's a reason for this. The purpose of the GPL is to bolster the free code base. In order to accomplish this, there has to be some incentive to write free code instead of proprietary code. The GPL says, "If you'll give back to the community, you can take and use these things that we have built. If you won't pass on your modifications to the code base to others under the same terms with which you got the base itself, you'll have to roll your own."
The notion that code must be "protected" from being "taken proprietary" is one of the most common bogeymen raised by RMS and other advocates of the GPL.
Heh. Unix fell to pieces and nearly died of being taken proprietary. It's only of late, with the rise of the free Linux and *BSD, that it has returned to vitality. A license that fosters a common free code base (and discourages proprietary forking) is a Good Thing.
Microsoft, the favorite target of invective from the open source community, isn't hurt by the GPL's "copyleft" provisions one bit. Why? Because it doesn't need to use anyone else's code. All it needs to do is wave a few million dollars, and programmers will implement (or reimplement) anything it wants!
Well, then it sounds like they're hurt to the tune of several million dollars every time they have to reimplement something they could've had for free if they'd work with the community (like Redhat) instead of against it. Even MS cannot sustain this forever, especially if they face a declining revenue stream as free software alternatives become more popular.
Thus, the young upstarts, in order to keep from having to give away the farm, will have to spend hours recoding algorithms for which tested code already exists.
Or, they could just release under the GPL. This does not entail "giving away the farm." Redhat + Cygnus, Aladdin, et al. all do very well and get to stand on the shoulders of the community. In short, why should I let you stand on my shoulders if you won't let me stand on yours? :-) When code is GPLed, we all benefit.
>The only thing wrong with the GPL is the very >thing which makes it work; the clause which >specifies that you may not GPL your work and >subsequently go out and sublicense it. >Translation: Sorry, kids--You cant make money off >it, even if you built it all from scratch, top to >bottom. Its a terrible paradox..It makes for >great software, but it also prevents programmers >from being compensated. The GPL, as nice as it >is, wont pay your rent. Eh!?!? Where did you read this? If you build the software from scratch, you can sell it to whoever you want under whatever license and still release it under the GPL at the same, earlier, or a later time. Lots of people have done this and are still doing it...
Ah, yes. Like IE for Linux. Mircosoft can abandon all it's kludgy OS code for good GPL code while still being able to control the world's interface to the Internet. We get a good web browser, they get to control what we see. jcarr@linuxppc.org
A corporation is a "person" under the law. A "natural person" is a biological person - that phrase specifically excludes corporations.
The word "company" is a synonym for "corporation" - a business that is not incorporated is not a company, despite common misuse of the word.
Thank you for nicely illustrating one of the dumbest aspects of the community (ie all the fallacious license infighting).
Thanks for a productive and illuminating thread.
AC
1st!
Were I not an AC, and had I the points, I'd moderate you up. :-)
Seriously, is it that big of a deal? If you saw an article in your local newspaper that was in the wrong section of it, do you call up the editor to bitch? No, you go on with your life. No reason to give anyone an ulcer here.
"The GPL is good for many things, and it has a very noble "spirit." But IMNSHO it's not the best idea. I'm not using the GPL even though I love the concept, because I want the users of my software to have OPTIONS.
One of the reasons the GPL is so unattractive is it restricts the users freedom in what they can do with the product, more so than the BSD liscense. "
*cough*cough* Obvious statement coming thru.
Freedom has more than not been defined by what you can't do( legaly and how we live our lives), than by what you can (rights). Especially since the former is a more easily managed set than the later. The question is which will benefit all parties concerned long-term(preferably) and short?
Note this is merely their policy for their own fork, not a requirement of the license. In fact, a license that mandated copyright assignment of derived works would violate the GPL!
> If the final result is closed source software anyway, why would anyone NOT steal the GPL code?
For the same reasons companies like Whistle donate code back to FreeBSD despite the fact they sell proprietary versions of FreeBSD-- the amount of effort it would take them to maintain a separate "secret" tree apart from the main source is not worth it.
> The only thing wrong with the GPL is the very thing which makes it work; the clause which
> specifies that you may not GPL your work and subsequently go out and sublicense it.
Stop FUDing. There is no such clause. The GPL only says you can't relicense OTHER people's work, any more than I can attempt to relicense a copy of Windows NT under the GPL.
> It makes for great software, but it also prevents programmers from being compensated. The
> GPL, as nice as it is, wont pay your rent.
The vast majority of programmers don't write software that will ever be sold commercially. Most programmers maintain databases and software that only has relevance to one company. For them using GPL software may well be better and cheaper, and as this whole thread has noted, they don't _have_ to give out every single change they make for internal use.
And as for the small minority of programmers that DO work on commercial software, most of them are compensated on a salary basis that has no relationship to how much money the software they write is sold for.
So where's the problem?
Of course, since it's closed source software that they'd be releasing, how would anyone know that it was their code that was modified? Sure it would be "legally wrong", but has that ever stopped a big company?
Read the GPL again more closely if you still disagree, as there are some subtleties here. "Copy" and "distribute" are not used synonymously. In some places it says "copy and distribute," in other places it says only "copy," and in still others it says only "distribute." It all boils down to this: in order to do anything with the software (including copying or using it) you have to agree to the distribution terms. But merely copying it or merely using it is not the same as distributing it.
Sorry if I was unclear.
AC
www.squishdot.org.
Check into it...it's almost as good as Slashdot, PLUS you get the code, PLUS it's written in Python.
The fear is that someone like m$ will start selling software with a license that is a cross between a EULA and an NDA; it would make the user part of the company's non-disclosure boundary for the purpose of using one copy of one program on one computer.
Good? I've heard IE called a lot of things (hole ridden, buggy, bloated, proprietary, system-stability-threatening), but rarely good. Just keep in mind, if they ever did that, it'd probably magically make itself "part of the operating system".
the above mentioned professor is really vocal about and energetic about the free software movement. he is a good speaker and i am sure he is a good lawyer. you should have seen the lecture he held on the judge jackson's findings. i am not taking any classes of his yet but i am looking forward to it.
Whoever flamed Rob doesn't understand what a community is all about, and would deserve to be ignored.
Yeah, yeah! Bruce Perens flamed Roblimo. Let's ignore him. Heh, heh!
Get real. BP & Rob are having a little fight. That certainly doesn't mean BP doesn't understand what a community is all about. Nor should he be ignored.
But this is exactly what Francois-Rene Rideau is objecting to! Why is this so difficult to understand? Let me try to explain in a different way. Suppose that a company is allowed to distribute modified versions of GPL code internally and has the right to prevent their employees from freely distributing it outside of the company. To see how this can potentially be a problem, imagine this company becoming very large employing thousands of workers each of which are prevented from freely redistributing useful code. Now imagine they merge with another large company extending their domain of secrecy. One can even imagine other companies getting together and creating a spinoff corporation whose sole purpose is to extend that domain. Mr Rideau's small hole becomes a big problem if corporations get very large, either individually or collectively. Now is this so far off? Are corporations these days becoming larger and more powerful or smaller? Many companies have internal economies that dwarf nation states. Companies are indeed getting bigger and more powerful and this can only be viewed as good if you like powerful, unaccountable institutions who restrict public participation and democracy. Now, for arguments sake, imagine corporations growing so large that they effectively control all aspects of the public sphere. The GPL as it stands would be a minor obstacle if you can make the legal argument that your domain is a country itself! Now if you can agree that this scenario would be a problem, then why is it not a problem on a smaller scale? What is currently stopping the corporation's expansion? Not much apart from hopeful signs like the Seattle protests. Further, Mr Rideau is absolutely correct in saying that corporations are being given the status of immortal global citizens within the court systems, another subtle power grab without public involvement. All of this would be of little consequence if corporations were not unaccountable tyrannies that have internal structures as totalitarian as anything that humans have devised. They have a top-down structure that severely constrains freedom. If you have demonstrated that you can properly conform you may be inserted somewhere in the pyramid where you take orders from above and delegate them out below. But most people are at the bottom, renting themselves in order to put food on the table. I am kind of surprised at Mr Stallman's down-playing of this issue considering that he had a direct experience of a similar nature. Mr. Stallman had to leave MIT in order to write GPL code because otherwise his substantial work would have been property of MIT and could never have been freely distributed, precisely what Mr. Rideau is saying. I am not certain how much of an effect GPLed code will be in changing our lives for the better but it may encourage public understanding and political debate/action within the software community.
Companies are individuals. Please refer to someone else's post earlier. I find it funny that so many people disagree with this in writing, when they obviously don't know what they are talking about.
When I first started playing with GIMP, every time I tried to recompile it, I had to go into one source file, and change a c++ comment to a c comment, just to get it to compile.
I never bothered releaseing my changes, and used the software. I, as long as I don't distribute the software to anyone, don't have to distribute the change, even though individual cells (employees) of my body get benefit from the changes.
Not to mention that if a company takes a tool, and changes it, and then doesn't distribute it (i.e. change the tool to meet some internal need, otherwise, why would they have changed it, and not distributed it) WHO CARES, I don't want their crap anyway. It was made to suit a very specific purpose, and really wouldn't benefit anyone.
these companies haven't violated anything, and this is a non-issue. The definition of the problem pretty much states that it is a non-issue.
> Perhaps the biggest problem the GPL causes is that it promotes fragmentation and incompatibility
:)
> by preventing commercial developers from using the same code base as those who are publishing
> open source.
The same argument applies to commercial software, though: since commercial developers can't use each others' code bases, commerical licenses must promote "fragmentation and incompatibility".
If commerical licenses promote fragmentation and incompatibility, why should we support them?
Hence the GPL
1st
But this is exactly what Francois-Rene Rideau is objecting to! Why is this so difficult to understand?
Let me try to explain in a different way. Suppose that a company is allowed to distribute modified versions of GPL code internally and has the right to prevent their employees from freely distributing it outside of the company. To see how this can potentially be a problem, imagine this company becoming very large employing thousands of workers each of which are prevented from freely redistributing useful code. Now imagine they merge with another large company extending their domain of secrecy. One can even imagine other companies getting together and creating a spinoff corporation whose sole purpose is to extend that domain. Mr Rideau's small hole becomes a big problem if corporations get very large, either individually or collectively. Now is this so far off? Are corporations these days becoming larger and more powerful or smaller? Many companies have internal economies that dwarf nation states. Companies are indeed getting bigger and more powerful and this can only be viewed as good if you like powerful, unaccountable institutions who restrict public participation and democracy. Now, for arguments sake, imagine corporations growing so large that they effectively control all aspects of the public sphere. The GPL as it stands would be a minor obstacle if you can make the legal argument that your domain is a country itself!
Now if you can agree that this scenario would be a problem, then why is it not a problem on a smaller scale? What is currently stopping the corporation's expansion? Not much apart from hopeful signs like the Seattle protests.
Further, Mr Rideau is absolutely correct in saying that corporations are being given the status of immortal global citizens within the court systems, another subtle power grab without public involvement.
All of this would be of little consequence if corporations were not unaccountable tyrannies that have internal structures as totalitarian as anything that humans have devised. They have a top-down structure that severely constrains freedom. If you have demonstrated that you can properly conform you may be inserted somewhere in the pyramid where you take orders from above and delegate them out below. But most people are at the bottom, renting themselves in order to put food on the table.
I am kind of surprised at Mr Stallman's down-playing of this issue considering that he had a direct experience of a similar nature. Mr. Stallman had to leave MIT in order to write GPL code because otherwise his substantial work would have been property of MIT and could never have been freely distributed, precisely what Mr. Rideau is saying.
I am not certain how much of an effect GPLed code will be in changing our lives for the better but it may encourage public understanding and political debate/action within the software community.
The moron comment was not me, obviously.
;)
Anyway, I do not want it to look like it was planned, because it came off without a hitch and nobody suspected I was just trolling for fame. Well, except for a close friend of mine, who just knows how I am.
All I have to say is the major flaw with the GPL is how long a entity has to release GPL code. This is the loop hole. Consider the following example: Cygnus - Modifies gcc which is GPL'd software. They then re-sale for profit modified version in binary form. They do not make the modified source available until after they have made some profit from it. 4Front Technologies - same deal except with sound card drivers for unix systems. The linux version are based from GPL'd versions but they do release modified versions in binary form with the modified source released at a later date. (Not in a timely fashion might I add.) -AC
> Specifically, they are going to put patented code into Linux. This would make distribution of
:) :) :)
> the modified code illegal
Not in jurisdictions that don't recognize the validity of the patent. For instance, there is plenty of GPLed RSA code from European countries that are sane enough to not recognize software patents. Distributing from such a country would surely satisfy the GPL, although if a US citizen received a copy of it, he/she would be breaking the GPL by attempting to distribute it further.
At least until this September
Also note Linus's exception for non-GPLed kernel modules. (but note also his distaste for modules that aren't open source and his pleasure in making them break across kernel versions)
After all, both commercial nonproprietary licenses and proprietary noncommercial licenses exist.
you get one from me, it's okay. But remember, Slashdot moderation is just the opinion of one person who happens to be running by with moderator points... you know? it really doesn't mean anything, though to some people, it is everything.
Theoretically, such clauses aren't usually needed. Copyright law itself does the limiting. If a copyright holder doesn't give you explicit rights (in the license) to change his license, you don't get to change how he has licensed the code to which you share copyright with him after you modify his code. Almost all licenses require you to share copyright with the original holder on derivatives. Nothing gives anybody license to use the work in which he shares copyright ownership, except the original license (unless, of course, he explicitly allows different licensing in the original license or in a new license).
Few people (even licensors) recognize this, so your statement is all too commonly seen. Someone is going to have to be sued big-time before this changes, but it seems that people who care and can afford lawyers don't use these licenses anyway.
What if a company just modify the code of an application with GPL license, and uses the application to make money, not distributing it, but just using it (ie. web aplications). Thats not distributing, thats using it and making a provit out of it, so, does the company have to distribute the "modified" application's source code ?
Commercial simply means done for money (or barter). Proprietary means exclusively owned, precisely the stance the GPL is designed to prevent. The only reason the GPL mentions money at all is that cheap binaries but unaffordable source is one obvious tactic for paying lip service to Free Software without actually providing any- other than blocking that loophole, they don't care how much money you make off it!
for what it's worth, I seem to remember
an interview with Anvin (?) (gs guy) where
he said he made significant $$$ licensing
his code to other companies (HP, for eg.).
He lucked out though (this is the exception).
I basically agree with you.
Monsieur Rideau is obviously unaware of the fact that in many legal systems (the U.S. being one), a Corporation (incorporated entity) is regarded by law as an individual.
Being as his thesis rests entirely on a premise that is at odds with this reality, perforce the remainder of his exercise is non sequitur.
Something like:
CD media ... $1 ... $10 ... $5 ... $14
Printed Documentation
Phone Support
Flashy Box
-------------------------------
$30
Something like that?
?
Heh.
You fail to mention Slashdot is a religeon. It has Gods, Saints, Bible, etc. And the religeon is protected by it's zealots.
Once you look at it from this point of view, you'll see everything that happens at Slashdot makes perfect sense.
(The posting of this story is equivalent to Darwin proposing The Theory of Evolution).
Maybe I'll live to see the day when companies can marry.
I think AOL and Time-Warner just got married. Now we can all look out for child-spinnoffs.
I'm disgusted that this was posted here at all. The submitter is dead wrong. He's already wasted RMS's time, and now he's trying to waste ours.
I guess this means I have a legitimate reason
to reverse-engineer software: to make sure that
they're not abusing my GPL'ed code.
Someone should plug that hole with some HOT GRITS
Yes. The author of this 'opinion' misses the fact that according to British common and American law, corporations ARE individuals and are accorded all the rights and liabilities of individuals under law ... including the right to enter contracts, accept licenses, sue and be sued.
GPL's language is no different in this respect, and is just as safe as, any other license or contract out there.
Hmm........
This has been discussed many times and RMS has a strong, principled position. He asserts the right of an entity to keep their work private. He has rejected licenses that require publishing of all modifications as non-free.
It is doubtful that a license based on copyright law could require this, anyway.
But as RMS says in the thread, this has in practice caused almost no problems.
Yet
Another
Frickin
Story
About
Mae
Ling
Mak
don't just click the "moderate this up" button just because it already has score 2 and is at the time top of the list. This comment does NOT deserve score 4.. hell.. I don't think it deserves score 2.. this before you moderate.. read the rest of the comments.
> When a GPLed application becomes available, the market value of its functionality becomes zero.
No, the market value of obtaining a copy is zero, but the functionality may be quite valuable.
> If people are willing to pay money for the derivative work, it must have added value that
> justifies paying that amoung of money.
So why isn't it fair for a proprietary developer to pay for the right to use the GPLed code in the first place?
> And it's UNfair for the GPL to attempt to deprive the author of that reward
Okay, so why shouldn't proprietary developers share their code with us, then?
The GNU GPL is good because it helps us distribute our pro-open source/socialist truth. We can use it to help stop the spread of treating humans as commodity goods that can be moved to lower paying countries at will. The socialistic GNU GPL will help us to free the common workes enslaved to people like Bill Gates!!! When we GPL our medical software the US will finally be able offer free, good medical care to all people. Their horrible treatment of poor people will be rescinded when all have access to the software that the medical industry runs on!!!
Nice job, but you didn't answer any of his arguments that actually were on topic.
He points out that some /.ers are hypocrites and gets moderated down?
Reminder: Moderation isn?t for pushing your own personal feelings and/or protecting other people?s faults.
I hope I get the meta-moderation on that one.
This could not legally be done by the government without paying Micro$oft for the copyright. It is not legal in these cases for the US to seize property of the monopoly without providing compensation.
So, the question is, does a corporation giving copies of code to its employees constitute a "distribution" or "publication"? Of course it does!
No, it does not. The problem arises in that the company is not giving copies of the code to the employees, it is providing them access to use it for the benefit of the company. Ownership of the code has not transfered from the company to the employee, just like ownership of the computer on the employee's desk has not transfered to the employee. With this understanding, we look at a paragraph that preceeds the above quote:
Now, the issue goes one step further -- can a corporate entity distribute a GPL software 'internally' and impose restrictions otherwise incompatible with the GPL (such as not distributing source or prohibiting further redistribution?) Note, BTW, that threatening firing someone for such a redistribution would also be invalid (the second sentence of Section 6 of the GPL says, "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein"; so, theoretically, if an employer were to fire someone for redistributing a modified version, the employer would lose the right to use the modified version too :-) ).
If a company or individual makes changes to a GPLed software, then that company or individual owns the intellectual property rights to those changes. Providing employees access to the altered software does not transfer those property rights to the employee (in other words, they are not a "recipient" under the meaning of the GPL), and therefore the employee does not own the rights to transfer to another. However, as soon as the company sells its changed software to any other entity, it is transfering the intellectual property rights, and the GPL comes into play. This is the key: The GPL controls the transfer of intellectual property rights; to use an analogy from the American West, it prevents the sheep herders from putting up fences in the grazing lands. If rights to intellectual property are being transfered, the GPL controls it; if no rights are being transfered, the GPL is not involved in any way.
But this now brings up the "Software Club" plan. How does it fit in? If you notice above, I made the point that the company provided access to the software to the employee for the benefit of the company. Entering the picture now is the legal concept of "consideration", or what each party gets out of it. The employer gets the value of the work done by the employee. The employee gets a paycheck (his share of the fruits of his work). Access to the software is a side-effect of needing the work done, and doing the work. The club's consideration is the money that the member paid for access to the software, and the member's consideration is the access to the software. Access to the software is the whole basis for the relationship. From this it is easy to see that the entire purpose for the club is to transfer rights to the software, and so the GPL will be involved.
This alleged "hole" is a non-issue. The GPL holds.
Chris "Anonymous" Beckenbach
Amen. Pure FUD.
Yes, but realize that the existance of the GOP *PROVES* that God had a sense of humor. At least when the rest of us bleeding-hearts aren't sicked to death of their rants and raves.
This is similar what TurboLinux has done in their TURBOCLUSTER product.
You get the (useless) kernel code as GPL. but it only works when a proprietory program is behind it and activates it using a serial number.
TurboLinux is not good for Linux. They are abusing Linux to sell proprietory crap.
You can modify the code under the GPL and not release the source if you don't distribute the binaries. So, he's arguing that you can define a "group" such that you aren't "distributing" the binaries or "selling" them. Fine. But I don't think any judge will buy off on that. If you form a "group" for the sole purpose of distributing the binaries, then you are selling the binaries (if you charge for membership in that group). Mere semantics will not avail you before any intelligent judge. Once you've issued the binary to anyone not in your business, you've distributed the binary. Which means you have to release the source. End of argument. End of controversy.
Any legal proceeding can be swayed by a
talented attorney. It's the American way
to prostrate before those with deep pockets...
And in other countries..*chuckle*..they
are trying to tradmark "Linux". Interesting irony
when someone seeks to gain trademark protection
by ignoring someone elses established and valid
trademark. That's akin to sabatoging a bridge
to eliminate an enemy and then crossing the bridge
yourself...
Are we this barbaric? Is there one thing
that the world can agree upon and then honor such
a thing in good faith?
I'm beginning to doubt it. And it's unfortunate
because it cheapens humanity across the board.
Those who wish to remain barbaric will continue
to suffer because of it. I for one, could
care less. People are free to join the organization called the human race at any time.
For some reason many choose to live and think
in ways similar to the animals I see outside
of my window. All actions are completely self
centered without regard to any of the other
animals.
Personally, my empathy is limited to entities cabable of feeling the same.
In modern barbarism, the club has been replaced
with a lawyer.
----------
No wonder Slashdot won't open the source... they knew all along. ;-) AC
Employees of companies don't necessarily have the right to fork their employers' internal development efforts and take those public. That's probably OK, or more than OK.
F1RST!!!!
I don't think you could, because, IIRC, licenses fall under copyright law, not contract law, and copyright law protects the GPL. Conflicting licenses nullify all of them.
IIRC.
Yet
Another
Fucking
Hole
In
GNU
GPL
Story
Thank you my friend. I just realized what has been lacking in my life...grits! As I microwave them, all I can do is imagine the ecstacy that will occur when I pour a hot bowl of them down the front of my pants.
I have always viewed the GPL in this light. If I make modifications to a piece of GPL'ed software solely for my companies benifit, then I may do that, as long as I don't distribute it outside of the company. Hell, I have a modified version of the Red Hat GPL distro that I maintain for new machines.
If what I do is a bug fix, I will email the author with it, regardless if I did it on "company time" or not. Those that I work for know and don't care. It makes the next version we get that much better.
Now with the Corel thing a few months back, that was different. It was not something that was being put out only inside of the company.
IIRC RTmark actually has a special project based on this premise (that corporations == individuals) where they are giving money away to anyone who can succesfully MARRY a corporation. Just thought I'd point that out to all you single fellows out there ;)
I've been led to believe that the GPL makes all compliant copies of GPL'd works legit, and that if GPL'd code leaks out of a company, it cannot thereafter bottled up again. But there is still a problem -- we are free to negotiate away the rights that the GPL grants us. As a hypothetical example, suppose program P is clearly GPL'd and freely available: If Company C can put enough economic pressure on me, they can get me to sign a contract agreeing that P isn't, that it is theirs, and that I will never use it or distribute it again or help anyone else do so without permission from Company C. For programs with millions or billions of potential individual users, this is not likely to happen, but for industry-specific code in industries where a few huge software companies have a lock on the market for enterprise systems, GPL is not an insurmountable barrier to taking private common knowledge embedded in freely available software.
POLYESTER DOT NET HUMOR POSTCARDS! .. YOU WILL LAUGH!
It is interesting to note, though, that the Artistic License does allow binary-only distributions within an association. So maybe this whole brouhaha would be better labeled as a hole in the Artistic License?
Not without buying out or merging with all of their customers. (Not exactly a money-making method there.)
The closest you could come is to hire your customers as 'contract employees'. At which point you have to pay them, handle tax-deductions from payroll, provide workspace, and become responsible for all that other employer-employee relationship junk.
On the other side of the fence, the code being added to a GPL project is GPLed as well, so there really wouldn't be anything (legally speaking) to prevent an employee from going home, getting the same base-source as he has at work and making the same changes in his spare time.
Now that a few Linux companies have some bones, why don't they organize a test case of the GPL. A pre-orchestrated test case brought by a party wishing to see an area of law challenged or strenghtened is a well known method.
No, I guess we will just skip along with no legal precendents for the GPL. La la la!
This guy seems to just be trying to stir up controversy so that he can get mentioned on slashdot, or maybe get a movie contract, or something.
:)
Posting as an AC for obvious reasons, I have done that. I didn't get a movie contract but I did get a heavily responded to item on Slashdot and an article in Byte Magazine.
No long-winded licensing that has to be interpreted.
then Roblimo would be hitting negative karma very quickly. It's just that in general, his contributions don't bear the same style as CmdrTaco or Hemos, but you can see him try hard to pretend he does.
/. prefs because he does the interviews, and they are actually more than mildly interesting most of the time.
I don't know about you guys, but half the time I run into an article that I wouldn't expect to see in pre-Andover slashdot, I would look at the news posters, and 95% of the time it would be Roblimo. Unfortunately, I can't filter his name out in
I'm speaking as an AC for obvious reasons.
If so, what would come squishing out?
(shovel and closepin on standby)
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Companies can keep their internal modifications secret as long as they don't distribute the code OUTSIDE their non-disclosure boundary - and once they distribute the object outside that boundary, they must also distribute the source.
That should be as long as they don't distribute the modifications outside the corporation. NDA's with outside parties can't be held to overrule the GPL (if the originator of the modifications thinks they do, then they are legally precluded from distributing their modifications by the GPL/copyright law).
As to the second point, the boundaries are determined by courts, in particular that corporations are legally considered to be individuals. "NDA boundaries" have no legal standing as individuals. Thus distributing outside the corp _is_ distribution, regardless of any NDAs.
Lynn
Help a brotha out...gimme some karma....maybe on the way out? God bless you, brotha.
Thats right!Apologies are a dated(and insulting)social device.Too often people have used
"I'm sorry as a get out of shit free card,till it
literally means nothing.You had enough conviction
to post the article in the first place,you showed
intention.Now comes an apology.A regret.What you'retelling me is you didnt mean to do it.you and I both know thats crap.When you lie(and that what it boils down to)you insult me.You insult
yourself by showing a lack of conviction.
Your article was a thought provoking and talk
provoking one despite the bungholes.It dealt with
issues near and dear to us.Slashdot threads arent
some kind of intellegence contest its a "DISCUSSION FORUM".That was fullfilled by your article.
NOW DONT EVER F%#*ING APOLOGIZE TO ME
AGAIN!
(Dont like this?GO DIE,whadda ya gonna do?
spank me?)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I hope R. was just asleep at the wheel and not deliberately trying to stir us up with such banality as this idiot's ignorant assertions.
What's next? Posting that we are all going to die, because some guy sent in a note saying he was abducted by the aliens and they told him so.
The sad part is, he will probably never admit that he erred in posting this lameness.
"Sig free in '03!"
everyone to be in the organization as a condition for software
distribution. Then the modified GPLed program is only distributed to
club members, and all the club members agree to only distribute the
program within the club. In a sense, the Trillian project (which is
porting the GNU tools and Linux to the IA64 architecture, which is
still under nondisclosure agreements) is such a club.
So, does the fact that this can be done break the GPL protections? No,
because it doesn't get around the requirement to provide sources to
everyone who gets binaries.
How's that? If the Trillian people decided that everyone would have to use their version of gcc by pasting text into an HTML form and hitting 'submit' and then having the resultant
Attempts to do this kind of thing for a
different reason (e.g. charge everyone big bucks for being in the club
and forbid them from sharing information with outsiders) may run afoul
of antitrust provisions in the US and the EU (forcing people to be in
a club before you do business with them may not be legal, depending on
the circumstances).
This one is also broken. If you only allow users of your software to execute it remotely, that by itself should cover your ass legally. You won't have to play any exclusionary games with your customer base, and therefore you will not have to chance running afoul of antitrust laws.
It now appears that all you have to do to sell proprietary modifications to GPLed code without ever having to release the sources to your changes is to sell your software as a service, and this is going to happen to most software anyway over the next 5 years or so as the Internet becomes ubiquitous. You'll sell someone a "word processor service" which is just an XUL interface definition and some TCP glue, and all of the guts of the program itself will consist of a set of binary modules held on your server which use CORBA to communicate with the front end. Most software other than low-level OS code is vulnerable to this exploit.
Jon
I've been writing code for over 25 years. I've been a lawyer for only 17. At work, I've seen that lots of lawyers know very little about computers; by reading the GPL threads, I also know that lots of programmers know very little about law. The two fields don't really relate well. Anyway, as RMS has just reiterated in the thread, and as was discussed way too much not so long ago, the key to the GPL is the word "distribute". RMS thinks, and I believe, that a copy of code used inside a corporation--and perhaps even used in a closed beta--is not a distribution. People then say "loophole" and come up with some way you have to join an association to get a copy of some program some evil entity wants to distribute. Well, law is not coding--it is not purely objective. If I sell a program, and to get a copy you have to join an organiztion, and the only thing you get from joining is access to the program, any court in the US would say that it's a distribution. Of course, there may be some gray cases in the middle, but most are not hard. It may not be absolutely provable from the words of the license, but law is not just a logic game--you have to look at what was intended by the document.
The GPL, on the other hand, places no restriction on the use of the software ("The act of running the Program is not restricted...."). Holding a license to the software under the GPL entitles a corporation to use it however they see fit. IF they distribute it, on the other hand, they must provide the source code.
I gather, from some of the better posts I've read, that giving binaries to employees is not distribution, so long as the software is used for the purposes of the corporation (i.e., giving it to employees to take home and run on their own computers to do their own things won't work). Further, a court would likely not look kindly on a "shell corporation" set up solely to defeat the terms of the GPL. So there's no real loophole here.
AC
OK, you take some GPLed thing to the duplicator and copy it. In order to do this you must have agreed to the GPL's terms restricting distribution, but have you actually distributed it? Clearly not. Suppose you pick up the pile of copies and shuffle them from your right hand to your left. Does this constitute a distribution? Of course not. If you place a copy in the hands of your mother, well, now you've distributed something, and you need to also provide her with access to the source code.
My view (and RMS's view) is that shuffling copies around within a corporation is just like shuffling them from one hand to the other. A corporation is considered a homogenous entity under the law.
If a copy is always a copy, then all those who receive copies are all of the people within a corporation.
A copy is always a copy, but if distribution is taking place "all those who receive copies" have to be legally distinct from the distributor. A person working as the agent of a corporation is no more distinct from the corporation than your left hand is distinct from the rest of your body.
I claim that [what I've just reasserted] is not at all clear from what I know, for it that reasoning were to hold, corporations acting as individuals would need buy only one copy of a copyrighted work and then they could copy it willy-nilly so long as it stayed in the corporation.
No. This is what you run into if you don't distinguish copying and distribution; this is the issue I was trying to clear up in my original post. First of all, if the work is copyrighted, you have no right to copy it at all, as an individual or as part of a corporation. You can only do what the license says you're allowed to do. That's why I wanted to point out that EULAs take pains to specify that you can make only one copy of the software, you can run it on only one computer at a time, etc. If they said, "You have been licensed to copy and run this software, but you can't distribute it," well, then a corporation would need just one license for the entire organization.
The GPL, on the other hand, says that "you" (individual, corporation, or what have you) can copy and run the software, and even distribute it under certain terms. So one license will suffice for the entire corporation. Yet, as I originally pointed out, there is no loophole here, because you really have to be doing the work of the corporation to be considered an agent of the corporation (i.e., an employee can't take the software home and do her own thing with it under the corporation's license). Further, a corporation whose purpose is to defeat the GPL would probably not be viewed as legitimate by the courts.
This is all IMHO, and IANAL, and I don't have a copy of Black's handy, and I can't cite anything, but I think this is the most consistent construction of the copyright laws and the GPL, and it is also the position of RMS, who has engaged real law professors to advise him in these matters. So I think I've got a leg to stand on. :-)
AC
I'm posting anonymously because I work for the third biggest software firm worldwide. Often times when I need to write something new I go and look in my library of copyleft'ed re-distributable source code. If I find something then I take it and put it in my own projects without giving credit or even copying over the COPYING file. My own project is now nearing completion and it will be greater than any GPL'ed software ever made. I'm going to be filthy rich because I'm going to make it copyrighted and undistributable.
There are a couple places I could use help tho. If you are also interested in building a new copyrighted undistributable Natalie Portman naked and petrified then mail me.
Woops!! I just poured hot grits on my copyrighted undistributable source code@!@!
If the final result is closed source software anyway, why would anyone NOT steal the GPL code? No one will ever catch you (closed source, right?). You'll finish your work sooner. You're not hurting the original author, because they gave their shit away in the first place. Basically, stealing GPL code is the best solution to most common business problems. Who gives a shit about licenses?
This brings up a term that has been sorely missing from this discussion up to this point: intellectual property rights. The key statement in the quote above is that, "Secure Computing...is being hired by the NSA...". Since the NSA is hiring SC to create the changes, the NSA owns the intellectual property rights to the code that SC creates, just as the NSA would own land or a car that it had paid for. Unless there is some clause to the contrary in SC's contract, they will own no rights in the code that they create for the NSA, and will not be legally able to distribute these changes. From the NSA's standpoint, the changes being done by SC can be treated just as if they were done by an individual employee of the NSA. The NSA letting its employees use the modified code also is not a distribution (as the author of the quote acknowledges), and so there is no violation of the GPL. If an NSA or SC employee does distribute a copy of the modified binary to anybody outside the NSA, the resultant crime is not a violation of the GPL, but a violation of the NSA's intellectual property rights to the changes they commissioned.
This whole thread is a non-issue. The alleged "hole" does not exist.
Chris "Anonymous" Beckenbach
Here is an excellant essay on the developement of corporations as legal fictions into sovereign entities with all the power of an individual but none of the liability. This is the reason the GPL "might" be invalidated. If it is then perhaps the Open Source community can work to appeal the court decision which gave corporations this kind of power which should only belong to individuals. http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/28/usa.html
Have you considered, though, that application service providers are on the rise? These are people who write software and make server farms where the software is run as a service for a client. Said corporation could take a GPL'd program, modify it, and make it a part of their backend application service that their costumers never see. That version of the program is now lost, a loophole around the GPL. The user coming into the website runs the program on the corporation's servers. It is never distributed or copied to a third party.
I agree with this, which is why I specifically posited a situation whereby the "key" is NOT written down, but merely stored in someone's head. Since it is not part of a file anywhere, and is never generated (it's merely typed in on the command line), it's harder to call it part of the source.
Actually doing this is likely to be very difficult in practice, and it's entirely possible that it wouldn't hold up (being a clear attempt to get around something with very obvious meaning), but I wouldn't put it entirely past someone to try it...
How many forks of *BSD are there now? How many forks of the Linux kernel?
The GPL doesn't foster fragmentation, it darn near prohibits it. The reason UNIX fragmented in the late eighties/early nineties is that every venedor added in their own, proprietary enhancements to the OS - the point, of course, was to add value and differentiate your product from those of your competitors. A good thing, usually, but in this case differentiation brought headaches the world over, created problems that are still being dealt with today, and blew the market into lots of tiny shreds.
If the initial product is released under the GPL, then this game of oneupmanship simply can't be played. Any feature that one vendor adds can be implemented by all of the others. Unfortunately, this would seem to kill the competitive advantage in bringing material improvements to the product - that would be, economically speaking, an affront to the principles of the free market. If I give a product out to the public, I should stand to benefit in some way from it, and if my competitors can take my work and distribute it themselves, then I lose that benefit.
It's not that cut-and-dried, though. Nobody can make a profit, in the long run, selling GPL'd software - the money is in service and support, and in coding applications to customers' specifications. Now the various free software vendors do have a clear incentive to improve what they're selling - not only does it help to expand their market as a whole, but it also adds to their reputation. Reputation means dollar signs when your business is providing a service - ask Bob Young and Marc Ewing. (One of the things I feel is missing from the GPL is some form of identity-of-author preservation, so that those who release enhancements are assured that their reputations will benefit. Right now, this is handled informally - the community knows who is contributing what code - but there's the potential for reputation theft via misrepentation of authorship.)
The net result: the services of programmers who "advance the state of the art" the most are, due to the reputation they gain, in the most demand, and so these programmers make the most money. The market for GPL'd software grows, and the codebase stays fairly unfragmented.
A commercial market for GPL code is feasible - Red Hat is proving this *today.*
The notion that code must be "protected" from being "taken proprietary" is one of the most common bogeymen raised by RMS and other advocates of the GPL.
The point isn't the fear that my code will be somehow stolen from me by corporate raiders - the point is that if I release code under a non-viral license, someone can take my code, add on to it, and then release it under their own commercial license. They benefit from my work; I and the community at large do not benefit from theirs. This is sure nice of me to let them do this, but it's not in my self-interest. And it fragments things all to hell. Now that someone has extended my code and propritized (is that a word?) the result, there are *two* choices out there - my still-free software, and somebody else's better software that (presumably) costs money. Some users will fork over the dough for the added value, some will continue to use my program. That's the very *anatomy* of a fork right there - the division of one piece of software and its user base into multiple incompatible camps. This hurts everyone. Interoperability decreases with time between the users that stuck with my program and those who went commercial, and people are discouraged from using either program. This hurts the commercial company, which loses sales, and it hurts me, because my user base that finds my bugs and submits improvments has shrunk.
Linux and the GPL may have prevented the meltdown of the UNIX market from fragmentation and the eventual standardization on NT. If that had happened, Microsoft wouldn't have any competitors for you to feel protective of.
A EULA is an End User License Agreement. Typically these are not sent out with internal software apps in companies that I have seen. Now in order for me to be considered as part of the single legal entity of a corporation I have to have some kind of employment agreement. I can't see this as being a prefferable condition for companies. It just wouldn't look good on the books not to mention all the people going out saying they represent Microsoft b/c they paid to be in the club. Maybe its possible but I don't think it is desirable for a company to want to operate like this. I for one would sell any shares I had in them.
In Republican America phones tap you.
.
I don't personally see any point behind converting GPLed software into daemons, when pipes work quite nicely. Also, if we're including pipes, we should also include calling GPLed commands in scripts. If this were, in fact, a violation of the GPL, then:
1) several folks would be in trouble
a. Netscape under Linux can use GPLed software as plugins (and, yes, it's still commercial)
b. Many commercial products rely on GPLed commands for shell-script installers, since the base GPL commands are GPLed versions of UNIX commands
and
2) we'd have to drop GPLed commands in favor of BSD-licensed commands, if we ever hoped for commercial software under Linux
Yes, I can feel the rebuttal coming back: what's the use of commercial software? Sometimes, commercial software really *is* preferable to GPLed software. I work in the publishing industry, and it's a bit difficult to write, say, color-matching open-source drivers/utilities without running into licensing difficulties. "
"Oops, you say your licensing agreement has a non-disclosure clause? But, my software is open-sourced...so I should get a lawyer?"
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
VMware ships with code for modules, as do the comercial OSS sound drivers. Are they crap? Have they been bad to the community?
CLUE STICK: Current kernel sound code was based on work done by OSS (but little or none of the original code remains.)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I link my code to a GPLed library without ever distributing the binaries outside of my company. I own the copyright to my code. It's not GPLed, and doesn't have to be (the GPL doesn't place restrictions on use). I can impose whatever restrictions I want on the redistribution of my code, but not on the redistribution of the library. An employee cannot legally redistribute my code in any form (according to the fictional license) and cannot distribute the binaries (he would be in violation of the GPL in doing so). Would it be all that different if instead of linking to a library we were dealing with modifying a program? Perhaps yes, perhaps not. I don't know.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Robin, you should know better to insult an already angered readership under the pretense of "an apology". Personally I didn't have any problem with the story, but obviously some people did.
You should probably talk to Katz... he's gotta have some thick skin with all the heat he takes...
if you never distribute binaries, then you need not distribute the source code. This is what allows companies to build custom software on top of the GNU system that can give them a competitive advantage in the market they serve. This has always been permited by the GPL even though many people have not realised this. This is as it should be in my view. Cheers, gbs
Frankly, even posting this particular thread was kind of dumb; anyone with any understanding of licensing at all would see that this particular 'hole' was simply a misunderstanding by someone who doesn't really understand how corporations work in a legal sense.
I really get the impression that some days, Slashdot is really grasping for news. This particular article needed more research before being posted.
If there isn't any news in a given day, if there is no "stuff that matters" -- don't post anything. If you review several thousand submissions and none are appropriate News for Nerds, then you are doing a better job. Choosing three or four items to run every day, no matter what, is resulting in a lot of stuff getting posted that shouldn't be.
This has been my home page for a long time, but I am getting tired of it. I would much prefer zero items to four items of minor-to-no interest.
Stuff that Matters. Not just stuff.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
The guy's not a lawyer, he is completely ignorant of the law and licensing in general, and you didn't even bother to check this out with anyone first. The postulated "hole" does not exist.
Licenses only apply to individuals? Since when? That seems to be the center of his thesis, and it's simply not true. Corporations are legal entities and can be party to licenses. Other companies have their proprietors hold the license.
You have always been able to keep a GPL modification secret if you don't distribute the binary, because the GPL was explicitly written to allow that sort of "internal" use without disclosure. Only when you distribute the program to others do the GPL terms come into play.
If the licensee is a company, that company can decide when to distribute the binary, but then it's required to distribute source like everyone else. If you are an employee within that company, you can not decide to "out" the source without their permission, because you are not the licensee, and you are not the copyright holder to modifications - the company is. But that's as far as it goes. If the company distributes to another legal entity outside of itself, such as a beta tester or a customer, they have to comply with the GPL terms on source-code distribution.
One of the posters postulated an "association" with an agreement that would override the GPL for its members. This would be seen as an deliberate attempt to modify the terms of the GPL by any competent court, and thus would be infringement of copyright, since the GPL explicitly prohibits modification of its terms.
RMS has a law professor who consults on the GPL. Robin, if you want to run stories like this, it would make sense to consult that law professor first to make sure you aren't talking out of your hat. RMS would be happy to give you his email address and phone number. If you can't do even that much verification, maybe you should go back to driving that yellow car.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I haven't the ability to read all the comments, and I probably shouldn't even write this post (strict work-internet rules here), however Ouch. I know flaming is generally excepted in moderation. But it must have gotten out of hand to have cause that sardonically worded apology. I hoped slashdot (its audience) had matured a little and could actually take the flame and still keep it's attention towards a actual meaningful discussion. But I guess not.
Nifty!
:P
It's easy to read - I wonder if lawyers will be able to read it...
Well, this is true to a certain extent, but there's some more details that need to be filled in:
Corporations are individuals under the law. In his original post, Mr. Rideau uses the word "companies". There are two general types of companies: Proprietorships and Corporations. Proprietorships are the most common form of companies. The different types of proprietorships are the Sole Proprietorship, the General Partnership, and the Limited Partnership Under a proprietorship, there is no separate legal entity- the owner's possessions and assets are open to legal action. In that situation, the transfer of data from one employee to another constitutes a transfer of the so-licensed software from one individual to another. Therefore, either individual would have the right to re-distribute that software as they saw fit. Even a non-disclosure agreement would not absolve one from this responsibility, since the GPL itself says (emphasis mine):
So, based on this, if one is employed at a company that is a sole proprietorship (which is the most common type of company in the US) and is bound by a NDA not to release or discuss the source code to the public, they are not allowed to redistribute any of the changes back into the company, since that would be distributing the source code in violation of the above conditions.
Now, while a corporation IS its own entity under the law, there is something called "Respondeat Superior", or "the acts of the agent are the acts of the owner" (that information, and the information in general regarding rights of agency courtesy of "Small Business Advisor" pg. 446-449). If an employee of a corporation starts using GPL'ed software, and does so on company time, is the company then bound under the GPL? It depends. If the person in question either has a) a clearly stated authority to speak on behalf of the corporation (i.e. in the articles of incorporation) or b) an implied authority to do so (like you're the head of the software design department and the CTO just said, "We need you to pick a new piece of software to build"), then the corporate entity is bound by the actions of the individual.
Therefore, if a someone within the company who meets neither of the above conditions takes a piece of GPL'ed software, modifies it, and then distributes it to five other employees, s/he is bound by the GPL, NOT the company. OTOH, if someone with authority starts using a piece of software, the company is then the entity bound by the GPL.
Based on that, since Mr. Stallman said that redistribution within a company is not redistribution in terms of the GPL (we have to assume that he means a corporation, since its been demonstrated that transactions within a proprietorship constitute transactions between individuals), it is legally possible to create an organization like the one Mr. Rideau described, where upon entering the corporation you agree to not distribute internal corporate information. Since it is not redistribution according to Mr. Stallman to distribute within a corporation, then section 7 of the GPL with regards to anti-distribution and restriction thereof does not apply, since a new instance of the GPL has not been created. All the employees of the corporations consitute a part of that single entity, so their individual activities within the corporation can be managed.
The upshot of all of this is that Mr. Rideau is right. Acceptance of the GPL by a person in a corporation with the right to do so binds the corporate entity to the GPL. Since internal distribution of the code is allowed, employees can be bound legally not to distribute outside the corporation, since they have not been bound under the GPL - the corporation has.
Imagine a situation where someone takes a piece of GPL code, say Linux, as the most obvious example in this forum. A corporation is formed, and the CEO accepts the GPL. The corporation makes a new, improved version of linux (for the sake of an example, we'll say they rewrite the memory handling code and double speed). Normally, if they wanted to redistribute, they would have to make public their changes. Instead, though, they make the software available by selling small stakes in the company (or simply on a fee basis and making them part of the corporation). So, if you want the software, you have to become part of the corporation. Once you are part of the corporation, you're bound by the rules of the corporation regarding redistribution, not the GPL (since the GPL does not apply to internal corporate redistribution). If the company wanted to release the code to anyone outside of the corporation, then they would have to make it public. But since they're only giving it to other people within the corporation....
Now, I realize that this is a remote situation. But its important that we figure out these weaknesses in the GPL before someone else does and exploits them.
Matthew J Zito, CCNA
me@mzi.to
Matt
Matthew J Zito, CCNA
me@mzi.to
Secure Computing /is/ releasing their version, per email with the company:
To: govt@securecomputing.com
cc: (bcc: Cathy Cromley/SECURE)
Subject: Your new version of Linux
I don't know if you are bound by any kind of non-disclouser agreement with
the NSA, but after seeing an article posted on Yahoo about your "High
Security" version of Linux you are producing, i was wondering if you are
aware of the "full disclosure" clauses of the GPL ( GNU Public Liscense )
that the Linux Operating System was produced under and how you plan on
handling that liscenses clauses.
It is our intention to be an active, responsible member of the
open source community. Within the constraints this imposes, we
will work with partners to develop new product offerings that
will benefit our customers, our partners, and us. However, we
will also benefit simply by having a Linux based secure operating
system on which to host our products.
Our modifications to Linux will consist of:
- strong policy enforcement code which is in the kernel
itself,
- a flexible policy engine which is structured as a separate
module
We will open source all the modifications to the kernel as well
as a general-purpose policy engine. We have not determined the
exact functionality of this engine, but it will support a broad
set of basic applications and it will be complete enough too
teach the community how to write other policy engines. We hope
that others will choose to enhance this engine and/or develop
their own policy engines that are optimized for their purposes.
We will keep the policy engines for our products, such as the
Sidewinder policy engine, proprietary.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft took GPL code and used it in their products...and nobody would be able to do anything about it! So don't worry too much about these technicalities-it's just impossible to enforce these licenses because if the source is closed you just don't have any way of knowing what they are using
---
The GPL doesn't allow an employee to take the work he has done on company time and distribute it for free. The GPL doesn't require anyone to distribute anything, it just specifies the terms that you are allowed to distribute under (you must include source with binary modifications, etc).
IANAL but I don't believe the company is "distributing" the software to its employees, the employees are using the software as an agent of the company.
EOF
Looks like this guy is another fine graduate of the "Enough to be Dangerous School of Law."
I think it's great that people are examining the GPL for loopholes. But can we stop jumping to conclusions? There really isn't a need to go off to slashdot half-cocked screaming about glaring flaws that completely invalidate the entire GPL everytime you think you may have something.
EOF
Thus, a positive side-effect of such hole is that you may freely mix free and proprietary software code from a range of otherwise incompatible licenses, as long as you don't "distribute" your code outside of your world-wide association. In other words, if you're member of the WWBA (World-Wide Bugroff Association), then you can freely mix and match most free software, as if it were under the bugroff license.
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
I should comment that RMS is also famous for keeping a certain lisp-machine company software, which was effectively open source, as good as or better than a well-staffed but closed-source lisp-machine company's work.
A partial counter-example to Kipling's "left him, sweating and swearing, six months behind", you understand(;-))
I suspect he's less than concerned because he knows that one competent programmer (in the Knuthian sense!) can defeat a hundred corporations who don't know why and what they're doing.
--dave c-b
davecb@spamcop.net
When Corel Linux 1.0 first came out, it was only to be released to "partners". I.e. testers and developers. Corel's response to critisicm was This is an "work in process" so we don't have to release the source in the open.
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Smarter folks than I have beaten this death, so I'll be brief. Let me just say that, as someone with experience at a fairly mid-size programming house, that this is not a battle that supporters of the GPL and Open Source want to fight.
Let me state it thus: a corporation, and especially one which sells something as intangible as software, must live or die by its reputation. If there is one thing that companies fear about Open Source, it is a perceived lack of control over a product which requires a great deal of investment and risk to produce. Especially in today's lawsuit-happy society, to ask a company to forgo control over their product is to ensure marginalization.
Now, of course, this does not address the fully theoretical question of whether the GPL does or does not prohibit what has been discussed. And, of course, there are those who feel that the goal of Open Source software, whatever it may be, is most certainly *not* to encourage companies to use the results; in fact, there are those who would rather they not. I happen to disagree and find this a shortsighted view, but TEHO (To Each His Own).
Just consider if *you* were writing some GPLed code. In this "recognition-driven economy", your main benefit from XYZ 2.0 may be the recognition of your peers, based on your perceived reputation for quality, bug-free code. You would certainly "hoard" such code, making "closed source" modifications, distributed "in-house", until such time as you saw fit to release it - and rest assured, release it you would, for without an audience, the source is mostly meaningless. Project this onto a company and you might see what I mean. Certainly in my experience I have found that when the inclusion of GPLed code threatens to scuttle a project, it is the GPL which goes, and not the project.
My $.02, and as always, IANAL.
Adam
The players tried to take the field. The marching band refused to yield...
Actually the person would be suing for wrongfull termination or something like that... in this case, the company only violates the GPL if *it* distributes the modified binaries without the source.
An entity can only violate the GPL by distributing binaries to GPL'd software without source code. Firing someone for distributing anything doesn't have anything to do with the GPL.
The thing about the GPL is it says you can't distribute the binary and then keep the source code seperate. You can't put any additional restrictions on the distribution of the source that aren't on distribution of the binary. Sure you can make a binary for internal use only, which seems to be what people are getting upset about. but that's a seperate issue. You can force recipients to sign a contract that says they won't redistribute, but A) that restriction is not based on copyright, it's part of contract law. B) the recipient still has to get the source, C) once the source leaks the originator can't prevent further distribution, only punish the one who leaked it for breach of contract (if they can find them). And of course it's entirely possible to sue to open the thing back up anyway without leaking based on the contract's restrictions being a violation of the license. Lawyers can wrangle all they want, but this kind of thing simply wouldn't hold up in the real world. Microsoft couldn't use it to make "MS Linux" because every single customer would A) have to sign a contract saying they wouldn't redistribute anything (an unsigned contract is amazingly weak, things like licenses take their legal force from the fact you start WITHOUT the rights they grant you, so if you make a fuss you're more likely to lose than gain), B) still have to receive the source code anyway. Rob
Thanks for the clarification. Just one question, does that cover associations too? (Are associations a legal entity at all in the US?)
First let me preface this, by saying that I've enver studied law, and could be totally wrong in terms of members of an organisation actually become part of the legal entity.
:)
Say I modified the Linux kernel, to support really useful feature X, As an individual person, Only I cna use it. If I started an organisation or an association, and did the changes as the asociation, I could then charge membership to the association. This membership entitles people access to the binary version of the new kernel.
As the binaries arn't distributed outside of my organisation, I don't need to release code. And the GPL doesn't say what has to happen internally in my organisation.
Wether or not this is fair, that is irrelevent. I think we all can aggree on that, even most of the anti-GPL people
But is there any legal way for the copyright holder to terminate the licence?
Wouldn't Adding a non-GPLed library or non-gpl source code in the tree be a violation of the _Non_ GPLed code's license (depending on how open or not the other license is)
This post is neither.
I read "heathen" in your use of proprietary, and "believer" in your use of commercial. Non-religious, like me, may differ in their interpretations.
The coders at Redhat + Cygnus, and the scads of other free software programmers who were let in on the IPOs would certainly differ with you.
I am quite interested in how those companies make money, but getting rich from the artificial value attributed to "balloon" stock in newly floated companies is not commendable. Heck, it's gone so far that job ads use "pre-IPO company" as lure. So you get a job and options, or "preorder" stock, then a bunch of investors are tricked into paying your "salary" while you do practically nothing in return, because when you sell your stock you can just go on to the next IPO company.
Nonetheless, MS had successfully marginalized both companies and the Unix platform as a whole.
Have you been reading Ziff-Davis too much lately? Few of the computers Windows' various flovours replace run Unix. But there is a plethora of companies telling companies to choose NT so that they can get lucrative support contracts.
To the contrary, the GPL affords them the opportunity at any time to work with the community, to cooperate, and make the software we use better.
This is religious clap-trap. I don't deny people the right to believe that programming should be a hobby you practice when you come back from your shift at McDonald's, but please, cut down on the preaching.
FWIW I think the GPL story was perfectly appropriate, and there was even some good discussion brought up here. It's too bad people are getting hot and bothered. Lots of readers had a bad monday I guess.
That doesn't excuse swearing and personal attacks.
Some people have no manners.
*sigh*
--
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
Actually, in the US, "employment" is very specifically defined in the law. I doubt very much that you could legally sell employment in your corporation for $10.
You could perhaps hire people as "consultants" or "beta program members", and require them to sign a NDA before getting your binary. It could work, but this is so far outside the normal method of selling software that most potential customers would probably choose to pass.
Of course, all of this is hypothetical crazy talk -- the largest value in open source code is the worldwide group of open source developers backing it. (Despite it's overinflated value, I don't think anyone would disagree that RedHat is a more valuable corporation than BSDi, with their closed source.) In most cases, trying to get out from under the GPL would be a fruitless struggle -- you would need a massive engineering budget to keep up with the closed source version.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Here is his original
I don't think he's a troll, just confused.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
One thing that strikes me in this discussion is that the assumptions that went into the GPL a from an earlier by-gone era when computers were few and software was vertical market by design. When GNU was created, distribution was somewhat difficult, and the market for any particular package was tiny.
The underlying assumption seems to be that any particular GPL user would be unlikely to want to get into the distribution business (because making tapes was difficult and expensive), and that computer time was so precious that any particular company would be unlikely to install and modify software that they didn't specifically need. The point was to ensure that the software licencees had the source, not that everyone had the source.
Now this scenario seems fine and dandy when there are only 45 sites using a particular PDP accounting package. But what it didn't fully anticipate was the current scenario where distribution is easy (Internet, CD-ROM), and computer usage and storage space is widespread. People have automatically come to assume that GPL == downloadable for free, when that is really a side effect of high powered personal computers and not a feature 'built-in' to the GPL.
So, think of the NSA deal as more of a "classic" use of the GPL, where one party's modifications are privately distributed to a trusted source. The point is that the NSA gets the right to modify the source code, not that you do.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The Free Software Foundation does have lawyers who work (at no charge) to help defend free software against license violations. One of them happens to be my one of my professors. :)
I don't htink you could demand new license fees with every release, because that wouldn't really be a subscription. But you could charge say $50/3 months and $200/yr and guarentee 1 software update every 3 months one's a member of your organization, I suppose....
Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but for one, according to the FAQ page, slash is just about GPL. The theory goes that they don't need to release it because it's only being used internally. However, when it was brought up that the NSA was contracting with (or considering to) a company to create a secure version of Linux, the general consensus was that the NSA should be required to publish the modifications that they contracted to have done. It was generally assumed that their distro wouldn't ever be intended to be seen outside the walls of the contracting company and the NSA, yet everyone assumed that since someone was shipping the code to someone else, the code should be available for all to see.
Thats all.
This really is the interesting problem - I personally think that if an employee leaks binaries without leaking source, he's violating the GPL, but the corporation isn't. There are liability issues relating to employees. If the company doesn't want to provide the source code for the leaked binaries, they have to fire (or otherwise discipline) the employee. If they take no action against the leaker, then they have tacitly endorsed the leak, and therefore take responsibility for distributing the program, and thus have to release source due to the GPL. If the corporation disciplines the employee, then they (generally) avoid liability fot the employee's actions.
There are lots of subtleties to employee liability law, and there are many conditions that have to be satisfied for things to work the way I described above. While the general concepts of corporate liability are very similar in US and UK law, and also in most other European or European-derived legal systems, there are bigger differences in the treatment of unauthorized actions of employees. Thus the outcome of the hypothetical would likely be different in different countries.
This, however, isn't really a weakness of the GPL. In one possible outcome, things aren't significantly different than if there was no leak, and in the other, there is new code available to the community - which is kinda the point of the GPL.
The only thing wrong with the GPL is the very thing which makes it work; the clause which specifies that you may not GPL your work
and subsequently go out and sublicense it.
Translation: Sorry, kids--You cant make money off it, even if you built it all from scratch, top to bottom.
I don't read it that way. The "you" in the GPL is the licensee. The restrictions on "you" don't apply to the copyright owner.
The same code can be licensed to different people under different terms. I think there are examples where companies have GPL'd code that continues to be included in their proprietary products.
Maybe, as someone posted, this is not "the" hole in the GPL. However, it's not a mistake to point out that problems with the GPL may exist (laws are not mathematically prove-able after all) and that discussing them is NEVER a mistake.
Whoever flamed Rob doesn't understand what a community is all about, and would deserve to be ignored.
So, welcome all and any discussion, here or wherever else.
I don't like this. While it may well be true I'd like to explore:
GPL places the following restrictions: If you distribute you must distribute all you recieved and any changes you might have made in addition to any other rights you recieved. While this does make commercial software more complex it does not exclude it:
So called software companies are often service companies in disguise (Sun, IBM) or maybe hardware manufacturers. Service always makes more money than just selling things because you can keep charging. Developers must always work for someone (customer or employer). Software prices (ie employee salaries) are more often dictated by employees than by their buyers (highly skilled profession). Programmers do not make money by selling things but by showing up to work. Since it is about 4:00 in the morning here I'll wrap it up: Software needs to be writen in our economy. It can be open source or not. GPLed code destroys a already stupid market of shrink-wrapped software that should behave like the food market rather than its current impression of precious medal market. Most anyone can grow carrots but they can't make silver. Let everyone grow and sell their damn carrots and stop pretending that programming is alchemy
Build a better carrot. Tell others how to do it. Make them tell others. That's the way programmers can enforce the concept of standing on the shoulders of giants, rather than their cow-workers feet.
I thought corporations were "persons", not "individuals". Is it really the other way around?
I dont see what the big fuss is about.. Ultimately, its up to the individual who's work is being used to enforce the conditions laid out in the GPL. Its not the FSF's responsibility, or GNU's responsibility. Its yours. You hire the lawyer if you find someone trying to rip you off..Have a look at GNU's GPL faq if you dont believe me.
That, if anything, is the biggest loophole of all in the GPL. It means that you can selectively turn a blind eye to anyone using your work within a commercial project. You simply choose not to enforce the provisions of the GPL. And, as we all know, passing a little money over the table will gladly make even the most pious coder consider that route, as sneaky and underhanded as it is.
The only thing wrong with the GPL is the very thing which makes it work; the clause which specifies that you may not GPL your work and subsequently go out and sublicense it.
Translation: Sorry, kids--You cant make money off it, even if you built it all from scratch, top to bottom. Its a terrible paradox..It makes for great software, but it also prevents programmers from being compensated. The GPL, as nice as it is, wont pay your rent.
Then again, there's always the Perl Artistic License, which tends to make alot more sense than the GPL on these matters. AFAIK, it does allow for sublicensing.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
Hmm..I see your point. See, we had to go through this sort of stuff when doing contracts with people who wanted to use Propaganda in some sort of commercial sense -- The other parties were generally concerned about GPL violations in that they would be held accountable or falsely accused of infringement if they were to use our stuff. Turns out that isn't the case at all. As we read it (the GPL) , any item with a GPL on it, even if its totally your own work, cannot be sublicensed and still remain GPL. Looks like we were wrong (happily..Heh)
Thanks for the heads up.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
In order to avoid "distributing" the software but still giving copies out, you'd have to make each person who had a copy an employee or contractor of the corporation in question. The cost of doing this would be immense (paperwork, taxes, etc).
For instance, in order for any employee of a private company to use any "company software" on their home computer, the company would have to "distribute" and [sub]license it to them (if permitted to do so). IANAL so I am not sure if the same applies for a person acting as the agent for a corporation.
I was certainly under the impression before that the GPL granted each individual the rights to reproduce the covered material. This was the big question when Corel tried to violate the GPL by insisting that beta-testers were not really covered, wasn't it?
Property law should use #'EQ, not #'EQUAL.
> Companies can keep their internal modifications
> secret as long as they don't distribute the
> code OUTSIDE their non-disclosure boundary -
> and once they distribute the object outside
> that boundary, they must also distribute the
> source.
> Giving the code to people INSIDE the
> non-disclosure boundary is not "distribution"
> within the meaning of the GPL, so it does not
> confer on such people the right to disclose the
> modified code without the approval of the
> company's official decision-making process.
I think this is how it would be interpreted by the legal system, yes, but this leads to Mr. Rideau's problem, which is very interesting.
What happens when a company widens the boundry of non-disclosure? For example, I found a company and make some amazing modifications to the Linux source, that makes it *the* product to have. But, I want to make money off of this exclusively...
So, I widen the NDA boundry. Come join my "software club" for $100 / year. You'll get all the software we make for free! However, you must sign this NDA saying you can't do this or that.
I am now widening my organzation. So the software is still being used "internally" so I do not need to disclose my modifications, or allow GPL redistribution.
Now, IANAL, so I have no idea if this would hold up in court... But I think Mr. Rideau makes an interesting point...
-Wintermute
> however, they are still restricted from selling
> their modified code.
Who said they had to sell it?
Come join my "Software Sharing Club" for $100/year! Just don't give the software to a non-club member or you will be kicked out and sued into oblivion...
This is *very* dangerous, IMO.
-Wintermute
I believe the Free Software Foundation would represent the GPL. I seem to recall that question coming up before.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
"An entity can only violate the GPL by distributing binaries to GPL'd software without source code."
If only that were true! But alas, one can run afoul of the GPL in a myriad of subtle ways. Like adding restrictions. Like removing restrictions away. Like linking the binary to a non-GPL library. Like including non-GPL code in the source tree. Like adding a frontend to apt or distributing KDE.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I think you're wrong, but it appears that RMS agrees with you.
You're essentially trying to draw a technical/functional boundary around an issue that can only be decided by a judge based on the expressive nature (not functional nature) of the code in question. It won't work.
Lynn
The gnu license, while well intentioned, is doomed. It cannot infect anything that touches it. Period. If this were so, then a string of musical notes, say CDE, played in that order, would prevent any other piece of music from having that sequence in it. Even if the entire rest of the context was so different as to not in any way resemble the original piece. Multiple licenses can coexist to cover various pieces of a work. Start Netscape and read the list of copyright owners, known and unknown, who may, or may not, hold copyrights to certain portions of the work. I look for IBM or Microsoft to release a branded version of Linux in the next year that incorporates some of their proprietary stuff that they do not open up. Who is going to put up the $$$$ to fight that for the GPL? No one. But I'll be we have a good discussion about how "that sucks" here on slashdot! Dave
Dave Bennett
According to many slashdoters, this should be exploited for all it's worth. See MSN $400 Rebate in CA and OR Stopped
That's just what I though when I saw this...
>The BSD license benefits everyone. The GPL is >designed to help some people but hurt a specific >group: commercial programmers.
:) its called "the academy", and is in large part responsible for the success of the computer age.
:)
Would you be pissed off if you wrote a program and then someone took it, under the BSD license, and decided to sell it??? Without giving you any of their 'hard-earned' cash? (hard earned in the sense that they must have had to really work to find such a sucker....)
>This also harms the general population by >hindering or even preventing the development of >better commercial products.
How so? If a product is good enough to hold up a company, buying it (aka paying the programmers for their work) isn't a problem for most of the sane world. If a programmer (or firm, or whatever) develops a good piece of software, people WILL pay for it. for a little while. then people get sick of the random crashes and go find something else that meets their needs as well or better than the first program. odds are (and this has been the general pattern in the past) that by the time Company A is heading for release 2 or 3 of their new whiz-bang software, a GPL'ed equivalent has sprung up. Imagine that, a free market for ideas!
>In short, there's no contest. The GPL is an >instrument of spite; the BSD license is an >instrument of freedom.
No, the BSD license is a way to make money off other people's code but still have enough disclosure (if the releasing company or organization so chooses) to fix buglets. The GPL prevents the concealment of the buglets totally, but at the cost of you being able to take my work, essentially steal it, and pass yourself off as a "commercial programmer."
Look at microsoft's "innovations" in the last few years. Many of them are outright THEFTS of other people's ideas. They do, of course, pick the best ideas. and if they don't think they can just take them and say "common idea", they tend to buy up the company.
elijah
elw@stderr.org
-----
-As far as I know, no "clubs" have membership
- agreements that set their members up as
- employees/agents of the host corporation, which
- would be required if their use of the software
- is to be considered "internal."
Actually, America online used to do something similar if i recall properly, by claiming in their membership agreement that the user was, once a member, considered a "representative" of AOL in any online context. This was the basis for their censoring their members' speech in non-aol-controled areas (like internet).
(Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong. -- That's what I remember)
At one of RMS's talks, he more or less said that this was intentional and that it would be wrong, or too much to ask for people or companies to release their modifications if they were only using it internally.
To a certain extent I have no problem with this. What they do internally is their business. But certain types of programs are affected in a much more serious way. Consider a piece of software that allows website builders to easily create dynamic content. This type of software would be useful for running online shopping sites. If you want to build an online shopping site, the attractive thing to do is take this free piece of software as a base and tailor it to your needs - and of course, don't let the competition have all your code enhancements - from a business perspective that would be silly. So, here we have a piece of software under the GPL that will encourage people to keep their code enhancements to themselves. How unfortunate for the author.
The problem is that the GPL only prevents the company from distributing their modifications. They are not distributing them, but they are letting users connect to their server and execute code containing the modifications (which is no longer completely "internal"). Shouldn't that situation be protected by the GPL as well?
I hope they aren't getting to you, but I feel that you were justified in posting that article about the GPL. In my opinion, this is exactly what should be discussed on Slashdot as it is a legitimate discussion in and of itself, and it directly relates to a large majority of Slashdot users. I don't know what most of the flames you received were about, but unless the whole discussion was a joke, then it is newsworthy and appropriate for Slashdot (again, in my opinion.) To all those flamers, I would say that if discussions like this one hurt your ears(eyes) just because it is about something you believe in so much that it is beyond fallability, then you do more harm than good to its advocacy.
BamaPookie
Well, even if that is a loophole, if even one "employee" of NickSoft let the code out, there's not much NickSoft could do other than "fire" the employee, is there? Since they already have the code, what do they care? How would you even prove one particular person was the person who released it?
Get fragged @ Lone Star Quake
South Texas' premier Quake server
So, if I understand correctly, the flap is about the GPL seemingly allowing someone to grab the source code for something, making their own version, and keeping all their work secret just so long as they don't try to distribute it publicly.
g 00002.html)
So what? Am I the only person who thinks that there isn't anything wrong with this? Heck, even RMS thinks its legit, if unethical. (http://lists.tunes.org/list/cybernethics/0001/ms
It can never be used to subvert a program, since if you don't distribute it, then it's contained internally. They can't sell it, heck they can't even give it away unless they provide code. But why should they be banned from using changes internally that they've made without telling anyone about them? And how would anyone know about it anyways?
This, to me, would be absolutely absurd. Where does it end? Ok, say you're working on a new addition to the linux kernel. Do you have to provide constant 24hr public ftp access to your personal source directories so people can see the new, improved source code as-it-happens? Do you have to allow people to see your changes the second they're made? Or does it suffice to upload the changes to a public CVS once a day? Once a week? Once a month? Once a year? Once you've done your own testing? Once you've done alpha testing? Once you've done beta testing? (remember the Corel beta-testers snafu?) Where does it end?!
I say the only realistic way is to enforce *public* distributions to be full disclosure, with source etc. To force full disclosure of internal, non-public things is an invasion of privacy by definition. If some legal precedant says that this is the way the GPL should be interpreted, you can bet I'm going to drop the GPL as fast as humanly possible (including re-releasing all my originally-GPL'd software under a non-GPL license).
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. -John Archibald Wheeler
I can imagine there'd be a distributed attempt at breaking the key, or just going through the source to find it.
It'd probably be hell to maintain anyways.
Faré is a brilliant, if perverse, mathematician.
It is just a shame he applies his perverse mind to
legalese instead of working on TUNES.
---
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
IANAL, so if you use this as legal advice and I'm wrong, don't say I didn't tell you so. I repeat - IANAL.
:)
Licenses don't apply to individuals but rather to legal entities, which can be a corporation, a person, an organization, etc. The only way a license is violated is when distribution to a separate, other legal entity occurs.
I'm not sure though - would a family be considered a legal entity?
Of course, notwithstanding what corporations are fighting for, it is always legal to do whatever you want with anything you own for personal use, period. But that's a whole other argument
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
FC Closer
Re. the so called "apology": people aren't pissed at the suggestion that there might be a problem with the GPL, they're pissed because they've heard this before and don't care. They're also pissed because the posted article makes it sound like the GPL may be totally broken, when in fact the linked discussion only talks about a possible minor exception.
So you can take your "apology", turn that sumbitch sideways...
I think you misunderstood the post. The first sentence, "Companies are not individuals and have no rights as such." was in italics, and that was because it was quoted, not for emphasis. I assume it was quoted from somewhere in the discussion thread that was linked to this /. article. The AC's original text started with the second sentence that you quoted.
The original AC post was saying exactly what you did in yours as well, that the first sentence is not true. That's also why it got moderated up.
Subject: Re: The GPL and secrecy
From: Richard Stallman
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 18:41:08 -0700 (MST)
> In a recent slashdot discussion, someone
>reasserted the often-expressed opinion according
>to which a company may choose to keep modified
>GNU GPL'ed software secret, as long as it didn't
>distribute either source or binaries of it, just
>like anyone is free to make private
>modifications of such code and not redistribute.
I agree with that position, as a question of
legal interpretation of the GPL. The reason is
that the company is not distributing the program
in that case.
*cough*
(yes, I'm sure there were others...)
+&x
>American-boy: do you have any idea as to how French law applies to this issue?BR
Well as a matter of fact I'm a French-boy and I can easily answer this one : French Law is exactly the same in this respect as American Law. In France companies are considered as "moral persons" i.e individuals. Therefore, if it's not a loophole in the US, it's not one in France either.
O.
All of you have missed something rather important (unless it hasn't gotten moderated and I don't see it yet) --
"If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all."I of course take the IANAL statement, but it seems like if your "employee contract" kept you from distributing a GPL'd program's source, then you simply couldn't distribute it at all. Besides, if the binaries left that "company" they'd then hit the GPL legal restrictions. So you'd have to be in the "company" to get even binaries. Why would you join such a club? What could they possibly offer you to lure you to the Dark Side(tm)?! =)
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
It seems to be saying that because a company is not a person, then it cannot be bound by the license. That is just bull. An incorporated company is legally a person and can enter the same agreements as a individual. Laws bound companies that sign contracts or agree to licenses the same what that they bound them to the individual. If it is not incorporated, then the individual who gets the license is bound by its terms and all the individuals who work for that company. That is my 2 cents anyway.
Actually, the thread does have an interesting point.
The story was misleading -- I read it as any company can re-license GPL'd code as they like, which is not what the discussion was about. Basically, since a company can own copyright on GPL'd code, they can control the distribution of it within the company. Of course, they're still not allowed to distribute binaries without the source, but they can still make money from it, by using modified versions in-house without redistributing the changes in the source.
He then expands this to say that by putting the copyright of new software based on GPL'd code in the name of a 'community', you can choose who to let into the community, and therefore choose who can or can not use/modify the software.
In my opinion, this can be thought of as a "hole" in the GPL, but not as dangerous as the story implied, and was more about what constitutes 'free' and 'fair', than what is legal.
--
Isn't it absurd. Corporations have no soul, are immortal, and are designed to avoid personal responsibility and yet they have rights.
I think that if a corporation has first amendment rights it can make a case for second amendment rights. Can you see it. MS arms itself to fend off the DOJ thereby declaring war against the US. I would love to see that just so the supreme court can see the absurdity of their ruling.
War is necrophilia.
I like the license - it is simple, and to the point (whereas the GPL and LGPL are VERY hard to read, but read it enough times, and you get it eventually). However, I found one problem (which is also hinted at by a previous poster in this thread):
You consistantly use the term "software" in the license. What do you mean by software? The binaries, or the source code? The "preamble" to the license states:
Our software refers to the work covered by this license
I think that if you changed the preamble to something like:
Our software (both source and executable format) refers to the work covered by this license
Then it would be clear what was meant by software. Your license does talk about the source, but it only seems to apply if the user received the source - ie, it seems like I could write a piece a software, and only distribute the binary under this license, and nobody could get the source code, unless I released the source code as well when I distributed the work.
If "software" was defined as being both the source and the binary, it would be clearer.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
So in a sense, a non-incorporated partnership or sole-proprietorship do not exist. Consider, if a sole-proprietor dies, the business dies with her. Partnerships must be restructured if one or more partners buys out others, or leaves. A corporation can survive in the total absense of any living person, so long as the bills are paid.
You are absolutely correct about liability, however.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
True, it's important to figure out these loopholes - but doesn't common-sense and applying the intended spirit of the agreement have any place here? IANAL but aren't judges supposed to be able to override the letter of the law or the letter of an agreement if its implications are perverse with regard to the intended spirit?
Female Prison Rape in NY
Slash isn't GPLed so that's irrelevant. Moreover, Rob owns all the code AFAIK so isn't bound by the "license", so it's kinda doubly irrelevant.
NSA contracting with a company to secure Linux.
And... ? You're not seriously suggesting NSA are going to start selling Linux by "employing" people for $10??
I think it is somehting that needs to be cleared up
I think it has been cleared up.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Hence, if any individual employee or contractor of a company is given
g cc-jvm) and then posted about my work on a newsgroup. I received requests to give the source out and did so. My supervisor found out and was furious. I claimed that I had done nothing wrong (indeed I still beleive I did not) but hesitantly contacted RMS. He informed me of the situation above. 4 months have past, but this week the university saw the error of their ways and released the changes.
a binary, then the same individual is also entitled source code and
accompanying rights, according to the license (or natural law).
This is not true. Suppose a company makes changes to a GPL'd program and uses them internally. The copyright of the changes is owned by the company. The changes are not covered by the GPL until they are "released" by that company. That is: a company can extend a GPL'd program without having that extension licensed under the GPL as long as they only use it internally (keep it secret). However, the minute they attempt to license it to a third party, they must use the GPL.
I have experienced this first hand. I wrote extensions to EGCS/GCC targeting the Java Virtual Machine (http://archive.csee.uq.edu.au/~csmweb/uqbt.html#
How we know is more important than what we know.
Unfortunately, the work done by an employee as part of his work for hist employer doesn't typically belong to him. It is therefore not within his rights to give that labor away. It's a violation of the contract that the programmer enters as part of drawing a paycheck.
Ultimately, the GPL cannot require that a person or corporation distribute anything. I doubt any enforceable license could be constructed that compels a user to do so. If it could, it would seem to be much a much WORSE situation than currently exists for Free Software, as proprietary companies could presumably use the same mechanism to ensure that YOU use the software that you buy in precisely the way that THEY dictate.
The bugroff license is a darned fine idea, and well motivated. If the software in question were really free instead of just GPL-brand free , we could rely on things like simple practicality to enforce software freedom: it would simply not generally be in any companies best interest to significantly fork from the freely available versions. It would also allow them to donate parts of their efforts back into free software projects without necessarily compelling them to donate ALL of their work to such a project.
None of this is new. I suspect it will only be resolved in a court of law when a company begins to think that the payoff might be great enough to risk a legal fight. Given the high valuation of Linux based properties on the NASDAQ, it might not be that far off.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
Rob, in that apology you explained why you did what you did in detail and then bashed the whole Slashdot community. Imho, not many flamers will be soothed by that. I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up apologizing for your apology :).
/. will be boring if you guys are scared of posting controversial articles!
Personally, I think you were right to post this because it raised interesting issues. Probably the real reason you were bashed was because you phrased the news article in a way that might be interpreted as "sensationalist".
Next time you post something that might be controversial, try adding something like "but let's take this with a grain of salt", etc. That will preserve the interesting discussion but you'll never get flamed. And
Broccolist
One of the stories I have read about RMS is about how he had a piece of software that managed a printer he used and the software had a bug. He wanted to fix the bug but was unable to because the software was under a restrictive liscense. This was one of the motivations for making the GPL. Perhaps in the scenario portrayed by Francois-Rene Rideau , RMS is of the opinion that because the software is being used for internal use only, it will not affect the world's ability to use the software. As soon as the company attempts to use the software in the world market it comes under the terms of the GPL and it has to be released.
What I am wondering is...
Could a company make a liscense stating that you are joining an association by using their software? And that by agreeing to the liscence you are are agreeing to not release the software to the world?
I am wondering if the definition of an association is a nebulous area.
Companies are not individuals and have no right as such.
There is an absurd body of USA case law (including Supreme Court decisions) that uphold the view that corporations are "manufactured" persons. They have rights, can enter into legal agreements, etc. Although corporations cannot vote in elections, the USA congress has happily implemented a number of workarounds to help large companies voice their "opinions". What infuriates many people is that while corporations enjoy many of the rights "real" people have, they aren't subject to many of the responsibilities of citizenship. No corporation for example can be drafted for military service or jury duty. The law is quite plain if a person is convicted of stealing or manslaughter or libel. The law is considerably shakier when it comes to punishing a company that commits these crimes.
In Canada, we recently has an insane ruling from the Supreme Court which declared that a Federal ban on alcohol advertising was unconstitutional because it infringed Freedom of Expression as guaranteed under our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That is, it infringed the alcohol and liquor companies' freedom to express themselves. Now that companies can express themselves, perhaps they will fight for their right to vote and practise the religion of their shareholders. Maybe I'll live to see the day when companies can marry.
Getting back to the "loophole" mentioned in the discussion thread. If a company engages a contractor or employee to augment GPL'd software, and the company doesn't distribute that software I don't see anything that gives the employee the right to distribute it. First, the employee is acting as an agent for the corporation -- the corporation isn't licensing its augmented code to the developer. Ie. the corporation isn't "distributing" the source because the agent is part of the corporation.
Also consider what happens if the code is unstable or unsafe for widespread usage. I think the employee or contractor would be liable for the damage such code would entail.
I think the real issue, both in the USA and worldwide, is:
Would a court overturn the GPL given that it seems to work very well as intended?
It's entrenched and established and everyone understands its purpose. The problem with the GPL is it is (at the time, necessarily) expressed in the language of old-school intellectual property concepts. It's abundantly clear that RMS didn't want those rules to apply to GPL'd software and the entire world has accepted that premise.
Face it, you have to look *really* hard to find a loophole in the GPL and those loopholes are usually based on semantics.
The worrisome part of the GPL is not that someone will invalidate it by discovering a loophole. That just ain't gonna happen. What worries me is when a company or individual violates the GPL can we prove it in court?
But I was wrong to post this to Slashdot, which is obviously not an appropriate forum for discussion of subtle ethical matters, and it is apparent that any mention of even a hint of a possible tiny imperfection in the GPL does not belong here, and that anyone who dares to mention any such thing on this website must expect - and probably deserves - a series of harsh, even obscene, personal attacks instead of rational rebukes or comments.
I was curious to see what Roblimo's apology was. I was certainly not expecting a snide attack on the entire Slashdot community. Does this mean you will no longer be working on the Slashdot staff, Robin? I sincerely hope so. No one with your open disdain for the site's users should be involved with it.
grep -ri 'should work'
It is true in the UK, I think since the introduction of the modern form of limited company, which is rather before 1886. Not sure on the precise details, it has been a while since I studied this sort of thing.
You aren't neccessarily selling the "software", you could be selling the ability to join "the group", one priviledge of which is access to the software. With a little work, this kind of arrangement could probably be worded into a EULA, where you agree to join the group by purchasing, etc. This could allow companies to in effect charge for products that use GPL code, and not release their modifications, if I understand the arguments correctly
I think the post was ok, and should be discussed.
This is a freedom of speech thing - the press do have to apologise sometimes.
Things such as this do need to be discussed, and although you make get heat from some for posting this, it does open it up to a wider audience, and even if it gets 2 more people more interested in contributing to the discussions of the GPL, its worth it.
This is a little off topic, but I think it is still appropriate with this tread so bear with me a little here.
Utah State Law has a minor provision with its alcohol laws that permit the sale of alcoholic beverages by "clubs" to its "members". This law was originally intended to allow operations like the VFW, Elks Club, ect. who typically have a bar for their members use. The idea is that the clubs can control the drinking habits of their members so the state doesn't have to regulate it as much as they do to open public taverns.
The only problem with this law is that it never specified what exactly constituted a "private club". If you are passing through the Salt Lake City airport, I think there is a "private club" you can join for a $10 annual membership (with a $10 coupon towards purchases of beverages in the "club"). The annual fee is the only membership requirement (oh... I guess you have to be of legal drinking age as well, but that is another issue).
"Clubs" like this are actually quite common throughout Utah, and it should prove to be very entertaining to see how many more "clubs" will be starting up with the 2002 Winter Olympics coming to town.
So in answer to the previous post... yes, I think a "software" club would be legal, but the question to beg and ask is who would "join" such a club or company? If the software is really that good then it would certainly be entertaining to see what folks would be saying about the "software clubs"? In addition, I fail to see how software produced in such an environment really would be better, but until something like that is actually setup and contested in court, the theorical discussion is really rather moot.
Aside, if you look up "Corporate Sole" in Blacks Law Dictionary, you will see they are a legal entity that exists for perpuity.
NOW, WHY is the Queen of England a Corporate Sole !?!?
Cheers
Um, hey, thats what i said...thats how if the company were to bankrupt the individual could be forced to sell his house to make up for the debt. This is not the case if you incorperate.
Right, and even in that case a partnership does not have a separate legal existence
Actually, it does. A sole-propiorship (forgive my spelling) or parnership does "exist." that is, if the comapny were to go belly up, the owners of the company would be liable to pay the bills, even being forced to sell their house. Obviously this is a strong reason to incorporate.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that there is what is commonly referred to as the spirit of the law. It's sole purpose is to create or capture a slightly vague idea or notion on paper. My understanding is that the spirit of the GPL is well understood. As such, parties that use products that are bound by the GPL would have a hard time trying to find a technical loophole since the ideology is pretty well understand/documented and expressed in the GPL license. I think it does a pretty good job of explaining its intent. As such, I believe that any action taken to circumvent the GPL would be viewed for what it was.
Patent filings are not copyrightable. SEC filings don't appear to be copyrightable (RHAT/LINX). Contracts/licenses are probably not "protectable" by copyright. (Think of the hairball that would result if they were!)
/. needs a full-time lawyer to clear up our legal confusions.. such an index [slashdot.org/law] would get lots of traffic and sharpen the signal here..
Does anyone have the definitive answer to this? Can, by law, the GPL be modified (if renamed)?
btw--
You can distribute modified GPL'ed code within a corporation when the use of that code is related to the corporation.
If I modify a piece of GPL'ed code at work and we are using it internally for the goals of our business, that is kosher. On the other hand, if I write a piece of code at work and I decide to give it to my coworkers and they take it home and use it for personal purposes or in separate businesses it is not kosher. In the second case, the code is distributed because it is taken out of the business.
There is no loophole (here.)
Slashdot was successful before the moderation system.
I do not believe that a large number of people are contending for karma. It's been made quite clear what the best way to do that is, and yet people who do that are the exception. If most people are simply contending for karma, the system has failed miserably.
Slashdot was successful before the moderation system. Moderation was only instituted *after* slashdot became very popular. It was its very popularity that made moderation necessary.
If the software underlying /. wasn't so important, there would be more forums to which people who don't like what slashdot has become could go to...mostly all forums are wait three hours until your post actually gets up, or a place filled with junk.
I'm not sure what this is suppsed to mean. There are countless forums on the net, for every type of discussion imaginable. Usenet (which is essentially part of the internet now, as NNTP is the primary distribution method) even still has some newsgroups that are good. There are many web forums that have a smaller audience than slashdot, post immediately, and have a very high S/N ratio.
Your argument makes no sense. A competent programmer could clone the slashdot system from scratch in a week. There's nothing terribly complex about it. The last release (which includes moderation in its first incarnation) includes 2784 lines of perl.
The moderation system is nothing special. It's a necessary evil because of the huge number of posts and the large number of willfully disruptive people. There's nothing about it that makes it difficult to implement. When faced with the problem they were, it's one of the obvious solutions.
What makes slashdot good has little to do with the underlying software.
Look at this. Fare' posted a fearful possibility to all of us /.'ers, and all we'd managed to do is go and makr Roblimo afraid to post any more such possibilities. This was made to cause an ethnical worry amongst us /.'ers, especially those of us that use the GPL. Any possibility of a loophole has to be addressed. All we need is M$ to get wind of one and make VisualLinux (the horror). /.'ers that flamed Roblimo and Fare'. You should appologize for such rude behavior, especially against those who mean so well.
I say shame on all of you
I am also a member of #tunes on openprojects.net, so if anyone has a problem with my postings, come talk to me directly.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
This is the way I see it... I can download a GPL program and make all the proprietary changes to it I want and not be breaking the licence agreement. However if I give that program to someone else I must also make the source code available.
Businesses are acting as an individual body. If a business uses a GPL program it is licensed to that business and they can use it as they see fit with in their business structure. They can make any proprietary changes they want, as it is acting as a single entity. However if they decide to use that code for clients or just make it available to others outside of that business structure the source code must be made available. For some commercial software, businesses can purchase special licences for employees to also use the software on a home computer. When that employee leaves or is terminated so are their rights to use that software at home.
If I decide to hard code in machine specific details to a program that I am using for my individual use I don't have to give that code to anyone or even let them know it exists. As soon as I share that program though the source must be made available. A business acts just as an individual in this sense.
Obviously if any code changes or additions I would make improved the performance or functionality of the code I would definatly release it, but making fine tuning additions which are specific to my machine or network stucture would be pointless to release.
----------------
I (which is the first word of nearly every sentence I write) posted this (fantastic) piece because I (being fantastic) felt (because the fantastic don't have to think) Faré raised some subtle but interesting (although the incongruent natures of subtlety and interest may not be apparent to you, since you're not fantastic) ethical and legal points about the GPL that were worth discussion and clarification (but the possibility that the points' need for clarification renders them unsubtle and uninteresting wasn't feelable by me, and, therefore, not worthy of consideration). I honestly did not expect to get flamed over my (unquestionably fantastic) decision to post his submission.
[The second paragraph has been redacted due to redundancy and its being really boring. --ed.]
But I (who am never wrong) was wrong (but of course I'm lying) to post this to Slashdot, which is obviously not an appropriate (which is the word we fantastic people use in place of "right" or "correct" because it makes our sentences longer and more officious) forum for discussion of subtle ethical matters (because you're all a bunch of dumbasses), and it is apparent that any mention of even a hint of a possible tiny (which highly comical phrasing would make you laugh if you weren't such a bunch of dumbasses) imperfection in the GPL does not belong here (because you're all a bunch of dumbasses), and that anyone who (not being a dumbass) dares (have I mentioned how daring I am already?) to mention any such thing on this website (for dumbasses) must expect - and probably deserves (for not knowing that to deign to speak down to the dumbasses is to become a dumbass oneself) - a series of harsh, even obscene, personal attacks (which is what rational rebukes or comments by dumbasses are called) instead of rational rebukes or comments (which is what harsh, even obscene, personal attacks by me are called).
Please accept my humble apology (by which I mean fuck you, you dumbasses). I was wrong (to lay this pearl before you dumbasses). I will try not to make the mistake of posting anything even remotely like this (or like the Theory of Relativity, to which my every post is comparable) on Slashdot (Where The Dumbasses Don't Block Banner Ads) ever again (because you dumbasses didn't block enough banner ads to keep me in clown college, so I don't really need those flamewar-inspired pageviews anymore).
-Robin (The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived, Dumbass)
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
This cant be good for business so to speak. But does it really make any difference, even if the GPL is violated by someone, legal or illegal, who will represent GPL in sueing their asses???
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
I find it interesting that Fare has completely missed the point of the GPL. The GPL isn't a license whose intent is to promote the unimpeded distribution of software; it's a license to protect your right to fix and modify the software you own. What Fare has done is to "poke holes" in the GPL by reinterpreting it as a public domain software license, which it isn't. It's roughly equivalent to complaining that a Porsche 911 sucks because it won't haul a trailer very well.
Damn, that's a good point...but it would be awfully hard to make that look like anything other than what it was (a cash grab on OSS w/o you getting the benefits of the source)...I mean would the membership be renewed on a "per-application" basis? Or would Company X actually promise a certain amount of binaries for say a years' membership to said "club"? I mean, you do have something there, but I think that anyone who would implement such a scheme would come off looking shady, and scare folks back to the original (open) sources...
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
Well. It's sorta on-topic. And it DID need a reference in it...
/(o\ I'm not a medievalist - I just play one on weekends!
xan
That which is, is not. That which is not, is.
I greatly fear I'm stepping into a flamewar here, but I see something I enjoy and value being threatened.
I thought this story was interesting, and spawned an interesting and thought-provoking discussion. More like it (even if a post is off-base or poorly informed, that it raises a lot of issues and shakes loose information) will keep me happy.
It wasn't the kind of thing I'd expect to see/find on ABC Nightly, but to me this is a feature, not a bug. I value Slashdot for the way it bucks the tendency of so many information sources to filter and grind their information into baby food so it can be spoon-fed to an unthinking audience. Slashdot trusts me to do my own filtering, and I prefer to.
Keep 'em coming, Rob.
Here is U.S. copyight law: http://www.law.cornell.ed u/copyright/copyright.table.html
I didn't find a straight answer as to whether someone could license their rights to organizations or only to individuals. The "work-fo r-hire" part seems to indicate the attitude behind the law: someone working for hire cedes rights thus obtained to their employer or employers. This is explicitly applied to authorship rights. It might apply to licensee rights and duties too; so if a person becomes a licensee - or if something happens to trigger one of their rights as a licensee (more likely with GPL) - in the course of work for hire, the rights and duties thus incurred might be transferred to their employer.
This would let an organization do what was posted about before, keeping source locked away while releasing binaries to their employees.
Interesting asides (the law is worth reading or searching for "interesting" bits, despite its complexity):
Check out Chapter 102.
Looks to me like copyrights are mostly meant to apply to arts and entertainment. They explicitly don't apply to "procedures", "processes", or "systems". Other parts mention computer software, but usually focus on games. Do copyrights apply to non-entertainment software at all? Perhaps patents are more appropriate?
Chapter 107, on "fair use":
"criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research" are not infringements of copyright. Since licenses are transfers of copyright-derived rights, I'd say this makes no-benchmarking, no-review-writing, and no-reverse-engineering (research) license clauses invalid, especially for non-commercial licensees, state laws like the proposed UCITA nonwithstanding.
Not true at all. See my posting earlier in this discussion for the true story of the GPL, as substantiated by Richard Stallman's own writings.
It was so nice that millions flocked to use it. Also not true. Most of those whose software is licensed under the GPL have no choice as to the licensing, because they are contributing to a project whose code has been "infected" by the GPL. Once this happens, there is no turning back. There are also other reasons why people use the GPL even though it is programmer-hostile; again, see my earlier posting.
--Brett Glass
Well, of course they did! What I am saying, though, is that they may have made that choice for the wrong reason. Or they may have not had any feasible alternative. (The GPL "locks itself in," soe once it's used in a project, it precludes other options.)
--Brett Glass
Unfortunately, the GPL brings about many negative consequences that other licenses, such as the X11 license, do not.
Perhaps the biggest problem the GPL causes is that it promotes fragmentation and incompatibility by preventing commercial developers from using the same code base as those who are publishing open source.
If code for important functions such as encryption algorithms and network protocols is published under a license that allows commercial reuse, it will be incorporated into commercial products as well as free ones, and closed source products as well as open source ones. This will promote standardization, as did UC Berkeley's release of the BSD TCP/IP stack. (The fact that the BSD TCP/IP stack was released for commercial as well as non-commercial use is often said to be responsible for the ubiquity of the Internet today.)
I believe the purpose of the GPL is to protect code from proprietership(word?)
The notion that code must be "protected" from being "taken proprietary" is one of the most common bogeymen raised by RMS and other advocates of the GPL. In fact, it's not a worry. Just because someone uses the code in his or her own work does not mean that the original is not available for someone else to use. It's still public! The only code which might not be available is the new and original code which that person may build around the open source he or she started with. And that's fair. Any added value in the new code will be the product of that person's labors, and he or she deserves to be able to give it away or not give it away. We should be glad to give such folk shoulders to stand on. (As Brian Reid once said, "Scientists stand on one another's shoulders; programmers stand on one another's feet.")
Other licenses which do not contain the GPL an anti-commercial "poison pill" (so to speak) also foster communities of open and shared innovation (FreeBSD and Apache are good examples). From these projects we can see that the GPL's spiteful denial of the code to commercial developers is not necessary. Since it is not a good idea (and not ethical) to undermine our colleagues' livelihoods or hurt standardization, we should not do so.
Perhaps his actions were not justifiable (if what you say is true, I don't think they were) but you can't overlook everything that GPL'ed code has accomplished just because of the sketchy nature of its origin.
It can be argued that GPLed code has done some good despite the GPL, not because of it. (Red Hat and Be, Inc., to name two companies, both exploit loopholes in the GPL.) But others -- in particular small developers -- will be badly hurt because they cannot do this.
Microsoft, the favorite target of invective from the open source community, isn't hurt by the GPL's "copyleft" provisions one bit. Why? Because it doesn't need to use anyone else's code. All it needs to do is wave a few million dollars, and programmers will implement (or reimplement) anything it wants! Microsoft's competitors, however, may not have those resources. Thus, the young upstarts, in order to keep from having to give away the farm, will have to spend hours recoding algorithms for which tested code already exists. This hurts their chances of success and diverts them from the new creative work they're trying to accomplish. If they can't advance the state of the art, we all lose.
Actually, I'm not asking you to believe me, I'm asking you to believe Stallman himself -- in his more candid moments, rather than when he puts on a false face and preaches "freedom" as a way of advancing his agenda. That's why I've purposely quoted him -- and provided the sources so you can see that I am not quoting him out of context.
I can also draw on accounts from reliable third parties who witnessed the genesis of the GPL. But Richard's own words, written before he began to conceal his agenda or spoken when he feels safe stating his true intentions, are the most persuasive evidence.
You very obviously have a large chip on your shoulder about this,
What you're seeing is not a chip on the shoulder, but rather a warning from someone who has a very good track record when it comes to spotting the long term consequences of current events. Throughout my career, I have spotted important trends and forthcoming problems -- for example, Microsoft's anticompetitive practices and their likely effects -- years earlier than most. But few in public forums have listened. (In the case of Microsoft, I predicted what has now unfolded back in 1989 on CompuServe's COMPLANG forum. I was told that I was alarmist. Then, it all came true.)
and careful quoting of someone can "prove" just about anything.
That's why I cite my sources: so that readers can see for themselves that I'm not quoting out of context.
I don't understand this claim at all. Most GPLed software I can think of off the top of my head was written more or less from scratch, so this wouldn't really apply. Except for stuff that uses GPLed libraries like readline and libapt, projects are under the GPL because someone thought it was a good idea.
The person who started the project, usually. From then on, there's no choice for anyone else who might want to contribute, as code licensed under a different license will not be accepted.
Richard Stallman, in fact, insists that anyone who contributes to a "GNU" project sign all rights to the code over to the FSF. I find this to be particularly interesting in that Richard would call this behavior on the part of anyone else "hoarding." Ironically, it's hoarding when Richard does it, too: the purpose is to build up an "arsenal" of code to use in his war against commercial programmers and software vendors.
You don't need to know Richard well to see that what he craves is power and control.
--Brett Glass
First, it allows code to be "infected" by the GPL. Not a good thing. The GPL zealots will immediatly produce GPLed versions of all of your products with little or no change, just for spite.
Second, you're submitting it to the FSF for approval. Bad move. The FSF's stated position is that any commercial software (they use the word "proprietary," but incorrectly) is "the enemy" (this is a direct quote), and that even the LGPL should not be used.
--Brett Glass
It is indeed possible that, within this club, members could exchange software derived from GPLed software without being required to reveal source.
Now, suppose, as a commercial software vendor, I place in my license for a software package the condition that the user join the "Software Sharing Club" before using the software. I agree to pay the user's membership fee.
This might make it legal to put GPLed code in the product without opening my source. Hmmmm.
--Brett Glass
In short, there's no contest. The GPL is an instrument of spite; the BSD license is an instrument of freedom.
--Brett
Not at all. When I give something away, then I give it away. I don't become spiteful if the recipient does unusually well by my gift.
Also, note that since any code I publish under the BSD license is available to anyone for free, anyone who does make money by using it will have had to add substantial value to it. (Otherwise, people will go for the free version.) So, anyone who does make money using the code has earned it, fair and square.
--Brett Glass
By forcing commercial software companies out of business and competing with them unfairly. This is a mean-spirited and destructive agenda. But, as I've mentioned, it's intentional. A key purpose of the GPL is to turn open source -- otherwise a good thing -- into a weapon against programmers' livelihoods.
The GPL says, "If you'll give back to the community, you can take and use these things that we have built. If you won't pass on your modifications to the code base to others under the same terms with which you got the base itself, you'll have to roll your own."
One of the most absurd claims made by GPL proponents is that there's some sort of "community" out there to which one is "giving back." In fact, that's not so. The GPL requires that one must give away one's code to everyone -- the entire world -- not just the authors of the code. And thus forfeit any chance to make an honest living.
Heh. Unix fell to pieces and nearly died of being taken proprietary.
Oh? I did not notice that Sun was having any trouble making money on UNIX systems. Nor IBM. In fact, both were (and are!) doing quite well.
It's only of late, with the rise of the free Linux and *BSD, that it has returned to vitality.
Being free of charge does tend to make software more popular.
A license that fosters a common free code base (and discourages proprietary forking) is a Good Thing.
Not so. Commercial use of the code is also a very good thing and should be encouraged. It furthers progress and avoids wasteful re-implementation of what has already been coded. The development of specialized implementations (what you are calling "forking") is likewise a good thing, as it produces systems which are well optimized for specific tasks.
Well, then it sounds like [Microsoft is] hurt to the tune of several million dollars every time they have to reimplement something they could've had for free if they'd work with the community (like Redhat) instead of against it.
Not so; they can do it considerably more cheaply than that in most cases. But even if they were hurt that badly, it'd be a bad thing. Wasting money is never good.
Or, they could just release under the GPL. This does not entail "giving away the farm." Redhat + Cygnus, Aladdin, et al. all do very well
Red Hat has never made a dime and may never do so. This is not "doing well." Aladdin has made some money for its founder but not a lot. Cygnus has made money from consulting but not from software.
and get to stand on the shoulders of the community.
Again, this putative community. Sorry, but this does not wash.
In short, why should I let you stand on my shoulders if you won't let me stand on yours? Bad analogy. It's fine to stand on one another's shoulders, but the GPL demands that I place a stake through my heart in order to stand on your shoulders. If I'm foolish enough to agree to this, I'll soon be dead and thus incapable of standing on anyone's shoulders.
But this is the point of the GPL, of course. As explained earlier, the explicit intent of the GPL is to destroy commercial developers.
--Brett Glass
This is why it's fair to allow commercial developers to re-use open source code (as the X11 and BSD licenses do). Any money they make from the resulting product will be the result of their value added, because the original product was available to anyone for free. If people are willing to pay money for the derivative work, it must have added value that justifies paying that amoung of money. The author has likely worked quite hard; let him or her profit from that work! It's only fair. And it's UNfair for the GPL to attempt to deprive the author of that reward -- which people are perfectly willing to pay. (If they aren't, he won't make a dime.)
--Brett Glass
P.S. -- By the way, GhostScript is licensed under the one license I've seen that's nastier to commercial developers than the GPL. It contaminates other products on the same media.
The paper windfalls enjoyed by those who got in early on the Red Hat and VA Linux IPOs were not "an honest living" -- in fact, it wasn't a wage at all. That money belongs to other people who foolishly bought into the Ponzi scheme which is our current overinflated stock market. And it certainly wasn't payment for work that made money; Red Hat has not made a dime. Due to the GPL, it is actually unlikely to do so. The GPL prevents it from owning what it sells. I therefore predict that Red Hat will never be profitable.
--Brett Glass
--Brett Glass
Just my 2 DM.
Visit
Re. partnerships, liability applies to all partners collectively.
if they pass you on the right, CHANGE lanes!
Regarding companies being considered individuals in the eyes of the law:
It's certainly true in Australia, so it's probably also true in Britain and the Commonwealth, South Africa, Canada, the USA and India. I can't speak for non-english-speaking countries.
Disclaimer: I Am Not An Accountant. But my mother is, and I've learnt at her knee, and written a lot of software with what I learned.
: Fruitbat :
I have discovered a truly remarkable
That's all i have to say...please direct any flames/questions/general rantings to the brick wall behind me. Thank you
Well, even if that is a loophole, if even one "employee" of NickSoft let the code out, there's not much NickSoft could do other than "fire" the employee, is there? ,/I>
The problem with your response above is that the "employees" cited don't have the code, if you mean the source code. They have the binaries they became entitled to when they joined NickSoft. NickSoft still holds the source, can keep it proprietary, and new members can still pay to "join."
It doesn't hurt to put out ideas of ways that companies in the future could get around the GPL. In fact, it's important to look at scenarios.
In the coming world of 'thin clients' (if they ever do in fact become the norm on the net) it seems to me that one way to keep clients really, really thin would be to use the X Window System or a system similar to it, to 'distribute' applications in the form of graphic primatives instead of actual binary code. If someone were to privately produce a highly enhanced Mozilla, for example, and provide the server-side power so that it could be run on the company computers, and only the result of it running would be 'delivered' to the customer, has an application been 'distributed' to the customer? It seems to me that the only actual software that's been distributed to the customer is an X server. Since the binaries are run at the server side, the source code can stay at the server side and never need leave the company. This could be a money making proposition. People are nervous about browsing the web because of the risks of running code on their unsecured personal computers. So there's potential something like this could become a very workable and lucrative business for companies with the skill to leverage GPL'd software and extend and sell it to clients.
The idea of a restricted distributiion club in fact, it does violate the underlying principles of the GPL, which is that you may not distribute modified GPL software with any restrictions on the rights granted by the GPL. Free software does not equal $0.00 in the copyleft sense, nor is the GPL simply about providing source code with binaries. Copyleft is about protecting every user's right to have the freedom to copy and modify the program as they see wish, providing they agree to distribute the program with the same rights they had. This is more explicitly stated in the preamble to the GPL: "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights." Based on this idea, even a club could not ask members to agree to limit distribution and would have little recourse against someone violating that agreement. The same would apply to a corporation seeking to limit the release of software based on GPL'd code through similar agreements with the public. One exception could be whether a corporation could restrict distribution for internal use only, based on who owns work performed, and therefore owns the right to make the decision to distribute or not, although that is a whole other can of worms better left for other subthreads on this topic. I think it would be difficult (in North America, at least, perhaps other can pass on info about their regions) to circumvent this agreement, short of secretly distributing code based on the GPL and completely ignoring the licence. As the Corel beta issue pointed out, any attempt to modify the GPL agreement and restrict downstream user's rights is a direct violation of the agreement.
I beg to differ! In (UK Law - poss similar in the english speaking world) partnerships the partners are "jointly and severally" liable and unlike corporations have NO limites to their liability. Each partner is treated in law as an 'individual' but it is usually the Senior Partner to whom legal matters are addressed. Senior Partner (Retd) ****** ***** Associates.
I suspect that if push came to shove Judges would allow considerable leeway in arguments presented by representatives of GPL. It is after all "in the public interest" and could possibly be argued "for the greater good". In this context Judges may ask "what was the intestion of the GPL".
A lot of people are saying that because corporations are legally considered individuals, this guys argument is bunk. That's bass ackwards... He's saying that if corporations are individuals, which they are, then they can distribute closed-source copies internally. Now all a corporation has to do is make a license with their shrink-wrap that, when you sign it, makes you part of the company. And there you have lost your rights to source, BECAUSE corporations are individuals. So I take gcc, make "super-gcc corporation", charge you $100 to be hired by that company, and give you super-gcc, sans source. It's legal, because as a member of super-gcc corp you have no rights.
Now this does seem like it would be technically true, but judges are people, not robots. Any company that would try this would need some serious balls, not to mention the PR problems it would cause.
So the argument by this fellow is that currently corporations ARE individuals, but for the GPL to work perfectly, they SHOULDN'T be.
~me
Well, I just do it. Write a fix/extension. Send to maintainer. My boss asks me how dare I, I ask who will fold in my changes into the next release.
There comes a point where an addition is a major investment. (I've done nothing above 10 lines so far :-))
Well, you can't win the whole world at once.
P.S I haven't actually told my boss. Now you know boss.
I think I'll have to disagree to this. The NSA is hiring a new INDIVIDUAL to do some very specialised work. This is just like hiring a new employee under a temporary contract for the singular purpose of building 1 peice of software. The NSA will still own the software because all it did was hire an INDIVIDUAL to build it on ITS behalf. It didn't go to someone and buy something that soneone else had already built.
On that note, i'd like to rant.
The source for slashdot will never be seen.
How many sites with the exact noise filtering capabiltity as slashdot have you seen? 0. It's the moderation system...it's pretty smart within itself, and that's why it will not be released. Slashdot and andover want to have the market for this type forum in a ball grip, and as of now, it does....it's sad, too. If i were more of an advanced coder, i'd write the damn software myself.
Screw you, moderators...there are people who will hear me, no matter how low you put me. Karma here is nothing but a game, and i don't care anymore.
A lot of people have posted comments like "I don't really see the problem" or "I don't understand". The problem as stated originally is a bit hard to grasp. How about this, though?
A basic issue with the GNU GPL is that it does not cover the use of the program as a service. This has not mattered until recently. The web has now made it possible to deliver such services to large numbers of people cheaply. Pretty soon we will see more fully-featured applications available over the web (MS Office apps, for example.)
Hypothetically, I will create a new company called "Compile.com". I will take GCC, soup it up a little, and provide a handy-dandy web interface so that individuals can (for a fee, or perhaps supported by advertising) select a target architecture, POST a piece of their own source code, and have a piece of object code returned. A linker would also be provided.
Now, accepting and disregarding for the moment the obvious rebuttals to this proposal (it's slow, people won't want to send their source code across the internet, it's a perfect vehicle for trojan horses), imagine if this were a successful service.
Why bother to install or compile GCC (ever tried it?) when the latest version, with proprietary enhancements, is available this way? I never have to release the source for those enhancements, however, since the object code (of the compiler itself) is never distributed to the end user. I could do this with all sorts of GPL'd software and would not be legally entitled to share any of my modifications, even though I would be profiting from them.
Please do not mention that someone could provide this service using a fully-free version of GCC, and incorporate their own, disclosed implementations of my proprietary enhancements. Of course that is possible, but it is irrelevant. And please don't say things like "we'll boycott them" or "companies live by their reputations". It's precisely because things like that do not always work that the GNU GPL was created. The argument, after all, is about the GPL itself, not about the community's reaction after a violation (of the GPL or of the perceived intentions behind the GPL).
kemokid
PS For an interesting article by Tim O'Reilly on the new possibility of open versus proprietary services, see Where the Web Leads Us.
Release the source! Moderate the stories!
<rant>
sigh. You know, the biggest problem with geeks is they have a #$@#ing opinion about everything. They find a news site that gives them a forum for their rants and suddenly they feel they own the place.
/. doesn't owe you anything. Nor does the rest of the world. Open source/Linux/Geekdom/whatever isn't about you getting cool free stuff from other people according to your specs. It's about giving, not getting; helping, not complaining.
Try practicing a little gratitude for a change.
</rant>
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light. --Edward Abbey
For now.
It seems like only a matter of time before the lawyers find the loopholes. Ka-Ching Lawyers make more money on both sides of the fence.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
is this true in ALL countries?
Companies need have juridical personality, so as they can own assets, have rights, obligations and civil liability. A company cannot be considered guilty of a crime, but those individuals who run it can.This is true in the whole western world, AFAIK. In ex-communist countries the laws of commerce are quite messy, if not nonexistent, for there was no need for them in the recent past. I don't know how this works in eastern countries.
-------------------------
-------------------------
"People ask FAQs all the time". - David Allen
I agree 100%. The post was criticized by a very few indeed (at least at an 1 threshold) before the apology came up. No article is going to taste interesting to all of us. I would go a bit farther and say that the criterium to choose among the submissions should not be solely based on informative content but should take in account the potential to generate discussion and exchange of ideas. The original subject was crap, IMHO, but very catalytic crap! I think that was the reason why it was posted.
Now, when I saw that mention to an apology in the main page I knew what was comming! That hit us all. Imagine someone who is reading /. for the first time and comes across such an eruption. What impression would be imprinted on his mind?
-------------------------
-------------------------
"People ask FAQs all the time". - David Allen
Yeah, for real, you guys have posted hundreds of bad stories.
My other
But I was wrong to post this to Slashdot, which is obviously not an appropriate forum for discussion of subtle ethical matters, and it is apparent that any mention of even a hint of a possible tiny imperfection in the GPL does not belong here, and that anyone who dares to mention any such thing on this website must expect - and probably deserves - a series of harsh, even obscene, personal attacks instead of rational rebukes or comments.
I can't believe that it's wrong to tell people there is a possible hole or inperfection in what these people use or adore. Yesterday I was discussing in another thread (about Linux Demo Day) the fact that it's NECESSARY to inform people that there are alternatives AND why, so they can make the RIGHT choices.
Just ignoring flaws, or inperfections or even bugs or shortcommings is the nail to your own coffin. That's why I say: Roblimo: you don't have to appologize for telling people that there are shortcomings or inperfections. On the contrary!
Why? because I'm a true nerd (living behind my computer programming 12 hours a day for the past 10 years) and proud of it, but that doesn't make me adore or love everything the OpenSource community poops out or says 'obey this'. We all think different, that's why there ARE people here who BELONG here PLUS like your posting. Think about that, forget the flamers. People who bash, flame and replace S-es with $-signes are never reasonable or right.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I think there was plenty of rational reasons for this story not to be posted in the first place.
1) There is only so much news worthy of fitting on /. so one must discern what is or is not news worthy. That's yer job, I think.
2) This news item sports such a weak argument, so much so in fact it that takes about a minute to see as so weak as to be irrelevent, as to not meet the standards of news worthy-ness.
You missed the point in your apology, most 'dotters are peeved because this is just a really weak story with a sensational claim/head line.
"Sig free in '03!"
If I get this right, it means that a company (or group or individual) to build in houe stuff without distributing it. Really it's not much of a big deal. It they want to update the software, they need to incorporate those changes themselves.
Actually, this could help a company use it. Perhaps they want to code in something that shows something they don't wish to let out into the public. This may include intellectual property, or access to proprietary hardware.
In that case, the company would be allowed to maintain the code themselves.
If the GPL forced them to release this proprietary code to the community, then they would have no choice but to go to a non-GPL provider. Thus, this GPL "loophole" allows the company to use GPL code to their own benefit.
Just a thought.
and once they distribute the object outside that boundary, they must also distribute the source But they only need to distribute the source to the people that they distribute the object to.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
I really don't understand WHY this story was posted? I read the mentioned thread, and I found a clueless person, pontificating (and the terms he used should have been `duty, redistribute') on ``natural law'', his rights, companies as non-legal-entities (which flies in the face of legal reality). This is low-level stuff to be posting as a major discussion going on over there!
Thanks
Jaco
If RMS doesn't seem worried then why should any of us?
Richard Stallman is one of the biggest advocates of Free Software and if there was any problem with the licence then you can be sure that he'd be going to get the problem fixed straight away. However as you've seen by his posts on the mailing list he doesn't see this as a threat and has explained his view on the subject.
--
Posted with Mozilla
After reading the threads for like 2 hours straight, my eyes hurt as so do my heart. The underlying issue for all the free codes that is on the market is that they are people out there that do not understand the importance of free code trading. When a price is put on to anything, especially codes, it causes a conflict of interest to the people involove. And ultimately causes the downfall, if not the complete distruction, of the code itself. Take linux for instance, due to its openess it has flowered into something that everyone here has grown to love and admire. It is only with common courtecy and ethical morals that makes this happend. If by any chance that people want to make this into a profit making schemem than it will eventually become the death of linux. Maybe I am a bit paranoid, even a bit stupid, to think that people can be just kind and loving. :) ... I feel that most programmers in our world currently are this kind of people. Do you know the feeling of a programmer when they are in their mad scientist mode, programming is life to them, and with that we forget about all our petty difference and go towards a common goal, to take the best code and make it bettere. That's is what makes programmers so esseteric, even downright crazy sometimes, but it makes them a better person. So my view on the problem is that people should bugger off on the profit and pay more attention on the building of something grand. If we can make linux and free codes the culture in this community, then we might have a chance of making something out of this short life that we have. I see so many potentials that linux have, that sometimes it is sad to see that nobody is paying attention to do it but go about arguing about legal issues. When human beings can think of something other than themselves, then maybe we can become the PEOPLE that is destined for us to be. Hope I don't offend anybody out there. If I did, we just have a different point of view .. :)
------ Life is as random as it goes, sometimes you just end up in high ground when you least expect to. -----
I agree that everyone should have a right to say what is in their mind if they think it is right. There so many comments out there that most of them have their merits. Some, if not most, will be somewhat different from our own, none the less it is just a different of oppinions or views and of understanding. Granted there are people out there who are downright rude, but it is but their way of communication. I have personally being flamed so many times that I think sometimes I live in flames of fire .. :) ... but the issues is that people react to our words and that is important. That means people are listening. And that gives us the chance to tell our own version of the story. Take the comments as there are, comments and views that we should consider. Hell, with this reply alone, I could be flamed, but does it really changes my point of view? I don't think so, for I still believe in the good of the people has. Take it all in and be happy that people feel that your words are worth flaming ..:)
------ Life is as random as it goes, sometimes you just end up in high ground when you least expect to. -----
Company law explicitly states that *members* of a company are separate legal entities to the company itself. In fact this is a basic underlying principle of company law. Consequently, distribution to members is distribution outside of the company, and must include source code.
Employees of a company are considered to be a part of the company *only in a tightly limited context of the work they do for the company*. If a company were to allow the employee to take the object code home outside the context of the work, that would be distribution, and must include source code.
There is no loophole here.
There's a very different potential way to get around the GPL. Thus far it's purely theoretical (so far as I know). It's essentially a cryptographic attack.
Section 3 of the GPL reads in part:
Here's the catch, though. It doesn't say that the actual commands used to build the executable must be configured. So the source code could be obfuscated by a stack of #ifdef's. The actual command to build the (modified) source is
make CFLAGS='-DA0=1 -DA1=0 -DA2=1...'
See where I'm going? The sequence of preprocessor definitions on the command line amounts to a cryptographic key. If the wrong "key" is entered the program might not compile, or it might simply do something different. If this is done pervasively in the modifications it might be impossible to use the source code in practice.
This, again, is a theoretical attack, and would take a lot of work to do in practice. There would also be the risk of whoever's distributing the software forgetting the key, since including it in the script would amount to it being part of the required source.
When I mentioned this to RMS, he wasn't terribly worried about it. I don't think it's all that great of a concern in practice, but it's interesting to think about...
I thought someone was finally going to bring up the possibility of reducing a piece GPL'd software to a sort of daemon which acts as a shared library. If the interface is designed rationally (i.e. code for it can be written from scratch easily), there would be no need to reuse headers or other GPL'd files. Then proprietary additions to the software could be made through the creation of a proprietary client program.
I'm not quite sure I'm following here.
You can compile proprietary code against GPL'ed (or, more likely, LGPL'ed) headers and libraries without problem.
I can copyright my scripts under whatever super-restricting licenses I want. Just because the architecture or the interpreter is GPL'ed doesn't in any way translate to the things using/running on them.
What you're describing sounds an awful lot like, say, kernel modules. Proprietary, non-GPL'ed binary kernel modules do exist. Their usefulness is limited, but they're out there and it's perfectly legal.
What exactly is it that you're objecting to here?
All it takes is a judge saying, "The club is a sham. By selling/distributing memberships, they're just trying to hide the fact that they're really selling/distributing the program, contrary to the license."
If you can prove this, I can't think of any reason a judge would disagree with you.
I think this AC is right on the nose. Too bad it was posted as an AC and probably won't be seen by many people.
I guess maybe you and I just see things differently here.
I have no problems with a company taking a GPL'ed program, making trivial changes, making moderate changes, or customizing it quite heavily and using it for their own proprietary needs. Isn't that kinda the point?
What's wrong with taking an ordering processing application and bastardizing it or just cleaning it up quite a lot and using it for your own site? Sure, it would be nice if you released your enhancements under the GPL, but you're under no obligation to, and I don't really see why someone should be forced to do so.
If you don't want your programs used in this manner, simply don't release it under the GPL. Write up your own license.
Consider code whose entire purpose is to manage a complex website.
I'm not sure I see what the problem is. Let's say I write a bunch of code, based on something that's been GPL'ed that allows people to make updates to my web site from remote locations (hell, a guestbook application might qualify). Are you of the opinion that I should be required to make the source code to this type of application available?
The GPL doesn't require making the source available to *users* of the program, only to those that you make the binaries available to. You're not distributing the binaries; you're just making the application available for use, so you're not obligated to redistribute the source code with it.
I'm afraid I don't see the negative point here.
Now, am I receiving that software under the terms of the GPL or under the terms of my non-disclosure/non-compete/etc agreements?
So long as the code doesn't change hands from one legal entity to another, it's not being distributed. Since you're acting in your job capacity for the same company that's giving you the program (plus proprietary modifications), you have no rights to redistribute the software because your rights over the GPL'ed portion of the code are in conflict with whatever NDA agreements you signed in addition to state/federal law. The GPL (and the law) states that when such a conflict arises, you lose your rights under the GPL to redistribute.
The company isn't "distributing" it to you any more than your lungs are "selling" oxygen-enriched blood to your heart. It doesn't leave the closed system.
You can do whatever you want with the GPL'ed portions of the software, but any bit that someone else in the company has added or modified is controlled by its own copyright/license agreement, which effectively means you can't do anything with it outside of your normal job functions.
Shame on ALL who have flamed and condemned! Yes, it is important to hear all sides of an argument, or it's no argument at all. It's dictatorship. BUT, it is PERFECTLY POSSIBLE to be decent about it! No matter where you are, or who you are, there is STILL another person at the other end of the line. You never hired Roblimo to be your punching bag, so don't treat him like one!
I am frankly disgusted by the trolls over this news item. And news it is! If there's a potential hole, it needs reporting! Slashdot did the same with the Sun licence, the Netscape licence, and just about every other Licence that's ever been published! Some of those got fixed as a result, for the benefit of all!
ANYONE who feels they can do a better job of running a news service than the people who run Slashdot - feel free! Grab the Slash code, or the Squishdot code, and run your -OWN- news service! You can't? Or won't? Then =HOW DARE YOU= tell others how to! If you're not capable, and they are, then maybe they know more about it than you do!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
No matter what interpratation you choose the GPL is probably still good. Sure some group of people could decide to create their own private version of GPLed software without legal fault, however, they are still restricted from selling their modified code. It is this restriction on commercial transactions which saves the GPL if "group liscenses" are valid.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
I currently have a yet-to-be-published note on this, which is being evaluated by the principals of a Linux-friendly ASP at the moment.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's wrong. Roblimo has discovered the sharp and hysterical edge of the Slashdot mob, which coexists alongside the community's even-handed and insightful edge. Unfortunately the first edge is hurtful, every bit as much as the second encourages one to excellence. Jon Katz discovered the same thing and survived the experience of being dragged through the mud. Now Roblimo's being savaged, and has reacted with a mild rebuke to the community.
You may not like it, but if you don't think it's deserved then you're not being even-handed. The community has a *large* mindless element nowadays (whatever the subject matter), and yes, their "contribution" can often be hurtful and unfair. Stay in there Robin!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Companies are not individuals and have no right as such. The author seems to have missed on a large body of law that says otherwise.
I'm afraid it is YOU who as made an assumption. What you meant to say was "...have missed a large body of US law..."
Honestly, not everyone lives in the US. I do, and it appears you do too. But Fare doesn't. And nor do many corperations which might wish to subvert the GPL. We have copyright treaties with other countries, but if something a buisness practice is legal there, there is nothing we can do about it! This is the formost problem for law enforcement on the internet. Its (whatever it is) legal SOMEWHERE. And there aint a thing you can do about it except embargo and block traffic. And you know traffic blocking doesnt work.
--Nick
I'm sorry, but if I hire someone to build me a deck the deck is mine. If I hire someone to write me code, the code is mine. It's the same damn thing.
Oh, really? So if I hire someone to steal your car, then your car is mine?
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
This guy's entire argument seems to be based on the (false) assumption that corporations are not legally bound by contracts/licences as individuals are.
I don't think that's what he's saying. I think he's painted this scenario:
A corporation takes some GPL'd code and modifies it, but doesn't distribute it, so they're not required to share their changes.
Anyone can join this corporation - all you have to do is ask, and agree that you will not distribute any of the corporation's secrets - for example, the details of their software.
Turns out this "corporation" exists solely to modify, but not distribute GPL'd code, so if you want access to said code, you must join the corporation and swear to secrecy.
A bit far fetched, perhaps, but I think that's what he's saying.
----
One type of company rising to prominence is the "Application Service Provider". Now suppose that I am an application service provider and I want to enjoy the benefits of open source. So I GPL a bunch of my software, my competitor takes it, modifies it, and then I find out that I have no right to ask for the modifications back! This means that I put myself out on a limb but did not get the protection that I hoped to get from the GPL.
You glossed over this issue with a guestbook application. Something inherently trivial and unimportant. Now suppose that the application was an order processing application? Or something like Open Sales? (The latter is a very realistic example since it is under a GPL BTW.)
These are non-trivial but fundamentally oriented towards use in an environment where redistribution of the software does not matter so much as getting others to use your server...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
What counts as distribution?
Suppose that I take a GPLed program, and modify it to be very useful in a server that subsequently becomes very widely used. Even though lots of people are using the program, I am not distributing it, and nobody else has a right to my changes.
For some programs this hole does not matter. For others it could matter a lot. (Consider code whose entire purpose is to manage a complex website.)
I know that Bruce Perens had some thoughts at one point about using rules on public performances to come up with a free license that closed this loophole. I don't know what those thoughts are exactly though, or what came of them.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
As I understand it, the slashdot "consensus" which the discussion thread refers to was that a company can sell a binary, built from GPLd sources, to the NSA (or anyone else), and only the customers can legally (by the GPL) demand to see the sources. No outsiders can.
So those GPLd changes are hidden from the world. They can only become liberated if the customer (NSA) chooses to release them, or if the originator sells the binaries to someone else who demands the sources, or if the NSA resells them to somebody who demands, and subsequently liberates, the sources.
At least that's how I understand it.
I don't appreciate this attitude on the company's and NSA's part, but it seems perfectly reasonable from a non-lawyer's legal point of view.
There seems to be a subplot that the employees who use the binaries are the ones who can demand to see the sources. I don't know about this; it seems to me the company (NSA) paid for them, so it's their choice.
Am I seeing this wrongly?
At any rate, altho I don't like the secretive attitude, it seems a very small hole, as only those products which are not sold to the general public, and probably only created on demand in the first place, are the ones which will never see the light of day. I simply don't see how this hurts much, and is certainly no reason to abandon the GPL.
--
Infuriate left and right
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
In the US, at least, corporations have legal status as an individual entity, and are treated as an individual with regards to most legal issues. Although I am not familiar with all the legal subleties involved, it is my understanding that a corporation, at least, can be treated as an individual concerning the GPL.
There might be some issues with non corporations, but my knowledge of their legal status is slight.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
GPL compatibility is important in any free software license, otherwise you cut yourself off from an enormous code base.
I am not worried about GPL zealots creating a GPL version out of spite. That version would offer users of it *fewer* rights than my version, so it would be at a disadvantage.
RMS has actually read a previous draft of my license and said that he thought it was fair to call it a free software license. It's changed since then, so I will have to resubmit it to him once the lawyer gets done with it--but since nothing has changed philosophically since then, I think that any problems he has with the license now will be small and correctable.
Also, the GPL uses the word "proprietary" correctly, and does allow for commercial use! I think you are just biased here. I can use GPL'd software on a commercial website, or as the back end of a commercial data system, etc.--the GPL has no problem with commercial use. What it has a problem with is the production of proprietary source code (meaning code which makes strong intellectual property claims, and uses those claims to deny access to the source--the word proprietary here literally means "property of", and refers to the statement of ownership).
That's ok, everyone knows that holes in GNU stuff gets patched faster than those in proprietarty stuff. :-)
Mycroft-X
Mr. Rideau is both correct and incorrect. He correctly points out that if the Corporation distributes a binary to the Employee, the GPL insists that the source, and all the rights to distribute the source, must also be made available. He incorrectly infers that the Corporation distributes the software to its employees, in order to use the code.
If the Corporation wishes to keep its mods secret, it may hire an employee to work on the code while insisting that the code not leave the Corporation's computers or premesis. This does not count as "distribution" because the employee does not gain custody of the code, except in the limited sense that you gain custody of your office window.
You are free to use the window while at work, but you may not take it home, modify it in unauthorized ways or redistribute it :-).
However, the GPL does enjoin the redistribution of the code under other licenses (section 4). So while you may make copies and keep them, or a Corporation may cause employees to make modified copies, but retain them, the Corporation cannot permit those copies to leave the premesis under any license except the GPL. If they do, government may prosecute them and the authors may sue them for copyright infringement.
Under section 8, Mr. Rideau's employee who redistributes the software (presumably against his employer's wishes, and against the terms of his employment) has in fact committed a legal foul, and is subject to penalty. The GPL does not excuse you from conditions or agreements that conflict with its terms, it only prevents you from distributing the code in those cases.
Can one company contract to another company to make modifications to a GPLed product under the terms that those modifications may only be distributed back to the original, hiring company?
I think that's the real hang up right now... If that is the case, then essentially, I can create a product based on GPLed software and then only sell the software to people that agree to my terms, which may override the GPL.
Otherwise, if a company has a GPLed product, everyone in the world would be theoretically allowed to phone, fax, mail, or email requests fot their modifications to the code, even if they weren't in distribution.
This whole confusion about who gets what binary and source, etc, is escalating. I'd always interpreted the GPL as being essentially, if someone wanted the source, they get it. If you didn't like that, you'd choose a different license. But now, it appears that one can develope under the GPL and withhold distribution from people who don't agree to your additional terms...
Oh... if only i had the money to burn, i'd cause a major infraction on the GPL tomorrow, just so everyone would know where they stand... But, I don't have the money, I don't have the product, and I don't have the time... Oh well....
Employees of corporations generally have no rights. They do not own the computer they use, the programs installed on it, or the data they generate. They're merely tools. They don't agree to the licenses of any software they use, the corporation does. Therefore, it's not the employees right or responsibility to distributed altered GPLed software if that work was done in a "work for hire" fashion (the general way most work is done for company's... you retain no rights to it and the company retains all).
I'm just poking around at all sides of this argument... I'm sure i've contradicted myself at some point across the past weeks. But this seems plausible to me.
But in that light, I can see how a company could fire, *with cause*, an employee who distributed GPL'ed software outside of the company. Trade secrets. Yes, you have a loyalty to the license, but first and formost, most companies demand loyalty from you. If you can't agree to do as you're told (code this for internal use only) then you should say so, rather than ignoring their orders. You won't be held liable for a GPL violation if it's found to be one, the company will... You were acting under orders.
Using the NSA's securing of Linux as an example, I can think of plenty of reasons that a company wouldn't want changes they've done to GPLed software to go public. First off, if they make an iron clad secure version, then of course it's going to be installed in every embassy, base, etc, of every government around the world. They'll all be able to look and verify that indeed they've plugged up tons of holes and not left any back doors laying around.
And especially in a setting such as the NSA, security by obscurity I think is perfectly acceptable. They have a huge amount of personel on staff that are capable of reviewing their implentations who will all sign NDA's (or not work on the project) and have all passed rigid background examinations.
Likewise, if I made a search engine based on, what? MySQL's not GPLed... Maybe Postgres?, but anyways if i made a search engine based on a GPLed database but I somehow found a way to accelerate queries 100 times normal, why would i want to give that back to the community? I'm not selling it, or distributing it, i'm just using it. And being that a search engine isn't the best of examples these days, but you really run the risk of doing R&D for your competitors as well yourself by using GPLed software if you need to actually turn over your changes back to the community.
"Organizations" don't have any speacial status that prevents them from being held to the GNU license for distribution. Corporations would, as they are legally the liscensing entity, so if Bob in IS gives Mary in accounting an update of the internal version of a GNU app, it's the same as Bob copying his customized version from one home computer to another -- totally kosher, as we're talking about a legal individual. You seem to be saying that any "organization" could use this to their advantage, but being an "organization" doesn't make one a Corporation (a legal individual entity). Your church group is not a legal entity (although the church is), so if the group sets fire to a warehouse or distibutes GNU software without source, the individual members will be legally accountable. Being an "organization" is nothing different than being in the same room as other people -- it gives no special legal privleges or responsibilities. Being a Corporation has many responsibilities (corporate taxes for one!). If someone wants to make a "club" that involves incorporating and hiring as employees every person they want to distribute GPL software to without source, then I guess you're right -- that corporation will be the biggest company in history just to avoid doing something that doesn't cost them any money in the first place. Seriously, OVERREACTION ALERT!!!...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I thought so too. It just annoys me to see all the Americanocentric nutcases around here automatically assume that the extent of the discussion is limited to the US and that he who doesn't know US law is an idiot.
:)
Anyway, see ya
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
If a company can't sell it, there is much less reason for them to hold on to source code, anyway. Indeed, for some companies, the good will incurred by releasing source code for useful things developed in-house might make it well worth it to do so. Not to mention that I doubt if a company could develop much which is really useful to the public for internal use only. It would really have to be a massive company, and if it were that large, word would get out and someone would create a public version anyway.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
Not every license has clauses limiting their contact with other licensed stuff, and you're right that the GPL is not the only one that does this (most don't though).
However I was replying to the statement that the GPL only kicks in when binaries are distributed. If the GPL were only there to keep the source code around, it wouldn't need pages of legalese to do that. Obviously there are a few more rules and requirements included.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"Few people (even licensors) recognize this, so your statement is all too commonly seen."
I'll take as an example the linux kernel. Although the package as a whole is licensed under the GPL+exception, a few of the source files are licensed under the BSD (last time I looked). That's because Linus is not relicensing that code, he is just using it per the BSDL. Nothing at all is stopping anyone from taking those files and redistributing them separately from linux
However, the converse is not allowed under the GPL. You cannot take a GPL source file and include it with a BSDL project, even if there are no modifications. It's a one-way street.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The start of that thread included the following statement: "a license is personal -- towards individuals only. Companies are not individuals and have no right as such."
Whoever (person or legal entity) that owns a copy of the software is the licensee. Your copy of gcc belongs to you and its license applies to you. However, ABC Corp also has a copy of gcc. That gcc's license applies to ABC Corp. When an ABC Corp employee is given a copy of modified-gcc, the modified-gcc is not being distributed, since it remains within ABC Corp. In the current legal situation that exists in the world today, I see no problem with companies keeping their modifications to themselves. As a case in point, it is apparently illegal to add a Qt front-end to GPL code. However, and RMS has said this, it is permissible to do so for your own private use. But is one breaking the law by giving this same modified code to one's parent, child or spouse? If it's okay to keep this modification secret and within the family, then what's the difference with ABC Corp keeping it within the private company network?
"Natural law gives rights and responsibilities to individuals; no group of individual, corporation, institution, or state, can claim any right, least these rights are the expression of individuals using their individual rights together."
I fully agree with these sentiments. However, they are not reflective of the current legal situation. Whether you like it or not, you have to live within reality. Maybe you can change it so that a future legal reality will be different, but for right now the law allows groups to be licensees.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This is very disappointing... Basically, this is a case of this one person, "Fare", wanting some publicity. Why didn't Roblimo read the thread? The entire "discussion" about the "hole" was started by "Fare" in the first place, with a leading question for RMS. RMS replies "Sure, that sounds about right", and then "Fare" goes into a tirade about how this means the GPL is worthless. RMS's response? "Um. Not really."
One of the main participants? He is *the* participant! Seriously, slashdot editors need to email RMS or other gnu people before posting stuff like this. Getting people all worked up because joe random decides that the GPL is worthless is a waste of our collective eyeball time.
Well.. either way, right?
1) Unless the code you receive actually *HAS* the GPL included, and clearly states that it *IS* under GPL, then you have to assume that you do NOT have any license to it, period. You cannot simply say 'well, it's based on GPL code, therefore I have the right to use it.'
2) As for the company situation.. it would come down to what 'distribution' is. If the company is selling you the software, one could say they were distributing it. I would imagine that in most courts, it would be fair to say that if it is only handed out to a defined class of people, say, those in the employ of the company, then it is not 'distribution'.
I am quite sure that in all those years, RMS and the FSF have realized binaries can be run. Since the GPL doesn't restrict use of binaries in the way you'd like to see, I claim that restriction was left out on purpose.
Ergo, the answer to your question is no. You'd need to write yourself another license if you want to restrict your code that way.
-- Abigail
Uhm, no, of course not. For the same reason that if VA Linux sells the company you work for a computer, it isn't up to you (unless you are the autority) to decide you are entitled to take said computer home. And for the same reason, you, as an individual and employee, aren't (in general) responsible for possible crimes the company makes.
If Secure Computing makes a secure version of Linux, and sells that to NSA, NSA has the right to demand source from Secure Computing. And the NSA has the right to sell or give away that product, to whomever they want. As long as the provide the source (if asked) as well.
But the GPL does not give you the right to the modifications Secure Computing makes for NSA.
The GPL isn't my favourite license, but I agree that there isn't a huge hole.
-- Abigail
That should be as long as they don't distribute the modifications outside the corporation. NDA's with outside parties can't be held to overrule the GPL (if the originator of the modifications thinks they do, then they are legally precluded from distributing their modifications by the GPL/copyright law).
As to the second point, the boundaries are determined by courts, in particular that corporations are legally considered to be individuals. "NDA boundaries" have no legal standing as individuals. Thus distributing outside the corp _is_ distribution, regardless of any NDAs.
Lynn
It seems Rob's taken things to heart.
:) Maybe that will introduce him to the sort of... heated discussions that can take place online.
Indeed. You know, I can't help but wonder if this isn't an instance of some sort of culture clash. The same sort of thing that used to happen when September rolled around on Usenet, or when [insert big online service here] got their first Usenet feed. Or whenever anybody from AOL posts.
As far as I know, Roblimo is first a journalist type. Like some of the communications majors I knew in college. Nothing wrong with that. But maybe Roblimo isn't too familar with the Internet and what can happen in online discussions. Like far too many people in the past, maybe he sees all this flamage and debate, along with the occasional personal attack, and gets shaken up, because he's not used to the way these things go. He's obviously taking it too personally, I'm just wondering if this might be the reason.
So, maybe we should suggest that he read some nice, friendly Usenet newsgroups for a week or so. I'd recommend anything cross-posted to comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy and comp.os.linux.advocacy.
Know what I mean?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Why would you post as an AC now after admitting trolling for the fame before? ;-)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
You'd think it'd be easy (easier) finding a story, living 16 hrs ahead of the states ;)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
IANAL, or a licence expert.
Looks fairly reasonable - although it is more restrictive than LGPL, which allows linking to non-free code - yours does not seem to (Clause 2)
Also, it still has the same problem as GPLed code with linking to other free, but non-GPL licences (MPL, QPL, etc, etc). If that is your intent, that is fair enough, but there is some useful software that is ruled out then (Mozilla for a start)
What about source code? Do you need to distribute that with any modifications? If I take your source code, and sell my modified version, providing the code back to you, in a form that is usless to you - say without instructions as to what it does or where it goes, I don't think I woudl be in breach of the licence.
Finally, and most importantly, the clause:
is going to be unaccptable to the OSS, I suspect. What happens if you are un reachable, dead or out of business? I believe the Apple source licence has the same problem.
What happens if someone wants to fork the code? Do they need to GPL it? If the code has been GPL'ed, can it be relicenced with this licence, with the new forker as the new owner who must recieve all updates?
What, someone who actualy knows what they are talking about?
Anyone would think this was /. 1998!
Let's say that what Fare talks about is possible, then I can do exactly the same with proprietary licenses.
Of course I don't have their code but I could buy a version of Windows and redistribute it inside such an organisation with a small entry fee to the organisation.
This would allow me to redistribute proprietary software without paying royalties.
Of course some may say "This won't work because you have the license for x person" but this isn't a problem given that in this interpretation the organisation is a person.
given that there is no way a judge would sustain this view (or maybe an anarchist judge???) I don't think there is such a big problem.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Interesting. Very interesting :)
:)
One thing I've noticed in this debate, though - one specific legal system is being assumed. Specifically, the US legal system.
Folks, slashdot is NOT an American-only site and there is a world out there with different laws. While I accept that most of the posters are American due to simple net demographics, I am not
The GPL may well stand up in an American court, or it may not. I really don't know and I'm not a lawyer - though the libraries argument seemed pretty persuasive to me. But what would happen if (hypothetically) I decided that I was determined to violate the GPL out of simple nastiness. I'm in the UK right now - could I do so legally? Or, say, in other member states of the EU (as I have basic freedom of movement within the EU) or the G8?
It's all well and good debating whether it stands up under US law, but when we're distributing these things across the world is it very relevant if you could hop over the border to Canada or Mexico (for example) and do whatever you pleased with the source?
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I'm not objecting to anything, except the declining value of top-level stories in slashdot. The front-page story sounded big and new and important, and it turns out to be something that practically everyone has already heard of.
I'm talking about how you can create proprietary modifications to a GPL'd program, in violation of the spirit of the GPL. You take the parts of the GPL'd code that you want to use, put them in something like a daemon, and access them from a proprietary program.
Kernel modules are not the same, largely because they are used by the kernel, not the reverse. Also, because they are connected with a general-purpose interface that has valid uses. Someone making a crippled kernel that only works with certain proprietary modules is closer to what I'm talking about.
Basically, I'm talking about ways to cheat the GPL into being an LGPL, so you can use GPL'd code in your proprietary software. You can even weaken it more than the LGPL because you could get away with checksumming the daemon binary (you can't checksum LGPL'd shared libraries because of the licence term that states that you must not prevent the user from replacing the LGPL'd code).
I mean really.
. I will try not to make the mistake of posting anything even remotely like this on Slashdot ever again. . It was slightly dumb, but welcome to the world. Maybe having someone else eyeball
it and ask "does this need wider exposure at this time" would have been better. It's not the decline and fall of western civilization though. If you get too afraid of doing something stupid you'll never do anything at all.
I do think this deserves some intelligent discussion. It was put before the masses
before it had been distilled to that point. So
predictibly enough lots of people now want to pour hot grits on you. Learn, move on - don't make too much of it.
garyr
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
For the sake of the children, of course...
--The basis of all love is respect
It's true that the original comments were WAY off base, and don't really apply. However, there's a strange sort of logic that appears when I squint through the lens that this article provides. If I work for a company that has modified a piece of GPLed code, and they give it to me to use in my job (e.g. let's say gnumeric spreadsheet, and I'm a trader for a financial firm that's added a real-time quote handling feature). Now, am I receiving that software under the terms of the GPL or under the terms of my non-disclosure/non-compete/etc agreements? Is the company bound to NOT distribute that code to me because I would be restricted by prior agreements (the GPL strictly prohibits distribution of the code if it would be encumbered by that distribution). Or, do I suddenly have all the rights that the GPL provides? Could the company sue and/or fire for cause if I then posted the changes to the gnumeric mailing list? What if I turn around and start cutting $10 CDs with source? Certainly the latter would trigger my non-compete, so I think that the company is required NOT to distribute to me unless they specifically waive my non-compete and agree to let me use the GPL to it's fullest!
This might put a hole in a few companies' plans for internal development.... It could also be the downfall of internal use of GNU tools in large organizations. The advantage of Open Source suddenly becomes an onerous proposition. Companies would have to very closely monitor which company information went into GPLed code (e.g. adding a database password to a GPLed program!)
Ick.
Ok, Slashdot has some obnoxious flamers. Given. But Robin, what's with the "you guys don't like me, I'm going home" attitude? Hasn't Slashdot thickened your skin a bit more than this?
;-)
Bottom line is that this article promissed more than it delivered. The thread in question brought up a point which several people quickly pointed out was a non-starter. Why waste Slashdot reader's time? Discussions of what the GPL does or does not have going for it should certainly be persued (the GPL is at the heart of some very large doin's and as such should never be taken for granted). But, this article simply wasn't up to the usual Slashdot standard.
It's OK we all have off-days. Relax. Have a "drink for nerds" (which appears to be defined as cheap wine, based on the Andover.net party at the Bazaar
On a related point, I've seen quite a few requests for "article moderation". Cool idea, I think. It could allow for a much more free-wheeling sort of Slashdot where more articles are published. I still think that an editor (preferably one with experience in the print world) would be a better short-term solution, though. The overall quality of the articles HAS gone up over the last year, but not to the standards of, say, a print newspaper.
But the signing of an NDA creates an association between the parties, making the party of the second part an agent of the party of the first, no less than an employee would be. So giving him a copy is not "distributing to the public". Title remains with the secret's owner.
That would be bad lawyering! The mere creation of an "association" (if that term had any legal meaning in this context) betwen parties would not create an agency relationship, no matter how many "parts" and "parties" may be recited in an attempt to make that conclusory and unsupported assertion sound lawyerly.
Under Florida law, at least, agency is a very special legal relationship with very particular fidcuiary duties and obligations, typically granting the agent a right to make certain legal acts that are binding upon the principal as though the principal had herself taken those actions. For this reason and others, an NDA does not, by itself, create an agency. In other states, your mileage may vary on this point, but I doubt it.
Indeed, most well-drafted agreements, including most NDA agreements, expressly disclaim the creation of an agency, joint venture or partnership as a belt-and-suspenders measure. Though these agreements also create associations between the parties, they likewise do not create an agency.
So giving him a copy is not "distributing to the public". Title remains with the secret's owner.
Reread section 106 -- title need not pass to render an act one of distribution. Even if this were not the case, the argument is flawed on its face. By this analysis, a distributor of pirated records could avoid prosecution merely by having his customers sign an NDA as a condition of sale.
Nonsense.
The copy is a "derivative work" within the meaning of:(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
Of course, even if that were true, it would not change any of the preceding analysis. GPL expressly permits creation of a "work based on the program," a term which is defined to include derivative works, provided that the conditions set forth in Section 2 are met. Section 2 only meaningfully limits the licensure of copies made upon publication or distribution. Section 2 goes further, expressly stating that "the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program."
As an aside, it may be interesting to some to note that not all copies of a work are derivative works within the meaning of the Copyright Act. In particular, verbatim copying, mere "framing" of a work, or failing to add meaningful original text would not fall within the statutory definition in Section 101.
Right, and even in that case a partnership does not have a separate legal existence. The only "persons" that exist in law are natural humans and corporations. Partnerships are just combinations of "persons"... they don't have any rights in law.
IANAL, but I'm 3-1 in pro se cases.
Bottom line, I'm with you. I don't see what the original poster's point is. Corporations have exactly the same rights under GPL as individuals do. So what?
1. companies pay taxes.
2. companies can be sued.
3. companies can sue.
4. companies can enter into contracts.
5. companies can have loans.
6. companies can issue loans.
So, I guess I need some further explanation of the loophole. The only way I can see it is if a limited partnership (not sole-proprietor) company (not incorporated) did this. Then, there would be no "individual" since it would cover a group that could not be legally assumed to be either humanly or legally individual.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
(I wonder if Roblimo will see my message)
The guy who posted to that mailing list was obviously laying a trap; he knew what RMS would say and he had his response planned ahead of time. It is the original sense of "ad hominem" meaning you take the words of the person you are debating with in order that they will corner themselves into agreeing with your argument. When RMS didn't agree that there was a problem, even after going along with his group-licensing theory, he submitted a link to his own theory to Slashdot. Now Slashdot is a very effective BS detector. Take LinuxOne for example. The issues raised in the GPL hole story were pretty clearly resolved on Slashdot even better than they were on the mailing list by RMS. I don't think Roblimo should be held to a higher standard of checking the veracity of the contents of links than Hemos is. (Sorry Hemos.)
"But I was wrong to post this to Slashdot, which is obviously not an appropriate forum for discussion of subtle ethical matters, and it is apparent that any mention of even a hint of a possible tiny imperfection in the GPL does not belong here."
I feel that Slashdot should be a perfect forum for the discussion of the subtle implications of the GPL. I say "should" because there are some topics that seem to bring out the immaturity of the crowd, and as has been commented elsewere, critisisim of any of the core elements of OSS seems to do it in spades.
The GPL is certainly a cornerstone of our world, in my opinion, it is one of the two or three most important documents of the 20th century. The Internet and Linux would certainly not be what they are today without it. But it is not perfect, and there have come to be other good licenses (including the LGPL), that fill in the gaps for areas where the GPL is not the best choice.
Rob, I don't accept your appology. Maybe this story wasn't right, but because of the content itself, not because of the nature of what was being discussed. I hope that as Slashdot (and it's community) matures, that the knee-jerk reactions to any critisim of OSS or anything else for that matter, fades away. I hope that you will continue to present stories that do bring out that imperfections in the GPL, Linux, Apache, Perl, etc... Without honest opinions regarding their weaknesses, they WILL stagnate and will wind up being no better than anything else that has come before.
Brad Silva
But the signing of an NDA creates an association between the parties, making the party of the second part an agent of the party of the first, no less than an employee would be. So giving him a copy is not "distributing to the public". Title remains with the secret's owner.
The copy is a "derivative work" within the meaning of:
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
The owner of the copyleft has licensed the secret's owner to make such derivitive works, in return for agreeing to certain conditions on public distribution. Since giving a copy to his agent is not a public distribution, the terms of the license are not violated.
There are cases, I recall, holding that infringement occurs when a consultant/third-party is given access to copyrighted works for the purpose of repairing software on behalf of the licensee. However, I seem to remember that these cases went off on copying, rather than distribution.
Precicely. The second party got in trouble for making the unauthorized copy. The GPL encourages you to make copies, either unmodified or derivative, and just places certain obligations on those who distribute them publicly.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
is this true in ALL countries?
The Bugroff license is very similar to Dave Winer's license for MacBird. Only Winer phrased his in legalese...
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
The employees must be able to get the code, because of the GPL. It doesn't matter who you ditribute it to, a friend, an employee, whatever, they must be able to get the source code for it. I really don't see the loophole from this summary.
-no broken link
the AC who was "talking to me" did not see this post so he responded to the other. Go here to see more.
Copyright law forbids you to make copies, whether or not EULAs do. GPLed software does not grant you the right to copy unless you agree to the distribution terms. I don't see how GPLed software is distinguished from any other copyrighted material. I can't copy copyrighted books, or music , etc. I can't distribute GPLed software binaries unless I agree to make the source available, including modifications. It does not distinguish between who copies are distributed to.
P.S. The post this is a reply to talked about a "loophole". The rest of this thread is about a loophole. This question is about whether the GPL is more restrictive than I've heard told.
true, but individuals who are employees are also entities under the law, and they are receiving copies -- do they get a rider that says, you are not receiving a fully GPLed copy? -- for acceptance of the GPL is the only thing that allows the copies, and the GPL adheres to the copies, and no other agreement can encumber the GPLed work, including I would assume an employment contract, so instead distribution must cease...
I'm not saying that your interpretation of the GPL is not allowed under the GPL, but that the alternate interpretation seems equally valid. And, authorship of the GPL, itself not copyrightable, does not impose any binding on other licensors so it is not clear that a licensee can be secure in your interpretation unless the FSF holds the copyright. I'm not saying "GPL sux", I'm saying it could be worded better, which the GPL itself says it will, from time to time, be :)
So, I've said all I feel I need to, but I will notice if you reply again because it shows up in my user page. Thanks for taking the time.
"Copy" and "distribute" are not used synonymously
I didn't say they were used synonymously, but I was not as clear as I should have been. I said the GPL "does not distinguish between copying and distribution in a way that differentiates them". What I meant was, how is it that copying is always copying under copyright law, but distribution is only outside of any particular corporation? Is that the meaning of the word?
The GPL never defines what "distribute" means. If you are aware that the law defines what it means, by all means, fill me it. But if I said to you "take this to the copy machine and distribute copies to everybody who works here", I would be using the word distribute in an ordinary way. The GPL uses it in no way that conflicts with this mean. I quote (the word "patent" has no bearing on this example):
Actually (I didn't say it before but I will now) "receive copy" and "distribute" are used synonymously in this example, or you are opening a loophole.
If a copy is always a copy, then all those who receive copies are all of the people within a corporation. Sorry, that's just what the word copy means. Now, you might make the point that corporations are individuals and "distribution" within the corporation does not constitute distribution. I claim that is not at all clear from what I know, for it that reasoning were to hold, corporations acting as individuals would need buy only one copy of a copyrighted work and then they could copy it willy-nilly so long as it stayed in the corporation.My question, especially in light of the language used in the GPL ("all those who receive copies"), is: where is the language that says that copying within a corporate entity is copying, but "receiving copies" within a corporate entity is not distributing? The world would still be a rational place if this were true, I'd be happy to swallow it, I simply don't see it.
Here is an example illustrating that the GPL contains ambiguous usage of terms it wishes it were not ambiguous, "copy" and "distribute":
If a corporation makes copies within the corporation, then they are still copies, that's the law of copyrights. Therefore, I would read "all who receive copies" to include employees, but the end of that sentence above would also imply that it means the same thing as "distribution". The GPL wants "distribution" to be "extra-corporational" only, but it is hard to make that case when "all who receive copies" includes all who do receive actual copies. Other less than clear quotations include "If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place..." Wording like that is not particularly problematic, but nor does it distinguish intra-company from inter-.
The GPL goes out of its way to finesse the shrink wrap EULA problem. It says, you do not have to accept this license, but then you do not have any other authorization to have this copy. So, every copy that a company makes has this restriction on the company. But the only way an employee can be given a copy, is if the employee gets a copy that has all of the terms of the GPL, including a copy of the GPL itself, but that includes the viral right to redistribute derivative works. How does the employee know which parts bind on the company, and which on the employee? It is ambiguous.
The GPL has additional ambiguous language (with my addition in italics):
The supposed loophole that started this thread is to have everybody join one corporation. I don't think that that loophole exists. I think the loophole is in the other direction: corporations may not safely modify GPLed software and use it "internally" unless the FSF owns the copyright. The FSF suggests turning the copyright over to them so they can enforce the licenses. I think in this case it means they won't enforce this aspect of it. IANAL, so perhaps what I see is ambiguous would not be ambiguous to a judge.
Understand, this is not FUD, I'm not bashing the GPL. I like the viral aspect, I'm just trying to make sure it works. My suggestion: tighten up the language, as the GPL itself says that it will do from time to time.
a company can't buy one copy of a copyrighted work and distribute it to all employees, so how can it distribute modified copylefted software to all of its employees without triggering the GPL-source clause?
However as I stated at the begining of this rant I do not believe this will be widely exploited. That said I am far from an expert on this issue.
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to" - I can't remember
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
Legally, this is incorrect. In order for the described exploit to work, those wishing to use the proprietary code would have to encorporate, which is not a simple feat.
A vague "organization" would not have the legal standing to use the described exploit. Furthermore, any use of the proprietary code outside of the agrigate could be considered illegal, as it is being used outside the corporation.
Robin, I could care less that you posted this article, I could care less that you've been flamed, but you shouldn't be subjecting me to the sophistry of your "Public Apology." As difficult as it is, even if you don't have a thick enough skin to ignore the flamage, I really don't think it's right for you to use your position as a Slashdot author to post argumentative content like that.
I wrote RMS about this, and this is the reply I got:
I agree with RMS that normally a corporation letting its employees use software does not count as distribution. However, in this case we have a different situation... Secure Computing (which is completely seperate from the NSA), is being hired by the NSA to make a special version of Linux for them. Therefore, I think you do have to count this as distribution, and as Fare said, it must be distribution to the individuals in the corporation (NSA), not to NSA as a group.If we allow this, then what is to prevent Secure Computing from selling this modified version of Linux to other companies as well? All they have to do is make sure never to sell to an individual (because an individual can request code, but the corporation won't), and they're fine.
Which is a huge gaping hole! Licenses must apply to individuals. How can a company ask for source code?
This guy's entire argument seems to be based on
the (false) assumption that corporations are
not legally bound by contracts/licences as
individuals are.
In actuality, the very PURPOSE of incorporation is to create a new legal entity (sort of a fake person) that can take legal responsibility for its own actions, rather than the company's head being explicitly liable.
To put this another way: if corporations weren't bound by licenses as individuals are, why do they even bother to license software (under any license, even proprietary licenses) from each other? Why do CORPORATIONS put their copyright on code they produce, rather than the individual programmers working for them?
This supposed "hole" is bogus.
DNA just wants to be free...
I am working on a simpler license here:
Simple Public License
I forwarded a previous draft of this license to RMS and he said it appeared to be a "free software" license as near as he could tell. I also have run previous drafts through the open-source approval list a few times. This version still has to go to a lawyer for review and legal tightening, at which point I will complete the OSS process, and resubmit it to the FSF for review.
Before you all tell me not to do this, here is why:
The main thing is it is shorter, taking up two pages to the LGPL's 11.
Please review! You can send comments on the license to justin@vsdl.org.
I'm trying to figure out if he brought this up due to the discussion about slashdot's code, or the NSA contracting with a company to secure Linux. Either way, I think it is somehting that needs to be cleared up... And definetly, someone out there needs to follow the GPL to the letter yet violate it in some way, so as to set a legal precedent.
Right now the GPL seems completely theoretical. But so far, everyone's respected it enough to not have to actually see if it's worth the paper it's printed on.
I'm very interested in discussions of licensing issues, and like many people I'm still undecided about how the GPL would hold up in court.
Yet, like many Slashdotters, I was disappointed by Robin posting this story. A single person has posted two messages to a discussion that suggests there is a problem with the GPL. RMS reponded that he doesn't think there is a problem, and no one else suggested that there is a problem. To call this 'news' is ridiculous, and the blurb that accompanied the article was highly sensationalist. That the initial submission was from the mailing list poster further detracts from the credibility of the story.
I just thought this was sloppy and sensationalistic journalism, and left it at that. With Robin's 'apology' I now feel moved to comment. Sarcastic flamebait like this has no place inside a story proper. Robin, if you want to make comment like this, join in the main discussion like the rest of us (and turn off your +1 posting right like others do when it is appropriate).
Remember, Slashdot succeeded because of the insightful comment of Rob and Jeff, and their uncanny ability to post stories that Slashdotters liked. It's great that they've benefited from Andover's business decision, but be wary of now trying to change the editorial content to suit your point of view, Robin--you may just find that you are less in tune with the Slashdot readership than Rob and Jeff.
Finally, let me point out that almost all of the negative comments that were moderated up commented specifically on the newsworthiness and journalistic integrity of the story; they were not criticising the stance of the original poster in any way. Robin's ill-thought retort comes across as highly inappropriate, unnecessarily harsh, and not in tune with the actual content of the discussion.
There, I've said it!
True, but it could also become his employer's argument that his employment contract was to do what was in their best interest etc etc (the rule that states that a contract to do something illegal is null and void - withold changes - is invalid in this case as it is not illegal), and on that point they could be said to have reasonable grounds.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I was curious to see what Roblimo's apology was. I was certainly not expecting a snide attack on the entire Slashdot community. Does this mean you will no longer be working on the Slashdot staff, Robin? I sincerely hope so. No one with your open disdain for the site's users should be involved with it.
I completely disagree with that entire statement. I mean, let's be real for a moment...Basically asking Robin to leave /., just because he gave as well as he got? Last time I checked, sarcasm wasn't a crime and, in this case, I feel it was 100% justified. He should not have even had to apologize for posting this story. Big deal. Feathers were ruffled...people got all worked up...someone may have actually had to THINK about what they were READING for a moment, rather than being spoonfed. ("Oh, the inhumanity!")
Yes, it's possible it could have been more thoroughly researched, but given the volume of article submissions and intricities inherent in each possible article (especially this one...are you an expert on French law? Can you tell me for sure that this so-called "GNU GPL Hole" doesn't exist in terms of their legal system? I doubt it.), it'd be unreasonable to expect every single story to be exhaustively researched before it's posted to the site. Personally, I'd rather see the news "as it's happening" than catch a follow-up summary saying "this is what you missed." That's the beauty of the web.
I think it's a pretty sad state of affairs when members of the /. community are so thin-skinned and hyper-sensitive they'd actually personally attack someone for posting anything. We're intelligent people here. There is no reason to lambaste someone for posting an article that raises questions, regardless of how "resolved" or "disproven" the thing in question happens to be. If there are any questions left to ask about something, it means it's not resolved. You can't advance without continually questioning things and exploring possibilities.
In short (ha!), ease off. The tone of Roblimo's apology should have given you a clue as to just how irrational the rest of the /. "community" was being toward him. I, for one, am ashamed that such things would ever be said to anyone on this website posting anything. (this next part is not directed specifically at invenustus, but everyone as a whole) If you can't be an objective reader and rationally talk about, and/or point out errors in, an article, what are you doing in the comments at all? If you need attention and coddling, go looking for mommy. This isn't the place for it. Let's try to keep /. (comments and all!) something worth reading, eh?
From the Bugger off license:
The GPL is just begging somebody to take it to court.
I say lets do it and get it over with. I brough up the topic of the GPL and companies recently and now I'm saying lets test it.
A few days ago at lunch, a few of us were discussing how the GPL would do in the US court of law. Then someone suggested testing it out. I asked, "how?" and the rest went like this: Have one of us (I'll call #1) write some
small unique code or take some code that they wrote on their own time a while ago, and slap the GPL on it. Sell it to another person (#2). Then have #2 modify it and sell it to a third person (#3), without giving the source nor the license. Thus violating the GPL.
Have person #1 and maybe #3 sue #2 to release the code. Take this to real court and battle it out. Of course this will take some money, but all good experiments do. You also have risk involved, if #2 wins, then the GPL may fall altogether.
Now would something like this be useful if brought to a real court. If #2 looses, then start an appeal to get to another court, to get more clout. This will finally prove that the GPL is legally standing. And the risk is that it could prove the opposite. But is any of this worth it?
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
In my interpretation, a license is personal -- towards individuals only. Companies are not individuals and have no right as such.
Being the owner of a C corporation, I can say that this is patently false. The whole concept of a company is that it does have many of the same rights as an individual. A company can enter into contracts with other companies or individuals, a company can be sued, etc. If I enter into a contract with a company, then I have a contract with a company, not with individuals within that company.
If the entire assertion is based on the idea that a company isn't a legal entity, then there's nothing to this.
It is individual programmers who have the absolute right to copy, modify, and distribute software (as claimed by the GNU GPL, but as I contend no human law can ever claim otherwise).
This is pure and utter BS. If you work for a company, then any code which you create at work is property of that company, and you- the individual programmer- have no right to distribute that software unless it's explicitly granted (outside the confines of the GPL). Otherwise, we'd never pay for software again, just get to know someone at the company. The GPL, as a legal document, can't really distinguish between a company and a person, and I'm not sure why it would, anyway. Companies can and do distribute software. I own RedHat Linux, did Bob Young personally distribute it?
How did this guy's clueless rantings get this much attention? He should have been pointed to a Business Law 101 site and ignored from then on.
Do you have ESP?
Uh, Roblimo, there was nothing wrong with posting this item. Others may have been familiar with these issues, but I wasn't, and now I know a little more having read about it. I can't imagine that I'm the only one.
Even if it turns out that the issues raised by someone somewhere are unfounded, and Slashdot posters are able to explain why, then the post and ensuing discussion have been worthwhile. It certainly isn't obvious to everyone at first blush that some argument or other doesn't hold water, and if nothing else, Slashdot can serve to make that apparent to a broad audience. Certainly, there's nothing obvious about the arcana of software licensing and corporate law. There is a genuine need for a forum like Slashdot to discuss these issues, where people with well-qualified opinions about this kind of subject can inform the rest of us.
Those of you who are flaming Slashdot in general and Roblimo in particular should bear in mind that what's self-evident to you may be completely mysterious to others. It takes a certain kind of humility and patience to understand that, qualities that some of you apparently don't have.
But, Roblimo, this whiny apology just makes the whole thing worse. Maybe you should consider a vacation from Slashdot, you're taking this far too personally.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
NDAs with outside parties are made as part of including the outside party in a contract which changes the outside party to an inside party, an agent of the corporation with defined responsibilities. Typically such a person would be a consultant or a prospective hire. This applies whether the "person" is an individual human or another corporation, limited partnership, or what-have-you.
The outside party becomes a "body part" of the corporate "person", like a fingernail or a ganglion. (Ideally - an important section of the brain. B-) )
(I can imagine a company's lawyer trying to hack up a shrink-wrap contract that purports to be an NDA. But since the body of the relationship in such a case would be the company providing code and the customer paying for it, the subterfuge would be transparent, and no doubt immediately struck if it came to court.)
(if the originator of the modifications thinks they [override the copyleft], then they are legally precluded from distributing their modifications by the GPL/copyright law).
But they AREN'T "overriding" the COPYLEFT. They're creating a relationship between the parties which makes the "person" who signed the NDA a part of an association. Granted he's a limited part. But so are the corporate employees and officers.
Once he's part of the association, giving him the modified code is not "distribution". He can still redistribute the UNmodified version. But the modifications (including any HE makes as part of his deal) are the company's undistributed SECRET. And they stay proprietary until the company releases the signatory from the agreement, publishes the secret, or the secret is exposed through no fault of an NDA signatory.
As to the second point, the boundaries are determined by courts, in particular that corporations are legally considered to be individuals. "NDA boundaries" have no legal standing as individuals. Thus distributing outside the corp _is_ distribution, regardless of any NDAs.
"NDA boundaries" do not have to have legal standing as individuals. "NDA boundary" is simply a shorthand term for defining the location of the "skin" of the corporation's (or other association's) "body" with respect to a particular secret.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If a company wants to keep the source a secret, my problem is not that they violate the GPL by doing so. Their maintentance, bugfixes, etc. become their problem and less of the communities.
What bugs me is the potential for an employee to be fired for distributing this source back to the community. Now it becomes his argument that the GPL grants him the right to do this, and they should not have fired him.
So now the company is sued for violating the GPL by that individual. The GPL still holds. And the whole mess just becomes a lesson that violating the GPL is a bad idea.
Dave
--------
WWGD? (What Would Goku Do?)
And boo to Slashdot for posting this ridiculous story without actually reading the links first. There's been far too much of that lately, as the comments keep seeming to indicate...
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Moderation allows a large number of people to collectively decide an news items worth.
In this case, -1,troll.
In addition, article moderation allows for less articles submitted as we can check for duplicates. Also it would give you guys more of a break. Allow yourselves ultra-moderation if you want, so that you can set the score of an article and not allow the regular moderators to adjust it.
-----
No Zen is good zen
Slashdot stories really are getting worse in the way they misrepresent minor stories as major disasters or breakthroughs. This is a rather trivial issue that has been kicked around for ages, and can't really be resolved without a legal battle (after all, you can make all the logical arguments you wish, but nothing is certain in court).
I thought someone was finally going to bring up the possibility of reducing a piece GPL'd software to a sort of daemon which acts as a shared library. If the interface is designed rationally (i.e. code for it can be written from scratch easily), there would be no need to reuse headers or other GPL'd files. Then proprietary additions to the software could be made through the creation of a proprietary client program.
I don't think anyone could make a case for communicating with a daemon being a creation of a derivative work. It is the same as the way you can make a script that runs programs which may be (and, in fact, are) GPL'd, without releasing the script under the GPL.
The fact is that there is no way to freely distribute and freely allow modification of software while forcing all later modifications to be released to free. Programs can interact, yet be seperate. There are many examples of programs which would be useless without the existance of another program (ex.: anything that isn't it's own operating system...), but they are clearly seperate and the copyrights are held by seperate people.
The GPL will not be upheld by legal threats, but by PR and competitive threats. Violation of the spirit of the GPL in this manner will create immense hostility from the Free Software community. Massive numbers will jump onto the hijacked project to duplicate the functionality of the proprietary additions, while eliminating annoying bugs and (of course) giving it away for free.
I fully expect that some company will try this trick some day, and be brought to their knees as a massive grassroots PR campaign paints them as evil corporate monopolists demanding money for an inferior product.
I think this may be too broad, legally speaking. Absent express definitions to the contrary, I believe a court would interpret "distribution" in the context in which it is used: a license to exercise exclusive rights to distriubute under the Copyright Act.
Accordingly, we should look for a transfer of title, rental, lease or lending. Accordingly, control or possession of a copy transferred among employees or agents of the corporation probably do not constitute a distribution. On the other hand, control or possession of a copy by a non-employee, non-agent, even if subject to nondisclosure would probably constitute, at least, a lending (bailment) of the copy.
There are cases, I recall, holding that infringement occurs when a consultant/third-party is given access to copyrighted works for the purpose of repairing software on behalf of the licensee. However, I seem to remember that these cases went off on copying, rather than distribution.
I'm just spitballing here, but it seems to me that a plaintiff asserting breach of GPL would probably do just fine in the case of a defendant who gave a customer/non-disclosee copies of a work.
It would be fun to research the judicial gloss on this statutory language to see how it informs the question of distribution within a corporation.
Nevertheless, for these reasons, I think "non-disclosure boundary" is probably too broad a range to permit non-distribution exchanges of copies. I imagine that the result would be probably much closer to an "in the family" (employees and actual agents) test.
Corporations are individuals in the eyes of the law. They can be sued. They can even be convicted of crimes. Their directors can be held personally accountable for their [i.e. the corporation's] actions. Being an individual under the law is why corporations exist! There's a reason why you aren't on the hook to pay the bills when a company you own shares in blows up, and that reason is that the corporation is a legal entity unto itself. The corporation is responsible for paying its bills -- the shareholders aren't.
The first line of the post from Mr. Rideau says it all: "in my interpretation [ ... ] companies are not individuals and have no right as such".
While I happen to think the bugroff license is cute and witty, the fact remains that the law is not terribly interested in Mr. Rideau's gross misinterpretation of the notion of the corporation's rights as an individual. Slashdot dropped the ball on this one. The GPL is as sound today as it was yesterday. We don't know how well it'll stand up in court, but if it's defeated, it certainly won't be because of some cockamamie "interpretation" that says corporations lack rights as individuals under the law.
Companies can keep their internal modifications secret as long as they don't distribute the code OUTSIDE their non-disclosure boundary - and once they distribute the object outside that boundary, they must also distribute the source.
Giving the code to people INSIDE the non-disclosure boundary is not "distribution" within the meaning of the GPL, so it does not confer on such people the right to disclose the modified code without the approval of the company's official decision-making process.
This is good. It means that a company can adopt GPLed open-source software without taking an increased risk that any company-secret changes they make for internal use only will be disclosed without their permission. That will make them more willing to adopt GPLed open-source software.
They'll still have to distribute the source to their changes if they distribute the changes themselves generally. And they're more likely to distribute anything useful but NON-company-secret than they would if they were working with closed-source code.
The only problem I see is if this speculation by legally-uninformed people, raising a spectre of employees disclosing their secrets, scares off management that otherwise would adopt GNU-licensed code.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It seems Rob's taken things to heart. While I didn't read the vast majority of flamebait posts, neither do most people. The Slashdot community moderated up the posts that criticized the decision. None of them criticized Rob personally. They spanned both sides of ther argument.
,but please expect that occasionally their opinions will differ from yours.
Calls for artticle moderation are valid, despite the fact that this may very well be difficult to implement.
Rob, chill out. You posted an article that alot of peopel thought hadn't been background checked efficiently. That doesn't mean we hate you, it means we think you made an error in judgement. I'm sure the overwhelming amount of people who responded to this article would be saddened if you ever left slashdot - you are slashdot.
You've brought thousands of people together tom participate in debate. Be proud of it
You're having a bad day. Walk away from the computer, get drunk, have a shower with your girl. Wake up tomorrow a happy man.
I agree with that position, as a question of legal interpretation of the GPL. The reason is that the company is not distributing the program in that case.
I don't think it is ethically right to permanently withhold useful improvements. But that is a different question from what the GPL permits.
I saw this hole ages ago. The bottom line is that corporations function largely as fictitious people. Authorized people can enter into contracts on behalf of a corporation. The contract can outlive the person's employment or even the person. And it can enter into contracts on behalf of its employees, assuming that those contracts are legal.
The interesting test case would be one where a company makes changes that they want to keep to themselves to GPL'ed code and one of the employees releases them. What it would be testing is whether the employees could act as individuals with respect to the enhancements to the code.
I agree with RMS that it would be ethically wrong, violating the spirit, if not the letter of the GPL. Furthermore, I don't think it is in the interest of the company doing it. Eric Raymond has written about the reasons that projects don't fork in Homesteading the Noosphere. Nearly all of the reasons that apply to a forked open source project apply in greater measure to an internal project by a company. But there are a couple of other issues that are special in this case:
In the end, I think it is an unlikely scenerio to last very long. In the short run, I could see a company wanting to keep some development private. A hardware manufacturer might keep drivers secret until they release their product in order not to tip their hand to the competition. I honestly don't think that is something we even want to try to discourage. If allowing them to do that encourages them to release open source drivers after the product release, I applaud them.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Companies are not individuals and have no right as such. The author seems to have missed on a large body of law that says otherwise. The entire position seems based on his opinion or personal preference rather than actual juridical decisions. I might have read more than two replies into the thread if he had bothered to offer court decisions supporting his belief that licenses can only apply towards individuals. But what do I know, I'm just an Anonymous Coward.
If you are a corporate employee, this can override certain 'human rights' you might think you have. You may not be entitled to your own thoughts, or ideas. You probably are safe from being legally tortured to death with pitchforks, look on the bright side :)
This fellow's hysteria seems to be based on the notion that people who are part of corporations have some sort of 'individual' rights. It's a pleasing argument, but largely hypothetical. Expect corporate powers over 'their own bodies' to become stronger and stronger as they are challenged.
To a corporation, firing and suing an employee to ruin the employee's life because the employee posted internal GPL code is the same as you cutting your toenails or burning off a _wart_. There is reason to believe that this perspective would hold up in court, because the employee theoretically had complete freedom to join, or not join, the corporation in the first place. Having joined, the employee's 'rights' or lack of same are spelled out in contract law... the person might find that they themselves did not own the ideas they used to modify the GPLed software, or any of the other ideas they talked about at work or came up with at home- so after being fired they could be left with _only_ publically GPLed work, and the company project which they forcibly publicized ahead of schedule- and everything else they did, not having been GPLed by anyone, is property of the company and if they tried doing anything with that, they'd be hosed, slammed into the pavement by a very slam-dunk sort of case in which they are STEALING TRADE SECRETS not theirs to GPL.
That is an ugly scenario, but it is quite real. So the trouble is not the corporate employee being harmed for exercising their right to GPL- they have no such right, they are a corporation's toenail in the legal sense and are not entitled to any such grandstanding. The trouble is on a more pragmatic level, and it's a medium sort of trouble, not a big trouble.
Basically, the corporation can fork a GPLed project and put massive resources behind trying to produce a significantly different version, all under tight wraps. It's allowed to discipline its parts as it sees fit, and is allowed to keep its work entirely to itself until it releases it with a well-funded publicity splash. At this point it must release source, and anyone can extend off this reference point- but the corporation can turn around and begin another round of complete revamping under complete secrecy, refusing to cooperate with outsiders.
I spoke to RMS about this, seeing it as a sort of loophole. He remained unperturbed, and I think I understand why- to RMS, 'free' development will always outpace, always outproduce such closed environments. For RMS this isn't even an issue, much less a loophole, to him it's the corporations being fools by turning away from a world full of willing helpers.
I don't know if he's right or not. Certainly he has a point- though there are also examples of types of work where a controlled team can outperform the bazaar- particularly game or art projects where the project's goals and values are very much a judgement call. On the other hand, OSS moves really fast- in the event of a radically altered GPLed codebase being sprung on the world, everything about it would be known and understood within days- there's not a lot of strategic advantage to keeping secrecy when you're inevitably going to make full disclosure anyhow.
Final analysis- this really isn't about the GPL so much as it's about corporatism. Like it or not, corporations get to own people and their ideas, legally. They also get to play in the fields of OSS alongside ill-funded hackers, and what they lack in nimbleness and cooperativeness they gain in sheer ability to market and distribute on a global scale.
It may be that eventually corporations will set the course for OSS by using their capacity to control collective programming skills and choke off communications. However, in a way this hardly matters- the source will get out there, no amount of GPL-allowable obfuscation (i.e. minimal) would stand up to the eyes of the world for longer than six hours or so, and frankly, if anyone thinks the amount of kluge and mess created by a world of corporate OSS 'coders' trying to trip each other up... would be worse than the current world of _closed_ corporate coders collectively trying to do exactly the same thing, with no expectation of eventual source disclosure.
Expect the corporations to abuse their privileges as hard as it can. It only adds a scattering of immensely rich, and twisted and obnoxious 'individuals' to the talent pool. Think of it like having some prima donnas who keep re-inventing everything, and just roll with it...
Sadly, this is untrue. Someone else pointed this out earlier but it bears repeating: in the United States, a corporation is a "natural person" under the law, entitled to all the same rights as people who happen to be made of meat.
This great Adbusters article goes into a lot of detail of the history of corporations and how we ended up in this mess. From the article:
Adbusters is wonderful, you should subscribe.
Here is my interpretation of the issue. Reading this is not a substitute for reading the real posts.
Background: GPL says that you can't just distribute a binary (in essence). If you distribute at all, it must be with source.
The Issue: Can a company make an internal distribution of GPL software and not release it? (E.g. NSA secure linux, or Corel closed beta)
View 1: Companies are not people. A developer in a company may modify the code and give to other workers in the company. These other workers have all the rights to source from the GPL. Thus, if one worker decides to publish the modified code, the company cannot (legally) do anything, it's GPL code still. Thus, internal distributions of software can only be enforced through threat of firing. Even if only a binary is leaked, people who d/l the binary can require the company to give the source!
View 2: Yes of course. That is not subject to the terms of the GPL, you are not distributing it. The problem with this view is that what if I want to sell modified GPL code? I can say: $10 to join NickSoft, Inc. Then I will send you code, but you may not distribute as terms of 'employment' with NickSoft. Boom, there goes GPL.
The original poster says both views are flawed and you cannot have any other (legally they are mutally exclusive).
RMS says, yeah maybe its a flaw, but its really minor.
Again, this is only my interpretation. Read the original posts.
(My personal opinion is close to RMS', its a very tough issue and is hard to avoid, however one states a GPL-like licence. I'd say leave it be)
--Nick
The idea is that someone creates an organization, and then requires everyone to be in the organization as a condition for software distribution. Then the modified GPLed program is only distributed to club members, and all the club members agree to only distribute the program within the club. In a sense, the Trillian project (which is porting the GNU tools and Linux to the IA64 architecture, which is still under nondisclosure agreements) is such a club.
So, does the fact that this can be done break the GPL protections? No, because it doesn't get around the requirement to provide sources to everyone who gets binaries. Attempts to do this kind of thing for a different reason (e.g. charge everyone big bucks for being in the club and forbid them from sharing information with outsiders) may run afoul of antitrust provisions in the US and the EU (forcing people to be in a club before you do business with them may not be legal, depending on the circumstances).
RMS often points out that the GPL (and other licenses) shouldn't be written, or read, as if they represent the whole of the law. Just because the GPL doesn't exclude some possibility doesn't mean that it is legal. It may be illegal for another reason.
As a colleague of Faré in the Tunes project (shameless plug) and a subscriber to (and occasional participant in) the cybernethics mailing list, I'd like to point a few things out.
First of all, Faré is French and resides in France. So before attacking his integrity, honesty, manhood, morals, intelligence, competence or whatever, ask yourself this question, American-boy: do you have any idea as to how French law applies to this issue? What if it were the case (perhaps not in France, but somewhere else) that this loophole _were_ applicable and an issue under some other country's law?
Also, as other posters have said, Faré is worried about what might happen if a corporation were created with the express purpose of hoarding otherwise GPL'd code. This might be an issue.
Finally, please don't fuck cybernethics up! If you want to join in on the discussion, that's great, but the membership is really soaring, and it'd be very unfortunate to see the list deteriorate, and I'm afraid that this is going to be the case. So try to keep the S/N ratio up.
Anyway, if anyone cares, Faré and I are on IRC right now (#tunes at openprojects.net). If you've got a problem with him (or me!), come over... we've already got the boxing ring set up.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.