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Why I Love The GPL
Roblimo writes "'There are a lot of good reasons to like the GPL: the GNU Public License. For one thing, it's a David and Goliath kind of thing. It's the little guy standing up to the corporate behemoths that run rough-shod over our daily lives by virtue of their influence, legal and otherwise, on government. For another, it's virtuous.' These are the opening words to a NewsForge article praising the GPL by Joe Barr. Now and then we forget how much of the software we use and love is made possible by the General Public License. Thanks for reminding us, Joe. (NewsForge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.)"
Definitely an improvement over the old days where you had to buy every little utility.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
It's the GNU General Public License, not GNU Public License.
"Thanks for reminding us, Joe. (NewsForge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.)""
Nope. No corporate behemoths here.
from the when-you-have-nothing-new-to-say-but-like-to-hear- yourself-talk-anyway dept.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I like it because when Bruce Perens created the GPL back in the late 70s for Sun, he was considering the average home user who may have needed to compile his latest application.
Back then applications were published in computer magazines such as Omni, Compute and of course Scientic American. These were usually in hundreds lines of code in length and principally written in Assembler.
There's not a week that goes by when I think of Mr Perens and his contributions with the GPL and the neural networks which lead to the discovery of the Internet.
Which is nice.
But software in the public domain, and software covered by a BSD-style license, is not afforded any protection whatsoever to ensure those same freedoms exist for the next user, or the next, or the one after her.
Joe's article perpetuates the falsehood that non-GPLed software can, somehow, be taken away from the public and locked away.
Bullshit.
He even goes so far as to cite the cases of the BSD networking stack (used by M$ in current versions of Windows) and Kerberos, despite the fact that absolutely nobody has been harmed and despite the fact that both software suites are still freely available.
If M$ could lock Kerberos away from the rest of us, don't you think they would have? Instead, they're just sticking their own users with gratuoitous incompatibilities, while the rest of us can use the real thing.
This is even more true in the case of the Windows IP stack. All M$ did by "stealing" the BSD networking stack is keep the rest of us from having to work around their bugs. This is a win for everyone.
Any Open Source Definition-compliant license guarantees that the covered code will, always and forever, be freely available for all to use, modify, and redistribute. The GPL is not required to achieve this goal.
The only goal the GPL works toward beyond those of other OSD-compliant licenses is the perpetuation of the FSF utopia, which calls for nothing less than the destruction of the software industry as we know it. It claims to work toward freedom, while it actually works to deny freedom to those who do not share its goals.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
The GPL is pretty nice ... but only for people who understand it ...
There are a lot of people who put their work under GPL but don't want others to use the Software for own projects.
Recently I wanted to use some GPL'ed work offered by someone for my very own projects and he accused me to be a pirate and thief and that he will be sueing me for having used parts of his code for my own work which he put under GPL. This has result into a little flamewar on ANN which you can read here. So using GPL'ed software written by others can indeed be dangerous because when it's offered in a way to the public by someone but not meant to be used like described in the GPL - e.g. misunderstanding.
Another thing with GPL is that it's basicly a thing where others rip off work written by others without returning anything. The operating system MorphOS for example is one of these things. Their developers are using a lot of parts from the open source world such as ixemul or libnix as well as ports of gcc, binutils and other things without offering the sources. When contacting them and asking them to hand out the code they usually reply that the code has been lost or they redirect you to older ports of the software with codesnipplets that doesn't work anymore. Most pirating of GPL'ed work done by others are done within the Amiga community as well as many other communities.
I don't say that GPL is a bad thing but I say that it's a matter of being ripped off and abused for what one has done if someone else takes everything and not caring for the work I've done and not returning anything, not even patches or code when asked.
It's simple: If you don't like the license, then don't use code from the program in your software. Most developers (on slashdot) who hate the GPL do so because the source code is available and technically they can do everything with it and yet the license restricts them. It's like bringing a cake near your mouth but not letting you have it. But instead if the GPL had made the software closed source, they wouldn't have complained. Developers are pissed because they can't use code developed by someone else in their own software and yet not give the freedoms to others which were given to them by the original developers. They're pissed because they can't have a free ride. If you say that you're using only one line of code from a GPL'ed software, then don't use it at all, code on your own. But if that one line is important enough to be used, then the author has the right to restrict its usage.
GPL (and similar licenses) is the only license, which, when it says it protects the right, it actually protects the rights of the user. Really. BSD style licenses don't protect the user/people's right completely.
But if that one line is important enough to be used, then the author has the right to restrict its usage.
On a few occasions at work, I needed some encryption and compression routines that I knew were available in some GPL-licensed libraries. I would have needed to make minor improvements over the existing GPL code for the routines to suite my purposes. However, I could not make use of this opportunity to use and improve the existing code. I think that it is ridiculous that 50 million lines of proprietary code that cost millions of dollars to write should suddenly become available to all just because a 200 line compression routine was used. I would have been more than happy to give back my improvements on the compression routines to the public. Instead, I had to purchase third party software and integrate that into our distribution. It is not the cost of the third party software that's the problem, but that each third party dependency destabilizes our software product and increases maintenance complexity.
alltogether quite a nice article. nothing most slashdotters didn't know yet, but still rather good.
but for some reason he had to put those nasty exagerations in there, and that's just again an example of partisan and ideological marketing!
the linux kernel is [...] the impossible notion that a bunch of kids on the Internet could create the most successful operating system in history come true.
it wasn't exactly kids and the term "most successful OS" might be swaying a BIT far from the truth!
Once again, it was piracy of public software. Stolen in order to increase Bill Gates' personal fortune. But it was legal theft.
come on, watch your language. don't throw the ridiculous piracy concept back at bill gates and what the hell is "legal theft" supposed to be? this language is no better than the whole "viral license" propaganda!
But Linux is immune to most of the kneecap-busting, air-supply cutting, baby-knifing techniques that Microsoft is so fond of.
i am no fan of microsoft, but i still find this rather harsh. if the article were meant to be journalistic, this would SO not qualify for an objective perspective!
well, all in all i totally agree with the author. but maybe he should cut back on the ideological and radical lingo!
jethr0
This looks so much like a troll because of so many errors, but I'll answer anyway.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released.
Your lawyers are either idiots or they royally screwed you. You do NOT have to release the source code of programs compiled with GCC. There are absolutely no restrictions on GCC compiled code and even the few (GCC and Libc) libraries your app might be linked to are released under the LGPL. If I'm not seriously mistaken, even the code produced by tools like bison are also restriction free since that is only *usage* of the software and the libraries needed are probably released under the LGPL.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult position.
Now you're not being clear. You say " a top online investment firm asked us to do some work using Linux." Was the software supposed to be sold/given away to the general public or only to the online investment firm who would only use it inhouse? If it was supposed to be publically distributed, then yes, you have to release the source code to any modification you have done to the kernel. That's the cost of customisability of the Linux kernel. But if it was only supposed to be given to the online investment firm who would only use it inhouse, then you don't have to distribute the source code to the public. You see, most part of the license applies to redistribution, not modification itself. If you distribute modification to a GPL'ed software to the public, then you have to release its source code. But if you only plan to use it inhouse, then you don't have to give the source code to the public. Or if you sell it to a private customer, then you only have to give the source code to the customer, NOT the public.
Well I'm not going to flame you, but I do think you've missed some of the useful points of the GPL. For one thing, I believe that you actually can use existingly GPL'd code if you negotiate an alternative license with the copyright holder(s) of the code. Admittedly this may sometimes be difficult if there are lots of authors, but given the relatively low number of developers in many projects, I'm not sure if it would be that common. Depending on specifically what part of the code you're interested in, you may not have to contact everyone in a particular GPL'd project.
People tend to release under the GPL because they want to make their work available for use by others, but don't want others to make lots of money from it without giving back. The alternative is that the code may not be available at all.
When I've released some software under the GPL, I've effectively lifted some (but not all) copyright restrictions for anyone who wishes to use it. In doing so, though, I certainly haven't given up my right to choose to lift even more restrictions on my code for certain people. The GPL licence begins with the traditionally restrictive copyright system, and then lifts some restrictions that specifically allow the software to be distributed openly under certain conditions, still protected by copyright law on behalf of the author(s).
There's nowhere in the GPL, however, where it says that copyright holders can't choose to release their code under a different license to a different party if they so choose. Many authors of many projects do exactly this, and I think you'd find that many other authors would consider making their code available for closed source projects if they realised it could be useful and were paid suitable royalties.
My opinion is that the GPL is good because it encourages many people to release their code in situations where it might not otherwise have been made available at all. I don't see how that's a bad thing -- people who want it under closed source conditions can always ask for it and negotiate an alternative agreement. If the authors agree with your small business cause, they might even choose to give it to you for free.
I have never programmed professionally. I've been playing around with c and some other languages for some years though. And I have been using gnu software for about as long. But it wasn't until this christmas that I really realized it's power. I've always been thinking that "sure, open source is a good thing, because then the others who know things can make changes".
But just before christmas I was playing a bit with the new transparency that xorg har brought us, and I was annoyed about the lack of functions in "transset". So I decided to take a look at its code. It turned out the program was very simple and within some hours, without any previous knowladge of Xlib and X-programming, I managed to change its behavoiur the way I wanted. (http://forchheimer.se/transset-df/)
Then I suddenly understood that you don't have to be a super guru who understands all the systems sourcecode to gain from open source. One day there will be some little thing that is bothering you that you actually CAN do something about.