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id and Valve May Be Violating GPL
frooge writes "With the recent release of iD's catalog on Steam, it appears DOSBox is being used to run the old DOS games for greater compatibility. According to a post on the Halflife2.net forums, however, this distribution does not contain a copy of the GPL license that DOSBox is distributed under, which violates the license. According to the DOSBox developers, they were not notified that it was being used for this release."
I can get a copy of the source for Half-Life 2?
What, me worry?
copyright protection is a bit out of hand?
Not meaning TFA, but why do we care? Isn't it a bit ludicrous to be caught in this situation?
But I don't see what the big deal is here.
The game.
Valve/iD already updated the games with the required files. Old, incorrect news.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Appears to be? been told? How do they know its running dosbox? Wasn't there some previous comment on another article that says its running things that someone couldn't run in dosbox?
as far as I can tell, the whole of the accusation is that they are doing things that can be done with DOSbox, so they must be using DOSbox. Come on folks you can do better
Why is DOSBox needed? They have the source codes for all their games, so why can't they make the games compatible with modern systems? The community did that for Doom and Quake (and not just once, because there are many, many different clients available for both games).
Bad troll is baaaaad.
PROTIP: There's nothing 'viral' in this instance. iD included the dosBox binary in their distribution sans the terms of the GPL and the authors file.
Go back to hiding under your bridge, mister troll.
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
Yes. It's not like iD has released anything GLP before.
Oh, wait...
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The only time you'd need to contact the developers is if you want to get an alternative license. Quite often people will release code under GPL and also be prepared to release it under alternative licenses, perhaps for a fee.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The third option, which isn't usually available when you screw up with non-free software, is to apologise really fast and comply with the GPL*. Although there are no guarantees free software developers are usually nice folks who can overlook a mistake.
It is one reason why all the 'viral' fud about the GPL is so annoying (not that it applies to this case, as there is no derivative product, but it usually rears it's ugly head in these threads). All the GPL does is give you an Option Three which isn't usually available - you would be in court for damages instead of sitting across a table from a bunch of altrustic techies seeking a negotiated solution.
*Historically stopping distribution and rewriting the offending module usually is an option too, depending on how antagonistic you were before admitting your mistake.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
It's no problem if the DosBox creators are rich and/or assholes.
As I don't know them and haven't read anything about them, I can't say whether iD should be allowed to do this. Anyone got any info on them?
It hasn't even been a working week even before the people who gave us great things like the GPL'd quake 1/2/3 source got jumped on for slighting you trolls.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
Why do we even bother?
This is not a "GPL fiasco" any more than pirating a movie is a "DVD fiasco".
And who's to say our ideology is the one that's kooky? You do realize that the "commercial world" is an ideology itself, and...
Never mind, it's over your head. Fucking troll.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Since Valve has a pretty intense lockdown on their games with Steam (a lockdown that I'm not entirely opposed to, since it is so good), they can lock access to any affected games until users update.
Said update should include a copy of the GPL.
-- lol pwned
There is much better windows doom ports that can fully run that game and ID even has there own win32 port of doom. Also the low screen res of that game will look real bad on new big screen LCD or CRT. Even the old win32 doom port at a max of 640x480 will look better.
how is the snowball in hell project comming along?
iD have been an amazing help to the free software community (do you really think OpenGL would have survived without them at the height of the Microsoft-mole-destroying-SGI fiasco?). Most likely this is just some underling's oversight. Don't panic or blow this out of all proportion folks, give them an honest chance to correct the issue.
I release some kernel code under GPL. This is used in many Linux-based products (cell phones etc). I probably only get to hear from 5% or so of the people that actually use it.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Good argument, very coherent in defense of your cause. I can see why the world lines up behind you guys.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
You're wrong. Tell me where they've offered to let me download the source of the build they're using.
You can't? That's because they're still violating the GPL.
in this case what the problem is is the GPL requires you to do 2 things if you are just doing a pass along distribution
1 distribute the COMPLETE COPY (with the readmes and credits.txt)
2 also distribute the source code (for something like dosbox you might need an extra disc cluster)
its also custom to like maybe oh pay the author something when you are raking in Mega$ because of the code in question (but thats ethics)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
DOSBox's download contains the GPL in COPYING.txt. So it was intentionally stripped out by iD...?
demands a coherent defense.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Global Partners LP?
OpenGL to PostScript?
Global Land Project?
I'm confused about what GLP has to do with this.
Small oversight by (on id's part) a hugely prolific developer of GPL'd software. Easily corrected and pushed out to clients straight away.
Attacking John Carmack for this precipitately is basically irrational. It also stinks of divisive trolling.
The man's licensed (a great deal of) his own software under the GPL, for goodness' sake.
They could have complied with the GPL easily, by bundling the DOSBox sources (or a notice saying that they would be supplied on request for a reasonable fee). Or, they could have developed their own DOS emulator.
This is not a GPL violation, it's a copyright law violation. They distributed a product that they did not have the right to distribute. I wonder how well they would take it if the DOSBox team decided to distribute Half Life 2 to a few thousand people - probably not very well. The fact that there was a non-discriminatory license available for free is irrelevant. A proprietary software company decided not to respect the copyrights of a piece of software, and distributed it without a license. Considering Valve's fondness for DRM, I wonder if they subscribe to the 'if it's not bolted down' philosophy...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Vultures? Most of the comments are either wrong (like yours) or pointing out that the article is out-dated and id/Valve already corrected the issue. What vultures? Unless you mean the editors, but your number is low enough you should know they troll articles like the anyone else.
Quack, quack.
Steam now has a reason to be ported to Linux. A lot of the new id games added to Steam play natively on Linux, there are others that use DOSbox, which conveniently works on Linux as well. If Valve ports Steam to Linux... it'd open the door for Linux users to easily buy and play these games, and I'm sure enough people would such that it makes business sense for them to do it.
Rabble rabble rabble rabble.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
You know, under normal circumstances, the release of ten year old games on Steam wouldn't have garnered a nod from places like Slashdot. So what do they do? Spark a rumor that they're violating the GPL and suddenly all the Slashdotties are crying and stamping their feet.... and giving them lots of publicity.
.zip of source code in the directory with the game in a couple of days. I doubt there is though. If there is, it certainly won't be Valve's fault since id are the ones who pack up the games for them to distribute.
Personally, I'm just glad I found out, so I could go and buy all those great games to play on my modern system. Thanks slashdot!
I'm also sure that if there is any "gpl violation" involved, that a steam game update will simply drop a
Because they have in the past released lots of cool stuff under GPL does not absolve them of the need to follow the GPL in the future. And, the are in the software business. They know where they got their code, they know what its licensing terms are.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Only modifications they might have made to DOSbox will have to be made public.
Please let's get away from this thinking that you can automatically patch up a GPL violation by releasing your modified source code later.
When you violate the GPL, you immediately lose your license to the GPL'ed code and you are liable for your past and future license violations. You cannot make up for that past violation by coming into compliance, and you cannot restore your license to use the code under the GPL license by coming into compliance.
What that liability entails is something that you can negotiate with the authors about, and if you don't reach an agreement, it's for the courts to decide. Theoretically, if the GPL violation is egregious enough, a court might well hand control over other corporate assets, including unrelated software, to the author of the GPL'ed software.
Many GPL authors will be nice and permit you to remedy past GPL violations by coming into compliance, and they may also grant you permission to use the software under the GPL. But all of that is at their sole discretion.
These game companies produce proprietary software and take strong measures against copying and copyright infringement. Why do you think it is unreasonable to expect them to comply with other people's software licenses?
Quite right, which is why the GPL is so popular. Think about that for a bit.
The GPL does not allow you to fix problems retroactively: when you violate the license, you lose all rights to using the software. There is no way you can fix it. That's to prevent companies from "forgetting" to acknowledge the software based on the assumption that the worst that can happen to them is to be found out and forced to comply.
So, if Valve/ID violated the GPL, providing the required files at this point is sufficient only if the authors of DOSbox are satisfied with it and grant Valve/ID permission to distribute the software under the GPL again.
The third option, which isn't usually available when you screw up with non-free software, is to apologise really fast and comply with the GPL*. Although there are no guarantees free software developers are usually nice folks who can overlook a mistake.
So, just to be clear: you do need to notify the developer once you have failed to comply with the GPL and then want to fix your mistake; by default, you simply lose all rights to the GPL'ed software if you fail to comply with the license, and only the copyright holder can fix that.
So i thought there where some experts on slashdot ? guess not..
What all you people fail to realize is - that a copy of the GPL is NOT enough - if you use GPL code together with your code you have to release the source code of your binaries too along with a GPL - thats what the GPL is all about !!
However, this does not apply for LGPL code - so always look out in your projects to never use GPL code - never - you have to release your source code under GPL too
I'm not sure if anyone has been buying/using old games on Steam, but I would have thought that X-Com: Terror From The Deep would have used DOSBox as well. This game has been on Steam for quite a while now - can anyone confirm this?
:(
Just got the id Super Pak as well... does this mean I'm gonna lose Commander Keen?
Your FUD is stale. At this stage the GPLv2 has been tested and upheld in several jurisdictions.
Agreed (although I'm guessing this one is Valve's fault). I wrote that because the troll I responded to was doing a "iD gets trapped by viral GPL" thing. I just thought I would point those three things out for anyone who didn't know beforehand (although I'm sure that troll either did or didn't care).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
DosBox is not configured well, it runs 320x200 games in a kind of widescreen. I've been able to use DosBox to run DOS 320x200 games (some of them in the package) with the correct aspect ratio. Anyway. The real problem is that the DOS games come without their setup.exe files and are configured not to use wave blaster/general midi. Whatever, just grab gzdoom or something and everything's well again :). Anyway, The package's great, it has Hexen II and Quake 1,2,3 including the mission packs (Win32 versions all of them). Also, the Master Levels. Good stuff.
The worst judgement that can be brought against a GPL violator is an injunction preventing further distribution. The GPL does not have any provisions to deny the license to those who have violated it, and so any violators can simply rectify their procedures and continue.
Thus, the GPL *does* allow you to fix problems retroactively.
It was there, at the bottom of the label after "monosodium glutimate".
You do realize that the "commercial world" is an ideology itself, and...
Wow. Next you're going to tell us that the whole 'commercial world' got together in 1848 or so and published 'The Commercial World Manifesto' ???
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
gb2/v/
... if Microsoft did the same thing all of the above posters would be expressing the same opinion.
It does if you want to be listened to. Talking bollocks because everyone else is talking bollocks only ensures that they'll treat you like they do everyone else.
Talking sense when everyone else around you has none is more likely to get you somewhere.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Correct me if i'm wrong but doesn't the GPL stipulate that you only need to give away source code when you MODIFY the original, there by copying left? merely distributing the original unmodified achieves nothing.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
You want another reason why linux isn't taking off, cause people jump all over something like this.
Way to go, make it known that GPL is associated with people who will attack you the first sign something may not be 100 percent perfect with the way you're using GPL'd software. You look at the people involved and you'd be silly to think any of the big players are doing this to intentionally avoid distributing the license...
Do you see Microsoft attacking stupid little lapses in following the license when no harm is done? Most of the time you don't.
Great name to make for GPL, really. The guys who will give you bad press the instant you use any of thier code in a way they don't entirely approve of. Remind me again why we would consider using GPL software and putting ourselves at risk of the same thing?
And this sort of thing is the reason companies are afraid of GPL. Back in reality, silly things like this are ignored because someone notices the mistake, fixes the problem, the authors of the original software are fine with it because it was a silly mistake that MADE NO DIFFERENCE TO ANYONE OTHER THAN PEOPLE PRETENDING TO BE LAWYERS. On the other hand, now big companies that could help make GPL'd software more common to the everyday user are now more afraid of using it. Why should they, its cheaper to pay for commercial software than to deal with all the bad press that can come from an honest mistake made by a bunch of raving GPL fanboys. Yes, I'm more than slightly annoyed with this kind of license bullshit.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
This is a perfect example of why open source is teh suck.
Whereas with the expensive commercial software, they have to pay money and follow the terms of the license, with the free GPL software they only have to follow the terms of the license. And you think the commercial software is better? Dumb.
Just downloaded the pack. It's using a modified, binary-only dosbox. They have added the license and thanks.txt back, however, it still is infringing.
I copied dosbox.exe to a seperate directory, and it complained about missing SDL dlls. Using stock SDL dlls, it says "Failed to find steam". As such, they are distributing a modified binary-only version of a GPL application. Given the distribution has already happened, they are legally obligated to distribute the source code to the steam "stub" present in their dosbox application. Failing that, they are guilty of some serious copyright infringment, and statutory damages can be huge.
I suspect it wouldn't look good in court having a very large, well-known software company stealing code from little guys, and using it as the foundation for a significant commercial project. This also makes it look willfull, as opposed to accidental infringement. Furthermore, given iD's technology licensing platform, which includes significant GPL distribution, they would have a hard time claiming ignorance.
When he ends each sentence?
All Valve needs to do is fix the problem. In most cases, if a company distributes software without the owners permission, there would be a lawsuit, followed by money changing hands. In this case, all we have so far is a few forum posts.
All Valve needs to do do to fix the problem (like so many other companies have done before) is to obey the GPL requirements, nothing else. I don't see how this can be worse than the threat of lawsuits and other stuff that normally happens. So please chill!
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
Then why not use one of the GPL'd, but heavily modified Doom engines. Some of the versions out there preserve the game play very well, but enhance it with fewer bugs, better resolution, optional accelerated resolution (for 1600x1200 DOOM goodness!), and hey even dehacked support.
And I forgot to mention, TCP/IP network play.
Is there any good reason to use the original doom engine?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So they take a GPL app, modify it, link in closed-source propreitary code forcing it to only work with another closed-source propreitary app (Steam), charge money for the resulting product, and remove the copyright notice and license. Furthermore, they deliberately obscure the origins of the product, remove much of the products functionality causing problems with the software, and badwill from people who do know the name of the program. Why on earth wouldn't these people be upset.
As for "fixing the problem", dosbox has been linked against steam libraries to make it only work with steam. Depending on what mood the court was in as to the interpration of what constitutes a derivitive work, fixing it would require at the very least open-source the steam client library or potentially all of steam. The GPL is a license designed to ensure that all recipients have the same freedom to modify the work. Valve has taken a GPL app, combined it with a DRM-laden application designed specifically to prevent users from modifying the application, and flat-out refused to abide by the letter, nevermind the letter of the GPL. Tivo technically complies, then breaks when you modify things. Valve didn't even go that far.
See here for more info.
No kidding. To use a meme from another site, the real WTF here is that Valve apparently used the old commercial id binaries along with DOSBox instead of just grabbing updated native Windows versions of the games made from the GPL'd source. Valve could still "sell" the games; it's just that the value would be in the (still proprietary) data files.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This sentiment obviously matters to the FSF. In GPLv3, they include an explicit 30 day cure period for first time offenders.
"I wonder how well they would take it if the DOSBox team decided to distribute Half Life 2 to a few thousand people - probably not very well."
Whatever id/Valve might feel about that, I guarantee that slashdotters wouldn't give a damn. In fact, slashdotters would applaud such an action as "freeing information from bondage". Slashdotters make such a big deal about minor GPL violations, but openly condone *major* copyright violations of others.
But it does mean they've cost the dosbox IP holders BILLIONS of dollars in lost imaginary revenue!
-
OMFG!!!!
The slashtards are revolting!!!
I have a GNU gpl license that came with commander keen. COPYING.txt
They sell the executables to Valve for a cut of the results. Unless they sold DOSbox they had nothing to do with it.
Unbloody Likely! Not in any court in the USA or Europe! Now this is an example of Anti-GPL fearmongering. In the very worst case, doomsday scenario a judge might rule that: They had to stop distributing the software, immediately, and that they had to pay some quantity in damages to DOSBox developers.
That is all. The only way I can even imagine a judge threatening to order such a thing as the forced open sourcing of a piece of software, is if the offending company continued to distribute the software in direct violation of a Court Order. Even then I think it's about 100 times more likely for additional damages to be awarded.
There is no way that any corporation will ever be forced to open source their software in todays Corp-friendly world. Huge amounts of stuff would have to change before that would ever even be possible. It's just flat-out off the table.
Reading their forum thread about this yesterday, the very first reaction was a developer ranting foam-in-mouth about the evils of corporation and that steam sucks your soul ect.
Come on. Last time i used dosbox (or tried to), it was sch a piece of shit that i didnt find a single game of my old early 90 collection that i could run on my Athlon without crashing/going down to 4fps or something. I wold have never touched this crap again.
The fact that steam uses it now to emulate those titles seems to indicate that its now reliable and fast enough to actually do that. This could boost dosbox popularity by orders of magnitude and really bring the project into the limelight, if developers would actually care. Now the message is: stay away from this stuff, all you get is a nasty slashdot article.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
You misread what I wrote. The steam client library is linked in the DosBox address space, combined into one program. Even the most strict intrepretation would require open-sourcing that to "fix" the current issues and bring the current distribution into line with the GPL. Potentially, it could be determined that the library is in fact part of one work (Steam), and as such DosBox is also part of steam by extension.
Note, in either case, this isn't likely to actually result in open-sourcing of the client library, or Steam itself. I never said it was. I simply stated what the possible rulings are based on a strict or liberal reading of the GPL. In either case, the judge is far more likely to say "here's an injunction - go work it out", [potentially] assign some damages, or some combination of the two. It would still be copyright infringement, but I suspect even the $150,000 statutory damages for copyright infringement beat open sourcing steam.
What I indicated before was what it would take to _fix_ the problem under the GPL. I never said that Valve had even the slightest chance of doing it, nor did I indicate that a court would make them. No license simply means it's copyright infringement, nothing more.
Apparently you haven't encountered what probably is the biggest problem with the lockdown; at least in some cases it won't let you run any of the mods. www.ttlg.com and is a very active community and many still make fan missions and mod the Thief games that are almost 8 years old but not even simple fan missions can be run with the steam versions. At least one new member signs up every week and asks why they can't run any of the missions only to get some condoleances for money wasted. I suspect, though, that there is a sufficient business incentive to make sure that mods can be run to make Valve do something about it. A number of people there are working on a Thief-like mod of Doom 3 and many aren't interested at all in Doom 3 so they won't buy it unless they can run the mod and any used copy sold is one copy less through Steam.
I'm reasonably certain that's never happened. It would be quite the uphill battle to demonstrate damages from violating the GPL. Someone like Trolltech or MySQL might be able to do so (because they offer commercial licenses as well), but pretty much anyone else is SOL.
The GPL is not legislation nor magic pixie dust.
I gather that a copyright notice has no been added to the Steam DosBox distribution but all the interest has now led people to carefully check how DosBox is being distributed. Currently it looks like someone went and modified DosBox.exe to make it check in with Steam (I can't verify this myself though). If this is true (it's not clear what has happened to this exe) a can of worms has been opened (and the half-chance "easy" way out might have been closed).
The licence oversight was just that and needed fixing but if the modified exe business is true then someone made one small problem and another larger problem with this particular distribution.
Sierra (or Vivendi really) released their old "Quest"es some while ago and they at least got that with dosbox and source right if I remember right (even though they never asked for permission or told the creators of dosbox either...)
The dosbox copyright notice on the backside makes me smile, mostly because how a open source program helps a commercial company, a success if you ask me.
I bought the super id pack, and I've looked in the directories of the old DOS games that use DOSBox. Valve and id have two outstanding issues with their DOSBox distribution.
They include COPYING.txt, AUTHORS.txt, and THANKS.txt, which is correct. They do not distribute the whole of DOSBox, just some of the binary executables. That, too, is fine AFAIK.
What they have not done is this:
(1) Present the GPL license to the user so that they know their rights to their GPL software. This should be done at time of purchase, and the Value EULA doesn't state anything at all about your free software rights that the GPL code allows you.
(2) Valve/id is required to include a written offer to distribute the source code for DOSBox, or else include the source code in the distribution. There is no such written offer that I can find.
IANAL, but that is my reading of it. Including COPYING.txt (the GPL license itself) may very well satisfy (1), but they must do something about (2).
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I had wondered about this. This warrants further investigation.
:).
Steam applications all include some copy protection code that involves communicating with the main Steam.exe program: this is most visible in games that weren't designed for Steam, such as Defcon or one of the Popcap games. Like them, Dosbox must have been modified to include this copy protection code.
This is right at the heart of this licence discussion and I am very glad someone has spotted it. Will Valve licence Dosbox under a non-free licence? Or will they release some of the source for Steam? Or will they ignore the issue and be sued by http://gpl-violations.org/ ? How wonderfully ironic that copy protection code should actually cause a copyright problem
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Nothing there prohibits them from obtaining another, identical license.
Yes, this type of modification appears to be required for Steam applications. It is something to do with copy protection. (It is surprising that more people haven't spotted this problem, especially as it goes right into two familiar Slashdot territories by pitting a DRM scheme against the legal strength of GPLv2.)
I am not going to buy the old id games (I have them on the original floppy disks!) but I have bought other little games from Steam and all of them have been modified to check in with Steam.exe to make sure you are authorised to play. That modification is also in Dosbox, and it's a GPL violation. It puts the Dosbox people in a very strong position, as I am sure that Valve do not want to release their copy protection code under the GPLv2. The Dosbox people can sue or ask for $$$ to release a non-free Dosbox. It is a good day to be a part of Dosbox.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Can we please stop perpetuating that id Software spells their name lowercase "i," uppercase "d"? A long time ago they spelled it in all caps, now they spell it all lowercase, or for legal reasons, uppercase "i," lowercase "d." They have never spelled it "iD." Where does this even come from? I guess the same place that pronouncing "gibs" with a hard "g" comes from, or pronouncing them "eye-dee."
But I have tried a few of the doom open source updates, and most of them make me motion sick. If you have a version that runs well in Gutsy that won't make me motion sick, I'll give it a shot!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
This isn't just about copyright notifications. The version of DOSBox being used in this distribution is a modification of 0.70. It was clearly modified on a source level as the exe is now dependent upon the existence of certain Steam libraries. This has been confirmed here:
& postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=60
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=16285
Running the modded DOSBox.exe in it's own directory first complains about missing SDL libraries. After adding those, it will them complain about missing Steam libraries. This is clearly a derivative work under the terms of the GPL and the source code has not been made available.
So Valve/Id have to go down one of two roads now:
1) Release the derivative source and give us valuable insight into how their DRM Steam engine works.
2) Pull the release and piss off a ton of people on Steam.
Either way - Valve is in trouble here. What kills me is that instead of protecting the game executables, they protected the GPLed Emulator they use to run them. What a bunch of idiots. If you ever needed a reason to hate Valve and Steam, they've just handed it to you on a silver platter. I mean isn't it ironic that for all the DRM in Steam designed to protect their own copyrights, that they manage to trample on the copyright of several people in the process and they just don't seem to care?
Ironic.
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
We are Slashdot. We are all of one mind. We have only one opinion.
Copyright is irrelevant, except in the case of free software, where it is good.
But you are not one of us. Your groupthink is malfunctioning. Your postings are crimespeak.
Prepare to be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
When he ends each sentence? Just watched some presentations he made about id Tech 5 and apparently he does. Now I don't want to be rude or disrespectful or anything, just curious - what would that "weird sound" be?
I dont see any point in this discussion.
First of all, Id is GPL firendly. They probably contributed more to the GPL'ed world than the DOSbox guys.
I respect the Dosbox guy's work, however, i also understand that programmers and human-ran corporations make mistakes, forget to do stuff, etc..
The licenses stuff going on is pissing me off more than ever, a normal human being (lawyers are not normal human beings) in front of the GPL and its friends would shoot themselves if they had a gun.
So far, it seems that they complied with the missing license, and we do not know whether they changed the code of the software or perhaps removed or not compiled parts of it they didnt need. We dont know either which compiler they used with it, meaning that comparing a gcc output with whatever they used is pointless. A simple request of releasing the code themselves for comparison would sort things out in a quick non-violent, friendly way. ID is probably the most unlikely to be GPL-friendly company out there -in the gaming world- yet they are so let's not piss them off by giving them a bad name.
Will that slow adoption of GPL software by large corporations? I'm sure it will, much like large corporations don't install free copies of Adobe Photoshop on all their workstations, thus "slowing adoption" of Photoshop.
Of course, some of what will slow adoption is FUD, but there's no cure for FUD, it's black propaganda based on lies. Rolling over for license violators won't eliminate FUD.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
man, someone can steal tons of ip from any given number of musicians and people around here treat it like it's their birthright but a copy of the gpl isn't included with software that no one pays for in the first place and suddenly it's a crime? get your heads out of your ass. this just shows how much a bunch of losers you guys are.
That's no excuse. It's even cheaper to spent 10 minutes reading the GPL FAQ than to fork over X thousand dollars for comparable software.
Unbloody Likely! Not in any court in the USA or Europe! Now this is an example of Anti-GPL fearmongering. In the very worst case, doomsday scenario a judge might rule that: They had to stop distributing the software, immediately, and that they had to pay some quantity in damages to DOSBox developers.
That is all. The only way I can even imagine a judge threatening to order such a thing as the forced open sourcing of a piece of software, is if the offending company continued to distribute the software in direct violation of a Court Order. Even then I think it's about 100 times more likely for additional damages to be awarded.
There is no way that any corporation will ever be forced to open source their software in todays Corp-friendly world. Huge amounts of stuff would have to change before that would ever even be possible. It's just flat-out off the table.
I have to agree with you.One of the first things I knew about law is that every contract has to be measurable in money. In this civil cases it is a similar thing. I you don't want to cooperate with the court, they cannot make you give the source code. But they can award damages to the offended party in the amounts written in the laws and in the contracts. So
You're absolutely correct. The GPL prevents them from distributing the DOSBox program without the GPL license but all they need to do is start distributing it with the GPL license to be compliant again. Technically they could still be sued for their brief license violation, but I imagine no one smart enough to work on DOSBox is that stupid.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Talking sense when everyone else around you has none is more likely to get you somewhere.
Burned as a witch?
Didn't ID software release some of their code as OSS? They didn't have to do that. Now that they may have turned around and used some GPL software, they aren't even given a break. Things like this would make a company just stay close instead of having to deal with the overly zealous OSS nuts who can't seem to understand give and take. Isn't that the point of OSS anyway?
It is one thing to not get credit, however, that's something that is easily remedied. Violating copyrights is a whole other matter. The DosBox guys are getting credit right now. Good job guys, haven't personally used you, but still kudos. Id and Valve should start complying with the terms of the GPLv3 or whatever. And it should end there.
The DosBox guys should realize that the DosBox is a utility to run old dos software (guessing, not a user, see above). They should be going out and celebrating that Id and Valve are pushing their software. After all, the GPL is a service model, right?
It's almost like the hostility between the driver writers and the hardware manufacturers. The driver writers don't want the hardware guys to steal their code and the hardware guys don't want to reveal too much about their hardware. With 95% of the market closed source, it's hard for them to justify releasing an open source driver just to satisfy a beligerent minority. 99% of that remaining 5% just want their video cards to work right.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
The reason FOSSies won't let go is because they are pushing a hidden agenda (but not all that hidden, if you read Slashdot). FOSSies are trying to lock everyone in to FOSS: operating system, word processing and spreadsheets, web servers, etc.
Getting people to start using Lunix is really the beginning of the end for consumer choice: once you are on teh Lunix, you have no alternatives except to use FOSS: the GPL's open hostility to commercial software assures them of THAT. And then... once a company foolishly decides to go with teh Lunix, then the consultants can REALLY sink their sharp little teeth in, and drink you dry supporting your reportedly free software.
EVERYTHING in life has costs. About the most valid way of looking at it is whether your costs are front-loaded or back-loaded. A good example of a front-loaded cost would be a car: you pay the major expenses up-front, and the longer you use it the less money it works out to. But then there are other expenses which are back-loaded, like rent-to-own furniture or electronics. Yeah, it's great, you can walk out of a store with a huge plasma HDTV for no money down... but you are going to end up paying three times what that TV costs.
Teh Lunix (and teh FOSS in general) is exactly like that sucker deal on the HDTV.
And the scary thing is, the FOSSies are trying to force everyone into making that EXACT SAME sucker deal. Their goal is to destroy ALL commercial software which charges money up-front with the understanding they will support the software for free (and in many cases will even add more features and improvements, also for free). Commercial software is a great deal... but like most great deals, the numbers only work out in the long term.
Fortunately, FOSS can't really make much headway in the real world. Since they don't have an incentive to innovate and improve, they rarely do (and when they DO, it's only because they are chasing somebody's tail lights). And since a majority of enterprise businesses understand front-loaded and back-loaded expenses, they are unwilling to abide the lower quality software coupled with it's higher TCO: FOSS promises an eternity of less for more.
Copying.txt and author.txt were added to all relevant steam folders via a steam update on Saturday 4th August 2007. (1 day before this Slashdot article)
... they could simply use GZDoom unmodified and write a small launcher that goes through Steam. Heck, they could even include the latest version of Yadex complete with the cygwin & Xorg required to run it on Windows. But looks like licensing was not the only thing the packagers were ignorant about.
How about 1776, "Wealth of Nations"?
Unless both the defendant and plaintiff are Danish. Otherwise it will be heard in another jurisdiction.
I'd much rather waste my time on Slashdot talking sense in the threads where others are at least trying to talk sense.
Besides, I actually did think this bit was enough:
Which is pretty much exactly true. The only difference is, it's actually conceivable that id is violating the GPL by accident, whereas it's much harder to say that you copied that DVD by accident.
But in either case, it's pretty clearly a violation of copyright.
It's not a huge fiasco that proves anything about the GPL, any more than my ripping a DVD proves anything about how evil DVDs are.
And it's likely not even that big a screw-up -- let's see how quickly they fix it. (If they're smart, they'll start distributing one of the open source native Windows/GL ports of Doom.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ever heard the phrase 'Never Reason With A Fool'?
Because your arguments frankly deserve a response like 'Penis, Penis, Penis'.
If the people don't understand reason, then reason will get you nowhere.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Who cares what OSI defines Open Source as? Their definition is NOT a license. It is just some hacked up definition. Like me trying to define,
Shared Source - software where you can share source code if you want to.
Now, Microsoft may disagree. But screw them eh? I made up some definition and copyright holder is irrelevent?
The *exact* same thing is with Open Source and OSI. OSI does NOT define what GPL mean or what GNU mean when they say open source GPL license.
Ummm, maybe because the RIAA is suing for damages and threatening criminal prosecution, but the FOSSies are just asking for the situation to be made compliant?
"Do you see Microsoft attacking stupid little lapses in following the license when no harm is done? Most of the time you don't."
The BSA doesn't care about "stupid little lapses". They aren't likely to investigate one-off piracy, either. Hell, Microsoft continued to allow security patches to known pirated Windows keys, and to my knowledge they didn't knock on any users doors over the matter.
Now commercial piracy or site license violations are a different animal. They aren't "stupid little lapses".
If, as a vendor of software, you made a mistake that brought you into conflict with a Microsoft licensing policy regarding distribution that was easily corrected, I'm sure that if you (a) distributed a patch, and (b) corrected your undistributed source files, you and Microsoft would have no further problems. And that's all that happened with ID/Valve in this case.
And most get a headache trying to read the lamer langauge in that gpl whatever license.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
To anyone but the Danes. Since I'm not Danish, I certainly can say "No loss -> no compensation".
Here's my fix for DosBox's configuration for the mega pack. It works if there are no other .conf files in the directory of Steam but the .conf files for the various instances of DosBox, or else. Use at your own risk, it might bring a meltdown on your PC. SteamIDDosBoxFix.zip . What it fixes: better screen configuration for 1280x1024 TFT displays, mouse sensitivity set to 500, sound tearing problems somewhat mitigated by slightly bigger sound buffers, that's it. The good part is that you can configure it yourself, have a look at dosbox.conf inside the package. Use the original dosbox.conf as reference. Please, excuse my code, but it's 2 am and strstream on a clean install of VS2003 sucks, so please don't look at the code, you've been warned.
No, actually, it demands no response at all.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.