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Are Bad Licenses Good For The Community?
mib writes: "ZDNet has an article about the history of OpenSSH that not only says that telnet sucks (duh!) but that that bad licenses are good for the the open source community because they cause some people to develop unrestricted versions of restricted software." This is a theme that develops more and more often when 'work-alike' apps are being created in order to migrate people from one OS to another.
More than anything, the openSSH vs. SSH situation demonstrates that moving from an open source license to a less-open license is a bad idea, BECAUSE it will lead to a splinter project. The main problems with this instance are:
A. SSH didn't convince it's v1 users that v2 was worth moving to or paying for (Not that it necessarily is or isn't worth it).
B. openSSH, while it's progress has been fantastic, still lacks features of the commerical version and GUI versions of v2 are not available
C. the open and commercial versions are not entirely compatible.
All of these facts have led to confusion about what version of SSH people should be using. For instance, what's the point in getting my users to use SSH in place of telnet when they make just as many connections with ftp (or dreamweaver or frontpage, etc.). SSH2 provides a graphical sftp client for windows, which makes the users happy and prevents that problem. Of course, I'd prefer the open source version for moral reasoons, but the two aren't compatible, so I can't run them interchangeably.
All in all it's just led to the better v2 ssh protocol not being widely adopted.
On another note, this situation is not like GIMP vs. Photoshop, et. al. because Photoshop or AIM or Napster were never open source to begin with, and if Linux user wanted the functionality those programs offered, they had to write it themselves. SSH was already available, but was was "revoked" later.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
What the hell are you talking about? Not only did that not make any sense, it had less than nothing to do with the post you were replying to!
Economics is one of those fields where nothing is isolated and everything is interconnected. Why do you thing it has the same prefix as ecology? To take one thing out of context with its environment is to cause a disruption somewhere else.
There is a reason why there is unemployment. All to often this is because there is no employment "slack" to hire them with. Employing them to correct disasters or fight wars will be economically disruptive. I am not saying unemployment is a good thing, I am just saying that it is there and is a part of economics.
Economics, like any science, does not make moral judgements. But it does assert that there are consequences to every human action. Getting rid of unemployment is a good thing. But there is a price to be paid. All to often that price looms where you least expect it.
Again, I'll ask my question. If there were a time of high unemployment, would you advocate the artificial destruction of a major city rather than wait for a convenient hurricane? Wouldn't you get double duty on the unemployment by hiring people to throw rocks through perfectly good windows? After all, you'll be hiring both the rock thrower and the glazer...
By the way, in reference to unemployment and WW2, why did the economy not fall back into depression when a million servicemen were mustered out? Why would you consider an economy beset with shortages and rationing to be healthy? From my reading of history, the forties were an economic mess while the fifties was the decade of prosperity.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Ok np. So many trolls around it's hard to be sure.
:)
What kind of car do you have? To get the error for my Firebird I just short two pins together from a plug below the steering wheel. Then the Check Engine light flashes in a certain pattern, and off I go to fix the problem... which occurs all too often
Alex
Sorry for yelling at you. I just kinda glossed over the "might" part and jumped to confusions. I see now your original intent, which was speculation rather than stating a conclusion.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Would people please stop comparing GIMP to Photoshop? Photoshop beats it in every aspect, hands down, with the exception of running through a web browser. But cooltext.com is far from a web based image editting application.
Photoshop is scriptable via applescript with the appropriate plug-ins. It has a thorough history tracking which you can save and saveable actions, so you can perform one task once and then apply that same task to 100 different files if you so desire. Saved actions will generate anything that the GIMP can, plus it will output Pantone and other spot colors, CMYK, etc etc etc.
I really think that GIMP enthusiasts should go to a design studio and watch a photoshop artist in action before trying to compare the two. The difference between the two is immense, and slashdot seems to remember photoshop 2.0 rather than 5.5
More oil spills means more work for cleanup people (job "creation"), and more dead wildlife (hooray, most of those birds ate "our" fish).
More hurricanes for Floridans means more new buildings, more disaster aid, and possibly a dead relative here and there. More housing rubble hauled off to the dump, more trees cut down to make new buildings.
I guess I should be happy for Miamians who get to live in spiffy new buildings, but I can't help but think the city councillor's analysis is a bit narrow-minded.
Wah!
I like the hurricane metaphor someone else used. We can survive a hurricane and rebuild afterward, but we'd rather not have the hurricane in the first place.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Since order creates chaos somewhere, it might stand to reason that chaos creates order somewhere.
Then logically, it stands that since criminals all drink water, all water drinkers are criminals!
One of the most basic tenets of logic is that just because something is true doesn't mean its converse ("opposite") is true. A=>B does not not always imply B=>A.
Not that I don't agree with your original point...
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Why wait for the hurricane? If they're so good for the economy, why not just shell the town with mortor fire every two years or so? We could keep the economic benefits without the incidental loss of life by using bulldozers. We could pay otherwise unemployed hoodlums to throw rocks through windows.
For those who are economically illiterate, I will explain the problem. Disasters employ people that would have otherwise been employed elsewhere. There is no economic gain, only a shift of resources from non-damaged areas to damaged areas. Even with pure economic efficiency, the net gain would be zero.
There are a myriad valid and moral reasons to help rebuild damaged cities. Citing bogus economic advantages is not one of them.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Huh? Just go to your local library and pick up a Haynes auto manual and it will tell you how to do it.
Anyway, thanks for trolling.
Of course a lack of a price tag alone does not make a software package better than its commercial counterparts. The old standard is that "freeware isn't worth money." The statement is an over-simplification, but it has some truth in it. Its not a matter of price - its a matter of functionality. Price is simply a factor - and of differing weight depending on your available funds and ability to negotiate a license.
I'm currently working on progect with a major US company in comparing SSH2 to OpenSSH as a company standard. The ability to negotiate a license and the available funds is not a major issue - price is a relatively minor factor. Its become a very heated debate with those involved. OpenSSH is holding its own very well against its commercial counterpart. The only failing so far is less support for Windows environments. Again, its a matter of functionality.
In the end, if the company ends up with the commercial SSH2 package we'll still see OpenSSH showing up in the environment. There are a lot of technical users who strongly support it. The only difference the lack of a price tag makes in this scenario is that those who support OpenSSH will be able to deploy it without justifying additional cost.
And there's the subtle point missed by those who fixate on prace tags - Open Source does not live or die by cost.
I can't see any how SSH's restrictive license helped "improve" OpenSSH more so than it could have had it remained under the GPL or BSD license. If SSH-orignal had stayed open, OpenBSD could have improved it directly and we would all be much better off because not only would there be that much less dispute over which is the de facto standard SSH, but also they would not have had to undergo the whole cloning effort. Granted SSH gives OpenSSH something to compete against (and vice-versa), but given that different people have different needs, SSH's source tree would have forked into N competing branches anyway, just like Linux has.
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This is not my sandwich.
They say that bad licenses are good because they encourage people to write workalikes with good licenses.
Grade A prime bull.
If the license was free, then there would be no need to write a clone. Coders could instead work on othe, new projects instead of duplicating effort.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Restricted software is good because it causes people to write unrestricted software?
Maybe I missed something, but if it was unrestricted in the first place, people wouldn't have to spend their time writing new versions. They could take the code that was already there and change it however they wanted.
In the same way that really repressive dictatorships are good for democracy.
While the SSH people are perfectly within their rights to release future versions under a more restrictive licence, one questions the business logic of pissing off your entire user base.
In part, the article seems to fall into the "OSS can only copy ClosedSS" trap, although he backs away from that in the end without providing an example of OpenSSH's innovation.
A standard would be good.
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E_NOSIG
The only problem with this idea is that every time someone reverse-engineers something because the original is badly licensed (for whatever value of "bad"), you now have an additional version of the product, which may or may not operate identically to the original. Who wants to test all that? At its worst, this leads to several functionally similar, but not identical, products, which not only won't be drop-in replacements for each other, they may not even interoperate. Open is good, but how much more motif/lesstif or Unix/Linux/BSD fragmentation do we need?
Discussions about licenses always seem to center around moralism and idealism.
Here's my definition of good and bad licenses:
A good license enforces what the maker of it wants and has no unwanted sideeffects.
A bad license does not enforce what the maker wnated to enforce or has unwanted sideeffects.
It is that simple, don't confuse 'good' with 'free beer'. Also be aware that good is highly subjective: what is good for you might be bad for someone else. I certainly can't blame somebody else for not delivering free labor.
Now some people on this site seem to believe that GPL is 'good' and should be enforced/envangelisized/promoted whereever possible. I'm not one of them. I don't think it is bad either, just that sometimes it is appropriate and sometimes not.
No in the case of SSH we are dealing with a bad license. It doesn't do what the originator intended (keep SSH propietary). Nor does it do what the users want, so they create their own version with a license that suit their needs. Probably, openssh will leapfrog past its original and become the default implementation in use.
Jilles
I'll point out that it's never been stated that the two products are in competition with each other
Yes, it's never been stated as such, but with the GIMP constantly drawing comparisons to Photoshop around here, I trully feel its' worth it to enlighten this community as how powerful Photoshop really is, as opposed to how powerful they think it is. Yes, the GIMP can be useful at times, but it really feels like an absolute toy compared to Photoshop.
And unfortunately, with the exception of the coders at Adobe, we don't have any say in the features we want or need.
Actually, Adobe works very closely with it's largest customers (I work for one of them) to determine the features that their next product should have as well as which features are causing confusing among it's users. And it's not the coders that make the actual decisions, it's the product managers who talk with tech support and sales in order to have a product developed that will spur people to buy it or upgrade their current copies. If you're a customer of theirs, and a feature you want to see included isn't there, AND it's a feature that many other people want as well, you CAN call and try to make a difference.
Besides that, photoshop is one of the most extensible apps around with fully document API's (hence the HUGE 3rd party plug in market), so if you're a coder, you can just as easily add the features you need to their program.
That's the KEY difference between closed source and open source that's been said time and time again but overlooked: proprietary software companies develop their software for their customers, whereas open source developers develop the software for themselves. It's a big difference. Necessity is the mother of invention, and closed source companies require money...
My take on the article:
Bait and switch is dumb, and won't work...
Go over the story.
Someone wrote a useful program, made it Free, everyone liked it and used it. He tried to make a buck by making it not Free. Users got mad, took the version he provided for free (the bait) and redid his tweaks. Therefore, the switch failed.
Closed source programs aren't really covered in his article. Free software that pulls a bait and switch will result in the users getting mad and reimplementing the fixes.
In otherwords, you can sell propriatary software, maybe users will pay, maybe a bunch will reimplement for free. However, don't try to release it for free to get marketshare and then try to pull a fast one with the upgrades.
If you use Free Software to establish yourself, don't expect to be able to make it proprietary, because someone will keep it Free. Proprietary software can't leverage the community, that was my reading.
Alex
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Outside of sloppily worded legalese, there is no such thing as a bad license. (I do not count EULA's as licenses) Certainly most of us would agree that compelling an author to release his private code that he wrote solely for his own use is wrong.
The controversy comes when software is first given to one other person. A software license is merely a set of permissions and restrictions on what the user can do with the author's work. It shouldn't make any difference whether the software is given to one person or posted on the net for everyone in the world to access. This is not kindergarten where if you give some of your candy with your friend you have to give it to everyone else in class. What harm is there is saying "here friend, have my software, I am not done with it yet so don't let anyone else see it until I tell you otherwise"?
Ownership of software is not the question. We are talking licenses here. Every license in existance including the GNU GPL asserts ownership rights upon the software. Ownership means the right to control, and by controlling how the software is distributed, the GPL asserts ownership.
You may not like the terms of a particular license. I may probably agree with you. But that's beside the point. That particular software with that particularly onerous license is not my software. I have no rights to compell its author to do anything. Calling a license bad is just sour grapes. You didn't get your way and now you're pouting.
If you don't like the terms of the license, don't use the software. Gee, where have I heard that one before?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I haven't released lots of things open source, but I've probably released about... ten thousand lines or so of stuff that I wrote for something at work that's not specific to what I do for a living.
If I give you the source for our main product, we're out of business. If, however, I give you a C++ class that's capable of doing mundane task X or Y, then we both win, since while you save time by using it, I gain stability by having it get thoroughly debugged by other eyes.
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Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Unfortunately, we need some commercial software to exist (like Windows) because they need to compete with free software. Competition spurs innovation (that's a dirty word now, isn't it?), and non-free software is in many instances, better suited to compete then free software. Whether or not you like Windows, it's got a leg up in ease-of-use to KDE 1/GNOME, and KDE2 is the result.
Competition is good. Changing free software to non-free is bad.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
Closed software is good because it gives us an excuse to reinvent the wheel and make better open software?
No, we do that to ourselves... Closed software is still bad, and if the world was Open Source, we'd *still* have 18 zillion versions of everything. Consider:
How many open programs are named 'ya*' or '?in?', for "Yet Another ---", or "?-- Is Not ?--"?
In the meantime, how many closed-source programs dominate the field for their type of application? (MS-Office; Windows; Photoshop; Quicken) Even if there are closed *or* open alternatives, people generally don't use them because of the stifling effects of closed software.
Even if Outlook and Eudora didn't exist, I guarantee you we'd still have mail, elm, pine, mutt.... etc., etc., ad infinitum. One program *or* one license is never enough for everybody in the Open Source world, and most people are just coding for themselves.
However, a commercial program like Outlook that is designed for the masses *does* give us something to shoot for; it's an example of "programming for the masses", which is what a program needs for more people to use it. So the Open Source e-mail clients of the future should be better for it.
BUT--this does not mean that if Microsoft opened the source for Outlook, that this would be worse--it would be better. Then we could examine it, pick it apart, and hack up a new e-mail client faster, fix some bugs, and avoid some mistakes. So open source licenses are still better, and closed programs provide an example, but they certainly don't help us by being closed, AND they aren't the reason why there are so many Open Source app/clones out there--that's just because everyone has their own itch to scratch.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sorry, but by that logic, tyranny was good for the cause of freedom by causing the revolutions that ultimately led to the U.S constitution.
Tyrannies still exist, and regardless of the failure of communism, the transition to a more free world was (and is) by no means certain.
Similarly, although the Open Source movement seems to have 'the tide of history' on it's side at the moment, all the votes are not in, and advocating complacency is a sure way to get blindsisded by the unexpected.
Bad licenses are bad. Period.
How about saying "high crime rates are good, because they convince people to vote for the larger police budgets that are needed to keep them safe". This is the sort of absurdity that this thinking leads to.
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The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
Why is it I keep seeing posts regarding why MS, etc should open up their sources so people can grab the source code and make something better of their own?
And it's not like it's remotely easy to pick up 250,000 lines of source and make something better. I work on huge projects during the day, and it's common for a programmer on the project to misunderstand an interface subtlety and make a mistake that shows up later down the road. And this with experience working on a code base full-time.
One of the great myths of open source is that it makes bug fixes and enhancements easy.
Is the grain of sand good for the oyster? Probably not, but it certainly causes a beautiful pearl to develop because of it. This is the entire basis of scratching the proverbial itch. People write software because they need it. And in this case, because they need it under a more free licence.
God Fucking Damnit
It was because he couldn't access the sources of a printer's driver.
In a way, you could say that it is because the driver was under a "bad" license (closed source) instead of open source.
So in a waym "bad" (restrictive) licenses started the whole free software movement!
The only way it could be argued that closed source software is good for open source software is when the open source software tries to emulate important aspects of the closed source software (e.g. AbiWord is intended to have a very similar look and feel to the market leader, Microsoft Word, so that AbiWord is intuitive to use for Word users). The larger financial resources of the software companies can be used to conduct research into what users require of the software and to design other aspects such as the user interface, and these fundamental features can be incorporated into the open source software. Therefore, the commercial software companies can lay the foundations for the open source programmers to build upon, therefore saving some development effort for the open source programmers.
So maybe closed source software can benefit open source software, but not in the way suggested by the article.
Bad Licenses are good for free software. This is the #1 reason why Linux and Apache are so relatively unpopular for Fortune 500 web sites compared to the sites of smaller enterprises.
You see a Huge company with 150,000 employees and a few Billion in annual profits doesn't buy software under the same restrictions as the rest of us. They don't suffer from bad licenses like we do.
Case in point. Nameless Big Company [NBC] buys a site license for NT. Latter it decides to create a web presence and simply grabs an NT CD and installs. As far as the internal developers are concerned NT Server is free because The site license essentially means paying for an estimated total number of servers with no penalty for adding more in the short term.
Even the CDs are different. I.e. No serial numbers to enter on the Corporate edition of MSOffice 97 when I had to install that.
Support is different too. They give the likes of NBC a different tech support number from the regular one. People answer that phone promptly and technicians come on site if needed ( for a pre established fee ).
Even Source code. yes. NBC can get the source code to windows if they ask for it. Sure it costs money but not nearly as much as that enterprise wide site license.
In short, bad licenses force ordinary users into open source and would have done the same to NBC. Except they get a not-so-bad license.
"Life Sucks. Then you die" -: Wolverine must have been talking to the small businesses who mistakenly believe that the fortune 500 became successful by choosing these tools ( which were only invented recently anyway ) and buy accordingly.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?