Slashdot Mirror
GPL Violators On The Prowl
ravenII writes "GPL Violations.org are looking after the GPL. Warning letters were personally handed over to companies at their CeBIT booths by Mr. Harald Welte, free software developer and founder of the gpl-violations.org project.
It seems big boys like Motorola, Acer, AOpen, Micronet, Buffalo and Trendware seem to violate GPL. Please visit the site for more information on GPL enforcements and violators."
Whats next, rude phone calls? Or how about ringing the door bell and then running away?
Sorry, but its not like Motorola is going to stop because a group they never heard of handed them a letter.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
How do you get to prove it?
Who proves it?
Who sues at the end of the day?
Is there a legal fund set up to help out?
We don't know?
If someone is acting on "our" behalf, I think "we" should know fully what is going on before hand.
For all we know, this could be a scare tactic by MS to worry people back to their side of the fence.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It'll be good to see GPL violators being held responsible. We can start with CherryOS.
Paraphrasing:
Violators will be shot
Survivors will be shot again
how long until
If nobody is going to take these people to court then there is absolutely no reason to hand these people warning letters. They have no intention of changing their practices unless they are taken to court: they are no better than Apple or Microsoft.
I'm f#$king magic!
GPLviolations.org was served with a patent infringement suit from the BSA
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
end up being one big company later having all "legal department" to enforce GPL and IP issues as well as defending them?
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
They could tell the Motorola people that their fathers were hamsters, and their mothers smelled of elderberries?
Then fart in their general direction?
FTFA:
Since more than one year, the gpl-violations.org project tries to bring vendors who use GPL licensed software in their products into license compliance. To achieve this goal, it uses a number of measures, ranging from warning letters over public documentation of GPL violations, up to legal proceedings. In this year, the project managed to conclude more than 25 amicable agreements, two preliminary injunctions and one court order.
Sounds like some folks are paying attention to this guy.
Yes, information wants to be free, and this guy seems to be helping to keep it free, and prevent it (i.e. information-processing logic that is based on someone else's IP that released it under the GPL) from being locked away inside closed-source products. What's your problem?
Giving a legal letter to some booth lackey at a convention is NOT how you get a company's attention. Send it to the CEO, the resident agent, the law department, heck ANYONE who won't simply throw it away.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
They can't do anything but send letters.
They have no standing - only the copyright holders have this, and if they don't do anything then nothing will happen.
They might be able to whip slashdot into a frenzy though.. maybe that's all that it's all about?
Is all the feedback going to be negative? Everything has to start somewhere, and frankly I applaud the efforts of this guy to at least start enforcing a license that many companies do not take seriousley. If nothing else, it brings to light the face that many legit companies in fact do not care to honor the GPL, but benefit from the software that is covered by it.
sig: Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not
Since it looks like GPL violator's website is down, here's a mirror:f f3409b0475e/index.html
http://mirrordot.org/stories/c00f3d2fd6588c34ae25
Let me guess.
:)
1.2-300 pounds
2.black duster or trenchcoat
3.t-shirt with either Star Wars or some free 4.computer-related shirt acquired from a trade show
5.big beard. Mandatory
5.telltale fedora
6.2 cellphones on belt pocket. One might be a Treo.
7.Lifetime membership to RenFair
You don't want to mess with these guys.
Before making nonsense, worthless comment, wait till the site gets unslashdotted and READ it. Most of you question might be answered there. Many other questions being asked are just stupid or have obvious answers. Like, how can you prove that the violaters are indeed using GPLed software. Many of the violaters are openly using GPLed software. Like using the Linux kernel. And then some question are very silly/small minded. Please.
Well, if you WERE a developer, you could get off your duff & do something about it, eh? There are these "little-known" BSD operating systems under your "less-restrictive" licenses. Check them out sometime when you're done with the C in 21 Days book.
... for him to serve one to SCO.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
Good thing you're not. We don't need any more ignorant developers.
Those like me who've read and understand the license, use it to make sure the programs we distribute are not redistributed without source. We *want* that restriction. If you don't like that restriction, feel free to not use the code and go the hell away.
But that's exactly my point, don't you see? That's the contradiction. You guys want everybody else to play by your rules when it comes to computer programs (those rules being fairly complex and confusing, from my point of view), but you have absolutely no desire to play by other people's rules when it comes to things like music and movies.
And those rules, by contrast, are incredibly simple: Pay for what you take, and don't give people copies. But any time somebody like the RIAA or the MPAA try to enforce those rules, you guys go positively batshit over it.
That's the contradiction. That's what I'm trying to point out. Hopefully somebody will read this and go, "Huh. I don't know if I agree, but he's got a fair point."
How can they tell that a binary has GPL code in it? I mean, do they use strings or something? If that's it, then it's pretty easy to defeat their GPL detection. Looking at the assembly isn't telling because some simple algorithms will be written the same and produce similar assembly, and optimizations will mangle all that anyway.
It'll take just one serious error/mallicious report/misidentification to be cause for libel and bring a suit that takes this site right out of commission.
This is good. I wrote in a previous comment that I thought the GPL had no teeth, if the FSF where the only people looking into GPL violations, because they don't really do a Hell of a lot about violators (sorry, it's a fact), and most FOSS developers don't have the resources to seek a legal solution against violators. None other than Bruce Perens took me to task for this opinion, but I still stand by it: The GPL might as well be a blank sheet of paper for most FOSS developers, what do they intend on doing when some Taiwanese hardware manufacturer embeds their code? Spit a lot? It takes a lot of money, money that few of us have.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
benifits nobody
Guess what, most companies don't want to give back source code, and its apperant by how many companies are violating the GPL. Having the restrictions the GPL does, it causes the companies to give back, which helps the community. Take PearPC for example. CherryOS has (obviously) ripped the code from them, and claimed that they wrote it all (in a few months or something, by one man, with no programming experience, which is bullshit) Nowadays, PearPC doesn't get many updates, because everytime they do, CherryOS does too. It's dampened the whole thing for the developers. If CherryOS was forced to obey theGPL (which they will eventually, some organization like the EFF or something will take them to court) then this wouldn't happen. Now tell me how limiting restrictions would help this case.
i personally think the GPL is the best license currently available (except maybe the apache type licenses because of their patent clauses).
the spirit of the gpl is that the code stays open. if you want people to write code for you to sell, use bsd software.
I think we all remember the MPlayer and libmad case, where KISS stole GPL code, and used it in their DVD recoarders and DVD players.
Wouldn't this be a good place to start, as KISS doesn't give a f**k about the GPL?
Sure they can. They just did.
If a company does not want to show their source code, they should use a BSD (or similar) licensed software or quite simply write their own. Some manufacturers of wireless access points would not have been on the recieving end of the GPL stick if they'd used something like OpenBSD with their own drivers.
I have seen violations at places like Iomega for there NAS drives. It was one of the issues that I brought up durring beta testing. And they said it wasn't an issue that they were using Linux with out releasing the source because their firmware developer for the embeded Linux told them it wasn't a problem and they weren't going to release the source. This little product only costed about 200.00 for network storage, and it has the potential to hit the market like the Linksys WRT54G did with custom firmware.
If anybody is interested in pursing Iomega about this let me know because I will sign a petition.
That's a blatant misrepresentation of his point - a straw man. Free-as-in-GPL doesn't mean "do not touch".
The GPL attempts to ensure that modifications to licensed, distributed, source code remain available to users. Whether that is a worthwhile cause is a matter of opinion; personally, I believe that for community OSS projects, the requirement for companies making modified versions to also make source available is generally good for the project.
Yeah, the freedom to use the code however you want, as long as you let others do the same.
My company and I have looked at open source opportunities before, but it's precisely for this reason that we kept away from OS - even though we felt we could use it and contribute to it... Can somebody please explain this to me, or provide me with a clear link?
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
I wonder if some company may eventually say:
"We won't sue you for infringing on our patents if you don't sue us for infringing on the GPL"
Also, would that even be legal to accept an agreement like that? Nevermind that it would probably be a bad thing for OSS.
It is. And people who don't agree with the GPL are free to write their own code and license it however they like.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
This opens up another front on the OSS battle so to speak. While some posters here question the value of informing companies that they may be in violation of the GPL and claim that they can simply ignore it, companies that ignore such warnings do so at their own peril. Why? Because from a legal standpoint they can't be sure who will hit them with a suit or when. There are all sorts of questions about who would have legal standing to bring a suit, and this itself would vary from state to state and country to country. If I'm a company bent on violating the GPL, defending that could be difficult especially if a GPL backing company like IBM or Novell decides it's in their best interests to get involved and bankrolls the lawsuit.
Given this, I think few companies will intentionally violate the GPL. So I think that most smart companies if informed of a problem, will probably rectify it one way or another rather than risk an uncertain threat of liability. Certainly any high profile organization with a smart legal counsel would. The not so smart ones are another story!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
From my (albeit limited) understanding of the GPL, it just wants you to give credit to the original authors of the code. When someone downloads a song, they are not in any way claiming that they wrote the song. There's the difference betwen the two.
"It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one." - Voltaire
without ever really stopping to think that that's not really what "free" means at all.
Then think about this: there at least two mainly known definitions of free: positive freedom and negative freedom.
The GPL follows the first one. Libertarians (i.e.e right wing people) follow the second. That's why you don't understand the mismatch, because there isn't one meaning for freedom.
And as positive > negative, *I* would say that GPL has more freedom than BSD.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I'll second the other poster who said, 'Good thing you aren't a developer.' See, development takes work; lots of it, in fact. Writing a program doat does anything more than put 'Hello, world!' on the screen takes a measure of effort that you, as a non-developer, can't really comprehend.
See, writing programs, especially *good* programs, isn't easy. It takes skill, patience, and experience, as well as a certain type of mind that isn't very common. And, before you tell me that even your seventy-two year old mother knows how to program, ask yourself this -- does she know what an eigenvector is? How about maxtrix transforms? Relational algebra? Multivariable calculus?
Why are these important? Because programming requires a high level of mathematical ability, at least if you want to have any understanding of why you are writing code a certain way.
So, all of this together makes a programmer, and people who do this sort of thing pour hours into their work. This is something they have created, and honestly, they should, and do, have the final word over what happens to their works. Some people are generous enough to release their works under a license like the GPL, which enables anyone else to use the program which the programmer has created, but with the caveat that the program can't be stolen and sold.
As a programmer, I'm happy the GPL exists, because there are a lot of ideas I've had for 'open-source' programs, and while I am happy to write them, I don't want to spend months coding, just so that some asshat can try to charge money for something I, as the creator of that thing, have released for free.
Finally, information doesn't 'want' anything -- it's an intangible concept, like 'santa claus' or 'income tax reform'. People want information to be free, and while that's all and good, there are far too many people demanding free information, and far too few people willing to work to provide it.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
"You guys?"
What, everyone who writes GPLed software is a music pirate?
Unlike all those Windows users who, undoubtedly, have never broken IP laws by, say, borrowing somebody's copy of Office or downloading a Dreamweaver zipfile?
Dear me.
Harald Welte is one of the netfilter guys. Look into MAINTAINERS and CREDITS.
He owns the stuff and he knows what he is talking about. The netfilter team also accomplished the first acknowledgement of the GPL in a court in Europe.
tglx
Bullshit. The GPL only prohibits taking open software, closing it and selling it as your own with no source available. You are free to use GPL libraries in your proprietary code without releasing your code, and to sell your closed code. Try again.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
"Why does this sound so familiar?"
Because it's wrong, and it's on Slashdot?
If you had RTFA, you might have noticed that the *author* of the code is the one sending the letters.
Yes, but freedom is a two-way thing.
For example, if you were free to run all over anywhere you want on your dirt bike, including my back garden, then you would have removed my freedom to enjoy my back garden in peace.
In any society where resources are contested, granting one freedom to one person may remove a freedom from another.
The GPL trys to addresse this in a way which preserves the most freedom. You are granted the right to modify and redistribute anything I do, as long as you also redistribute the changes you made, so that I and others can benefit in turn. Your additional freedom comes at the price of not restricting the freedom of others.
Alternatively, here is another way of looking at it. Information wants to be free, but copyright laws are provided which allow it to be locked up. The GPL uses these laws against themselves, to create information which can never be locked up.
You're making an entirely unwarranted assumption: That GPL developers routinely infringe others' copyrights. Most developers I know are very respectful of any copyrights on a work.
I suspect the fraction of free software developers who infringe many copyrights is lower than the fraction of general internet users who infringe many copyrights, just because the former tend to be more familiar with the law and what it takes to produce a copyrightable work.
Don't confuse GPL developers with file traders just because they both read Slashdot.
I know this *is* slashdot and all, but according to the article, the group last year reached 25 amicable conclusions, 2 preliminary injunctions, and 1 court order. That would lead most *readers* of the article to conclude that in fact they do take people to court. That is the usual way that you get injunctions and court orders.
Often companies start with warning letters too.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I've seen allot of arguments for and against the GPL. I don't really take sides either way, but here are my general observations about it.
/any/ way, code that has a GPL license, that you must also release your code under the GPL. It's my understanding that this is not so. If you modify code covered under the GPL, then you have to release your modifications. If you use code covered under the GPL, then you have to release copies of that source. If you create /new/ code, but it depends on a GPL item, then you can release your code under whatever license you see fit - open or closed source.
Allot of people have the common mis-conception that just because software is released as being free, that they can do what ever they want with it. The truth is, if that were the case, then all we would have is mass chaos. This would lead to (more) code stealing and mis-use of IP.
Another mis-conception that I see, is that people believe if your code extends, in
Anyway, I've forgotten my original point here, so I'll just say this:
We can't have Free/Open Source without rules; That would just be Chaotic/Open Source. And if you violate the GPL, you deserve to be sued for. It's akin to breaking a Constitutional Amendment. I mean really....
http://www.accelerateglobalwarming.com
Apple didn't bother with a scary letter.
Apple has threatened to invade Taiwan if the self-governed island moves toward formal independence from Apple's dominance in the mp3 player market. The threat has become more real to many in Taiwan as Apple prepares to enact an anti-secession law that some analysts fear may provide Apple with a license to attack the island.
That's what LGPL is for.
If Oracle and Electronic Arts can grok this than so can anyone else.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...outsourcing this to SCO?
(...) You are free to use GPL libraries in your proprietary code without releasing your code, and to sell your closed code. Try again.
LGPL libraries you mean.
If I were to sell copies of Star Trek DVDs that I made myself, Paramount would be all over me for violating their copyright. I have no contract with Paramount. That's the point - I have NO right to sell someone else's copyrighted material without permission. You must have permission to distribute ('publish') someone else's copyrighted material.
That permission could be given by a contract. Or it could be given by a license, such as the GPL. When the author places his work under the GPL, he grants permission to copy to those who adhere to the terms of the GPL. If someone doesn't follow the terms, then they DON'T have permission to distribute the copyrighted materials. It's a simple case of copyright infringement.
The GPL is far simpler than the usual EULA. The GPL makes no restriction on use, but most EULAs do. Most EULAs prohibit copying, but the GPL encourages it. The GPL is a license granting you permissions that you wouldn't otherwise have under copyright law. You don't have to accept the GPL, you just fall back on standard copyright law if you don't. No contract is needed.
I just read the LGPL and it still seems too restrictive. This is from the POV of a one-man part-time developer. I have steered away from any GPL stuff just because it's a can of worms if at any point you think your app might become the basis of something commercial.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
Those like me who've read and understand the license, use it to make sure the MUSIC we distribute are not redistributed without PERMISSIONe. We *want* that restriction. If you don't like that restriction, feel free to not use the MUSIC and go the hell away.
3 words,
1 hypocrite
Before you call "bullshit", you might want to check your facts: the GPL in fact does not allow this (read par. 2). You're probably confused with the LGPL, which does.
I think you missed the parents point, the Google search appliance, a product they are distributing. The Q he is raising is if it is Linux based and if they applied any custom patches to any GPLed software within.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Usually, if there's a demand, a supply manifests itself. it's automagic, really.
GPL Violations.org has successfully been slashdotted. Congratulations! We are a force to be reckoned with.
These aren't the sigs you're looking for.
"From my (albeit limited) understanding of the GPL, it just wants you to give credit to the original authors of the code. When someone downloads a song, they are not in any way claiming that they wrote the song. There's the difference betwen the two."
The forms of art are inherently different. The average pirate doesn't incorporate a downloaded song into their own work without credit, and the average GPL violator doesn't listen to the code. The implicit rationale here is "I follow this certain set of rules for one piece of media, and if another medium has different rules, then they're wrong and can be ignored." Different media have different uses, and thus, sets of rules.
In situations like this, the golden rule still applies: treat others as you would like to be treated. If a software developer -- big or small -- wants you to honor their wishes and respect their rights, do so. Likewise, if a musician -- or even a record company -- wants you to respect their wishes and respect their rights, you should as well. Because some day -- whether you're a musician or a programmer or a painter or an author -- it may be your own rights that somebody has taken the libery of ignoring.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
"Pay for what you take...."
"Take"? It's 'copy', not 'take', one source of the confusion.
Many programming applications *are* scientific, and eigenvectors are very useful when it comes to linear systems of differential equations, which are used extensively in engineering. (Note: I'm assuming you know this, of course, but that many other readers don't).
There is also a lot of programming which involves physics in some form or another, or at the very least differing rates of change -- multivariable calc is important for writing games, financial anaylsis tools, and more.
Yes, there are a lot of programs on the 'hello world' level, and equally many more that don't ever descend into the gritty world of math, but even so, the designers of these programs would do well to have a basic understanding of the math behind the tools they use. How, otherwise, can a coder know what 'going quadratic' means, and how to avoid it, in terms of a search algorithm? What about having an understanding of inductive logic, so that they can write routines iteratively, rather than recursively? Would you trust an encryption scheme designed by someone with no experience in number theory?
I will admit, I'm biased -- I'm a math-and-science guy, with an emphasis on math, but my original point stands. Namely, that without the requisite background knowledge in mathematics, writing good code on these big calculating machines we call 'computers' is nominally an accident. Ergo, a Good Programmer needs this skill, and is much more rare than Some Guy Who Took Visual Basic Once In Junior College.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
This is one of the instances in which geeks are naive to the weaselly, successful ways of lawyers and politicians. The geek instinct is to first survey the complete territory: "how many violations can we grep across the Net?" The lawyer or politician would first identify a few highly vulnerable violators, and take them out, before hinting that perhaps "everyone does it". They'd build momentum, gaining mindshare for the idea that "you better not do it". By the time they did their "complete survey", they'd have already shrunk that population through intimidation. Before creating more, by promoting the idea that it's widespread.
Geeks have to start thinking more about "social impedence" feedback problems. Maybe all the recent work by programmers in modelling social networks, filled with live normals, will create some conventional Usenet-style wisdom. We've got to learn through data what the accomplished weasels seem to know by instinct: defining the scale of the problem prematurely can increase its scale. Computers are sitting ducks - solving people problems requires a much more dynamic approach.
--
make install -not war
sveasoft (gpl-violations is slashdotted, so maybe they are listed)
Maybe if the law didn't mandate things like statutory damages in the order of thousands of dollars per infringement people wouldn't be quite so critical of RIAA's tactics? When I can potentially be sued for 20 counts of copyright infringement for sharing 20 songs with a combined retail value of maybe $20 and be potentially on the hook for a minimum of $15,000 and a maximum of $3,000,000 (!) in damages it doesn't take very long for us mere peons to cry, "FOUL!"
So, is this GPL-violator guy asking for/threatening thousands of dollars in damages each time he sends out a letter?
The situation with the GPL is precisely analogous to the situation with downloaded music. (Most) music copyright owners expect a payment of some kind in exchange for their providing you with music. Creators of GPL code also expect payment. The only difference is that the music owners expect payment in the form of money, while GPL code owners expect payment in the form of more GPL code. In both cases, you legally have no right to distribute or use the music or code unless you make the appropriate payment - it's just that the terms of payment are different. In both cases, you have the choice not to accept the terms imposed by the owner of the work, by choosing not to use their work (and finding e.g. an independent artist who allows free downloads, or software that is distributed under a BSD or MIT license).
First, the math thing was more of a side-point, not a main point.
Second, you don't trap future development! The GPL mandates that source code must be made available. Licenses like the GPL specifically allow one to make modifications to the code as they wish, provided that any redistribution includes those changes. This encourages development!
What the GPL *does* do, is prevent other people, the freeloaders, from taking all that work, rebranding it, and selling it at a profit. It keeps the rights to the code squarely where they belong -- in the hands of the developers who funded the work and provided the labor, not in the hands of unscrupulous businessmen who are out to make a quick buck on the generousity of others.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Subtle difference: Company A starts SELLING some 'free' (they believe) source code in their product. Only then are they in violation. As they should be, they are then making money selling the work of others without the permission of the original authors. That's what copyright is for, and it works. [Need I add that this prooves there is no need for software patents since copyright law already protects your intellectual property?]
Then people should be bitching about the magnitude of penalty and not the fact that there are indeed penalties.
You can use GPL libraries in your proprietary code and sell your closed code, provided your distributed binary is not a derivative work of those libraries.
The LGPL allows you to do so even if your distributed binary IS a derivative work.
Whether something is or is not a derivative work is a subject for the law and not something which the license can set out (because if it's not a derivative work, the license doesn't apply).
I am not trying to tank there stock. I am trying to get them to release the code so that a good development process can go forward like what is happening at sveasoft.com with WRT54G
Your argument only works partly. What I mean is that your argument only works the throw those arguments back in the faces of those who use them against corporations and organizations like the RIAA. You aren't really disagreeing with the idea that intellectual property needs protecting, but you are disagreeing with those who dislike big businesses protecting their intellectual property. You know as well as I do that nobody is going to enforce the GPL against college students or grandma, and you know that this action to protect GPL'd software isn't for simple "copy-and-paste theft" but rather huge portions making up the majority of the software these companies are using.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The GPL and BSD licenses will become equivalents if the GPL isn't protected sufficiently.
Yes, but that supply usually manifests itself because the people doing the supplying see some kind of benefit in meeting the demand. Usually because they get financially compensated. Sometimes for other reasons. But always because they get some beneift from it. Whether or not there will be an "automagic" supply of free information depends a lot on what the incentives are for suppliers of that information.
And YOU miss the point entirely by holding up your personal standard of what's "right" and saying that, clearly, that's what the courts should enforce, regardless of the law in question.
I'm sorry, but an MP3 of a Britney Spears song hardly qualifies as "information." It is (at least by the legal definition) a work of art. And it is therefore protected by copyright.
The author of a copyrighted work can choose to publish it or not. That's THEIR decision--not YOURS. IF they chose to share or publish it, they have the legal right to impose terms on that sharing. If you don't like the terms, you don't have to accept them. But then you don't get to see/hear/use that person's creation.
But to somehow claim that YOU PERSONALLY have some kind of "right" to take whatever you chose from whoever you chose whether they want you to or not under some "principle" of information freedom, frankly, offends me, and should offend anyone who has ever created something, be it art, music, or software. I made this--it's mine. It's not yours. If I'm so inclined, I am willing to let you share it if you agree to some rules. To say you can ignore any rules you don't agree with is arrogant beyond measure.
I must have missed something. I remember reading somewhere in the GPL license that you need to distribute the source code along with the program... I do not recall, however, that the program and its source should be free (as in costless). Nor do I recall that the source code should be readily released to the community.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe are all the following are valid:
- Under the GPL, I can take your code, modify it for my usage, and never release the end result to you or anybody else. Your code is released under the GPL, which sets limits to the way I distribute work based on yours. Not to the way I use it.
- Under the GPL, I can take your code and sell it to my customers, as long as I release your code to my customers. Moreover, I can sell them the upgrades and bug corrections that you release. Sure, some customers will become aware of this and will download your code for free, since it is there to grab. But most won't, because they won't be aware it exists or where to download it in the first place.
- Under the GPL, I can take your code, modify it, and sell it to my customers, as long as I release the resulting code to my customers. Arguably, they must release their source code if they build on top of it and decide to distribute the finished product, since mine and yours are released under the GPL. But they also have the right to never release the work I did to you or to anybody else. And most will, especially if the resulting code is specific to their business processes.
.. assuming that there is willful infringement in every case, and that the companies involved will not comply with the letters. This is a pretty big assumption.
I guess you flunked out of charm school, and I guess you've never heard of the old adage "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar", so I'll spell it out for you here:
Making threats against a neutral party will usually make them a hostile party.
If they are neutral and you threaten them, you're damaging your own cause, because you'll be souring them on OSS and the GPL.
If they're hostile and you threaten them, then you don't gain anything.
If they're neutral and you ask them nicely, they just might comply.
If they're hostile and you ask them nicely, you haven't lost anything.
By sending the letters, the companies who are doing this understand that we're not all rabid loser anti-corporate zealots. Making threats will do nothing more than sour them on the GPL and open source in general.
I'm even pretty sure there are some GPL violators amongst the companies that fight against OSS (or at least trying to prove how bad and communist OSS is)...
"Honesty is such a lonely word..."
Damn, I am sleepy, that should go to 302 Google Exploit discussion ;-((
There you are, staring at me again.
This diverges slightly from the file-trading theme here, but to extend your point: Many of us who use free software started to do so in part because we didn't have the means to legally obtain and use much of the software we used previously. Some people have moved to free software because they can't or don't want (for various reasons) to pay Microsoft, etc. to use their software, but also don't think that violating copyright is a moral thing to do either.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
>You can use GPL libraries in your proprietary code and sell your closed code, provided your distributed binary is not a derivative work of those libraries.
What's the point of having gpl libraries in your code if you're not using them? AFAIK, linking to them does create a derivitave work, just as adding a few verses to a song would.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I've written GPLed code. I've protested what the RIAA and MPAA have done. I'll tell you why on both counts.
I write GPLed code as a step towards making someone else's life better. I like writing software, the code I GPL I would be writing anyway, and making it GPL doesn't harm me in the least. I make it GPL instead of BSD or public domain because I want to see the amount of freely available software increase as rapidly as possible, and I think the GPL promotes that.
Now, what's wrong with the RIAA and MPAA trying to enforce their copyright? If it were that simple, nothing. But I'll tell you what... these guys have successfully lobbied to take the vast majority of what would be in the public domain, a part of common culture expected to be commonly available, and made it their private property. Companies like Disney are founded on public domain material - Grimm's Fairy Tales, Pinnochio, Sleeping Beauty, you name it. They didn't pay a dime for those stories, stories that someone else wrote and the culture validated, because those stories had passed into the public domain.
Since then, Disney and other MPAA companies have successfully lobbied a 28 year copyright period into *120 years*. They go back and lobby for another 20 years every time their oldest works, the ones they built on public domain material, are about to fall out of copyright. This is no less than organized crime - bribes given to lawmakers to steal our culture from us. That's item 1.
The MPAA and RIAA are working very hard to make general computing illegal. A general computer is fantastically useful - it has transformed the lives of billions. Open systems based on simple principles can yield unbounded potential. The internet is a new testament to that fact, if the prior success of general computers weren't enough. But the MPAA and RIAA believe that general computing is a danger to their revenue, since it allows copying without flaw any information you have available to you. So the MPAA and RIAA, whose members' revenue is a fraction of that of the computing industry, but who control access to public attention and famous figures, lobby governments continually to make computers without DRM illegal. Have no doubts about it, mandatory DRM *will* cripple your computer. It *will* end up in a place where all of your personal information is available to "reputable" companies, where use of programs written by "unreputable" companies will be illegal to run, and where government sanctioned monopolies will charge exorbitant fees to vendors so they can release programs that actually run under DRM. You will see programs that cost money each time you use them, and more money to use them in more sophisticated ways. And using them in innovative ways that the creator never thought of? This will be simple impossible. This is the future if mandatory DRM is allowed to pass. That's item 2.
Finally, the penalties for copying the mass marketed tripe they produce are ludicrous. Charging 10 times the value of the illegally copied goods might be reasonable, both as a penalty and to account for the offenders that you can't catch. But the penalties are 100s or 1000s of times the cost to buy legal copies in stores. The penalties are totally disproportionate to the offense. That's item 3, minor as it may be in comparison to the other two.
That's why some of us get outraged when organized criminals call us communists for happily giving away our works, and name people who copy material that should have been part of the common culture after brigands of the sea who rape, murder and steal.
i was under the impression that slashdot forumns and comments are made up of many thousands of people with differing opinions, often times leading into hot debates regarding such issues as copyright...
thank you for clearing that up, slashdot is only one entity with one opinion on everything.
idiot...
Harald Welte did a very interesting presentation about GPL Enforcement in Germany at FOSDEM two weeks ago.
He is one of the few, with Theo de Raadt, who really fight against proprietary software. See this Kerneltrap.org feature about OpenBSD fight against closed source drivers for wireless.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4340497.stm
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
That pretty much sums it up.
But it only takes one of your customers to download the code and make it freely available.
Manual Moderation +1 insightful
I wonder if the whole reason we are seeing "trusted computing" and copy protected CDs is the mass copyright violation of the napster crowd.
But enforced 'freedom' isn't freedom. Maybe it's a level playing field, and maybe it's a good thing, but it's not 'free' and it's not 'open.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
In one case, copyright is being used as a tool to protect the ability to freely disseminate and modify works. In the other case, it is being used as a tool to restrict freedom of distribution and prevent modification.
I'm not going to bother telling you my personal opinion on the matter, but given the differences in the two scenarios, it should not be surprising that freedom-minded people might be more supportive of the first use of copyright, and more critical of the second.
"You're making an entirely unwarranted assumption: That GPL developers routinely infringe others' copyrights. Most developers I know are very respectful of any copyrights on a work."
You are most likely right. I would imagine that serious developers who've put their heart and soul into brilliantly crafted code will often understand that musicians (and anybody else who chooses an art form other than software development) also tend to work hard and don't want their rights violated, either.
I think the bulk of the issue is Slashdotters who are aware of the rules regarding the GPL and other art forms, use the GPL as a convenient rationalization for music piracy, or piracy of non-GPL software. If not that, then they compare the GPL license with a typical license for, say, music or films, and believe one to be more equal than the other, while ignoring the fact that different media tend to have different uses, and thus different rules.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
And many OSS companies aren't the authors of the software they sell and aren't doing anything to benefit the real authors.
All of this is irrelevant, however. The question is whether you believe in IP or you don't. If you don't you shouldn't embrace the GPL or the RIAA.
Mirror here.
My life is an open book ... up to a point.
The LGPL doesn't really allow derivative works to be closed source. The problem is that the GPL incorrectly defines derivative work in a way that is so unreasonably broad that merely doing #include <gplheader.h> could potentially make your project a derivative work. That's why the LGPL was specifically created to remedy what a sizeable percentage of FOSS developers consider to be a fundamental flaw in the GPL.
In all likelihood, the implied linking restrictions in the GPL wouldn't hold up in court, so legally, the GPL and LGPL are probably equivalent. That said, most companies aren't willing to take that risk. And ditto for some BSD open source projects.
Despite what some of the moderators seem to think, the ACs are right on this one. Developing an app as GPL is fine. Developing a library as GPL is really a cheap shot, and in the end, only hurts your library's acceptance in the general computing world, as it makes it nearly impossible for a closed source app (or even some BSD-like apps, depending on license variant) to use your library.
If you're lucky and the library is useful enough, it may still be adopted in spite of being GPL-licensed, in which case, a BSD variant will inevitably be written. Suddenly you have two groups maintaining two versions of an essentially identical library (e.g. getopt_long). It's a total waste of time and resources, all for stupid political reasons that would have been obviated had the authors chosen a sane license for the library to begin with.
There are only two appropriate licenses for libraries: LGPL and BSD. For GPL-like protections (without fascist linking restrictions), use the LGPL. If you don't care if someone does a closed-source derivative work, use BSD.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I hate to burst your bubble, but if you use GPL'd libraries in your proprietary code, the end result is *by definition* a derivative work of those libraries.
This includes something as simple as including a GPL'd header file. The only reason why code is allowed to include kernel headers (which are GPL'd) is because there is an *explicit* exception made by Linus to allow it.
If you are actually doing the above, you might want to talk to an IP lawyer.
Chris
The heavy handed tactics of the entertainment industry is what gains them the public relations disaster.
You seem to think that just because someone's anti-GPL, they're anti all FOSS licenses. I prefer the MPL to the GPL, for instance because it doesn't try to extend its cover to other code - only its own code and modifications to it.
In one case, copyright is being used as a tool to protect the ability to freely disseminate and modify works. In the other case, it is being used as a tool to restrict freedom of distribution and prevent modification.
I love your twisted logic here, justifying copyright infringement on the one hand because it promotes "freedom" but condemning it on the other because it promotes the "freedom" to disseminate. Orwell would love you.
Here's the situation, and it's not a shade of grey as you imply: copyright infringement is either good for all or bad for all, you can't pick specific instances where it's good for some and bad for some. That's called subjectivism, and it has no business intruding into a legal matter such as copyright infringement. Open that door and all law suddenly becomes entirely relative, and you do not want to go down that path. Is murdering a white supremacist wrong? Sure, the world's better off without him, but does that make murder "right"? You cannot use the "it's for the greater good" argument because there is no "fair" way to define the greater good. What's good for you is most likely bad for someone else. That's why these matters must be objective, not subjective.
So, which is it? Would you stand on a hill and defend my right to violate the GPL however I see fit? I doubt it.
Don't look now, but your double standard is showing. Perhaps you'd be more comfortable with this definition instead.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Hey, Let's get off grandmothers and eigenvectors/eigenvalues. Mine taught me that Jacobian itteration is simple, but subspace itteration is more efficient for large matrices. What did yours teach you?
----- There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend; those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
If you customized each customer's code, they probably will keep it private and accomplish your goals, which are all legal under the GPL.
Note that if you for some reason start getting lazy in supporting them your customers can just take your code and give it to somebody else to maintain. They could also ship it to Elbonia for future maintenance.
Likewise, if you started raising prices and your customers became dissatisfied they could band together and create a replacement for you which would maintain all of their code while maintaining confidentiality. They could even hire a programmer to run diffs to tell apart the areas of code that you provided to all customers vs a single one. Common code could then be donated back to the parent project that you borrowed from for maintenance.
The GPL allows for many business models, like the one that you propose. What it does though is empower the customer - if the vendor gets out of control the customer can go to somebody else, or bring maintenance in-house.
I explicitly did not state my opinion on the matter. If you are going to base this conversation on assumptions, then the conversation is over.
Had I written "It is not surprising that the family of a murder victim might want to kill the murderer," would you have assumed that I am advocating vigilantism?
I can't get to the article, but the summary lists Buffalo as a possible violator. If they are, I doubt it's intentional, since they released all their Kuro box code (which their linkstation is based off of) here .
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Nowadays, PearPC doesn't get many updates, because everytime they do, CherryOS does too. It's dampened the whole thing for the developers.
Is that really true, or just something you believe? Looking at the PearPC stats on SourceForge, I can see the downloads are declining, but only from a peak in September, corresponding to the latest release.
Besides which, I don't really sympathize. The developers are the copyright holders. They have the power to stop CherryOS if they want to. If they don't want to do it themselves, they have the option to go to the Software Freedom Law Center and try to get them to persue it, or sign their code over to the FSF and have them handle it.
If CherryOS was forced to obey theGPL (which they will eventually, some organization like the EFF or something will take them to court) then this wouldn't happen.
The evidence of infringement is overwhelming. CherryOS could have been taken down almost immedately through a preliminary injunction.
Obviously, I don't approve of what CherryOS has done, but I don't approve of people not standing up for themselves either.
Freedom minded people might also want to appreciate someone ELSE'S freedom to distribute his works under whatever license, agreement and policy they wish.
It's a double-standard pure and simple. I'm not saying that the majority of slashdotters are downloading movies and music against copyright law unlike the GP but I will say this.
The same fucking power and ruleset that the GPL is using is the same fucking power and ruleset that copyright holders are using.
The GPL is a copyright. Copyleft is just a cutsie term that the FSF attached to it. I love the GPL. I love libre software. I appreciate the FSF working WITHIN the law just as the Nature Conservancy works with contract law to preserve greenspace.
The question of someone's vigilante method of serving notices (I can't read the original site to determine if he is operating as counsel for the FSF) is a different issue. The pure and simple fact is that people who download or distribute music against the original terms of copyright are just as shitty as people who download or distribute GPL code against the terms of the GPL.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
It is good to see someone doing something about GPL violators, but what happens when the violators are other GPL developers?
I contribute (a little) to a project called AutoIt3 (http://www.autoitscript.com/). They make a really useful scripting language for Windows.
Until recently they were using the GPL license. However some people took big chunks of the code, ripped it and repackaged with a different name. They only mention "based on AutoIT" or something similar on the Readme.txt but not in the code and of course they do not mention the original authors of the original work nor on their web page.
Some of the AutoIt developpers were so pissed that now they have changed the license (for their newest releases only, of course) and do not distribute their code until some months later.
Perhaps what these guys did is legal, I don't know, but if GPL developpers dishonor the heart of the GPL, then why use it and how can we expect for commercial companies to abide to it?
OSS would be better off without ANY restrictions on use.
There are no restrictions on use, the restrictions are on redistribution. You can even modify GPLed code and never release the modifications, as long as you similarly never release any binaries.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Rip off Apple by using their code in your project without permission -> get sued by the copyright holder (Apple)
Rip off Microsoft by using their code in your project without permission -> get sued by the copyright holder (Microsoft)
Rip off a free software developer by using their code in your project without permission -> get used by the copyright holder (the developer)
Which part of this simple process don't you understand?
Pleading the Fifth Amendment isn't going to win you any points here, bub. You explicity did not state your opinion, true. You did, however, say the following:
The latter half of the last sentence is an implicit justification of copyright infringement. If you are (a) unwilling to state your position on the matter and (b) arguing a point that supports copyright infringement, it logically follows that you feel your opinions differ from mine (hence the reticence to disclose them). If you wish to end the conversation, be my guest, but you alone are responsible for the image you project to others. If you don't wish to be categorized in this manner, perhaps you should state your fucking opinion and remove the doubt. Or perhaps you should stop ducking the issue, which you are so artfully doing. There's nothing worse in this world than a fence-sitter who acts like they're "above it all."
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Thank you for consuming my HD with source code I will never open. Hosting it online would be an EVIL BAD THING TO DO.
Once again thank you... my Linux Boxs' 5 gig HD praises you every day.
The person behind this effort *is* a contributor to the Linux kernel at least, though, so I don't see what's wrong with him warning vendors about violations of the GPL when it comes to using the Linux kernel. Not all of the code is his, of course, but some of it is, so why shouldn't he be allowed to tell them to stop it, and why shouldn't he threaten to take legal actions if they continue to violate HIS copyrights?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Actually, you are abiding by the terms of the GPL if you just use it in house. (As opposed to attempting to reverse engineer Windows, which is against the terms of the agreement, even if I do it by myself and don't tell anyone.)
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
But it's only legal because of the GPL, which licenses you to use the code in this way. The GPL only restricts distribution, but it applies to use as well. If it didn't, then use would not be permitted.
Let's see... I'm over 200 pounds, but I'm over six feet. We'll count that. I own a black duster. Hell, I own two. Half my t-shirts were free giveaways, but I never owned a Star Wars shirt. I grow a beard out of laziness. I own a big black cowboy hat, which is close enough to a fedora. I don't carry a cell phone when I can help it, because I loathe cell phones. And I've never been to a Ren Faire, and won't ever if I can help it.
Man, I made 4.5/7 and didn't even know. Thanks!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I call "B.S." The legal system allows you to kill someone in self-defense. That is "subjectivism."
No, it's not. Self-defense is not defined as "justified murder", they are two completely different concepts. If you're too naive to understand why, this conversation is pointless.
The concept behind the GPL is "make sure everyone has the freedom to read/use/change this stuff." The base concept behind the music industry is "make sure we suck as much money out of the people as possible." These two concepts could hardly be more different.
You're missing the point, perhaps because you're trying very hard not to think too much about the implications of copyright infringement. The law in this matter is clear, not fuzzy at all: a copyright is a copyright is a copyright whether it applies to the GPL or the RIAA. The law doesn't state "copyrights are only for nice people with nice ideas." You seem to think it should say that, so I encourage you to lobby your elected representatives to change the wording of the law. That way only nice people get the protection of the courts, and all those nastybad, doubleplus-ungood people get none at all.
You are a nice person, aren't you? I sure hope so. I'd hate for someone with a differing view from yours to classify you as a bad person. In your world, that would be very bad.
Perhaps you should think about the implications of what you're proposing before you propose it next time. There's a reason justice is supposed to be blind. In your world, you'd prefer she peeks at Santa's list to make sure you deserve protection.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Maybe you should read the license that the software is distributed under, instead of trolling Slashdot.
I want you to pay me for your use of "the"... and "?". They are both mine and "I want you to respect [my] wishes and respect [my] rights."
Or I'll sue you...
Bitch.
Feels good doesn't it!
Now If I was to tell you it would cost you $1000 each time you'd understand how people in third world countries feel about software patents and western media!(Cambodians I've talked to LOVE the idea of $40 DVD's it makes their WHOLE WEEK!
Of course you could go without "the" and "?" and still acheive a happy functional life, starting to understand?
I really hate you people.
For a person who apparently prides himself for objectivism and clear thinking, you aren't really shining here. My opinion has no bearing on the conversation, but to appease the beast, here it is:
I work at a commercial software company. We have a total of 55 employees. Our code is most definitely not open source, and we use copyright to retain control of our products. Given that we are in a niche market, we have not yet had significant problems with piracy. Nevertheless, we take certain steps to make it more difficult to pirate our software. I have been involved in the development of those measures.
When I was in college, I used to download MP3s. Mostly, these were legal music files from MP3.com (now defunct, at least as it was back then). Yes, there were some illegal files in there. In the last several years, the total number of MP3s I have downloaded illegally is precisely zero. I fully see the hypocracy of saying one thing and doing another, so I do not participate in that activity.
However, my personal ethics aside, I am capable of understanding, if not agreeing with, the viewpoints of other people. A very smart person (I forget who) once said that wisdom is being able to entertain a notion without agreeing with it. That's all I'm doing here.
If you don't wish to be categorized in this manner, perhaps you should state your fucking opinion and remove the doubt.
Perhaps it is you who should stop categorizing people based on a lack of evidence. You sing the praises of the legal system, a system based on the assumption of innocence, and yet while doing this you accuse me of unethical behavior merely because I did not find it relevant to state my opinion. In my book, that's "hypocracy."
Do you have to run through legal whenever you want to install Tcl or Perl?
I work in a similar environment where any application must be reviewed and approved prior to installation, even if the application will only be used internally. Legal departments just want to make sure the company won't get in trouble (and likely to justify their existence).
My company is changing it's policy a bit to specifically address the user of Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Historically this was under the policy I mentioned above, but given the nature of some FOSS licenses, the company is addressing these differently. The policy doesn't say we can't use FOSS, but it does outline risk so that a project fully understands what they are responsible for. As you've indicated, using code internally doesn't often present a great amount of risk, but as soon as you release anything outside your development environment, you better have everything covered.
What if you wan't to add proprietary extensions?
Well if you are using a GPL license and have any thoughts of distributing part GPL (original code) and part proprietary license (your code), you better understand the GPL license. The GPL has some specific language in it concerning use with proprietary add-ons, integrations, or extensions. I'd guess that most people probably don't "fully" understand the implications of the license and that's where legal departments try to reduce company risk.
Since open-source licenses (including the GPL depend on copyright law for their enforcement, most open source advocates seem to have no problem with existing copyright laws as it applies to software.
Patents are another issue altogether.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Finally, information doesn't 'want' anything
You're right. He shouldn't say that. Information hates being anthropomorphised.
So I'll explain the idea more formally. The marginal cost of information approaches zero. In a free commodity market, the cost of a good approaches the marginal cost.
Isn't that inherent to the demand? A real demand has a method to manifest the supply. It's like a simple energy exchange (no loss or gain). That is, if you have a *real need, you will spend your money, hence manifestint a supply.
The GF bought a Sony HDTV which of course, the resident geek BF set up. I was amused to see a full printed GPL license in the included paperwork. I gather it uses a GPL-derived photo viewer program to display the content from media inserted into the Sony-proprietary (irony!) Memory Stick slot on the front.
I wonder if should I ask Sony for the source code for the TV.
I searched for some kind of adapter that would plug in the Memory Stick slot and take a Compact Flash card with no joy. There is an adapter that goes the other way, fitting the Memory Stick into CF slot, but the BF hesitates to recommend buying a memory stick just to make the TV happy. *sigh*
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I think that in general most people ignore rules they don't agree with (witness jaywalking, rampant filesharing, office supply theft, cell phones in theatres, etc etc). Looking just at filesharing - the majority of people believe this to be the greatest thing since email. So I wouldn't agree with saying that ignoring the rules is "arrogant beyond measure" but rather "typically self-centered".
You seem to be blinded to the idea that "to copy" is different than "to take". The cost of copying has dropped to virtually nothing in the digital age, making scarcity obsolete for IP. Copyright attempts to retain scarcity on IP artifically, and the view by many is that this is in vain - in a number of years, despite attempts by RIAA/MPAA or whomever, digital copying will be ubiquitous and free.
As a potential author, I would have to be aware that my works, even if I never released them digitally, will end up in the public and traded freely. Does that mean that I should not produce my work at all? Does that mean that I won't see a dime for my work ever? No. It may mean I get less income from a particular work than I otherwise might, but any work of value will still find paying customers. To wish that the gravy train of lifetime compensation per work and pay-per-view consumption continues is to wish the stagnation and death of thee internet and the Information Age.
To keep this on topic - the GPL is necessary to protect the ideas of Open Source in today's copyright landscape. Without it, unscrupulous companies will "take" open source code (not just "copy", but "take", as in claiming ownership and credit) without any compensation to the good samaritan coders. This is a thing to be fought, and rightly so. The RIAA/MPAA etc exist to do something similar for their works - however, they are not attempting to prevent unscrupulous people from "taking" works (claiming ownership or credit), but are trying to enforce a "pay-per-view" model.
I personally find obtaining digital things for free to be good, and arbitrary rules against it I ignore. I also personally feel that falsely claiming credit or ownership of a work is abhorrent, and should be fought against.
I think the way things are going, we'll end up going back to a "patronage" model, with quality being the revenue generator, and the actual 'works' freely available. For books, the real consumer value is in owning a physical copy (the 'work' being essentially an ad for the particular stack of bound paper). Publishers sell books not 'works'. For music, this will mean live performances rather than the 'works', which are essentially ads for the live performance. The **AAs will become the patrons of tommorrow. For software this means Open Source everywhere.
The true value lies in quality. That is what drives the economy and progress, and successful business models will always reflect this regardless of how copyright law plays out.
-ZOD-
the copyright for the code rests with the authors [unless assigned to another person/group/co/org]. these are the peple that need to bring the actions. the fsf are a good starting point for people intested in doing so.
the site mentions court wins, but provides no links [eg press releases, cort decisions, etc] and doesn't even directly say that the site owner was involved in the case. he makes tenous associations between himself and the fsf, but doesn't provide any real proof of association [and no, putting a link to another website does not count].
this looks a little sketchy to me...
sum.zero
And how does that apply to the "demand" for free information that we were discussing?
As long as you don't redistribute you have no problems. At my old job we used to use openh323 stack because it saved us 1/2 million in licensing fees for a commercial voip stack. Problem was it was pure shit, we had to put 3 developers on it for a year to get a workable version. I don't think we ever released what they did, for fear our competitors would pick up our changes and actually get a workable voip stack for free.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
if the other groups are using gpl code, they are required to keep the original copyright attributions in the code. failure to do so voids their rights under the gpl as far as i know. this is their only right to that code, so they now are violating the copyrights of the original coders.
your friends should have taken the violators to court, not turned anti-gpl...
sum.zero
there are very real differences between commercial indfringement and personal filesharing, not to mention that filesharing is legal in some places.
;P
your arguments, while often verbose, are simple misdirection and oversimplification.
can't we all just get along?
sum.zero
I'll feed the troll.
You know as well as I do you aren't forced to use GPL or even LGPL software in your commercial product. You are perfectly free to write everything yourself or choose something from the BSD license camp.
I love how different people define freedom these days. It means one thing to the Bush Administration and another thing to John Gilmore.
If you want my personal opinion, which you don't, BSD licenses view free in terms of free to do whatever you want with it. the GPL licenses view free as in the code must remain free in terms of it must be available for all people at all times. The GPL folks figure the way to do this is by drafting the terms under which you make use of the code.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Usage of a program is not restricted by copyright law. So use is permitted just fine without the GPL. The GPL even specifically says:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
So, no, running the program is not covered by the GPL, it doesn't apply to use at all. It goes so far as to explicitly exclude it from the terms.
sorry, having looked a little harder i now see he is the chairman of the netfilter team and that the actions seem to revolve around his own project's code. i would think this should be made clearer in the text of the site as it is, at least partially, a vehicle for his personal interests. having to go to another site for the info is not enough, imho.
it is likely more of a case of incompetent web design than malfeasance though...
sum.zero
US Mail Certified letters to those corporations US Legal Departments is the best place to start...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
This probably can't happen. Usually companies are only asked to stop the violation, meaning the penalty is only having to go back and redo the development the way it should have been done in the first place.
Damages are also a slight possibility, but the amount is hard to establish for GPL violations unless they are one of those few dual license cases, where the software is also offered for sale under a commercial license.
I suppose some court in the future COULD impose punitive damages that include loss of a company's copyright, but it seems unlikely, and would probably be reversed on appeal.
IANAL
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
If you want to close-source your app, even if it is derived from GPL code, all you have to do is remove absolutely every single line of code that is covered by the GPL that you yourself did not actually author. If those lines include necessary portions of the program, then they must be rewritten from scratch (but not copied from the GPL'd work). If your changes to the GPL'd work are extensive enough that you expect a commercial distribution might actually succeed in the first place, this is probably not a problem.
Remember, copyright only protects _content_, not ideas. You cannot be sued for violating the GPL if you only copied an idea (or even a whole mess of ideas).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The situation with the GPL is precisely analogous to the situation with downloaded music. (Most) music copyright owners expect a payment of some kind in exchange for their providing you with music. Creators of GPL code also expect payment. The only difference is that the music owners expect payment in the form of money, while GPL code owners expect payment in the form of more GPL code.
No, you don't get it (don't worry though, not many do). This is not about "payment" in any form, people don't use the GPL because they want to "earn" something, if that's the reason then they're confused. This is about Freedom.
There's a *distinct* difference between movie/music piracy and GPL piracy: FOSS was made to keep information *free*, and to promote sharing as a Good Thing. When someone is enforcing the GPL, that someone is preventing information being locked down and is thus protecting peoples freedom. The RIAA/MPAA wants to *prevent* sharing, and stop people from doing what they want with their music/movies.
Both kind of piracy is illegal, but it's waaaay different. The ethical background here is black and white, and can't be put in the same booth, ever.
Life is Reality
I've often wondered about that. If I keep the original copyright notice in there, and make modifications (perhaps significant) and release my changes under the GPL, how do I label it? I have to keep a copyright notice that attributes the code to someone else? What about my contributions? What if it's a complex mix where I can't nicely label just my parts? The GPL tells you what you're allowed to do and what your obligations are, it doesn't tell you how to do this in practice. Does the FSF have documentation on this? I haven't seen it.
This really could have a reverse affect. What I do not see here is "We try to work with companies to find a suitable path to bring them into GPL compliance". What I do see is the GPL version of scare tactics and lawsuits.
Most companies, especially the smaller companies, may be trying to be in compliance. They may not know how. This effort is most likely going to scare many companies off by showing how successful companies have tried to work with OSS and wound up being stuck in legal battles. The GPL is confusing for many and is mostly understood by word-of-mouth and/or other peoples confused interpretation. Not every company has a legal department to assist.
Let us take Sveasoft for example. Many people are outraged by the companies refusal to freely distribute (paid subscription required) their binaries and often scream "GPL VIOLATION". They do have their sources available for the public. According to Sveasoft, as well as my understanding, the GPL restricts the sources and not the binaries to be freely available.
A "strong arm" is not what Linux needs to assist with wide spread adoption. A community of people to assist with compliance is.
However, unless there is distribution actually occuring, any copying would fall under the category of personal use or fair use, which you have permission to do anyways, even without explicit permissison from the Copyright holder(s).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The point was you don't need to agree to the terms of the GPL if you just use the software. And hence having to run use by legal is pretty idiotic. It's like running the use of an extension cord by legal...there are no circustances where use could affect anything, legally.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
So, I guess locking up (or killing) people and taking away someone else's money are all the same: either good or bad. It may not happen that locking up convicted felons in a prison is a good thing while locking up innnocents is bad. It HAS to be either good or bad, right?
Well, not.
It would be "double standard" if the OP stated the ultimate goal is to protect the copyright owner - however, if he thinks that benefitting the average citizen is the important thing, the standard against which everything is measured, then he may claim that different cases of copyright infringments can be judged differently without having to resort using double standards.
And the law is based on pretty subjective things (and at its very fundament is (or should be) the "greater good"): that's why we use humans to create the law and make judgements and not computers.
Real life is overrated.
Poster 2: That's really generous of you.
Anonymous Dumbass (sneering): True generosity would have been to give all of your money to the relief effort.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
The law requires the permission of the copyright holder to use (as in, make a derivative work from) the code. The license grants the permission.
Transposition type. I hope you are just being obtuse!
Stripping copyright notices from a work when you copy with intent to redistribute _automatically_ negates any permission you may have previously had to copy the work unless such permission also explicitly included permission to strip existing copyright notices (which is highly unlikely, but possible).
While it must be conceded that finding such infractions may be technologically very difficult, it's still copyright infringement and infringers can, if discovered, be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
1) Statically link it, and provide the user the ability to relink with a bugfixed version of the LGPL code
2) Dynamically link it.
Plenty of commercial developers use LGPL code with no problems. See UT2004 et.al.'s use of SDL.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
I would stand on a hill and defend the idea that "information should be free." If the GPL advances that idea, I'll support it. If copyright infringment does so, I'll support it too. It's no "moral relatavism" or double standard at all, because copyright infringment and the GPL are not the ideas being defended at all, but merely tactics.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If your customers are consumers, why would they care or bother unless you suddenly changed your tune on support?
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
>> Here's the situation, and it's not a shade of grey as you imply: copyright infringement is either good for all or bad for all, you can't pick specific instances where it's good for some and bad for some.
Not true. Any item created within the past 28 years could be covered by copyright as it was envisioned by the writers of the constitution - 14 years with a single renewal of 14 years.
Any item that is currently copyrighted and has been so since 1925 violates the Constitution "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
I don't care what Congress or the Supreme Court says right now. It's ok to disagree with the law, and in this case the law as currently written is wrong.
Thus, just from that argument there are two types of copyright infringement - that done with items that are protected for a reasonable time, and that done with items protected for an unreasonable time. Here already are two options where it can be good or can be bad.
Now you might argue that the law is the law, and if you disagree with it you can change the law but you can't ignore the law. If you do, though, you are getting into those shades of grey that you claim don't exist.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Forget the term 'IP', it's only confusing ordinary people who aren't going to look up the details (yes, that means you parent poster).
IP is essentially both trademark, copyright and patents at the same time. *NONE* of those are related, they are simply not covered under the same law, their rules are completly different.
Copyright is what helps protect creative works. People write things in the GPL so that they can ensure it remains open and Free (as in freedom), and copyright is necessary to obtain that goal. (If they don't care if it becomes closed, they can just choose something like the BSD lisence instead.)
Patents (and trademark) are a whole different matter, they're not relevant to this discussion at all. Don't mix them, don't use the term IP unless you actually know what it means and your comment applies to all kinds of IP. Otherwise you're only adding further confusion. I'm not an expert, but atleast I'm humble enough to say so when I'm not sure.
"Believe in IP" is rather meaningless to say (you could be talking about anything), but you should embrace copyright (to a certain extent) unless you want everything created only to exist in public domain from the first second it sees the light of day.
Life is Reality
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Man, I've been here years and I missed the 'offical complaints' pages. Where is that? Do we all vote on it or something?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Programming an application isn't an easy task, but I think it's just a bit elitist to say that non-developers "can't really comprehend" it. There are many complex jobs in the world, and programming is just one of them. It really isn't special. I know this goes against some of our preconceived notions of programmers as gods, but it's the truth.
You said in another post that the math bit was a "side point"... Your wording makes it sound like you need to know those items to program, and you know as well as anyone else that is completely false. Yes, some applications require it. However, some applications also require knowledge of tax code. Does that mean you're not a programmer if you don't know tax code?
In short: Cool the ego.
You are refering to freedom as "anarchy". I don't want to live in an anarchy, stealing and murder should and must be illegal. Doing what ever YOU want to do with MY code should and must be illegal. You *can* however do what ever I give you permission to do, and that includes sharing it with others _as long_ as the freedom I gave to you is passed on to those you give my code/binary to.
We are protecting freedom here, what's so hard to understand? People aren't allowed to take away other peoples freedom in regards to MY code. If you must have that freedom, use a less restrictive license. There is however nothing wrong in protecting freedom, and it's still freedom.
Life is Reality
I demand someone smack you with a framed, nude picture of Ayn Rand.
Call me when they're done.
=Shreak
There are reasonable people on slashdot
and the reasonable position is thus
the RIAA and MPAA are unreasonable for calling me a pirate for making a copy of my cd/DVD for the car/van/boat/kids and securing the other in my closet.
the BSA are unreasonable for calling me a pirate if I re-sell my copy of office 97 on EBAY
and companies who use GPL/OSS without following the terms(give credit and open the code) are being unreasonable for not passing on what they got for free.
NOW, do these reasonable people likely have copies of music or software they haven't paid for? yes, possibly.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
"Believe in IP" is rather meaningless to say (you could be talking about anything)"
Gee and just a few paragraphs ago you said "IP is essentially both trademark, copyright and patents at the same time." I only count 3 things. Are you confused?
Apparently you want to shift the discussion from consistency of position on authors rights to a technical discussion on what "IP" really means. Nobody (including you) has any confusion about what I meant by "IP" in the context of the discussion.
Remindes me to the Netgear situation. I'm waiting since August 2003 for the source code of the firmware to the WG602. They did release a source. But the orginal firmware (the one I bought in the package) had a telnet server and the route command didn't work completly. I couldn't find this bug in the released source. Thus they released the wrong one. One guy tried to help me last year, but I haven't heard from him since 3 months.
b4n
Actually, in the states I have lived in, killing in self defense falls under the category of "justifiable homicide." It is still legally murder, but murder under a set of circumstances that mitigates or removes punishment. The taking of a life by an individual is never lawful, the state simply recognizes that circumstances and intent can completely change the nature of a given crime.
Another example is the development of the fair use doctrine. It is not an explicit modification of copyright rights, but an affirmative defense (just as self defense is) that states legally acceptable justifications for violating copyright law. These defenses have been further modified through legal precedent, and take into account the purpose and character of the use of copyrighted material. In practice, copyright law is in fact a very subjective area when it comes to what is a violation and if or how it should be punished.
Well I'm the doctor and I say you're dead, so shut up and take it like a man!
No, I don't think you get it. It's not so much that coders who release under the GPL expect to earn anything specifically for themselves, but that they require anyone who wishes to make use of their work (where use here means deriving a new piece of software) to provide some value in return (by releasing the derived code). The end result is about freedom, but the mechanism is identical to the situation with music. That's the whole reason that the GPL is referred to as "copyleft" - it uses the mechanism of copyright in a way that most people view as backwards. But the fact remains that the GPL uses copyright law. It could not exist without that copyright law. The same copyright law that music producers rely on. Unless you respect copyright law, the GPL is meaningless.
Ethically speaking, this is also about freedom in another sense: the freedom of a creator of some form of "content" to choose how their work will be used and distributed. GPL coders choose to release their code under the GPL. Others choose to use a BSD-style license. For whatever reason, most creators of music choose a very restrictive set of distribution terms. Not all of them do though. And frankly, I consider it far more ethical to respect the choices of "content creators" (else how can I ask anyone to respect my choice to use, e.g. the GPL) than to violate the terms which those creators freely chose. Better to persuade people that they're making the wrong choice about how to distribute their work, than to deliberately flout their choice (thereby encouraging them to flout my choices).
Woah. I have no problem with the GPL per se; more the encompassing RMS/Open Source movement, such as the parent's (or another in this article) comment of 'only GPL code can link to GPL code' and the like.
You're more than correct; you can license your code all you want. But there are licenses, such as BSD, artistic, or plain old PD, which are 'free.' The GPL, while a perfectly good license, however, is just as restrictive as anything commercial; the cost is simply in a different coin.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Use of copyrighted things is automatically permitted. The only thing restricted by copyright is copying. (And public performances, which only applies to video, audio, and performing art copyrights, not software or image copyrights.)
Or have you been brainwashed by all the EULAs out there into thinking we need permission to run software?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And why should a company even care ? It seems he's a no-one, a busy body who spends his time interferring in the affairs of others, worse yet he's a Trekkie!!!! http://gnumonks.org/users/laforge/ Though what he is doing is on the right track, he is trying to highlight the misuse of open source software by companies, but if GPL-Violations.org is to get any credibility they need some tougher sounding backers : Lawyer types, other big companies who DO play the game right ... and they need to drop the "I wish I was Lt LaForge" stuff ;-)
Depends on many factors. Deliberate infringement of copyrights or patents is always worse than innocent, inadvertant infringement, though. And for-profit infringement is always worse than free. So the company would already be negotiating at a huge disadvantage, and with much more to lose. There are other factors (how broad the patent is, how important the GPL'd program is to the community at large), but in general, other things being equal, that would be a very risky, and probably losing, move by the infringing company.
:)
The fact that there is so much redundancy in free software only strengthens the community's position in such a case, since dropping one project (at least until the patent can be worked around) will still probably leave several that do approximately the same thing. And you thought Gnome vs. KDE vs. Xfce vs. GNUStep was a bad thing!
On the one hand you quote the letter of the law ("To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;") but in the same breath discount the "spirit" of the law ("I don't care what Congress or the Supreme Court says right now.") Fascinating how you bend things to fit just what you want, disregarding all the rest. Too bad there's nearly a century of case law that says you're wrong.
Now, there is one small point where we agree: I disagree with current copyright law. I think it's overly restrictive and panders to media moguls and the like. Odd, then, that I'm defending copyrights, eh?
And that's where most people misunderstand me. I'm not defending copyrights. I'm simply against this self-appointed vigilantism that says it's OK to "steal" from someone else because the law is wrong. This "two wrongs make a right" logic is disgusting, but in reality I doubt most MP3 pirates don't care one whit about the law. They want their free music and DVD's and to hell with everyone else, nevermind the fact that hundreds or perhaps thousands of people expended effort to produce the works they are pirating. They cloak their own personal greed in the guise of playing Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the...well, not the poor since it's difficult to imagine anyone with a PC, MP3 player, and broadband Internet connection "poor." It is a lie, and I despise lies of this kind more than any other.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You catch flies with shit.
As I work for a hardware vendor with an avid interest in operating systems for the embedded sphere, I would like to see more effort on the positive spin of GPL violations, and less on the policing spin.
What do I mean? Why hasn't someone thought to set up a "GPLCertification.org" site, where vendors could get their products certified as GPL compatible?
Police-state tactics, of repairing the damage 'after the fact', don't suit the F/OSS ideology, in my opinion. Far better to put in some up front creative energy into coordinating GPL usage, than to wait for someone to violate it and then butt-rape them in the courtrooms.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
No they aren't they are releasing the code for each release. They just aren't releasing the beta releases. They have got the okay from the OSS councel or what ever the governing body of GPL is.
The question is whether you believe in IP or you don't. If you don't you shouldn't embrace the GPL or the RIAA.
This was the text I was commenting on. You are saying that if you don't believe in IP then you shouldn't embrace the GPL.
Of course you need copyright to enforce the GPL, they coexist quite nicely and as expected. But patents are not good for software, especially open source software. This was the part I got hung up on, it doesn't make sence. However, someone might read it and think the GPL is inconsistent with copyright law, or that you either support both the GPL and the RIAA or neither. Your post was inaccurate and could easily lead to confusion.
Since it was inaccurate I thought you didn't know what it really meant.
Life is Reality
Rephrase the question, as it really has nothing to do with the GPL. How can they tell that a binary has someone else's code in it?
Looking for strings is one mechanism (and the most obvious). Looking for particular quirks in the behavior is another, disassembling the code is another. There are people who are experts in looking for this sort of thing. Yes, there's a chance for false positives, but the chance is slimmer than you might imagine. And, the false postive will turn up in discovery, before the case gets off the ground, so that's no biggie. (That's kind of the whole point of having discovery, SCO's abuse of it notwithstanding.)
Easy to defeat GPL detection? Perhaps, but it would take work, and the whole point of using someone else's code is to save work. If you've got to do a massive rewrite to hide your theft, you're probably going to end up doing nearly as much work as if you wrote the code yourself from scratch. So what's the point?
I'm only considered fat by people with frickin' eating disorders. And I've known a few.
And I'm still taller than you. Neener.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
What about GPL developers who violate the BSD license? Why does the GPL using community tolerate members who violate other licenses? What makes it's okay to violate the copyright and license of non-GPL software? Why does the GPL community tolerate such behavior in its members?
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4l.html
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The other posters' responses are more or less right on, but this may be an easier way to think about it: the GPL is a purely a defense against charges of copyright infringement. The legal part is: it will never come up in court except as a defense. (And it will probably never come up as a defense, because anyone who's actually complying with its terms is unlikely to be sued.) That is why it has never been tested in court. You don't sue someone for violating the GPL, you sue someone for violating your copyright, and they proffer the GPL in their defense, if they can. Which they presumably can't, or you wouldn't have brought the suit. Think of it as a limited-use get-out-of-lawsuit-free card that comes with the software.
I understand. You're saying the principle behind it is the same (specifically since it's ruled under the same law (copyright)) and thus they should be treated/responded to equally (music piracy & GPL violations).
You are completly right about this, I'm just pointing out that the differences in ideology underneath this is as big as it can get. On one hand you have users of Free software trying to keep things open and Free for everyone and trying to keep those freedoms alive, and on the other hand you have the RIAA/MPAA whose doing the opposite. Analog legal situation: yes. Fighting for the same cause: far from it.
Analog ethical situation: Well, the underlying motivations are opposite, but the ethical situation for those who brake the law (being it "stealing" music/movies or GPL code) is "perhaps" the same. I personally think copyright laws are too strict and simply wrong (the GPL doesn't enforce/use these wrong, restricting parts), and thus I have few moral problems "stealing" music/movies off the internet. I don't believe I'm doing something morally wrong as I wouldn't buy whatever I'm downloading before I downloaded it anyway (however there is a chance > 0 that I would buy it later). But that's just me.
When it comes to the artists: Yes, they should be respected. But again, I don't believe it's morally wrong downloading music I didn't pay for, so I don't feel disrespectful towards those artists. (Read my previous comment on this here.)
Life is Reality
The GPL, while a perfectly good license, however, is just as restrictive as anything commercial; the cost is simply in a different coin.
;) I guess you're right anyway.
Those were your words, not mine
Thank you for a thoughtful reply.
Life is Reality
"Of course you need copyright to enforce the GPL"
Thanks for making my point. The GPL will only succeed to the extent that people respect the "IP" behind it. Now, I don't want you to be confused or "hung up" by the term "IP" as it's used here. Since we are talking about the GPL, everybody understands that we're not talking about software patents. Likewise when we talk about "IP" with respect to music, we aren't talking about software patents either. Is that clear enough?
"However, someone might read it and think the GPL is inconsistent with copyright law, or that you either support both the GPL and the RIAA or neither."
Well, anyone who would conclude that my statement implied that the GPL was inconsistent with copyright law is not a very careful reader. As for the second intrepretation, that's fairly close to what I was saying. In other words, if you wish people to respect your rights under the GPL, you should respect their rights with respect to licensing other material. Obviously, if we only abide by licenses we personally agree with, then licenses in general would be worthless.
No problem.
The main thing I'm trying to get across here is that the GPL is neither 'free as in beer' nor 'free as in speech;' it's an interesting way of using copyright law, and of allowing other people to use your code, but the requirements of repayment (of changes) and the no linking/'viral' nature is, or appears to be, non-free.
And I can understand some company getting confused that the 'free software' comes with strings attached.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
if you wish people to respect your rights under the GPL, you should respect their rights with respect to licensing other material. Obviously, if we only abide by licenses we personally agree with, then licenses in general would be worthless.
Yes, but being a lawful citizen doesn't equal to supporting all and every law (with "supporting" I mean "agree to"). Obviously we're talking about the same law here (copyright), but they're using it differently. The GPL uses copyright to keep information Free and open, the RIAA/MPAA uses copyright to impose strong restrictions upon the consumer. Thus, I personally don't support **AA's actions (trying to limit my freedom of using their products that I've paid for). Copyright law should be far less stricter, and promote much more fair use.
My point is that eventhough everyone should respect the law (licenses and so forth), that still doesn't make every law "right". The RIAA should not try to take away my freedom to do use their products as I please. So legally speaking you can say "respect the law, context being GPL or RIAA", but morally speaking I say they are completely different matters. One doesn't have support the RIAA to support the GPL (or vica versa for that matter).
Life is Reality
"The point was you don't need to agree to the terms of the GPL if you just use the software."
You never need to agree to the terms of any license. (But if you do something the license does not allow you to, you are breaking the law.)
More importantly: how come you are able to use software without copying it? Don't you copy your software from CD-ROM to hard disk? And then from hard disk to memory?
what do they intend on doing when some Taiwanese hardware manufacturer embeds their code?
Let China swoop down and close all of Taiwan's factories?
Get your Unix fortune now!
If I wanted to discourage Open Source software, this is a great way to do it. One of the reasons for using Free software and Open Source software is the sanity of the licence. I want to AVOID the software police looking over my shoulder.
If large companies are going to be harrased, or possibly sued because of mistakes they might make with open source, they are not going to use it. And if they don't use it, then that has a huge effect on what other people do.
"This is something they have created, and honestly, they should, and do, have the final word over what happens to their works."
Hard work entitles you to exactly nothing.
The reason people generally get rewarded for work, is because the parties involved agreed so, and the reason people generally get rewarded for the fruits of their talent is because there is more demand for the products of a talented worker than for those of an untalented one.
"Finally, information doesn't 'want' anything -- it's an intangible concept, like 'santa claus' or 'income tax reform'."
Next time, try to understand English before you post. "Wants" also means "ought", "should".
"And how does that apply to the "demand" for free information that we were discussing?"
What do you get out of discussing things on Slashdot? There's your free information right there, obviously you are meeting a demand, and presumably you are getting something out of it.
For illustration on this point of human nature, when I was a kid, it was free to go to the various museums in the area. However, one new curator was dismayed to learn that buses were using the museum as a stop, solely to let their passengers use the washrooms. Shortly thereafter, the museum started charging admission, and is currently $27 to enter; there may be a free day once a week, but last time I was around there, this was not the case.
Moral of the story: whenever there is no cost to use something, eventually that resource will be abused. People will always equate costless with worthless.
Moreover, and more to the point, there is no 'money' behind open source code. Their threats have no teeth, since they are not backed up by lawyers and legal action. Sure, there are eventually victories, like against SCO, but it is costly to fight such things, and Im guessing that smaller targets will submit to getting 'screwed' by a large company rather than risk entering the courts. Sure, people are happy to pony up cash to help defend linux, but what about a small OSS app some college kid made in his spare time? If a large company blatently rips off his code, it is first unlikely he would even know, and second it is unlikely he would persue a legal recourse. And, any victories would be uncertain, come at great personal expense, and may not even be worth it in the end.
Heh, mine is in dec :P
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
"Those like me who've BANDAGED and KISSED the TREE"
Anonymous coward, you are an idiot! Of course, you must have known by now, your mommy told you so.
(BTW, feel free to hunt me down like the dog I am. I am not hard to find, and once you've found me I will pinch your pimple.)
More accurately, the combined work of the new code and the GPL item is required to be under the GPL when you distribute it.
However, if you can extract the new code by itself from the combination (for example this is easy if they're separate source files), then the new code by itself can be under whatever license its author wishes. This is permitted even if you receive a combined work: you are free to extract pieces of it and use the pieces according to their individual licenses. The GPL has a clause in it permitting this.
-- Jamie
The BSA hounds whoever it's masters PAY it to hound. Who would pay the huge fee's to the BSA?
Thanks for putting on the feedbag. Thanks for going all out. Thanks for showing me your Swiss Army knife.
The difference is the software guy isn't buying off congressmen to make 100+ year laws that stack the deck in their favor.Change the copyright laws back to the original standards and i'd be happy to play nice with the theiving corporate whores.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Programming requires logic, not math.
Formal logic -- especially the boolean logic central to coding -- is a branch of discrete mathematics.
There is no calculus/Eigen/matrices in presentation (UI)
Well, if you use vector graphics (SVG, Flash etc) for your presentation, obviously you're using vectors there. If you use raster graphics (bitmaps, gifs etc), you're using matrices. And hopefully you can see that the presentation for something like Doom 3 involves quite a bit of mathematics.
Further, while talking to databases may not require calculus, it definitely uses set theory and boolean logic. And parsing XML requires some type of finite state machine. Again, discrete maths.
You can write programs without having studied mathematics formally, but even one ungraduate discrete maths subject will make you a better developer. Do yourself a favour.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
No, you don't get it. It's about not letting anyone else take control.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
>> On the one hand you quote the letter of the law ("To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;") but in the same breath discount the "spirit" of the law ("I don't care what Congress or the Supreme Court says right now.")
Nonsense. Congress and the courts have already tossed out the spirit of the law. I do not discount it but embrace it.
>> Too bad there's nearly a century of case law that says you're wrong.
As I already said, the whole century of case law is wrong. We had almost two centuries of case law that said blacks were less than whites, and we tossed all that out. We have a century of case law that says corporations are people, and all that is wrong, too.
I'm not arguing at all whether copyright infringement is illegal. I'm just saying that there are shades of grey between the black and white extremes. Your parent post said there were none; hence your post was incorrect.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Because copying software enough to run it is explicitly allowed by copyright law since 1990 or so.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
There is a difference between using something DEFENSIVELY versus OFFENSIVELY.
Using IP law to mitigate harm caused by IP law is a good thing. It shouldn't be necessary, one shouldn't have to use copyright against people and companies who use copyright to harm. But it is.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
You forgot trade secrets.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
"copying software enough to run it is explicitly allowed by copyright law since 1990 or so"
I did not know that. Where does it say so in the law?
Adult supervision
That used to be a lot funnier before the National Guard proved it at Abu Grabe
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I was counting items in his list, not making one of my own.
(a) Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Sorry about that. It's been hard to see past all the bullshit posted in this forum lately. :)
Synology (www.synology.com) sells the DS-101 Disk Station, a NAS appliance based on uCLinux, with no source offered and no GPL references anywhere on their site.
Jim Buzbee did a review on Tom's Networking recently thst mentions the detectable presence of BusyBox and thttpd in the firmware image. His review mentions that Synology are "working on" this issue, but they don't appear to actually be complying. I've written them as well, politely asking them to do so, and aside from a polite "We're on vacation, we'll look into it" response, there's been nothing for weeks.
I hope they do release the source, as the modding possibilities for the box are enticing; but to date, they're still in violation of the GPL.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Have anyone deal with microchip and there compiler C30? It's based on GCC 3.3 and all copyright belongs to FSF. It's possible to download the source for the compiler but that version is not the same. And earlier version of the compiler had compile error in the public code. Another funny this is the extra licence requirement. When downloading a binary version the is a 60-days license and the compiler will stop working after that time. For some resons the license check is not included in the public version :) /bin/make" (and extra space is added). This makes it impossible to run under Unix. All the files have been edit in windows as well.
There latest public code of the compiler are all the building files bean tempered with. For most (not all) the start of the file have been changed from "#!/bin/make" to "#!
Does it help if I cry out loud?
Should be noted that there is no "legal definition" of a corporation as a "single person". If you can find one I'd love to see it.
The Farewell Tour II
Until recently they were using the GPL license. However some people took big chunks of the code, ripped it and repackaged with a different name. They only mention "based on AutoIT" or something similar on the Readme.txt but not in the code
If they have removed copyright notices, forget the GPL, forget licenses, forget civil suit. Move directly to Sec. 506, criminal offenses.
"(d) Fraudulent Removal of Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent, removes or alters any notice of copyright appearing on a copy of a copyrighted work shall be fined not more than $2,500."
That is $2,500 per count, i.e. per file (same way RIAA reached a $97 billion lawsuit). After the first $100,000+ lawsuit (I assume 40+ files), I don't think they'll do that again...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Appearantly this guy's fallen to the same noob perception, and associated the word "free" with the word "cost" augh.
Which is precisely why the term "free" is a poor one. It is semantically confusing, and even contextual cues can be insufficient to determine which meaning is intended.
You are not respecting their choices about music distribution. And yes, I've read your previous comment. But the bottom line is that the only thing you can know about how an artist regards file-sharing is the terms they choose (choose!) to distribute under. Are some artists getting screwed? Possibly. But it's their battle, not yours - you can't know who's getting screwed, and who's happy with the status quo. There are plenty of artists that either (a) choose not to join in the RIAA clusterf**k and become independent, or (b) negotiate with their studio to allow online distribution. Your claim to be "fighting for the small artists" is specious at best.
Do you copy a page of text when you look at it? An image is formed on your retina.
The idea that transfering into memory is "copying" is an old SCO thing, IIRC. Any reasonable definition of copying would mean creating something that can be given to someone else with losing your use of it. So transfering into memory from the hard drive, no. Sending from memory over the network to a receiver on the other end, yes.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
(As opposed to attempting to reverse engineer Windows, which is against the terms of the agreement, even if I do it by myself and don't tell anyone.)
My company reverse engineers any competitor's products to know what their market focus is and then decides on what our product has to do... thats illegal?? i know a few other companies that do this as well.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
No, the bottom line is that the artists should benefit from any shakedowns by the RIAA or ASCAP done in their names. Alternatively, they should have the power to tell the labels and the lawsuit proxies to back off.
However, that's not actually the case. If a band wanted you to have some of their music for free on their website, the could/would/have been overruled by their label.
Infact, the cartel situation in popular music forces artists into a situation where they're basically forced to choose between indentured servitude or obscurity. If the labels could get away with it, they would have all music reclassified as works for hire.
They even tried to pull that but the congress wasn't quite that much on the take.
As far as what I believe: I believe the same thing that US Supreme Court Justice OConnor does.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Adding a few verses to a song doesn't make the new verses derivative. The modified song as a whole is, but you could sell the new verses separately without infringing on the original song's copyright.
Linking to a GPLed work -- dynamically or staticly -- does probably create a derivative work. But dynamic linking isn't done by the distributor of the code; it's done by the end user. And the GPL does not restrict the making of derivative works for private use, so there's no violation there (there can be no contributory infringement without direct infringement).
Including a header file doesn't necessarily make one's work derivative of the header file; the header file often doesn't actually cause any code to be generated. Rather, it sets out the APIs and layout of the data structures. This is unlikely to be copyrightable, and the FSF certainly doesn't want it to be copyrightable -- can you imagine the blow to interoperability if an API copyright was upheld?