Slashdot Mirror
The GPL: A Technology Of Trust
The GPL: A Technology Of Trust
Society is built on exchange. One particular form of exchange that we're genetically wired for is reciprocal altruism: speculative generosity with expectation of future payoff.
Open Source is a textbook example of reciprocal altruism. But this leaves the Open Source community vulnerable to parasitism. (This term comes from game theory; I'm not trying to insult anyone.) In a small group, trust comes from repeated interactions, and personal experience is adequate to recognize parasites and avoid them. But in a large group, interactions between any two people are often indirect and/or infrequent. Something more than experience is needed to engender trust between people who don't know each other, and who may never even meet.
Therefore, any large group must evolve a technology of trust. If it doesn't do so, it will fall victim to rampant parasitism, which will cause inefficiency, which will eventually bring stagnation and failure to compete -- that is, death.
The GPL is a technology of trust. Contributors to GPL'd projects trust that the GPL -- which depends on law, itself a technology of trust -- will prevent parasitism. They trust that if they contribute to a project, they will have access to the valuable goods built on their own work. So, while GPL'd projects can have forks, they can't have proprietary forks. And that makes all the difference.
This analysis may seem simple or even obvious. But its implications are far-reaching.
1. The GPL will eventually dominate Open Source (if it doesn't already). Both analysis and observation point to the GPL, or something like it, as the destiny of Open Source. More than any other current license, the GPL discourages parasitism; thus it enhances efficiency; thus it helps a culture outcompete rivals whose technologies of trust are less advanced. By making its host culture successful, the GPL -- or some future license built on it -- will finally win out.
2. We must preserve the GPL, for the sake of the community. When Microsoft attacks the GPL, it would be tempting for those of us who don't identify with ``Free Software'' to use as our primary reply that ``Open Source is more than the GPL.'' That would be a mistake. The GPL's peculiar strengths are crucial in the Open Source community's competition with other cultures who would love to see Open Source, let alone Free Software, gone and forgotten.
3. The GPL is good for business. Companies that use the GPL are neither foolish nor stupid. They simply want to trust that other companies won't be able to take unfair advantage of them, and the GPL gives them that immediate security while simultaneously allowing open cooperation. And in the general case, the GPL is a friend of business because it makes new and better efficiencies possible, and economies thrive on new and better efficiencies.
(On the other hand, we can agree with Microsoft that the GPL is bad for their current business. We can then proceed to use Microsoft's favorite word as we reply: Innovation won't stop just because you're not ready for it. The printing press was a good thing, after all, even though it forced professional scribes to change their business model. Adapt or die.)
In summary: We in the Open Source community need to stand with the FSF and defend the GPL against all comers -- not merely as a tactical move, but because the GPL is a valuable technology of trust. To outcompete other cultures, we must adopt technologies that work. And the GPL works.
-- Chip Salzenberg <chip@pobox.com>, member of the board of the Open Source Initiative
Really that surprises me.
We all know that the GPL prevents against linking between GPL code and proprietary code. How is that usefull for a corporation if they have to release for free a product they planned to sell?
Ok sure, maybe it is good for internal applications, businees applications and the like they don't make money on but really.
I don't beleive the theory that the money would be made off support. If that is so, no one will be developping the software.
Really, as usuall, there is a little lack of reality in this speach...
Not all computing can be under the GPL.
Maybee you arn't thinking of the right use for the GPL. I am the president of a small independent industrial research company located in Pensacola Florida. My company recently canceled plans for a new project that would have included the purchase of a large 5-axis milling machine priced at over a million dollars. The reason the project was cancelled had nothing to do with the machine, it was of extremely high quality. We cancelled because of the dismal condition of the CAD/CAM software used to run it, and the fact that we would be at the complete mercy of the purveyors of this proprietary software if we were to continue. We have been using a CAD/CAM software system in house that I will leave unnamed, because I don't have a single good thing to say about it. We spend more time finding workarounds for software bugs than we do making new designs, and this is just a 3-axis system. Moving up to a 5-axis system would involve much more complexity, and many, many more software headaches. Given the fact that CAD/CAM is one of the original uses for a computer and the software has been around and under development for decades, we have to ask "why it is in such dismal shape?" I think that the bugs are either built in, or left in, intentionally. The CAD/CAM software business model that has evolved relies heavily on expensive yearly "maintenance" agreements and "updates" that no company would agree to if the software actually worked. So software developers make sure that it doesn't! A company such as ours that stupidly buys into this business model is thereby made hostage to the software developer's demands. We contract to do a particular job, and then find that we can't do it because of some software bug that we need to "upgrade" to get past (at great expense, of course) thus providing ourselves with a whole new set of bugs. At our company we paid for a comprehensive suite of features initially when we bought our current software, but most of these "features" have proven to be completely unuseable because of bugs! So, we have reluctantly decided to pass on our new project. It would have opened up an entirely new industry and caused the purchase of numerous new 5-axis milling machines had we proceeded. I emphasize this point because I think that the manufacturer's of new machines need to take heed: it is in their basic interest to see that this software problem is solved. In conversation with my peers I see that I am not alone in being utterly outraged at the software developers selling CAD/CAM systems. These developers are plainly the weakest link that manufacturers must overcome when bringing a new product that involves machining online, and the prices these proprietary software developers charge for their services are beyond absurd. It can cost more for the software to run a milling machine than it costs for the milling machine! A fully implemented CATIA "seat," for example, costs something like $120,000.00. Hire another engineer, pay another $120,000.00. Oh, and don't forget the yearly "maintenance" fee so someone will help to get you past the built-in bugs. Sorry to be so long-winded. The reason I am writing is this: It seems to me that the GPL software approach to this problem is the only way that it can be truly solved. I also think that, because of the obvious economic advantage to industrial users and machine tool manufacturer's to get this particular job actually, and finally, DONE, these same users and manufacturer's would be willing to fund such a project. My company can't be the first (or the last) to look at the dismal software situation in this industry and simply to keep our money in our pockets and opt out. To paraphrase a well-known quote: "$120,000 here, another $120,000 there . . . pretty soon you're talking about real money!" CAD/CAM software is used in an industry that is being bent over and shafted with an unprecedented level of viciousness by proprietary software leaches. It is an excellent place to show what the free software approach can actually do to alleviate this problem, both in terms of the financial benefit from much cheaper production costs, more reliable production, greater control and less frustration, but also in terms of fostering a community of effort for the good of all rather than this cut-throat approach we now have.
No one has yet explained the difference between releasing my code under a BSD license and simply releasing the code directly to the public domain.
I want a license that will guarantee that my code and all dirivative works based on my code remain free for the rest of time. Only the GPL does so.
At this point MS could release an MS BSD or MS MIT product and subtly modify all the protocols to only work with MS products. They couldn't do so with a GPL protected license.
Before you say that something like this could never happen, review the modifications made to the kerberos protocol by MS so that the clients would only work with MS servers.
This is the evil that releasing code under a non-GPL license allows.
Stop the madness, only release under a GPL license.
I believe the difference is that the BSD license code absolves you of any warranty/liabilities. Few will deny that MS or some other 'evil' entitiy could do what you describe withe BSD style product (They *do* use BSD code in their OS). People who use BSD style licenses know full well that the code may be used as such. It is part of their intent. DO NOT DENY US this right. We do NOT share your agenda. And for following our agenda we get blasted by others who insist that we undermine their agenda. So be it. It's our choice.
Someone once said, "Don't throw perls before swine". The BSD license doesn't provide for this. I therefore support the GPL. It attempts to keep the swine out of the loop.
a non-interactive text adventure in multiple parts
PART ONE: the end of an icon
You are walking along a old cobbled road, carefully stepping over mounds of decaying horse shit and avoiding what appears to be puddles of rat piss. To your left is a row of Tudor type houses, one being a shop. To the right is a sea wall, and beyond that is the frothing ocean.
Rainwater gushes through guttering and spills out onto the street, running into streams and slowly diluting the budweiser pools.
You can see a glinting object in a pool of piss.
A scruffy man is shuffling away from you.
>get object
You shudder as you plunge your left hand (the one you rarely masturbate with) into the piss pool and retrieve the object. It is a gold sovreign.
You are now rich.
The scruffy man has moved further away.
>enter shop
Pausing only to shake the piss from your hand you stride purposefully into the shop.
Peering through the murk you determine that this shop in an apocethary, many strange object line the shelves and pungent vapors permeate through the air.
A snoring dwarf is leaning against a table that seems to be serving as a counter.
>cough politely
The dwarf awakes with a start, then eyes you suspiciously. Still looking drowsy, he demands to know what it is you want. After some discourse, you discover that this shop sells nothing but cakes of soap. Being hungry, you decide that any cake will do, and purchase as much as your coinage will allow.
You are poor.
You are encumbered.
>sell soap
You inform the dwarf that you wish to trade some soap back.
The still bleary-eyed dwarf offers you a good price, which you readily accept.
You are rich again.
You are no longer encumbered.
>leave shop
You exit the shop.
>look
You are standing outside a soap shop, munching on a cake of lavender flavored soap. There is a scruffy man shuffling down the street, away from you.
>pursue man
You set off after the man, catching the filthy sod within microseconds. Wheezing and oozing pus from many abrasions and untreated cuts, the man turns to face you. You swallow in order to control your natural vomit reaction. Clearly this man needs soap rather more than you do.
>give man soap
You can't give that to that!
>wash man
I don't know how to do that!
>vhsdjvjksd vshdjkvsdhjkfsd
What?
>stupid parser crap ftyjtfgy
I don't understand stupid.
>give soap man
You give the man the largest block of soap. He looks at it as through he has never seen soap before. Carelessly, he allows it to drop to the ground where it begins to forms suds in the streams of rainwater and piss.
>again
You offer the scruffy man another cake of soap. He ignores you and turns to walk away. As he turns, he slips on the soap suds and falls face first into a particularly large piss puddle. Slowly some grime washes away from his visage, enough to allow you to recognise the man. It is Richard GNU/Stallman - patron saint of the unwashed and the geeky.
Thinking quickly, you boot Stallman in the face as he attempts to rise. Next you dump all the soap you carry onto him and roll him over and over in the puddle.
Years of filth falls away while Stallman panics at the water. Soon, his attempts of extricate himself provide enough motion for the cleaning action so you step back and allow the process to continue.
>wait
Time passes. Stallman is getting cleaner, though slowly.
>wait wait wait wait wait wait
Hours pass. Finally you decide that Stallman must be clean by now and move to help him up.
Alas, the powerful soap cocktail not only removed the grime, it also dissolved the Stallman. No doubt his untouched-by-soap skin was unable to withstand the cleaning process and he simply fizzed away.
Congratulations! You have successfully assasinated Richard Stallman. Your score is currently ONE from a possible FOUR. To continue, press [SPACE].
That's five miutes you'll never get back, fool.
I would think that if there were any (major) violations within Microsoft of the GPL that there would have been some whistleblowers by now.
How does it stop anyone from using the fruits of their _own_ labor? If they're using GPL'd code in the first place, they're taking advantage of the fruits of someone ELSE'S labor to base their code on. If the code is their own... well, they CAN dual-license it (like the new orinoco_cs driver in the 2.4 kernel, for example - it's GPL/MPL dual licensed). The GPL does not, and AFAIK cannot, stop someone from doing this.
You never answered the question of the previous poster - what's so terrible about saying "You may make use of the code I've written, so long as you do as I have done"? Reuse is great, but what about companies that sell component software, like many commercial companies (including Microsoft) license for rote jobs like spellcheck? You think that someone wouldn't take them to court if they violated the terms of THAT license? Why should it be any different with open source? It's still licensed - only the license says "This software is available to everyone - if you want to modify it, you must reciprocate". (A slight oversimplification, but I hope you see my point.)
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
But as long as someone posted the correction, that's good enough for the readers. :-)
Theft is taking something against your will. If you use a GPL project and contribute to it, it's your decision.
Furthermore, what is the freedom that you are so proudly defending? Freedom to make code proprietary? So you want to be able to take other people's code and hide it from the community?
You are requiring a freedom to take freedom away from others. That's akin to saying I want to have the freedom to beat others with a baseball bat, because else I don't have freedom.
You are always free to do with your code as you wish. What GPL prevents you from doing is takeing code from OTHER people that was meant to be shared, and making it not shared. That is the difference.
It's not a radical left policy. Neither is it a right wing policy. It's a policy of any republic that values freedom. Or then again you might want to live in a state where I CAN go beat down your door with a baseball bat just because I want to.
Gift economies only works when the gifts are predominately given to people who are part of the gift economy.
I agree that the BSDL is a wonderful and altrustic way to make a gift to everybody, however, as a sustainable economy, I have more faith in the GPL. Than again, even if the BSDL fails to create a sustainable gift economy of its own, it hasn't failed. It wasn't the goal of the license.
In fact, the name cyGNUs was chosen to emphasize the connection.
It wasn't a public company, so I only have the word of the owners that they made money. And they did start adding som few non-free products. I doubt they made any significant money off these products, though.
> You can't argue my points, so you resort to ad
> hominem.
True, I can't argue your points, but that is because you don't have any points.
That's why I'm making fun of you instead.
RMS: Howdy neighbor, how about I letting you borrow my lawn mover, and you letting me borrow your hedge cutter? It is up to you.
Jay: That is not true sharing! That is sharing at gunpoint! It is theft! It is a virus! You must let me use your lawn mover with no conditions attached, you radical leftist!
Sigh.
Anyway, Hercules is under the QPL, another copyleft (i.e. "viral") license. Jay doesn't care about the issues, he is just carrying an old grudge towards RMS for targetting GNU towards 32 bit platforms with at least 1 MB of flat memmory, at a time where most people (including Jay) could only afford PC AT class machines (80286, segmented memory).
The GPL is really not designed for Pure Software Companies. It's not really designed for software companies at all. It's designed for software using businesses. If an average medium to large business took the money they spend every year or two on Microsoft Office, and instead allocated it to paying the wages of programmers working on OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc, then they'd be able to get the features they need included, while benefiting from the features that other users find critical.
That's how the GPL is supposed to be used.
Politas
Hear, hear!
The GPL is ultimately valuable for its' darwinistic aspects, in addition to all the aforementioned virtues. It creates the MOST dog-eat-dog software development model that I'm personally aware of.
Code well, and your code (think DNA) survives and evolves. Code badly, and your code (DNA) dwindles and dies.
We can thusly conclude that all that oppose the GPL are weenies that don't 'trust' natural evolutionary forces, and demand protection from them.
Or something like that 8P
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
IBM, Sun, and HP care a lot about the GPL. After all, they could have released their software under some other free license, but they didn't. They wanted to make sure that they released the software under a license that would guarantee that their work could not be used against them. GPLed works are embrace and extend proof. It is impossible to add proprietary extensions to a piece of software when you have to release the source code along with the binaries. These big business know this, and so they use the GPL when they are giving out source. In fact, the GPL is the only free software license that these companies are likely to use. Don't look for BSD style licensed software from IBM or Sun anytime soon.
Not only is the GPL embrace and extend proof, it is also possible for the copyright holder to license the code under another license for people who are willing to pay. This is how the folks at TrollTech make a living with QT. QT is free for free software products, but commercial products have to pay for a commercial license.
The GPL will almost certainly harm software only shops that aren't interested in selling service and support as their primary business, but that's just the way things are. Only a small percentage of programmers actually work in this type of environment, and protecting these people's jobs is akin to protecting the jobs of buggy whip manufacturers after the automobile became popular. As free software becomes more and more competitive programmers that buck the trend will find themselves looking for new work.
But it isn't only free software that makes it hard to compete. Nowadays it is impossible to make money selling a web browser, but is that Netscape's fault for GPLing their browser, or is it Microsoft's fault for bundling their web browser with Windows. The answer is obvious, and it illustrates perfectly the plight of the commercial software developer. Too many of your competitors are willing to give software away.
I agree with your take on Mozilla. AOL is never going to be able to sell copies of mozilla. However, since that is not how they make money, it works out well for them.
Just imagine how badly their XP negotiations with Microsoft would be going right now if they didn't have the Mozilla trump card up their sleeve. They would be screwed. AOL needs an independent browser, and the GPL allows them to build one without fronting all of the costs themselves. If you look at the commits you would notice that their are plenty of hackers with email addresses from other companies. That is valuable work that AOL does not have to pay for. So the GPL is definitely working in AOL's favor.
And just because a piece of software is GPLed doesn't necessarily mean that it can't be a source of income. Cygnus was able to make money for years supporting gcc. They got greedy during the tech fever on the stock market, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their business plan before that was invalid.
In fact, there are lots of companies that wouldn't have even had a prayer of being successful without the GPL. No one was interested in yet another proprietary widget set. And yet thanks to the fact that they released under the GPL QT became popular with hackers and now TrollTech is able to sell proprietary licenses of their software to people who don't want to make free software (but still want to use QT).
The folks developing MySQL are another good example of how to make money off of a GPLed product. Who would be interested in yet another proprietary database (especially one as limited as MySQL). However, if you give it away for free, and sell service and support then your product has a good chance of becoming quite popular. And the fact that independent developers will help you improve the product doesn't hurt either.
Sure, there are a lot of developers working on Free Software that aren't ever going to get paid for it, but there are lots of hackers that are getting paid to hack on Free Software, and their are some fairly successful businesses that are using this model.
Part of the reason that GPLed software is becoming more and more popular is that software developers the world over are starting to realize that none of us are going to be the next Bill Gates. The days when you can do a project that is significant enough to become a commercial product as a solo project (or even with a small group of hackers) is long past. And even if you do come out with a piece of software that has commercial promise their is no guarantee that one of the gigantic software houses (ie Microsoft) isn't going to simply clone your product, undercut your prices, and out market you. Heck, even large commercial software houses like Corel and Borland are having a hard time keeping their heads above water, and they have large software applications that people are willing to pay money for. Microsoft's "integration" is making it increasingly hard for their products to compete (because they don't integrate as well with the rest of the Microsoft stable of products).
And Microsoft gets bigger every year. They are continually on the look out for new market niches to dominate. With their purchase of Great Plains Microsoft is getting set to dominate the small business accounting world, .Net aims at Microsoft controlling a major portion of the web, etc. etc.
This is why companies like IBM, Sun, and HP are now pitching software into the GPL world. For example, Sun knows that the only chance that an Office suite has against Microsoft Office is if it is free, and guaranteed to remain that way forever. So OpenOffice has been released under the GPL for three reasons 1) so they can get some help from like minded hackers, and 2) they want to create a market for an office suite that works well with their Unix based hardware, 3) they hope to make office suites a commodity and cut off one of Microsoft's important revenue streams while growing demand for their Unix servers.
IBM is working on doing the same thing with web services. They are helping with Apache and SOAP because they want to be able to sell IBM servers running OS400 or AIX (or whatever) that are capable of working with .Net clients. Like Sun, they would like the help of like minded hackers, and they want to make sure that their hardware has a capable set of tools.
HP, on the other hand, has already created a neat set of tools (e-Speak or something) but no one has heard of it, or is interested in using it. They hope that releasing the source code will help it become a standard.
Even more importantly, with GPLed software you don't have to be a big company to make a difference. Independent coders all over the world can collaborate on software that they all can sell as a service. And hackers working for large non-software oriented corporations can work together on truly interoperable infrastructure.
You can try to be the next Bill Gates if you want, but the outlook for making that kind of money from commercial software (at this point in the race) is pretty slim. The competition simply has too much of a head start.
So why on earth is it that your photograph on your home page shows that you use so much GPL'ed software, then? If you feel moral compunctions about free software sharing, then step up to the plate and stop using it.
- jon
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Yeah, I'll agree that the GPL does make it difficult to get equitable development funding costs shared around. Obviously, no GPL'ed software is developed for free. It would be nice to be able to have some reasonable way of spreading costs for it while still preserving the guarantee of openness and non-monopolization, but it's very unclear how that could work.
ESR is correct that a lot of open source software is developed by programmers working for other sorts of industries who need a piece of software to get their job done. For software that needs development beyond that point, it might be interesting to have a 'commercial for a couple of years' clause, which would allow commercial development and sale in traditional non-sharing style for a limited time, wherupon the code would revert back to the public commons.
This wouldn't be any sort of GPL, of course.
- jon
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Nonsense. The GPL doesn't deny anyone the ability to profit from the fruits of their labor, unless they choose to labor on GPL'ed software that they do not hold the copyright for. Believe me, no commercial software company will allow you to incorporate their code to create a derived work and then sell it, either. Not unless you pay them for the privilege, right?.
The presence of the GPL and code written under the GPL does not in any way prevent you from finding such a commercial vendor and offering them hundreds of thousands of dollars to allow you to base derived works on their products, if you like. The presence of the GPL and code written under the GPL does not prevent you from writing your own code from scratch, and profiting thereby.
I'm mystified at this kind of confusion that people have over the GPL. The people who complain about the GPL tend not to complain about the BSD license, when in fact they are complaining that they are not being allowed to profit adequately from someone else's work. Is that model more in keeping with your notion of capitalism? Take my work for free, and make money on it? If you are so concerned about the integrity of the capitalist system, pay cash on the barrel head for your software libraries, and be done with it.
Complaining that you're having to pay more than people who are willing to abide by the GPL is laughable for someone so concerned about Communism.
- jon
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
You've made some remarkable assertions about the GPL but you've failed to substantiate them in any way. Do you have any arguments to back up what you say or should you just be ignored?
> How many people here USE Linux for more than
> a firewall or the kewlness factor?
I use Linux for everything and run my business on it. Web server, firewall, in-house server, desktops. It does everything we need and does it with far less hassle than the obvious alternative.
> I used to, but Windows is easier
Funny - that's precisely the opposite of the reason I use Linux. Windows is just *so* much harder to get things done on. You spend all your time fighting the system where with Linux you tell it what you want done and it does it.
Of course, it helps if you can speak the language.
John
Is your post GPLed ?
Actually, he can't, since it's not his original work -- an interesting twist in this case is that it's precisely the fact that he ripped it out of the Monstrous Compendium that makes it so funny. We can just hope that the copyright owners (I've lost track of who owns all that stuff by now. WotC?) would agree that this qualifies as fair use.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Great stuff? Ehh -- what's with the public and sociobiology anyway? The original "Sociobiology" was written in desperation by Wilson, as an attempt to rekindle interest in his sort of behaviorial research at the time when molecular biology was making traditional observational biology rather passe. Twenty-five years later, mainstream biology *is* molecular biology.
There are interesting questions to be sure in the genetics of behavior, but experiment, combined with molecular evolutionary studies, are the way they are being addressed today (for example, this paper), rather than by just-so stories. Look at all the recent sociobiology proponents -- Pinker, Wright, Dennet -- and you'll notice that they aren't biologists.
It's funny that this Slashdot piece was posted today. I just read chapter 12 of 'Nonzero' before coming in to work today. In fact, the first time the phrase "technology of trust" showed up in the text, my first thought was "Dude...Open Source..."
Sorry folks, "non-GPL developers" should've been "GPL developers" in that sentence. And I even previewed. :-P
So next question: Seriously, how do you feel about commercial software? Some authors require that you pay for their work, and don't even get source. Are you also angry about this choice of distribution terms?
As near as I can tell (and this is your fault, for ranting without explaining), your real problem is that non-GPL developers aren't producing source code that you (or others) can use for non-reciprocal gains (e.g. proprietary extension, etc.). You are whining because the 'cost' by your philosophy, is too high. I'm sorry, but if it's that important to you, you'll just have to write it all non-GPL. Then we can put Chip's hypothesis to the test!
Mein Kampf not only explores the implications more honestly, it also includes a great deal of information about implementing a practical program to achieve some of the ends mentioned. Of course, you do have to play down a lot of the genocide and cruelty which inevitably ensues, but then one does not make an omelette without breaking eggs, does one?
For the humour-impaired, that was sarcasm.
I sometimes wonder whether Adolf's notes from his time in the German boy-scouts-analog could be assembled and printed as ``Mein Kampfuer''? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I guess then that Dubyah will only support-church-sanctioned licences. And since he'll be going to those in a position of social authority to ask about said licences, and people in power seldom give away that power, the implication is that we're headed for another Dark Ages, albeit with digital watches.
The essence of the Dark Ages was centralised and absolute political power, steered by ecclesiastical authorities for whom no sacrifice (by other people, of course) was too great.
I do wish someone with both a brain and political power understood the difference between freedom and mere multiple choice. I do wish those willing to order fire put to the fagots actually read and believed what their example had to say on the topic. Then we wouldn't be facing the apocalypse for which Dubyah is a trigger. Sigh.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Copying software, for free or for money, doesn't means a thing.
People, and I mean every techie, IT manager or dweeb who can handle a mouse and type "make install", figures that they can do it better and then they proceed to try (and usually fail because they didn't understand the magnitude of the problem.)
I've given away designs that I could/should have charged for and the fact remains that GPL and Gnu/Linux is the first (and perhaps only) place since 1978 where the community and the concept of a community has actually had a chance.
You can give people a map of where to go and directions on how to get there and they will stumble around engendering bankruptcy after failure before admitting that they don't know it all.
I hope that the Potchlatch society continues...
It gives me hope.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Wow, the opponents of the GPL are becoming extremely vocal.
This is my view of what the GPL does, and why it does it, and why that is good:
The GPL is constructed on one basic principle: all software should be Free (note capital F). Now, I dont necessarily agree with that principle, but that is RMS's view of software - the view from which he designed the GPL. This is, in some ways, the 'natural state' of software. If there were no software copyright laws, then when a person bought a piece of software, they would be able to freely modify and redistribute it. However, in the current capitalist state, that is not possible - because software copyright laws restrict people from doing what they would be able to do quite naturally.
The GPL, then, is designed to create an island of software that obeys the rule of the 'natural state' inside the current system by using copyright laws. And the GPL is designed such that this island of software will always remain free, and never grow smaller.
Regardless of wether you disagree with RMS's ideal of a natural state of software or not, you can still agree with the GPL - if you beleive that free software should remain free. This is what the GPL ensures. If someone has taken their time and produced a useful software work and released it under the GPL, then they can be assured that their work, and modifications to their work, will remain free, and that it will continue to benefit the free software community.
Other licenses (such as BSD) allow software that was free, to be used and extended in ways that in no way benefits (and perhaps even harms) the free software community. Others can use the BSD works, without giving anything to free software in return. In essence, it allows greedy individuals to stand on the shoulders of free software, pick the high-hanging fruit, and walk away with it, whistling blithely. I dont like that.
-Laxitive
They had some proprietary add-ons, but as I gather, most of their revenue was from support contracts, and programming contracts (make GCC work on our new computer).
Admittedly, life being what it is, it doesn't always work out to work that way, and people think they won't get caught, etc....
None have perfectly reached their optimal strategy, but the incidence of "I want a dollar, give it to me or I will hit you with this stick" is much lower than the number of people who have access to sticks and would like an additional dollar, so the trust building thing we call "law" and laws against "robbery" must be doing some good.
And in defense of the person complaining about the .so file, it was, IIRC, not designed in the first
place as a library. They took his program, librarified it (under the GPL), then "just linked"
to it, to create their program.
And the point is, you're not allowed to link to GPL code, unless yours is GPL'ed. Sorta like "you can't link to our library without paying".
You arguments against the GPL have much in common with Microsoft's; including that they are mostly FUD. This helps Microsoft, not Open Source.
-- Buddy
While I too dislike the GPL and think it is bound to fail (in the sense that it will never reach its inspirations), I must say that your point of view is simply ridiculous.
First, the economic gains that we have made have not (for the most par) been in the form of increased employment of programmers and related staff. It is based on increased productivity. If GPL were to ever replace propreitary software in the work place, it would surely do it on the basis of increased efficiency. In other words, GPLs success would not hurt the economy, if anything it would help it, because it would have to be better to succeed. The number of lost shrink-wrapped programming positions would be relatively nominal and those programmers would almost certainly find other programming jobs developing software for corporations (which is where most programmers work).
Second, this point of view is simply ridiculous, assuming you do indeed believe in the free market. The free market is about letting the best product, service, or person win, free from arbitrary regulations, tarrifs, and the like. If it has enough staying power to really hurt programming positions, it is better, let it succeed. In the long run, we would all benefit.
That said, my reasons for disliking the GPL is as follows: First, I think advocates and defenders of its license are rather disingenuous in their defense. They claim GPL is a gift. Well fine, it is a gift, no one is making any one use it. But it is a limited gift, in the sense that it puts all sorts of stipulations on its use that do not exist naturally, in any shape, way, or form. What's more, their authority to enforce those limitations (which is really the only way they differentiate GPL from any other number of open licenses) is based on the same laws that proprietary software is based on. Second, its current sofware is of limited use to the vast majority of the public, not to mention myself. [The proof is in the pudding, how many people actually use it? Baring daemons like sendmail, apache, and the like, which are being replaced]. Third, it does its damnest to prevent investment in software, since the backers have very little chance of making a satisfactory return. [Yes, we've all heard the support argument, but how does _actually_ funding software development entitle you to "support" any better than anyone else? Sure, RedHat, IBM, and the like have made some, but it's chump change, not nearly as much as propreitary software gets per user hour.]. Fourth, it's organization is severely hampered by its openness. As contradictory as that sounds, there is real value in having CENTRALIZED control. While de-centralization itself can be a virtue, I judge this to be far less valuable than loss of centralization.
In other words, I don't see GPL as a credible threat to programmers. I also don't see it as a credible threat or benefit to consumers. Some companies may try it, a handful of people may lose their jobs, some GPL (or free) software may be thrown into the laps of consumers, but, by and large, it will not reach large enough proprortions to be terribly relevant to anyone.
The problem with the GPV is that it is not a true form of sharing, but a coercive one. Sharing at gunpoint isn't sharing, it's theft.
When was sharing mentioned?
To stupid to even read a dozen paragraphs are you? Just spouting off the usual garbage without bothering to check what was being claimed...
Which corporations are taking the lead in publicly supporting free software? No big surprise: It's companies like IBM, HP, Sun, SGI, and Apple - all of which traditionally make most of their money from selling hardware and services. It is very much to their benefit to give customers added incentive to keep buying their boxes, so they'll lower the price of their software if that's what it takes.
And this is the way it should be.
Hardware has significant material cost. The cost of making hardware scales with the number of units produced. The marginal cost of producing additional units includes a significant amount of labor and parts. This is not the case with software. The marginal cost of producing additional units of software is approaches zero.
It makes sense that, over time, certain classes of software cease to have any commercial value, whereas hardware continues to have a cost. This is natural. For a company to insist on charging the same price for the same software in perpetuity or, even worse, compel customers to purchase their copy over and over again, is distinctly unnatural.
Eventually, that method will fail. It's not nice to mess with Mother Nature.
IBM, et al. have figured this out. They are positioning themselves to be able to prosper in a marketplace where many classes of software are free. They have decided not to waste their energy trying to paddle upstream. Certain other companies have figured this out, and are doing their best to fight the inevitable. They will emit a lot of heat before they collapse.
Noone is forced to pay the money unless they actually want to. If noone can be arsed to make the improvements and release it under the BSD (there is nothing to stop them doing it) then maybe the motivation of money will get it done.
Maintaining compatibility with the "improvements" can be quite tricky when the source is closed. Even worse, it could in some cases be illegal due to patents.
An easy source for an older popularization of the concepts behind this article is "The Selfish Gene" by R. Dawkins. I think that it's still in print, but I haven't checked for a few years.
Also, most modern books on either game theory or ethology would give you the background that you feel to be missing. But I like the Dawkins presentation. It's easy, accessible, and gives a fine basis for generalizations without the need to go into the math.
(If you like the math, try some Game Theory books. But they are generally heavier going.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I don't think that you understand game theory. It's true, that the author of this piece was only looking at a small piece of the model. This is, however, necessary. The model is huge. And it can (in principle) does include the kind of social interactions that you describe.
The thing is, if we want to understand it, we need to take a small piece, and model a toy system. If we were to implement it fully, I doubt that the Blue Genes computer would be powerful enough to do the analysis.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Kereberos wasn't under the GPL. And the field was not put there to enable proprietary extensions.
If Kereberos had been under the GPL, then MS couldn't have pulled that embrace and extend trick unless, somehow, they were able to patent their extension.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
1) Some of the proponents of the GPL believe that all software should be Free. This is not a cornerstone of the GPL.
2) The GPL insists that all code based on code which has been licensed under the GPL should, itself, be licensed under the GPL. And to that extent it asserts that descendant code should be "Free" (i.e., GPLed).
3) Other licenses, designed to optimize other things, are Free in slightly different senses. (And, of course, with some of the licenses, the word free is a total misnomer. MSWord, e.g., is not free, except in the warez sense.)
4) Deciding what is the "natural state" is a peculiar exercise. I don't find the concept useful. If you do, perhaps you could explain what that means, and how you decided on how to determine it. (Software only exists in the context of a culture that is sophisticated enough to contain computers, so "natural state" would seem to need to include that society.)
5) The term reciprocal altruism from (in my experience) Dawkins "The Selfish Gene" seems to be a better mapping for the concept that the GPL is attempting (so far rather successfully) to create.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Actually, I think that they can even sell GPLed code (that they didn't write). (I'd need to reread the license to be sure.) What they can't do is forbid their customers from redistributing. And they must provide their customers with the source. And license their work under the GPL.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I don't beleive the theory that the money would be made off support. If that is so, no one will be developping the software.
Here's why people will develop the software. If you are supporting the software you have knowledge about where the bugs are which makes it much easier for you to fix them. Furthermore, the more solid the product you are offering, the more likely you can sell it and related support contracts. So it is definitely in your vested interest to contribute to the code.
Furthermore, if you contribute to the code, you'll have a far more intimate knowledge about it, making it much easier for you to diagnose and solve problems in the future. This means reduced time that you have to spend on support calls which means greater efficiency and revenue. It's also much easier to sell your services when you can say, "we've got 10 guys on staff who wrote most of the code so we know how to support it."
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Personally I feel most comfortable contributing to the GPL because I know that nobody is going to come along and lock away my work in their own proporietary software. Wouldn't it piss you off slightly if you put years of hard work into a projet and the Microsoft came along and hacked your code to be subtly incompatible and then released it without source code? You can try to argue that if your product is better it will win, but then your product may not be bundled with every computer sold to the public
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Event A causes loss of value iff total value is lower in the world where A happened compared to world that is otherwise identical except that A didn't happen. And so pirating is loss, and so BSD parasites do cause loss through inhibition of growth. Saying that "since you didn't *absolutely* lose, you didn't lose at all when someone parasited your code" is like saying "software pirates don't hurt the industry" is like saying "you won in lottery, a bus full of money was driving to give them to you but I raided the bus before you even know you won".
OK, so my analogues are weird. Whatever.
- Kaatunut
- Kaatunut
I still don't see the difference between the so-called "potential" and "actual" in this case. Both cause you to have less money. The difference?
I used the steal-lottery-money example because it had a similar properties; that you didn't lose anything you already had. As for the property, well, some would argue that property in itself isn't a universal law, but I'd argue...
The lottery money is bound to come to you if I won't steal it, and likewise, software sales money is bound to come to you unless someone pirates your software. What is the difference? Some 'moral' value? That stealing lottery money is wrong because this money "belongs" to you, whereas pirating your software is wrong because the money that would have come from sales... what? Doesn't belong to you?
- Kaatunut
If the pirates wouldn't have bought the software, I agree with you. However, if they would have, I maintain: what's the difference? The lottery money belonged? How is this belonging different from my software sales money belonging to me?
The lottery money "belongs" to me in the sense that the former owner of the money (lottery company) promised this money would be delivered to me to be used in any way that I wish. This software sales money belongs to me in the same sense that the software buyers promise to deliver me the money upon buying. Whether this delivery happens now or in the future is irrelevant; to understate this, I said "but the lottery money is not yet delivered".
If my analogues are too weak for you (I hate analogues anyways, they're for religious people) and if you're still there, just tell me this: why is (to not gain any money INSTEAD OF gaining X money) different from (to lose X money INSTEAD of not gaining any money)? The former being piracy, the latter theft, in both cases 1) the end sum difference is the same (-X), 2) both were justified means of gaining money.
Or do you dispute the 'justified'? Why is it less justified to gain money by zero-copy-cost mechanisms? Do you quibble about material items with extremely low production costs sold for high prices too? As I see it, in free market the point is not how expensive the product was to make (the production cost for producer is IRRELEVANT as far as the customer is concerned) but what customers are ready to pay for it.
- Kaatunut
Did I misread something? The first quote seemed to make you agree with me that piracy is theft is the pirate was going to buy the software and pirating made him decide otherwise. By the third quote, must we now conclude that all pirates only pirate software they wouldn't buy?
My argument never was that all pirates are thieves. I'm simply saying that those who would otherwise have bought the software are. Is there an agreement on this or not?
- Kaatunut
When I give you a copy of free software that I've written, I lost nothing
To be precise, the marginal cost of giving someone else a copy is negligible. I'd suggest that the cost of giving someone a copy of your software = (Value of your time)*(Hours spent coding and copying) / (number of copies made). I'd suggest that if you spend five years of your life coding THE software solution, and give all the copies away for free, then all of them together cost you five years of your life - hardly nothing.
Yup! There are perfectly valid reasons to use the GPL, but "protecting the software" is not one of them. The software is already protected. No company can steal it. No company can damage it. They can do all sorts of nasty things to derivations of the software, but the original software is inviolate. Nothing Microsoft could possibly do with a "M$Linux" would affect any Redhat or Debian user in the slightest. Their copies are still on their hard drives untouched.
If you want to make your software freely available, distributable and modifiable by all, the the BSD license is more than sufficient.
Reciprocal altruism is just another name for enlightened self interest. It's a fancy name for "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine".
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
One of the reasons that I like to use these packages is that the code is freely available to all, and that will always be true. That gives me some extra assurance that any investment of time I make in these programs will always be open, to me and everyone else.
But the BSD license has these very same assurances! Your software will always be freely available to all people. There's nothing a company can possible do to your code to change this. Your code will still be there. All of your users' copies of your code will still be there. If you have a thriving community of developers, they will still be there. Derivation does not make the orignal suddenly disappear. You cannot steal what is free. The GPL is sufficient if you want to prevent companies from using your code without reciprocal compensation, but it is not necessary to assure your code's freedom.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
If you post source code on a website, it will remain their as long as the website does. It keeps on giving. If other people also post your code, it keeps on giving faster. Regardless of license. It is most definitely NOT a one-time gift.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
A M$Office that only runs on M$Linux does not *damage* Redhat or Debian. None of their code base is affected at all. Their code is still protected. Microsoft hasn't changed it at all.
Like I said, it is not necessary to use the GPL to protect code. However, there may be OTHER reasons to use it. Preventing damage to Redhat's corporate mindshare/marketshare in Linux is one. I'm sure you can think of others. But the protection of the code is already assured.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
A company can hijack your user community ... you will lose your users.
This isn't feudalism and you aren't a feudal lord. Users are not serfs. They are not tied to your code. YOU DO NOT OWN YOUR USERS!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
No, you don't. The reason you trust your neighbor is because you have faith that he has learned that killing you is wrong. I'm pretty sure you're not willing to sacrifice your life thinking that the society will punish him/her.
>>The only people who get stuck in this situation are large corporations.
The only people you hear about are the large corporations, and even they don't get much attention. The "little people" won't even get any attention. Nobody gets any help.
If you are a company doing software development for hire, it is undesirable to lose your users! It ain't feudalism, it's making choices in order to maintain the customer relationship. The GPL offers insurance against a competitor who wants to unfairly reuse your work while keeping his own work proprietary. There is someone out there with a vested interest in taking away your users and you would be foolish to ignore that fact when selecting a license.
Microsofts lawyers seem to agree that the GPL is enforceable, since we havent seen any MS-Linux
(just a silly example, I dont expect MS to want to return to Unix-type software)
I don't think lack of an MS-Linux proves much, but it is implicit in their objections to the GPL that they think it works.
The FSF disagree with you.
They say, and I qoute: "at least one application program is free software today specifically because that was necessary for using Readline."
Which is completely irrelevant to the discussion. The question was whether or not people were being forced to do anything. Your quote relates to someone wanting to use Readline. There's simply no connection.
You might as well say "people are forced at gunpoint to pay Lotus money, it's simply theft" and then support it by quoting Lotus as saying that people who wanted to use their software had to pay. There is no force, there is no gun, it is not theft, not even by analogy.
Put something under the GPL and you cast it to the four winds. Forget about using it as a source of income, unless of course you're Redhat who sells the convenience of a linux distribution ready to go on CD. That kind of model won't work for other things that are neither that large nor that complex. Take mozilla for example, is anyone ever going to make money from selling it? Am I supposed to go out and pay money to get it on CD when the download is only a few minutes on my DSL connection? I don't think so. AOL is never going to make any money of Mozilla, it exists soley as a trump card in their dealings with Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that open source/free software is bad, I'm simply pointing out that the idea anyone is going to get paid for their work is absurd. At most it will be something they can put on a resume so someone else will pay them more to develop software that isn't open source. The handful of exceptions such as developers at RedHat or IBM are just that, exceptions. If an IBM developer is paid to develop GPL'd software it is because IBM is making the money to pay him with non-GPL products. Some guy working in his garage on a pet project isn't going to see one red dime. This is something that we need to accept. Pretending and proclaiming otherwise is simply going to put off those bright enough to see the truth. If there is anything that almost everyone dislikes its being bullshitted. We've grown used to it from people and organizations we don't trust. Getting it from the open source crowd is simply going to make people distrust it as well.
Tell it like it is, not how you think people want it to be.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
When I write and release software, trust doesn't enter into it. It's my gift to the world. Eric Raymond's comparison of free software to other gift economies is very accurate for me. Take what I've made and use it. Make the world a better place. If it has to be proprietary, so be it.
This sort of unconditional gift isn't possible with the GPL, so I use the BSD license. As long as there are a few others doing the same, we can keep it up forever. This isn't a competition. We can all win.
--
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
While I don't want to dismiss this line of reasoning too casually, I think it overlooks a far more important form of trust.
The reason I trust that my neighbor will not murder me in my sleep is that I trust society at large to enact retribution (prison time) on my behalf. The state has absolutely no obligation to protect me (despite what the "we must think of the children!" crowd thinks), but it does have an obligation to enforce its laws. One of those laws requires a reasonable effort to find my killer, and that is what keeps me safe.
But this trust is semi-optional - if I am fearful for my safety, I can take actions on my own. I can obtain a guard dog, or study a martial art. In many parts of the US I can even keep a gun in the nightstand.
What does this have to do with software?
UCITA. To a lesser extent, the DMCA. The apparent inability or unwillingless of the government to deal with a proven predatory monopolist.
In social terms, software (and other media) rights are arguably closer to a feudal model than a democratic one. We are asked to trust that Lord Bill, who can literally do no wrong, will not harm us. If he does, we have no rights.
This trust is mandatory - we must trust our software providers, and are legally unable to act to reduce our perceived risk.
For instance, we have to trust that UCITA, the DMCA, and a mandatory subscription model won't result in a situation where our critical data is held in a proprietary format that we can no longer access because the product was discontinued (and technical self-help caused the software to self-destruct), and no tools are available to extract the data in other forms because of the DMCA and anti-reverse-engineering provisions.
In contrast, the open licenses make this trust optional again. I can trust that 'gcc' will always be available... or I can keep backup copies of the source, and the source for everything needed to compile it, on hand.
I think most people will be concerned with this form of trust, not the "gift culture" that motivates developers.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I hope this isn't true.
Copyright protects expressions of ideas, not ideas themselves. Through a process known as "clean rooming," Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter, can effectively produce their own code based upon the algorithms embodied in any GPL code.
This isn't reciprocally true, by the way. To the extent that Microsoft relies upon patents and retains trade secrets and ownership to the title of copies of their program, Microsoft may well be able to stop effective reverse engineering or clean rooming. (And this has nothing to do with UCITA, BTW -- these protections existed under applicable IP laws, the common law and the UCC.)
I always found it funny that, in a backhanded way, the GNU project is just one more thing Xerox invented.
--
$ find
For authors, GPL'd code is an exchange.
--
Actually, this is largely due to the fact that Hercules was originally written on Linux, and the original developer didn't worry too much about other OSes. One of my ongoing tasks is to make Hercules pure ANSI C to remove the dependency on egcs; this is not so much for philosophical reasons as it is for portability reasons. Hercules doesn't run only on Linux or Windows, BTW; it's in the FreeBSD and NetBSD packages collections, and has been reported to run on AIX with minor modifications.
Hercules is distributed under the QPL, which appears to me to be only marginally less restrictive than the GPL (and more like the LGPL), including some language that looks very much like a 'coercive form of sharing' (with the "maintainer", at least).
The QPL is the license that most closely matches the original author's desires on licensing while still being an OSD-compliant license. The original author is even more hard over than I am about the GPV, BTW. (Bet you didn't know that was possible...) When I write code by myself to share with others, I do use a BSDish license.
I don't think Chip disagrees, either.
I do...else why would he say " it would be tempting for those of us who don't identify with ``Free Software'' to use as our primary reply that ``Open Source is more than the GPL.'' That would be a mistake."?
You arguments against the GPL have much in common with Microsoft's; including that they are mostly FUD. This helps Microsoft, not Open Source.
"There is no idea so good that you will not find a fool who supports it." -- Larry Niven
Not even Microsoft is wrong 100% of the time. As for FUD, if raisiing real issues with something is FUD, then it's a lot more prevalent than you would otherwise think.
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Not in my plans. Neither is getting sued by the FSF, should it ever decide that they need to actually sue someone instead of just blustering.
Misquote and misunderstand RMS, and sttempting to drag his name through mud. Fuck you.
I do not believe I'm either misquoting or misunderstanding him; I'm merely taking his ideas to their conclusion, and raising what I believe to be legitimate objections to that conclusion.
Further, RMS has made himself a public figure, and having his name dragged through the mud (though I do not agree that that's what I'm doing) comes with the territory. This objection is typically raised by cultists about the leader of their cult; is that the image you really wish to portray?
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
What if you're selling software? The GPL prevents other companies from using the old "embrace and extend" trick.
Not even a little bit. There's nothing to prevent a M$ from implementing their own version of a program and using that as the basis for an e&e tactic. The most commonly cited example of this, Kerberos, isn't even an example: not only could M$ have done so if their other choice was to use a GPVed implementation, but the premise is a fallacy...since the field they used to implement their extension was put in the Kerberos spec SPECIFICALLY for that purpose!
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Code well, and your code (think DNA) survives and evolves. Code badly, and your code (DNA) dwindles and dies.
This is true of any open source software package, not just those licensed with the GPV.
We can thusly conclude that all that oppose the GPL are weenies that don't 'trust' natural evolutionary forces, and demand protection from them.
This is true of those who oppose open source software; it is nto true of those, like me, who oppose the GPV but support the larger concept of open source.
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Unless you're being literal.
You have a CHOICE of whether you contribute.
The GPL sets the rules for that contribution.
If you don't agree, don't contribute!
It's just that simple folks!
--Remove chicken to e-mail
... GPL explicitly denies the software itself as a source of revenue ...
No, it doesn't. You can sell GPLed software. You just can't do so EXCLUSIVELY - somebody else could start selling it, or giving it away, once they have a copy.
That doesn't mean they WILL. And it doesn't mean that, if they do, your market will dry up entirely. Think: Did you buy the distribution of Linux you last loaded, or did you download it from the net?
Yes the financial model pays you for the service you provide rather than the software itself. But even with proprietary software a very large component of the price is for the service rather than the underlying code. People buy software for what it will do, not what it is, and when they pay they expect support.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Microsoft wants to (or already does) use GPL'ed code but does not want to release what they did with it.
If so, I'd bet it was incorporated by low-level workers, in violation of the company's policies and the wishes of the upper management. Too much of Microsoft's business model is built on keeping the source to themselves for an exec to risk having to give it all away for a few extra features - or even a lot of very powerful features.
Especially since the GPL doesn't stop you from reverse-engineering the code and writing your own equivalent to create the feature! It even allows a single person to do this - though a large company would want to "clean-room" it, with one team doing the analysis and another the coding, to avoid risk of conatmination with enough code snippets to cross the boundary between a genre member with fair-use quotes and a derived work.
GPL and the other open-source licenses are built on copyright - which protects an expression - not on patent - which protects an idea. (Despite the way some companies are trying to stretch copyright into a super-patent.)
And the open-source social contract (not to be confused with the Social Contract license B-) ) is this:
- Here's what I did. Some nice ideas, and a lot of drudgework to make it run.
- You like it? Use it.
- You tweak it and keep it to yourself? That's fine.
- You tweak it and sell it, or give it away?
- Don't keep the tweaks to yourself,
- don't keep ME from using your tweaks, and
- make sure everybody else who gets it does the same.
- (You want to take the ideas and do your OWN drudgework to make another version run? And sell that? And NOT share the guts? I can't stop you. Just don't use the fruit of MY drudgework in YOUR version.)
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 we really trusted people, we would simply give them the code free of license and trust that they would do the right thing. Many licenses (the BSD license, the Artistic license, etc.) go much further in this direction than the GPL. But even those licenses exhibit a lack of trust, because the reality is that there are some untrustworthy folks out there.
People on this thread are obsessing about details and evading the issues. That's sad, because this is an important topic. Altruism is a slippery subject. That's why when the The Selfish Gene came along it was such a big event. The selfishness was still there, you just had to look in a different place.
Chip is discussing cultural altruism, the idea that communities can adopt altruistic social conventions. The GPL itself has two faces. Stallman had a selfish motivation for creating the GPL community: his own convenience. The GPL community is an altruistic culture, but only mildly so compared to the normal context of debate.
Think about bats exchanging blood meals. One night you feed well and return to the nest to find your buddy on the verge of starvation. So you cough up a blood meal. There's goes desert. Then you hit a dry spell and now you are verging on starvation. You see your buddy return to the nest with a fat belly. He turns away. You die. The term for this behaviour is "defection". It's stupid to look for altruism in a context where defection doesn't inflict real harm.
It's not easy to decide what behaviour in the GLP community counts as defection. Stallman created the GPL in an era of scarcity. Good quality code in those days was difficult to obtain. Now we are in an era where the code we have is as much of a problem as the code we don't have. It's quite possible that trolls are doing the most harm to the GPL community.
I try to figure out why Stallman felt so injured by his inability to access other people's changes. I think his ambitions weren't compatible with duplication of effort. He needed to cajole people into cooperation in order to get where he wanted to go. That was a different time. These days software has become an enormous ecology. In a large ecology, there are always niches. Niches promote diversity, and diversity is usually good.
One of the key functions of a healthy ecology is colonizing new resources. When new hardware comes out, the gcc toolchain is often the first spoor. gcc is like the worms in the soil that make it possible for plants to set down roots. Regardless what vegetation comes and goes, the worms need to be there. I think the GPL makes a lot of sense in that niche. However, it's definitely a mistake to think that the GPL is the only approach to homeostatic altruism or that the ecosystem doesn't benefit from a diversity of approach.
Would the security of OpenBSD be improved by adopting the GPL? It makes me laugh to even think about it. A secure OS hardly wants to apply every patch that's floating around. In this context abundance is a bigger threat than scarcity. Here, take the code, go away! Leave us alone! Our classical GPL notion of defection (playing with your marbles in a tree fort) makes no sense at all. Does any thread of defection remain? If defection doesn't apply, none of Chip's arguments about altruism have any bearing.
If OpenBSD does not survive on the basis of policing altruism, how does it survive? (Isn't that a more interesting question than predicting its doom?) I find the theory of absorbing boundaries more applicable in this context. Altruism is a social theory. Nothing stirs debate like a social theory. In that sense, altruism is a selfish meme entirely in its own right. Absorbing boundaries are abstract and dull.
Let's peel away altruism's self promotion, and look at some other possibilities here. To begin with, OpenBSD is not terribly dependent on growth. In fact, OpenBSD actively resists growth wherever possible. Security and growth are not often on speaking terms. What OpenBSD does appreciate are contributions which fix or simplify the existing system. The scarcity the OpenBSD team confronts is their own ability to review the code base. Nothing makes their life easier in that department than having less code, or less cluttered code.
But let's suppose Theo gets a brain tumour and decides he needs an aggressively protectionist license. The dirty bastards must give something back! How would he write an OpenBSD GPL? No one can use OpenBSD until after they've submitted an approved patch to the OpenBSD team? Just what would make their lives easier: a pro-troll license.
We'd have to add an anti-troll provision. If you submit three patches which contain bugs, shoot yourself. Ask a question from the FAQ three times, climb into the OpenBSD powered baby mulcher. A Darwinian license would be a nice thing, but I don't think it would accelerate progress on OpenBSD.
An interesting example of OpenBSD thriving is the KAME IPv6 extensions which have been donated to the BSD lineage by a consortium of seven Japanese companies. None of this work is under the GPL that I've ever seen. This is the heartland of the inter-op niche. I don't think it hurts anyone that the KAME implementation can be used in any context. The valuable commodity here is conceptual experience. Would it make sense to impose an agglutinating license like the GPL? I don't think so.
On reflection, it makes more sense to think of your code being incorporated into OpenBSD being a privilege rather than an obligation. Even supposing you write a perfect piece of code, the world changes. If your perfect routine is hidden away in a proprietary system whose going to notice when the world changes in a way which violates your requirements for correct operation? Not only do the modules need to remain correct, but the interactions need to remain correct. How about contributing your component back to OpenBSD? Now you have a group of clever and decidated people paying a lot of attention to potential problems and you aren't paying them for the service they are offering you. Amazing!
There are lots of reasons why people will continue to contribute back to BSD even if the license doesn't compel it. What's strange about the GPL is the currency of return even makes sense. This can only be the case when quantity matters as much as quality. The GPL community has a very aggressive process of assimilating crap. It eats crap and shits food. (Sometimes after more than one iteration.) That alone should make it clear that the GPL is an odd corner of the ecology.
If the selfish altruism argument carried any real weight, we wouldn't be using the GPL. We'd be using an anti-DMCA license. This software is free to everyone, except those people who profit from making it illegal for us to determine how things work so that we can add support to our platform.
Finally a definition of "defection" red in tooth and claw. If anything is going to bring down the GPL or BSD communities, it's a legal context where you can't write the code in the first place.
Another area where the GPL falls flat is in code re-use. The GPL is very effective at encouraging code re-use at the component level (i.e. via linkage). But that's not the whole story. Object oriented designs encourage run-time re-use; generic designs encourage compile time re-use. The LGPL covers components, but it isn't much use for generic code.
Generic code exists to make the implementation space easier to navigate. It doesn't have much to do with the finished product. Code re-use at this level makes the most sense if everyone re-uses it. The scarcity here is in compatible skill sets. This an area where you really don't want niches. We all know about languages whose name includes a number.
Wouldn't it be better when the day comes that a proprietary chunk of code gets donated back to the community that the proprietary code is already based on the same generic libraries? The GPL does not encourage that. A generic source code library hardly needs the GPL to enforce community. Re-use is a community almost by definition.
The GPL doesn't appeal to me much. I've never been that interested in peering over my shoulder to see how other people are getting on.
All the things I'm interested in working on I find are already under the BSD licenese. Often the ideas are more valuable than the source code anyway.
I see the GPL as being an inherently materialistic license based on the view that source code is an intrinsically valuable commodity. 90% of the code I've seen I'd only maintain at gunpoint. Stallman must get more pleasure than I do at realizing everyone else's version of the same code is worse still.
To make the GPL non-materialistic, it would have to control ideas. I'll really laugh the first time I see a GPL patent granted. "This patent is free for all to use, but patents which cites this patent must also be GPL'd"
Is that the view of the world the GPL community wishes to take?
I can't help but paraphrase an American senate review panel on the subject of selfishness: Q: Does the staggering sum of money we are spending on this supercolider in any way help to defend the American people? A: The staggering sum of money we are spending on this supercolider makes America worth defending.
I'm disappointed to see Chip take such a narrow position on the role of political altruism. I think creativity is its own reward, and that creativity flourishes best where politics is practiced least.
Uhhhh how silly!
And what a good answer to my questions either!
If you were a core programmer working on the linux kernel, you'd already have an appreciation for the fact that no one needs to prove their right to redistribute code that you wrote and they either did or did not modify. No one has to ask your
permission, because you already gave it openly. If you feel that they are parasites, don't license it under the GPL.
If I like to work on GPLed code, I'm required to release my work under GPL, I think you know that.
So back to my code question:
Is there a way to live from writing GPLed code?
I would say: writing for 15 years GPLed code while living from the parents money, to get famous , and then being called into a supervisory board of a new upcomming company does not count(that happens far to rarely).
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I can only see that the author makes certain claimes.
.... At that front it is clear how to make money: claim a GPL code mine, make distributions for the stuff you mine and sell them .... that heavyly sounds like a standard proprietary business.
Numbered from 1. to 3.
But where are the proofs?
e.g.:
3. The GPL is good for business. Companies that use the GPL are neither foolish nor stupid.
They simply want to trust that other companies won't be able to take unfair advantage of them,
and the GPL gives them that immediate security while simultaneously allowing open cooperation. And in the general case, the GPL is a friend of business because it makes new and better efficiencies possible, and economies thrive on new and better efficiencies.
If I where a core programmer working on the linux kernel in my spare time, I would consider companies which make linux distributions as parasits, taking an unfair advantage from my work (not giving me any refundings).
Unfortunatly there are only few companies comming up to my mind releasing GPLed code *NOT* working on linux distributions.
So where are the companies the author is talking about? Giving away GPLed code?
What code is that (kind of applications)?
How do they make their money? (What is the service they offer?)
Frankly: the only way I like to live is making code and sell it.
I have no clue how to make a living with GPLed code (I make mey living as consultant, and make nearly no code, all companies which I programmed for filed bancruptcy. Now I founded my own one, but I still rely on SELLING the code!)
Unfortunalty, the standard litarature from RMS and ESR do not cover how a smal team, of lets say 10 programemrs can lvie from GPLed code, not to talk about living from not gPLed code.
Everybody only makes claims and abstract conclusins from the claims, but no proofs.
BTW: a decent linux installation costs 3 times from a decent Win2k installation
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Dunno, and don't care. I think companies should make profit on providing goods or services, not because they are granted a monopoly on an "idea". Greedy people don't like this, though, 'cause then they have to keep working for their dough instead of doing some upfront work, then sitting back & raking it in.
Interesting point.
But while it doesn't deny anyone the ability to profit from their labor, it also doesn't provide a mechanism for them to profit.
The GPL is essentially silent on how you exchange code for money, and I think it is right to be skeptical of that missing element, since without it there isn't a source of money to invest in the next generation of the system.
Of course there are lots of possibilities... Eric Raymond has spent several years looking at the various possibilities. I find myself unconvinced of their effectiveness however.
Redhat for example is really supported in a way that is more similar to NPR than it is to Eric's idea of loss-leader plus support. VA on the other hand doesn't seem very effective at earning money at all. And neither of these companies is able to collect enough income to really support the development that is going in to their products.
Repayment in kind (as the original article suggests) by keeping the software free certainly attracts a few people, but by its nature these people must be supported somehow.
I think the GPL would benefit from some sort of a right of taxation. Either as a duty to a non-profit which then redistributes the income to various developers, or as voluntary payment. But without some evidence that the development can continue to grow in the long term, skeptics who are not able or willing to maintain their own software will seek out an alternative social system that has a future that they can count on.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
What is wrong with BSD style licenses is that they lead to people feeling like a sucker. How would you have liked your terminal emulation code to end up in the windows NT Telnet program? hummm.... That would suck big-time. Any scumbag can come along, take your code, and make minor additions or just combine your code and a 3rd party's code and make a proprietary product. You would have not any rights to it, and your work would enrich someone else. ie you would be a sucker.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
At least one has - Slackware. Profitable from day one. Still profitable today. Not huge, no, but profitable. A small company with a small group of paid programmers that keep their target audience very happy.
Anyway, it's not quite correct to say that the GPL denies software revenue, although it certainly makes it tricky.
The future probably has room for quite a few successful ventures using GPL, but it may well be that only smaller ones like slack will be successful and releasing everything as Free Software, while larger companies will need to embrace the movement to some extent, but maintain some proprietary level, either in making hardware or keeping their top items pay-only. That's not really a problem. If you really need a large, complicated program with the most cutting edge features then you probably won't mind to pay for it. But eventually, when that cutting edge program ages a bit and is no longer cutting edge, it may well be cloned or freed regardless, and one will only need to pay if one really needs the newest features. In this fashion the best of both worlds can be achieved - companies that spend money programming the latest and greatest can make their money back and profit on top of that, but they can't turn the program into an indefinate license to print money either, and the stultifying effect on innovation and computer science excessive proprietarization causes will be almost completely avoided.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
If you were a core programmer working on the linux kernel, you'd already have an appreciation for the fact that no one needs to prove their right to redistribute code that you wrote and they either did or did not modify. No one has to ask your permission, because you already gave it openly. If you feel that they are parasites, don't license it under the GPL.
If you don't want to give stuff away, then don't. Just remember that the rest of the world gives to us far more than we can ever give back.
Go ahead and make arguments, but saying stuff like "GPV" and making overzealous analogies makes you sound like the kind of person who writes "Micro$oft"; that is, not very convincing.
One advantage that the employer gets is to direct its employees to produce software which meets its particular needs. Is that enough? I think so, but maybe there's more...
There's are several big leaps here, but very little insight. How did you come to these conclusions?
The most glaring omission in my eyes is the fact that you don't reconcile the difference between altruisim with traditional goods (ones that have physical identitity and which "go away" when you give them to somebody) and the kind of sharing we do in the "open source" community. Here, "parasites" making copies of our work doesn't reduce our ability to use our own copies. (This is one of the founding principles of the GPL, in fact.) Therefore, parasites aren't much like parasites at all.
I think the GPL is great, personally, but I don't think I follow your argument.
But it helps...
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Because it adopts that favorite tactic of Communists, denying someone the ability to profit from the fruits of one's own labor. The viral nature of the GPV prevents someone from profiting from his own work.
You just don't seem to get it. It's not about denying someone the ability to profit from their own labor. It's about denying someone else the ability to profit from your labor.
Go release your own code under a different license and let others release their code under the GPL. That's what freedom of choice is about.
Your use of Microsoft FUD on the GPL makes me laugh. You don't seem to get the fact that the so called "viral" property of the GPL is a good thing. It's just being called a bad name in the hope that something bad will rub off on it.
"
As I see it, if Alice (the original author of a piece of software) chooses to go the GPL way she makes the choice to make her source code freely available. She is presumably aware that it will be quite difficult to get people to pay for it, on the grounds of the parasitism effect mentioned in the article. She expresses her desire to keep all future versions of her software free by choosing the GPL, over say, the BSD license. That may be because she doesn't like the idea of others profiting from her hard work, by simply releasing her software in binary form under a new name with minor additions, under a different license, demanding payment. She may not mind that others simply use it (in the GPL sense) without payment and in exchange contribute improvements to her software. It is her right as the original author to make this choice.
Noone has forced her at gunpoint to release her software under the GPL, but in a sense she forces others at gunpoint (the gun being the law) to adhere to the license under which her software was released. The point I was trying to make in my post was that she could just as well choose to release her software under a different license if her motive was to profit as much as possible from her work. That is not something the GPL can forbid her.
G Neric got it right. I didn't mention the issues (s)he brings up because I was merely addressing the profit issue brought up by Maynard.
Right. There is no element of force in the GPL. If you don't want to share your work with the world, don't use GPL'd code in your work. That seems pretty simple to me.
If you want MS or Apple to make monopoly profits from your efforts, then use something like the BSD license for your work. That seems pretty simple too.
Use whatever license you please for your own work. Don't whine when others don't see it your way, and use some other license for their work.
There's room in the Open Source movement for lots of different licenses.
There is lots of room in the opensource movement for different licenses, but some of us want more than just opensource. The people who don't like liberty don't have to have it. The rest of us will continue to lean towards the GPL.
See what I've been reading.
I don't know if my place of work qualifies, but it is getting close. We have a small handful of products. Some have always been free (mostly on BSD-style licences). We have just decided to drop commercial licences for our last product, and go with GPL. We sell support for the stuff, and also custom development. We may still sell licences of the big product for customers who rather pay us than accept GPL, although I expect that to be a rare thing.
This company, Index Data, has survived with this business model for 5 years now, and grown from 2 people to 8. Not big enough to rival Microsoft, but a well established company in its own right.
In Murphy We Turst
A simple exmaple: How many Palm-OS units conversion software are there out there that charge money? I remember searching for this a while a ago and I turned up AT LEAST 10 of them.
Open Source is not meant to solve that type of inefficiency. For reasons of ego and pride, such things will always exist.
We cannot in good conscience, deprive buggy-whip manufacturers of their revenue. To do so would be IMMORAL and UNECONOMIC.
Not giving him the printer source to solve his printing problems also caused RMS misery.
Economics should be put into service of people, not the other way around.
If economics was all that important, all males should be pimps, and all women prostitues. You can make an economy work that way (there are some details that need to be worked out). Then everyone can have a job and be gainfully employed. That will work too.
If you decide to learn a new skill and get out of that market, more power to you.
If you decide to change your business model and cater to a different type of client, good.
If you decide to think hard and come out with a better license than the GPL that gives you what you want, and also caters to your customers needs, excellent!
Getting a lawyer to sue RMS? Fuck you.
Misquote and misunderstand RMS, and sttempting to drag his name through mud. Fuck you.
Complaining and griping on slashdot? Ha. Let us laugh at you.
Technology "...total technical means and skills available to a given society..." - Cassel Concise English Dictionary. More broadly it can connote the application of science to the industrial capabilities of a society. Technology depends at a minimum on the trial and error application of physical principles to physical problems. Thus the hammer is the earliest solution to a technical problem ". . . may be if I hit it hard enough. . ."
Law and contracts are NOT technology, never were and never will be. They are arbitrary social agreements or conventions. No science is involved. Anyone who disagrees is invited to watch C-SPAN in order to detect the functioning of science in the legislatorial environment. Since legislators have been known to back legally setting PI equal to three, the detection of science in the process is likely to be difficult. Furthermore law is backed by the threat of social or government sanction. It is not dependent on trust. Those guys carry guns in the black-and-white sedans are not exercising social trust. They represent pure, unadulterated threat. So, in short, the GPL is also dependent on law and the use of social sanction for inforcement. Just because GPL talks softly does not mean that object is not a big stick behind its back. Evidently MS does not like the idea of this.
jwdougherty
-- The only thing more hazardous to liberty than a politician is two politicians.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
This is all well and good in theory, but where are the examples to back you up? If this were a perfect world where people share ideas and are guided by ethics and ideals, then good. However, what is to stop people grabbing GPL'ed code, adding a bit to the user interface, and patenting/selling it? Most of the companies that have tried to make GPL work commercially (Corel, Eazel) don't seem to have done very well. Like it or not, this is a world of IP and patents, where things that aren't commercially viable are not sustainable.
--
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
I'm not really sure about that. It seems to me that the person or people most likely to know that there was a violation of the GPL would be the person or people who used GPL'd code in their project.
Whistleblowers tend to be people who discover wrongdoing, not people who commit the wrongdoing. It's a nontrivial task to indentify some code as being part of another product, especially if any steps were taken to mask its origin.
Well, i'm starting a Open Source based and using company in Dallas, TX with the idea of trying this wole trust deal inside the company and with other companies. :) I'll let you know how it goes, or you can just keep tabs on TerraBox
What? me have a sig? don't be ridiculous.
Academic software often used to have this sort of licensing scheme: free for non-commercial use. One problem is that it's much harder for software to get widely used with such a scheme, so you won't often make money anyway.
Of course, such licenses are definitely non-free.
. . . is, yes, basically what a lot of people are saying. It forces others to make their software GPL if they should use any of my libraries. But what bugs me about this isn't any concept of "forced sharing" - it's that there are people out there where that just isn't an option. Perhaps they need to make money off this, or they don't have the ability to share the source for one reason or another (company issues, for example). And for that, the GPL won't work.
:P
Case in point: SDL. For those who don't know, I quote from the website: "Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device."
Go to the games page. Note Civilization: Call to Power. Yeah, that's right, it'll run on your Linux box. Is it free? No. That's a company. They can't *afford* to give it out for free. Would they have made the Linux version without an easy way to port it? I honestly have no idea. I can easily see them saying "well, we'd have to write our own libraries since all the other libraries out there are GPL, and we just can't afford it. So much for that."
Now, I know that *someone*'s gonna say they should just give it away for free. But this isn't reasonable. Somebody - many somebodies - spent each day for a year or more making this game. If they gave it away for free, they'd have to get another job that pays. Which they would, and these games wouldn't show up.
So what's the solution here? What I'm doing with my libraries is using a much less restrictive license. I believe in open-source and all, yes, but even more than that I believe in providing good-quality software. If X company needs to spend large manhours writing a library that they *could* have just used off the 'net, their product costs will go up. They'll sell it for more money, or will put less features in, or will do less bug-testing. Come on, deny it - even if Microsoft decided to use my library, would everything else stay the same? No, they'd do *something* extra because they have extra time/money. Or maybe they'd shift the release date back. But it *does* increase the overall value of software, and it *doesn't* restrict its uses. I'll probably GPL games after a while - once I've made what I can off people who are willing to pay money, I'll GPL it and let the open-source community have at it. But there's no consistent way - especially with games! - to make money off free software. I mean, what am I gonna do, take the Redhat tactic and offer support to paying customers?
I've ranted on this long enough, I think . . .
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I didn't realize using legal threats was trust. To call the law a technology of trust is grossly stretching the meaning of the term.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Twice wrong. Most obviously, the GPL does not prevent you from selling the software. It prevents you from charging anybody else for the right to sell the software. This distinction is crucial; the fact that you cannot seem to grasp it alone proves that you are not fit to discuss the subject. Read the actual GPL, then come back.
This bit, however, betrays your cluelessness even more:
No. Producing software costs time. You will find out, once you have escaped immaturity, that time is far, far more valuable than money.
So his entire argument falls apart.
I suspect the GPL will not dominate open source. Non-GPL licenses will become dominant and GPL will be used only by open-source fanatics who will become increasingly irrelevant as the mainstream open-source community moves on.
The "always cooperate never defect" strategy is more like the BSD license. (If you share fine, if you dont fine)
The GPL is more of a Tit-for-Tat strategy: if you defect (close our source) we'll defect too (sue your ass).
If our world was an optimal maxima system (no copyright restrictions for software?), then the BSD and GPL licenses would be effectivly identical.
But that isnt our world, so in a sense, the GPL is a concession to reality.
If you were to take code from 20 different programs under the "Caucho.com" license and combine them, you would have an enormous amount of difficulty trying to sell copies of that software. If anyone wanted to pay you, then you would have to charge enough to cover all those 20 other companies. If any of those 20 companies decides to set an unreasonable price, then your product is dead. (If a company was threatened by your product they could buy one of them and take you off the market)
If you take code from 20 different GPL programs, and combine them, the resultant license would be just as simply as if you had written it all yourself.
Having licenses which stack up makes it more difficult for people to derive from your work. This works against people who are hoping for someone to return the favor.
This is why the "free for non commercial" type of license is effectivly a proprietary license.
Reminds me of the quote "Linux is user friendly, it's just more picky about who it's friends are"
everyone repeat after me. "Linux is NOT a desktop operating system. Linux is NOT a generally productive environment. (excepting server and other relatively obscure non-user (read:sysadmin) functions)"
while you're at it, chant "GPL is not good for the pocket-book of the programmer" too. cause God knows I dont' want software written by someone that wasn't motivated by survival (the almighty buck) to write it.
If you're hearing rhetoric about Linux, open source, or Mac and everyone's bashing Microsoft, you've found Slashdot.
Well, I'm afraid you are taking a valid position and twisting it in a way that suits you. I suppose that's what I get for replying to a troll :)
Do I *like* the GPL? Yes, I think it serves a strong purpose in OSS, and I can totally understand why a programmer would want to release under it.
Would I release under the GPL? No, I use the BSDL because I believe that free is free, and that means for the corporations too.
Now, this does not mean that I do not respect the GPL, I do. It's a personal matter of choice. This is the damned problem, why is there even an issue of GPL vs. BSDL? It's about time the two camps stop whining and respect each other. If someone has GPL'd their code, RESPECT IT. If someone has BSDL'd their code, RESPECT IT ALSO.
Is this really so hard? It's simply a matter of recognizing that these are two DIFFERENT, yet TOTALLY VALID viewpoints.
Don't take life so seriously; it isn't permanent.
[Paraphrase] In the case of Readline, there was no force it was a choice by the user based on the quality of Readline and the work involved in someone attempting to duplicate what it does.
Anyone can write thier own code for any task they wish. There can be compelling reasons to use code that happens to be licenced under the GPL (or some other licence).
If anyone wants to use someone else's code as an integrated part of what they write, and that other code happens to be licenced under the GPL, they have to abide by the GPL. Any other licence would have it's own restrictions but usually not as many benifits as the GPL.
In the cases of GPL violations, the resolution has consistantly been either;
The main alternatives -- BSD, commercial, and artistic -- have thier own benifits and drawbacks. You're free to choose any of them for your own work. Being critical of the GPL for something it doesn't do is a bit harsh.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I don't believe that the error -- or even negative economic impact -- of this belief is self-evident, as some would like to claim. Or to put it this way, backers of the status quo need to actively defend it, not just attack the alternatives.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Let's compare your QPV to the GPL:
- They both let users distribute the software unmodified.
- You may make modifications to both pieces of software, except with the QPL you must go about it the long way with patches.
- In both cases the Author has the right to use your new additional code -- although with the GPL undistributed modifications need not be made availiable to the author. Note that if I don't give anyone (including the Author) patches to the QPL program I am violating the license but myself being the only person who knows, what can you do about it?
- All modifications are to be under their respective licenses.
- All binaries are to be accompanied by source code.
- Derivative works using libraries must include source.
- No warranties for either license.
Wait a minute, the only BIG difference I see between the licenses is that the GPL allows the user to not accept the license and default the software to be under copyright.
Huh? Why do you dislike the GPL again? Oh, I see, it doesn't fit your ultra-conservative right-wing politics.
So sorry to see that you apply world politics to everything. Are you careful not to buy Heinz ketchup because it is Union Made?
And, it seems, there's no provision for the idea of automatic patches. You know -- another set of source patches with an install.sh that downloads your software and automatically patches it. Just as good as a GPL source fork, really, except that you have to put up with downloading a large package with a bunch of useless code for no reason. Ho-hum.
And if you don't like the Vaccination nature of the GPL, well, reread part 6 of your own license. Read it carefully and tell me that it doesn't require derivative works to include source. Can you do that and keep a straight face?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
A similar effect can be had in many cases by simply issuing the software under multiple licenses. You can make your software available under the GPL, allowing anyone to inclue your code in other GPL'd software. Simultaneously, you can solicit royalties from those who want to use your code in their proprietary software. Many authors of GPL'd software do this.
I like your point about licenses and payoffs, though. Proprietary licenses and the GPL are alike in that they have a desired payoff, either money or more free software. Perhaps it's fair to call GPL and proprietary licenses "payoff licenses" and BSD-style licenses "non-payoff licenses."
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
The only people who have affirmed that the GPL is enforceable so far are a couple of second-rate lawyers interviewed here on slashdot. You don't "know" that at all.
If you happen to know a first rate lawyer, please do interview him and post the results.
Microsofts lawyers seem to agree that the GPL is enforceable, since we havent seen any MS-Linux
(just a silly example, I dont expect MS to want to return to Unix-type software)
If my work is under the GPL, I'm already allowing every other asshole in the world to hack my code to be subtly incompatible, and release it with source code. Any reputation I gain by being the creator of a great program can be lost by some retard forking off a shitty version, and damning my version by association.
In theory you are correct, but in practice that has never happened, please read Homesteading the Noosphere, that explains the social characteristics of open source proyects and the people who contribute to them.
------
C'mon, flame me!
No sig for the moment.
You're right, it is about gifts. The gift that the GPL gives is that users of GPL software and of deriviatives of the software always have the right to see the source. This gift is not possible with the BSD license. That's why users prefer the more magnanimous gift of GPL software.
any effect on profit is a side-effect of the main goal, to guarantee users these rights.
They need better lawyers.
The real point of GPL, however, is to enforce the position that ownership of IP is bad, and using the stick of masses of free software developers to say join us or we well pirate your product (steal your income) until we can clone your product and give it away for free (terminate your income).
So the better analogy here is, hundreds of people have sticks, and tell everyone that if everyone that attempts to make a living by choice of a professions that require selling IP, will result in being beaten down. Not just software IP, but music IP, soon to be literature IP, next to be soft hardware IP (VHDL & FPGA's), and then all IP (patents protecting means of production for Drugs and Machinery) under the theory that RMS professes that nothing is worth more than it's reproduction cost. A Porsche by RMS's theory on property rights may be stolen, reverse engineered, and while your CNC mill copies it using stolen materials (it all comes from free sand after all and therefor it's ok to steal finished free sand, so everything isn't worth anything).
The entire flaw in RMS's theory is that residual costs of engineering, tooling, marketing, and capital do not contribute fair return on investment costs contributable to the real cost of a pirated copy of any product that contains any IP/ROI. He makes the case for software, supports the application to music, and shows it in disdain for patents of all types. His ideal system was implemented by populist subversion of property rights, and tried in a number of countries five decades ago - all failed economically since the "system" failed to provide the economic incentives for innovation. No reward, no game.
Sure, the larger community can always put our own documentation teams together, and sometimes we do, but more usually the quality of the primary documentation remains under the control of the developers who, especially now that they aren't being smothered in VC money, are instead under pressure to create support profit centers in the Linux IPOs that hired many of them on a year or so back.
This also seems to be producing major software that just will not install smoothly from source without very special knowledge, forcing people into dependence on .rpms and even .debs - in a way that just wasn't the case even a year or two back. Either I'm getting stupider (doubtless all the time) or stuff is getting more glitchy to handle without an intermediary to predigest it - which really means in a vital aspect it's no longer so open, not so much a gift as a loss leader.
- Probably only a minor diversion in the flow of what's basically a very good thing. But annoying.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
No, the original post made it clear.
There is a reward for commercial development. That reward is money. There is also a reward for GPLed development. That reward is that others will also develop under the GPL, and more and better software will be available for free. Hence, indirectly GPL developers gain money too - because they can get software without needing to pay, and thus save the money they would otherwise have paid for the software. (If I write some stuff for Linux, then Linux gets better, so Linux sticks around, so other people write stuff for Linux, so I don't have to buy Windows.) Even those who don't develop help, because they create communities which effectively provide customer support for GPLed products.
Allowing GPLed code to be used for commercial purposes would deny that reward to GPL developers in the same way that allowing commercial code to be given away for free denies the reward to commercial developers.
There are only a few problems with your idea.
The first is a danger in letting official distributions spring up for a profit. What I think is one of the big benefits of the viral GPL is that it prevents a company from getting GNU software, selling it commercially, and then suing THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR for illegally copying the software. Of course, they didn't do so.. but they still have to prove it in court, and they still have to have a lawyer to say so. In evidence, the company has a boxed product and the original author has a bunch of files on an FTP server - which looks more like the pirated copy? The author also has the old problems of being sued by a monied company, such as the company pumping up their own legal costs so that the defendant is ruined if costs go against them, or (in one case which actually happened, although it was about patented hardware rather than copyrighted software) suing for multiple violations all at once so the author can't afford to be represented in all the suits. The GPL at the moment blocks that, not least because in many GPLed works the firm could not identify an author to sue (Do. Do. Do. Do. and Do., anyone?), and also because a boxed copy of a distribution would have to be GPLed and therefore the concept of illegally copying it doesn't exist.
The other problem is the one you point out clearly. Most individuals cannot afford to be solely responsible for distributing a piece of software. Whereas WRITING software for free still gets them a benefit (they can still use the software themselves), making effort to distribute it for free costs money (copies, bandwidth, etc) and if they ask money for the distribution those costs go up even more because the firms they get them from all start demanding a piece of the pie.
Furthermore, allowing the person "who last modified that generation of the software" exclusive rights to distribution of that generation is guaranteed to cause problems with the scope required to create a "modification". You write your neato latest distribution and put it up on a few free ftp sites, then your local company buys one copy, adds a few zeroes to the end of the main binary and adds their name to the author field to constitute a "modification", and throws the result into a $5m marketing and distribution machine. Where's your reward for work now? (If we believe the ridiculous argument I saw earlier, that the CD layout of an image of GPL'd files is not derivative of those files, then all they need to do to get modification rights is to reburn the disc with the files in a different order!)
This is different from the MS Marketing Virus how?
An old spanish proverb goes (roughly) "A thief thinks everyone is a thief"
In other words a thief will see all attempts to be trustworthy and develop trust, to develop a flourishing society, etc ; he/she/it will see all of these as a threat to their own (immoral) activities, and think that some one else is trying to steal from them.
Only a thief would see a gun in every out-stretched, helping hand.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'm a little surprised and a lot concerned that people seem to have forgotten the main reason Stallman holds the views he does. Check some of his earliest stuff and you will see it.
Simple, isn't it?
Next level: how much software have you had to abandon because the author(s) and publisher (a) went out of business and (b) the source wasn't made available? You then had to move on to something else, go through another learning curve, maybe even spend a lot of time converting old data to the new format. That takes time, brothers and sisters, and time is money. And that's where the word "trust" really comes in: are you willing to bet your livelihood that WhizPublisher and BowToProgrammer will be around in the future?
Then there is the other aspect of "trust," that the publisher and the author(s) will continue to maintain the software, fix the bugs you find, and extend the functionality in ways that are useful to you. A couple of examples will serve to illustrate my point:
EXAMPLE 1: Remember troff, the typesetting program developed for Unix? It was a great piece of work, and did things incredibly well. Unfortunately the author died, so much of the incredible work had to be scrapped because no one else could begin to understand the code (not even typesetter manufacturers -- I watched one guy at Varityper try). Now, if the source had been released widely (fat chance, being a bastard child of a utility regulated by the FCC) there might have been enough of a brain trust developed to fully understand the workings of the original program. Instead, some people wrote a work-alike that serves us today, but loses some really nifty code.
EXAMPLE 2: Microsoft WORD has an interesting history, being the first massed-marketed pieces of software whose beta was bound into a mass-market magazine. (PC World, for those who care about such trivia.) Since that time it has become a definition of bloat, yet there are features professional writers have requested of Microsoft that have not been included. Because Microsoft does not make the source available, there is no way for the technically-minded professional writer to add any of those features that would REALLY make life easier. One of those features, a phrase dictionary, is one reason the legal profession sticks with WordPerfect.
We trust vendors to "do the right thing" but they are under no obligation to do so. Those who say "if you don't like it, go write your own" should be aware that the entry cost for writing a word-processor package is very, very high. Indeed, one reason for the Open Source Movement in general and the GNU Public License (not Virus) in particular is to lower the cost of entry by building a collaborative effort to accomplish a task. Divide and Succeed.
And so we now get to the bottom of why Microsoft and Stallman are at odds. Microsoft wants to hold your productivity hostage, so that THEY can release stuff under THEIR terms and to THEIR schedule. Microsoft has no significant competition in a number of markets, so competition won't keep them in line. (Remember the anti-trust suit?) The ONLY significant competition currently in place is GPLed software, because Microsoft can't "embrace and innovate" something that requires they show their cards for all to see.
The BSD and similar licenses are flawed in that Microsoft can "embrace and innovate" to the point that the original code is lost in the jungle of proprietary extensions that Microsoft would add.
By the way, Microsoft isn't the only company that plays the grab-and-obfuscate game, only the most obvious one.
What Microsoft fears most is that other corporations are beginning to "get it," that the large proprietary corporate model is not the only model for ensuring viable support for software products. The distributed development model, specifically OSS protected by the GPL, provides the same advantages as the corporate (or centralized) development model without the "bottleneck effect" of corporate management prejudice and the cost of "buying" 30,000 programmers.
And what about all those programmers? Banished to the bread lines? Guess again. Some of the most lucrative programming is in applications for specific industries. Corporations are looking to combine off-the-shelf components in ways that improve corporate productivity, and are willing to spend the bucks to make that happen. Look at the insurance industry. Look at the food-supply industry. Banking. Finance. Even waste management.
Want to work on something a little more generic? Try embedded-systems programming. There are still microwave oven controllers to be programmed, not to mention metal-forming presses and the like. Who do you think programs the firewall appliances we use on our cable and DSL feeds? Who do you think creates the new gambling machines now showing up in Vegas and Atlantic City? Even my furnace has a microprocessor in it.
And not to worry, e-commerce isn't dead, it was just overblown. There are lots of jobs there.
So stop crying about loss of jobs for programmers with the GPL. If anything, it will increase the number of programming jobs because the tools will be cheap enough to lower the barrier of cost of entry.
THAT is the blessing of the GPL: it lowers the cost of entry into computing for a number of industries.
I would like to trust other businesses to fuck me at every opportunity, but in dealing with them I know that they will unless I have tall walls, miles of barbed wire, loud dogs, barking lawyers, "access" to key politicians, and my own private military.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
PHB: This GPL is broken.
Dilbert: What's wrong with it?
PHB: People keep ripping off our code.
Dilbert: Impressive. You know the word "code".
PHB: I took a 1-day seminar on technology so that I could "interface" with you "techies" better.
Dilbert: So what do you think we should do to prevent the competition from stealing our code?
PHB: Well, I thought if we rewrote the GPL somewhat...
Dilbert: I'll humor you. What did you have in mind?
PHB: Well, the GPL is based on trust.
Dilbert: I can see how that would be a problem.
PHB: So I was thinking we need to emphasize this point on trust more. Can you try capitalizing it?
Dilbert: Sure. It's a computer related thing, so do you want me to capitalize the sEcond letter, or the last letteR?
PHB: Hmm, that might be getting too technical. Could you just, I don't know, italicize it?
Dilbert: [click] [click] Done. You want fries with that?
PHB: Ah, no. This should do it, I think.
Two weeks go by
PHB: Dilbert, I thought you fixed that GPL problem.
Dilbert: I did what you thought would fix it. Strange that it didn't work.
PHB: Yeah, I know... I was thinking... Maybe we need to do something more radical. Could you maybe boldface it? No, no, no wait I have a better idea. A bigger font! That should do it!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
..actually, you've just reminded me of a book I read a while ago. It's called the Darwin wars or something.
Part of it, describes a true story of a famous mathematician who spends years working on the concept of altruism. In the end, he thinks he has proven that it's impossible for altruism to exist and kills himself.
I think we should agree that none of us really understands altruism at this point, especially with all the confusion that results when you try to define it's meaning and prove its existance, and just agree not to use it in our arguements.
Maybe that was off-topic. If so, mod it down :) screw it, I don't care.
"just connect this to..."
BZZT.
Liberty.
I asked you before, but you never answered, so I'll ask again. How much is Dreamworks paying you to advertise your site here under the name 'AI'?
Go Kathryn Thurber!
Are we talking about a piece of software for consumption by a normal user? I'm not sure how it would pay a lot. A normal user, outside the world of game theory, does not sit around and say "Before the Revolution, I spent $400 a year to buy the 10 best computer games of the year, which cost around $40 apiece and were equally good. These days, 9 of the 10 best games each year are nearly free, and the 10th, which is equally good, costs $400. This is within my budget, therefore I will buy it." In reality the 10th Game Company would be lucky to move stock for $20 apiece once people are no longer used to shelling out the dough, unless it is really amazing software, in which case it will immediately become warez.
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"
No. Appearing: 1-12
Armor Class: 4
Move: 12"
Hit Dice: 6+6
% in lair: 40%
Treasure Type: D
No. of Attacks: 3
Damage/Attack: 5-8/5-8/2-12
Special Attacks: See Below
Special Defenses: Regeneration
Magic Resistance: Standard
Intelligence: Low
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: L (9' + tall)
Psionic Ability: Nil
Attack/Defense Modes: Nil
Trolls are horrid carnivores found in nearly every clime. They are feared by most creatures, as a troll knows no fear and attacks unceasingly. Their sense of smell is very acute, their infravision is superior, (90'), and their strength is very great.
A troll attacks with its clawed forelimbs and its great teeth. A troll is able to fight 3 different opponents at once. 3 melee rounds after being damaged, a troll will begin to regenerate. Regeneration repairs damage at 3 hit points per round; this regenerationincludes the rebonding of severed members. The loathsome members of a troll have the ability to fight even if severed from the body; a hand can claw or strangle, the head bite, etc. Total dismemberment will not slay a troll, for its parts will slither and scuttle together, rejoin, and the troll will arise whole and ready to continue combat. To kill a troll, the monster must be burned or immersed in acid, any separate pieces being treated in the same fashion or they create a whole again in 3-18 melee rounds.
Description: Troll hide is a nauseating moss green, mottled greed and gray, or putrid gray. The writhing hair-like growth upon a troll's head is greenish black or iron gray. The eyes of a troll are dull black.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
You can argue all you want, but it is the GPL you want to argue against, not the GPV. If you do want to make a good argument against it, don't use forms of rhetoric to do it. It doesn't help your argument.
I was wondering how long it would take before someone tried to assign this motive to the GPL. It's goal is not to destroy the software industry but rather to foster development within it, especially with those who want to volunteer their time. If it wanted to destroy the software industry, it would be preaching anti-technology rhetoric: no computers, no software. That's a rather bleek, end of the world argument.
The software industry includes all those who create software, whether they get paid or not. It is made up of the people who devote their time and energy towards a particular project.
What I believe you mean is it will destroy the portion of the software industry which is based on the supply versus demand model. In short, software is developed because it is thought to meet a certain need - or demand - and a company supplies the software to those consumers who need it. That company then charges a certain fee for this service.
In contrast, the GPL and its respective code operates outside this model. Consumers can now make their own supply to meet their own demand. The GPL just requires that all future improvements be shared openly.
The GPL restricts the freedom to use the code privately without releasing the code. Closed software restricts the freedom of using private code openly. Comparing freedoms in this way, both have their limiations. Comparing the freedom the consumer has over the final product, the GPL lacks very little.
... is because Bill Gates fears that his nickname in this community would forever be "Free Willy".
Yeah - marvelous argument you have there. No has to use the GPL - if you don't read the fine print you should expect to be surprised.
Quoting some parts of GPL goals while leaving others out... predictable. One goal is to allow the reuse of software. Another goal is to hold any code built upon GPL'd software open to ensure the benefits of open source in the future. Vague goals (as you describe) will always have interpretations that conflict - and this is supposed to be worth saying?
The GPL doesn't apply to any work building upon a GPL'd library. It's only for those that want to play within that software. You can even sell binary patches to the GPL code without opening it.
If you don't like it you have no right to other people's work. It's not communist as there is a choice. It's freedom to be able to distribute your code in a way that you see fit - not to have it called "communist" and your wishes disregarded.
The GPL isn't a monopoly and yet it plays by fair rules. No one's forcing you to play with the GPL. Read the licence and decide for yourself - but you'll need a response that doesn't pick and choose passages from the GPL and misnome that a convincing argument.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Well it could be considered off-topic, but this
is THE answer to these guys making *BSD bad.
I laughed when I read this! *good*
user-agent: lynx2-8-2 modSSL OpenBSD-current
--
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
Windows® 2000 uses the FreeBSD IP stack.
Linux has some BSD driver code, they share some
codebase, and many driver developers post their
drivers to both Linux and *BSD. Some things they
develop, and at least one (BSD Compress for PPP)
must be compiled as module because of license
issues.
The BSDs often steal code from each other and
do well so. (Think of the OpenBSD fork.)
Linux PSX2 support was IIRC cloned from the
_initial_ effort the NetBSD people made, but
they finished earlier (because NetBSD has most
1/1000 of the developers of Linux?? dunno).
All darwin code initially was put under APSL
because those copyright paragraphs started to
grow very fast (because of the clauses 3 and 4
of the old BSD license). Newly committed code is
integrated into darwin as-is (e.g. BSD, LGPL...)
though.
--
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
I have switched fully to OpenBSD with the 2.9
release, just keeping DOS for
- inititalising a system (hardware access, DEBUG)
- hex-editor, some text editing
- SPEED (zsnes and vgb-dos)
- booting windoze in order to play starcraft
Heck, my registry is 233kB!
And I am content with OpenBSD, ok I am a console
user (never really got used to GUI, even used
command.com and cmd.exe as windoze console), but
_it is ok for daily use_.
As for IE 5, I have to say: I _miss_ it. I never
ever met a browser which can cope with a mix of
Lynx2-8-4-pre2+SSL and IE5.* (I use lynx normally
but when graphics I wish I had IE, and wine is
of 1999 on OpenBSD because it's not ELF yet on
i386) - I tried Links but found frames irritating,
and it has no textfields-need-activation.
But for webdesign, IE 5.* (they don't differ) IS
the industry standard. And my homepage is designed
for IE _only_.
I have opera5 on linux binary emulation, but it
sucks (no java, but except for the chat it displays
my homepage next to correctly - don't think of
netscrap 4 and co.) - there are soo many things
I know IE had done better. Fonts!
/me likes neither MS nor GPL, but I have to live
with it. But the world changes, and I'm going to
learn C by heart in order to contribute to OBSD.
--
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
He said he was using work from this book, which is an excellent text analyzing human progress using game theory. The book has all the groundwork you are looking for, including examples, etc. I think that if you read it, the basis for his argument becomes much more apparent. In fact I suggest everyone read it, because it presents an interesting means of analyzing almost any social situation, and it is very relevant to current goings on in the software community.
Check it out at FatBrain
The same can be said for any application you could care to name. Someone is going to build an office productivity suite because it makes the secretaries of their company more productive. Someone is bound to implement the TCP/IP protocol because the computers become more valuable when they can talk to each other.
Finally, we would hope that people are going to release that software to the public under a GPL-style license. It's not generosity, but calculated self-interest. It's good to not have to shoulder the entire cost of developing an in-house application. It's good to have products out there that are free and compatable with other products. It's good when the forking process comes up with a better product. I fully believe in the Open Source movement's ability to create great software, even though the process would appear to be "voodoo economics" to any corporate accountant.
The point is, software doesn't have to be sellable in order to be valuable. Hence, it doesn't have to be sellable in order for people to be willing to create it.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Then you kill the hostage by formatting the drive with the source code, take the money, and flee the country in an action-packed chase scene, with Cameron Diaz in tow. Or maybe I just saw it in a movie somewhere. Please ignore this paragraph.
The advantage is, you get paid for the work. Unfortunately, you couldn't use any GPL'ed code in such a product. Otherwise, it seems like a workable idea if the product was good enough to attract people.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
How about IT oursourcers? Currently they produce nothing except support. They set up large corporations Windows boxes, administer them etc. Wouldnt it be feasible for a establised outsourcer to write GPL software cos they earn so much in support? Currently most of the oursourcers are contractally in bed with M$ anyhow, but once a few start using GPL software to cut costs and increase profit. These people have an incentive to use GPL software, and thus as an industry the outsourcers will collaborate on commodity type sofware.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
Oh for fuck's sake.
I work for a telecom's equipment vendor. I write software to keep their lovely hardware stable and featureful. I get paid to do that. There is absolutely no chance this work would be released under the GPL.
I then arrive at home and write compression software. I do this for pleasure. I want everyone to be able to use it. I release it under the GPL. With the GPL, everyone can use it. There are no restrictions on usage, or unmodified copying. I also like the idea that I play in a field of like-minded people who will openly share their work. It's a nice inducement, but I'd still be writing my free software anyway.
Now, if there were some commercial interests in my home written software, I'd like to be able to negotiate my position. I'm greedy and self-centred. If you don't like that, tough. With a ultra-free license like BSD, I've already given away all the crown jewels. Companies who want my code have choices
The GPL is as likely to bring down the software industry as home brewing is to bring down the brewing industry.
Does my bum look big in this?
The forced openness that the GPL (and other OSS licenses) establishes creates a culture and social order where as an open-source developer you are meatured by the quality of your work on a daily basis by a vast comunity of your peers. In many companies there are 'Code Reviews' where a developer goes into a conference room with a few of his coligues who then proceed to critique his code. In the end, only they know how good or bad it actually is. In the OSS comunity, that group of people critiquing the code is far move vast and generally quite knowlegable. Reputations are built on OSS projects and you're only as good as your most recent release. It's a competitive enviroment that retains a sense of comroderie,, unique to OSS development.
Imagine for a moment of microsoft has the Windows Source Code peer-reviewed in this fashion... There would be riots in the street...
Developers have the opportunity to build great creadibility, and to earn the respect of their coligues in a non-business enviroment, while working to develop truly valuable products for the business and non-business user alike.
The same thing applies with regard to fixes, and patches. Only yesterday, the OpenBSD Project was Chastised for not producing a patch in less than 6 days. Show me one instance where, first the user comunity of closed-source software could creadibly do tat, or is even made aware in a reasonably timely fashion, by corporations, of bugs in their software. Open source is conducive both to discovery of bugs and (tue essentially to a type of peer pressure) the timely patching of those bugs. Again, in the OSS comunity you live and die by the quality of your code.
The GPL goes far beyond game theory. It creates a social structure that facilitates it's successful use. I'd love to hear from some sociologists with regard to the operational characteristics of Open Source Development. I'm sure it would make a fascinating paper...
--CTH
---
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Well, I'm pretty sure that RMS would never accept your proposed "fix" to the GPL, but you of course are still perfectly free to release your own code under any licence you wish. You could even give it a clever name and start promoting it as an alternative to the GPL (although I doubt you could call it Open Source, as it seems to violate several terms of the Open Source Definition). In fact, I wish you the best of luck.
I don't think that the clauses as you wrote them would have the effect you're looking for, though. If anyone can modify a piece of software, and by doing so, become the new primary distributor, then a trivial change (say to a version number, or a comment) would allow anyone downloading the software to redistribute it. This could even be automated so that everyone could freely share the software, just as if it had been GPLed.
It doesn't even have to be automated. If you are charging for your software under this scheme, and someone wants it to be free, it only takes one person to set up a mirror site with some trivial modification, and you have had all of your revenue cut off, through perfectly legal means.
You seem to believe that hundreds of programmers are making a terrible mistake licensing their software under the GPL, since it hinders their ability to become stinking rich directly from the sale of that software. I prefer to think that all of these developers have chosen to place their software under the GPL because they understand it, and they truly wish for their software to be as free as the GPL makes it.
That's enough ranting for now... :)
Living better through chemicals
seems theres an awful lot of trust in the courts..has it ben challenged and upheld anywhere ? usa? other places?
what if MS uses a bit of the code "without anybody knowing" how would the gpl developed ever know this is the case?
(maybe this IS the case)
Let me see if I can encapsulate your argument:
a) You _really_ understand the GPL.
b) Other people don't _really_ understand the GPL.
It's not a good idea to base your argument on the assumption that other people really don't know what they're doing. For users who never develop software, the GPL provides more rights than any proprietary software EULA I have ever seen.
If someone is capable of writing software that's worthy of any sort of protection, they are smart enough to understand the GPL. If they use someone else's work as a base, they must abide by the license. Also, what's the chance of someone coming from a proprietary background into the world of open source/free software without being bombarded by explanations and discussions of the various licenses? If I had never seen this idea of sharing before and I was used to the types of restrictions in proprietary software, I know that I would check things out first to make sure it wasn't a trick.
If someone develops his own work from scratch, then he's free to close his work if he realizes that using the GPL is a mistake. I submit that by the time his program gets to the point that it's worth something, he will have figured out the extreme complexity of the real meaning of the GPL.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
No, you don't seem to get it. As has been shown time and time again, the GPL prevents people from profitting from their development under the simple principle of "why should I pay you for it when I can copy it for free from him?". Also, denying someone else the ability to profit from your labor is exactly the same thing as denying yourself the ability to profit from your labor.
Let's imagine a world where the GPL had a few more clauses that might make it more palatable to those wishing to profit from the software:
There are probably holes in these clauses (I haven't done a lot of thinking about it), but the goal is to leave the code "open" and, yet, control how the code is distributed (so that the distributor may profit from the distribution if he so chooses). In this manner, the goal of the GPL is preserved in that code can be shared and modified as the "customer" chooses. The obvious problem, though, is how to physically control the distribution of the code (its the same problem that proprietary software faces).
Would this more appropriately address both sides of the argument?
Why do those rewards have to be so cleanly separated? Why can't free software developers make a profit from their work more directly?
As I see it, the GPL was meant to promote software freedom , but, because of its supposed parasitic nature, actually dissuades many people from contributing to the development of that GPLed software. Again, as I see it, the reason for this is that these people feel they cannot profit (read: recoup costs) from the development of the software when the distribution of that software is uncontrolled (ie. anyone can copy the software once its released). My suggestion to "fix" this is to adjust the GPL to allow for a bit of control over distribution by encouraging unrestricted modification of the software, but limit distribution of the software to the persons (or designates) who last modified that version of the software. In this manner, businesses may truly exploit the GPL's "cost of distribution" clause to recover costs (and, yes, make a profit) without resorting to proprietary, closed source code. So, customers may still make changes to the source code as they see fit which they could then distribute in a new release (if they thinks its worthwhile) or contribute back to the original developer (if they don't want to get into distribution work).
You might claim that I could go out and recreate all GPLed software and put it all under a license like I am describing above. True, but that's merely a shifting of focus and, ultimately, doesn't address the problem (ie. the GPL from a business point of view). To encourage more businesses to put more resources into the development of GPLed software, the GPL must provide better mechanisms for those businesses to see a profit from the development. My approach attempts to do that without sacrificing the freedom of the code to be further changed and modified by the user.
Careful! Is it that they want to make sure that no one else can "sell" their work or that they want to make sure that no one else can prevent their code from being "shared"? The two are NOT the same thing (for instance, there is a lot of GPLed software on any Linux distribution, so you could say that the distributors are profitting from GPLed code).
If they are GPLing their code simply to prevent others from "selling" it, then they are being hypocritical because that was not the intent of the GPL.
Why? I think his interest is software freedom, so I would think that any approach that promotes that would still be basically agreeable to him.
Hmmm. At first glance, I thought you weren't getting my approach. However, on second thought, I see what you mean and I'll have to consider if there is an adjustment that takes that into account. My goal was to allow someone to "profit" from distributing their open source software until someone else makes a significant change to it (at which point the new person can do the profitting). In that way, the software is still free, but businesses can see a revenue model for the development of free software (and, thus, it would be worth their while to develop it).
No, it has nothing to do with "hindering" their ability to become stinking rich. If they want to give their software away, even in my model (if it worked), they are free to distribute it at no cost. I am not even suggesting changing the "derivation" clause, so, once they release their software, it will remain open. I was only suggesting changing the "distribution" clause to give the developer the potential for a solid revenue stream (but, obviously, my idea has flaws).
GPL is no more or less parasitic than the average commercial license.
Your whole argument is based on the idea that software is necessarily a scarce commodity and that it must be sold by a commercial company. Wrong. Think statistics.
All it takes is one programmer out of millions with both the means and motivation to write some piece of Free software and suddenly many millions have a new piece of software. It might be a teenager showing how hot they are, young programmer wanting some experience in a new area, an experienced programmer looking for an interesting project to work on, a university research project, a company loss leader and who knows what else. No "business model" needed.
One in a million. And as the world's population gets bigger those odds only get better.
The FSF disagree with you.
They say, and I qoute: "at least one application program is free software today specifically because that was necessary for using Readline."
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
--
Two witches watch two watches.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
So you're saying, basically, is that its excusable for corporations to gouge consumers, simply because its still a better option for the consumer than using nothing at all? Come on. Theres no excuse for buggy software, and theres no excuse for gouging and artificial upgrade-cycle lock-in.
I don't want to argue, but first you have to clarify the terms "efficiency" here. AFAIK, there are a lot of inefficiencies in open source programs in the sense that there are lots of different programs that do the same thing, for example: How many CD burner programs out there? Or the more classical one: How many windows managers are there? If we can unite those efforts, we would bring more efficiency. The closed source counterparts tend to create fewer variations (I suppose)....
Well, to me this is not strong enough. As I perceive, businesses are aiming for profit. In software industry, they try to keep any lines of their codes shut in a safe box. They don't want any other covet it and "plagiarize" it. So, they won't leer into GPL code as GPL requires them to open their "secrets" if they incorporate GPL solution. Therefore, where is the sense of "open cooperation".
In the other hand, if the software is not quintessential to their business, they might like to do this (i.e. cooperation with Open Source guys). For example: IBM, HP, of which they have other businesses than software. If the company whose life and death are in the revenue of software sales, they will strongly oppose open source movement (example: Microsoft, Adobe, etc).
Just my two cents....
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
It does. But more than that seems shallow. The author jumps from premises to conclusions without any groundwork. Please, some examples of cultures of trust demolished by parasites. Please, some cause-effect data. Even some detailled argumentation would be welcome.
I give him credit for an interesting idea (i.e. the GPL has a "genetical" advantage on other free software licenses and will ultimately prevail), but I think that conclusion should be more grounded, not simply stated.
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
There's nothing in this article that we haven't heard a thousand times before, it's just that now it's formulated in quasi-biological lingo.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
How about IT oursourcers? Currently they produce nothing except support.
Currently, IT outsourcers can make money off someone else's software. You suggest that they should write their own software (for which they pay the authors, but gain no additional revenue) and provide support for it - hence lowering their margins. Not the best business model.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
They had some proprietary add-ons ...
How can you have a proprietary add-on to a GPL program? It's not possible; you would have to release the add-on under GPL unless it was a provably unrelated product.
Remember the kerfuffle about a proprietary program linking to a GPL .so library? According to RMS, the proprietary program inherits GPL through linking.
This is precisely why business is afraid of GPL.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
It's nice to think that business can be based solely on trust (as in point #3 above), and it's not hard to see that a company that has other interests (like hardware, internet assets, etc.) could release its software under GPL without expecting compensation.
However, it costs money to produce software, if only to feed the authors, and GPL explicitly denies the software itself as a source of revenue. Has any pure software company ever made money by releasing all its software under GPL? (and selling support?)
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
"In many parts of the US I can even keep a gun in the nightstand."
Where can you *not* keep a gun in your nightstand? I am pretty sure you can do this anywhere in the U.S., unless you don't own the gun legally or have somehow lost your right to own a gun.
Even in California, you can keep a gun in your nightstand. You can keep one in your business (if you are the boss or have the boss's permission) or even in your tent when you go camping. I guess the people who wrote that part of the penal code believed that people posess a fundamental right to defend themselves in their homes, places of business, or temporary encampments.
MM
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
Andrew
Failure is its own reward.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Nobody in the history of the world has ever been forced to use GPLed software. A person may choose to incorporate GPLed software into their own software. But nobody has ever been forced to use GPLed software. So anyone who shares their software under the GPL is doing because they want to. If they didn't want to share their software under the GPL, they would have chosen to re-write the GPLed portions that they included. You simply cannot justify your "sharing at gunpoint" remark. It's just hyperbole.
Your "radical leftist politics" remark seems meaningless to me. If I say that "you can use my software so long as you let others use the software you derive from my software", how is that a left or a right wing position? Andrew Williams
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I disagree with the usage of the word 'altruism' - and with the concept. My small contributions to opensource, while gpl'd, have nothing at all to do with 'altruism'. I view altruism as one of the cardinal sins, as a giving-up of one's values with no guarantee of a return of value. One's life and work must be held as the highest values, because they are what can achieve the ultimate value - happiness. My reasons for contributing to opensource are as simple as 'giving back to those who have already given to me' - I'm paying back a debt, not trying to get others to repay my un-requested effort.
As for the value of the GPL - I absolutely LOVE the GPL.... although I prefer the BSD-style licensing in some cases. I like the idea of "if you're at home, use it for free - if you're at work, trying to use it in your money-making activities, pay me please because my effort helped you get paid". Generosity is fine, charity is not. I'll help someone change a flat tire for free, but I won't help them run their business for free.
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
Your comments have made clear to me a fundamental difference between GPL and proprietary software. The difference rests in what the developer of the software expects in terms of a future payoff. Microsoft (or any major software company) develops software will the expectation of monetary revenues. GPL developers write code in the expectation of future software they can use for free. Is it just me or are these two options the extremes of possibility? Isn't there some middle ground where the future payoff could feed the developers stomach, as well as his head?
I much prefer the licensing that Caucho.com has put on Resin. In it, you're only required to pay for the product if you're going to make money off of it. On the other hand, if you're some university lifer who hacks together a great technical document repository, you don't have to pay.
In this scenario, Caucho has decided that their future payoff, either money or free software/services, is determined by their customers. This, I'll call it payoff based licensing (PBL), seems much more pragmatic than the extremist options presented by either Microsoft or GPL. Users of Caucho's software can decide if they want to use it independent of the ideological dogma of the software developer.
Microsoft and GPL are simply sharing opposite ends of the same bed. If you want true altruism, then look towards BSD style licenses that don't impose any restrictions on how you use the software. If you have no restrictions in the license, then you have nothing to enforce. Microsoft and GPL on the other hand, have to be concerned about parasitism (piracy and illegal use) since they are concerned about a future payoff.
The trust you speak of is between the software developer and his/her customer. The developer trusts that in giving the software to the customer, (s)he will receive a future payoff in return. Microsoft and GPL have the same issue in terms of depending on trust and hoping they will see the future payoff. Of course, they diverge some in how they might go enforcing their licenses should the need arise, but the concept is the same nonetheless.
The GPL is similar to proprietary software licensing except that it demands a different future payoff. This and other systems in which the future payoff is rigid and fixed, IMHO, will have a disadvantage to PBL schemes that allow the customer to dynamically determine the payoff based on use. I wouldn't expect any of these systems to die off, but I would expect PBL systems to gain much more market share in the coming years.
Now, there is some software that people will want to keep proprietary. But, for the most part, that kind of software won't become free before market conditions make it sensible for people to contribute to it freely, GPL or not.
If free software required altruism or the stick of the GPL to work, it would have disappeared long ago. Altruism may help it a long a little, and the GPL may have some benefit, but the force behind free software is simple economics.
ever taken BSD-licensed code and integerated it into the kernel
Hell yeah. BSD code is free for the taking. Both Microsoft and the GNU folks use it to enhance the quality of their software. BSD code benefits both sides of the war, and slowly raises the usefulness of even the worst software by providing functional, good code that can be freely incorporated into anything, without bickering over politics.
totaly false ...
who forces you to work on GPL code ?
People who chose to release their code under GPL want to be sure that no one ELSE can sell their work.
If they want to make money out of their work they won't use GPL.
"ich bin drin !"
I have to dispute this. We are not genetically wired for this kind of behavior. We're genetically wired for some things, but this is not one of them. We see such trust and altruism in societies both modern and primitive, as a survival strategy (strength in numbers), but I don't think we're wired for it.
I agree with the points of the article, but altruism stems from an ethical doctrine that, while fairly widespread, is socialized in to people. We're not born with that value, notice how you have to teach children to share. People are taught that it's ethically virtuous to act in an altruistic fashion, but we learn that, not born with it.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
Do you really believe this is the only logical outcome? I think that, yes, it will lead to inefficiency, which will lead to ... well, just inefficiency. It depends on what kind of competition it is up against.
I personally prefer to view the argument for the social contract of the GPL in ethical terms, rather than economic terms. Does the author of a work have the moral right to tell the users of that work that they are obliged to give back to the community, or not?
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
The author's name is ROBERT Wright, not Richard. And all /.'ers should read his other important work, The Moral Animal, too. Great stuff.
For a movement such as "open source" to in one breath claim the true path of freedom is one of open exchange of ideas, and then use a term like altruism to help define this, seems contradictory. Free exchange presuposes that what is being exchanged is being done under consent of the owner, which implies property, which implies property rights - which cannot exist in a socio/politico/economic culture that uses altruism as a standard for defining ethical interaction between trading partners. Wouldn't it be more accurate to define the free exchange as an environment where owners of property share said property because they believe it is in their self-interest to do so? This would bring with it the condition that when it is no longer in their interests, they will cease to share. I'm not disputing the conclusions of this post, but I would be interested in a discussion of open source that keeps in mind the necessity of property rights in maintaining freedom.
I'm not a Certified Game Theorist, but I find the author's conclusions difficult to accept.
If we take the entire software industry as a zero-sum system, we can say that the GPL shoots for an optimal maximum. If we take the Prisoner's dilemma as an analogy, it would be like saying that the optimal strategy is to never defect (always cooperate). And he's right: it IS the optimal strategy on the long run.
But like every game theorists know, optimals maxima are almost never reached on complex systems, particularly in those made of "selfish entities", in this case humans. Why? Simply because there is way too much to gain in defecting. The more the system approach its optimal maximum, the more it pays for a single individual to "not follow the group" and play for its own personal good. For example, if most of the softwares written were released through the GPL, it would pay a lot for a single programmer to released it through a private license. Sure, it would be a short relative gain for him (and a short loss for the system as whole), but in real life most people lives in short term (for obvious reasons).
I'm not saying that the GPL or the open source movement is bad. On the contrary, it seeks the best for the community, and you just can't be against that. But it is also illusory to believe that the kind of Holy Grail that the author's suggest could ever be reached. There's plenty of similar systems in our society, working more or less the same way, and none (AFAIK) as ever reached its optimal strategy.
Its great that the OSS and FSF movements are getting behind the GPL (God, I feel like I just came out of boot with all those acronyms... "AE2 I need to get to PSD ASAP 'cuz I ain't got an LES since RTC!") presenting a united front towards MicroSoft and all those other generally bad folks cannot be mistaken as a bad thing. But I'm extremely confused by the GPL. Thus, from reading it about e^189 times, I have come up with these thoughts:
Whomever wrote the GPL must be some form of primitive AI (a la MadLibs, so from now, we shall refer to the aforementioned "Whomever" as "MadLibs"). You input the words you want to include and it creates a liscense. Ohh... purdy.
The program, MadLibs, is producing semi-erroneous output. Obviously its grammar checking modules must have some bugs. It also doesn't seem to screen for bad user input.
MadLibs, since it is used by the GPL, must have used some GPL'd libs or at least something like gcc. Thus, through some time of wierd time-warp redundancy, it is victim (sorry, I couldn't think of a better word) to its own measures!
And to the grand finale...
We, as the OSS/GPL/FSF community, should have complete access to the MadLibs source, so that the GPL can truly be at least understood completely and without question by more than maybe, 6 people. And thus, the world is a happier place. Oh yeah, and somewhere in there, Bill Gates is rendered blind, half-witted, and impotent (like his software).
No need to thank me, just doing my job.
--christian, defender of the universe.
kupo?