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Why the GPL Licensing Cops Are the Good Guys
Reader rtfa-troll writes: "'GPL enforcement by Software Freedom Conservancy puts electronics makers on notice, leaves business users untouched,' says Infoworld, going on to explain 'You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be raided by your proprietary suppliers, in the form of the Business Software Alliance, than to ever hear from SFC, let alone face any action. License compliance is a major and costly issue for proprietary software, but the case concerns an end-user license agreement (EULA), not a source license.' The article gives a good summary of why having GPL licenses enforced helps everybody, except for 'hardware manufacturers — typically those creating low-cost consumer and business electronics' who need to verify that they pass on the same rights to others as they received with the original code."
Nearly four months ago, I noticed that my internet connection was very sluggish. Eventually getting fed up with it, I began to seek out software that would speed up the gigabits in my router. After an hour of searching, I found what at first appeared to be a very promising piece of software. Not only did it claim it would speed up my internet connection, but that it would overclock my power supply, speed up my gigabits, and remove any viruses from my computer! "This is a fantastic opportunity that I simply can't pass up," I thought. I immediately downloaded the software and began the installation, all the while laughing like a small child. I was highly anticipating a future where the speed of my internet connection would leave everyone else's in the dust.
I was horribly, horribly naive. Immediately upon the completion of the software's installation, various messages popped up on my screen about how I needed to buy software to remove a virus that I wasn't aware I had from a software company I'd never once heard of. The strange software also blocked me from doing anything except buying the software it was advertising. Being that I was a computer whiz (I had taken a computer essentials class in high school that taught me how to use Microsoft Office, and was quite adept at accessing my Facebook account), I was immediately able to conclude that the software I'd downloaded was, in fact, a virus, and that it was slowing down my gigabits at an exponential rate. "I can't let this insanity proceed any further," I thought.
As I was often called a computer genius, I was confident at the time that I could get rid of the virus with my own two hands. I tried numerous things: restarting the computer, pressing random keys on the keyboard, throwing the mouse across the room, and even flipping an orange switch on the back of the tower and turning the computer back on. My efforts were all in vain; the virus persisted, and my gigabits were running slower than ever! "This cannot be! What is this!? I've never once seen such a vicious virus in my entire life!" I was dumbfounded that I, a computer genius, was unable to remove the virus using the methods I described. Upon coming to terms with my failure, I decided to take my computer to a PC repair shop for repair.
I drove to a nearby computer repair shop and entered the building with my computer in hand. The inside of the building was quite large, neat, and organized, and the employees all seemed very kind and knowledgeable. They laughed upon hearing my embarrassing story, and told me that they saw this kind of thing on a daily basis. They then accepted the job, and told me that in the worst case, it'd be fixed in three days from now. I left with a smile, and felt confident in my decision to leave the computer repairs to the experts.
A week later, they still hadn't called back. Visibly angry, I tried calling them countless times, but not a single time did they answer the phone. Their negligence and irresponsibility infuriated me, and sent me into a state of insanity that caused me to punch a gigantic hole in the wall. Being that I would require my computer for work soon, I decided to head over to the computer repair shop to find out exactly what the problem was.
Upon entering the building, I was shocked by the state of its interior; it looked as if a tornado had tore through the entire building! Countless broken computers were scattered all about the floor, desks were flipped over, the walls had holes in them, there was a puddle of blood on the floor, and worst of all, I saw that my computer was sitting in the middle of the room laying on its side! Absolutely unforgivable! I soon noticed one of the employees sitting behind one of the tipped over desks (the one that had previously had the cash register on top of it); he was shaking uncontrollably and sobbing. Despite being furious about my computer being tipped over, seeing him in that state still managed to make me less unforgiving. I decided to ask him what happened.
A few moments passed where the entire r
A few weeks ago, I foolishly ran a strange executable file that one of my acquaintances sent me by email. As someone who doesn't know much about computers, at the time, I thought nothing of it. "Why would my acquaintance want to hurt me?" Following this line of thought, I ran the file without question.
How naive I was. Despite having what was supposedly the best anti-virus software out right then, a virus took over my computer and held it hostage. It was pretending to be a warning from Windows telling me to buy some strange anti-virus software I'd never heard of from a company I'd never heard of to remove the virus.
This immediately set alarm bells off in my head. "How could this happen? My anti-virus is supposed to be second to none!" Faced with this harsh reality, I decided to take it to a PC repair shop for repair. They gladly accepted the job, told me it'd be fixed in a few days, and sent me off with a smile.
A few days later, they called me and told me to come pick up my computer. At the time, I noticed that they sounded like whimpering animals, but I concluded that it must just be stress from work. When I arrived, they, with tears in their eyes, told me that the virus was so awful and merciless that they were unable to remove it. "Ah," I thought. "That must be why they sounded so frustrated and pathetic over the phone. Their failure must have truly ruined their pride as professionals." I later found out that two of them had committed suicide.
After returning home, I tried to fix it myself (despite the fact that even the professionals couldn't do it). After about a day or so, I was losing my very mind. I stopped going to work, stopped eating, was depressed, and I would very frequently throw my precious belongings across the room and break them; that is how bad this virus was.
That's when it happened: I found MyCleanPC! I installed MyCleanPC, ran a scan, and let it remove all the viruses! They were removed in precisely 2.892 seconds. Wow! Such a thing! I can't even believe this as such never before! MyCleanPC is outstanding! My computer is running faster than ever! MyCleanPC came through with flying colors where no one else could!
MyCleanPC totally cleaned up my system, and increased my speed! If you're having computer problems, or even if you aren't having any obvious problems, I recommend that you use MyCleanPC. As a user, it did more for me that any so-called "professional." It'll even boost your PC & internet speed!
MyCleanPC: For a Cleaner, Safer PC.
The people who support your ideal are the good guys, the people who don't are the bad guys.
The issue I have always had was the double standard that a lot of people in the Open Source Community have. It is OK to pirate Closed Source tool, but if a company breaks a rule in the GPL they should be fully punished. That is the most damaging part, because in order for the GPL to be respected the GPL community needs to respect the other Licenses out there.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Out of curiosity, If APIs cannot be copyrighted, does this mean they cannot also be covered by the GPL? This would seem to be a fairly major implication of the Oracle vs. Google case. (Speaking strictly about API definitions/header files.)
No licensing cops necessary. End of story.
You're welcome.
is not a serious GPL advocate? because if you scroll back through every story on pirating websites like pirate bay, the issue of music copyright, film copyright, etc, the typical argument is 'we are robbing those evil studios so its ok'.
Then any cops you pay for are the good guys. It all boils down to control. And trying to keep control while releasing your 1's and 0's to the world.
I support violating software in any way shape or form you can imagine.
Your pattern of 1's and 0's deserves no special protection no matter what license you use.
Sometimes chaos is simpler and more acceptable.
Another job well-done, by the alleged editors. That link goes to the second page of a two-page article.
First page.
When you use laws to advance your agenda, you will find that the effects are not what you intended. These "good guys" appear to believe that enforcing the GPL would result in more mobile devices with all software on them open sourced. But that, of course, isn't going to happen. If a company does not want to release the source code now, it will not release the source code in the face of legal sanctions either. It will simply stop shipping the product. Then it will purge all GPL software from any future devices. Linux is not the only OS available, you know. Thus the end result of GPL enforcement is not more open source devices, but fewer. It is true that none of them will be "stealing" the work of GPL programmers, but is that really of any concern to anybody but them? The result for users is fewer available choices, each running on a proprietary OS with weird UIs. Is that what you are really after?
EVERY time I've encountered an ostensibly rabid anti-"M$" Linux/GPL proponent, they always - without fail - have a pirated Win XP partition, for that "one thing" they need it for.
It's hilarious that the people in favor of forcing "freedom" for software on everybody else define freedom to mean that everyone should do things according to THEIR rules. If code is truly free, release it in the public domain. Of course, THAT would mean that you can't control what people do with it later -- and control is what the GPL is all about, despite the pretensions of its fans. They care about getting the outcomes they want, not about individuals having freedom to do whatever they choose.
I never quite understood why many hardware producers do not provide linux drivers, or at least the means for third parties to write them. They simply have to conceal the fact that they are stealing from the open source community!
troll feeding mode: The real question is - is MyCleanPC licensed under GPLv3? You see, I'd like to see the source code to this available, so that if it is, as one suspects, a virus, one can alter it to become a real anti-virus and release it that way. And if any virus-authors get hold of it and want to make a virus out of it, they can do it, but they must release the source code to this baby. It should also not be on any locked-down hardware - freedom 3 of GNU - the freedom to modify and distribute the changes - should be there. Assure me that MyCleanPC is completely GPLv3 liberated software, and I'll be more than happy to look @ it. /troll feeding mode
While it's true that the FSF and the SFLC have advocated 'Use liberated alternatives', don't pirate has never been explicitly urged by any of them. In fact, in one of his essays (which I reproduced from the GNU website in a recent GPL thread on /.), Stallman clearly says that if your neighbor asks your for a software that you use, it would be wrong not to give it to him, under the 'help your neighbor' pretext. Nowhere does her ever urge people to stick to the terms of any agreement - he only argues on whether those agreements are ethical in the first place or not.
fly...don't fear to survive at all project returns the project is dying and its that should be fact came into irc Network. The and has instead (7000+1400+700)*4
Stallman makes it a point to argue that the GPL is not about 'open-source', but rather, about the liberation of software. As in the 4 GNU freedoms. Your conflation of the GPL w/ open-source misses the point about why a lot of people - not just businesses, but non commercial software projects, want nothing to do w/ the GPL, even if they are convinced and have embraced the principle of open source.
On this one issue, even though I think they're being anal, I agree w/ Stallman and the FSF. Open Source is not so much a philosophy, as much as it's a development methodology, described @ length by ESR in 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar', so that a software project can leverage all the external help that it can get, in terms of peer review and what not, and ultimately release a software using terms and conditions it feels are most suitable to its goals. Some of the assumptions are over-optimistic, such as the 'millions of eyes' argument, since more often than not, the only people reviewing the source code of a program are the project members themselves, and maybe a handful of downstream users most interested in it. Otherwise, every open source program out there would be as excellent as Mozilla used to be. But the goal of the Open Source movement is just that - to ensure that source code accompanies the binaries of all software that changes hands. Now, whether the hands have to be changed or not, or whether the creators can impose other restrictions on the software not having to do w/ source code release - that's a different issue altogether.
What the FSF and Stallman advocate, and what the GPL protects, is something they misleadingly call 'Software Freedom', but which I more accurately describe as the 'Liberation of Software'. In Open Source, you can have licenses that restrict the distribution of software downstream, which most businesses that make their money from it would likely want to do, even if they like using Open Source while developing their apps. However, under the GPL, there's no way one can do that, since that would run afoul of Freedom 2 of the GPL, and even Freedom 3. Similarly, on the issue of 'Tivoization', Open Source doesn't have a problem w/ a company making a device in which the software is locked down, as it is in the case of Tivo. However, the FSF does have a big problem w/ that, which is one of the reasons they changed the GPL to come up w/ version 3, since it violates Freedom 3 of the GNU.
On the issue above of whether it's hypocritical or not to respect FOSS licenses while disregarding proprietary ones, the argument that the OP of this thread was making was if the GPL people cannot respect proprietary licenses and stay off software that uses licenses that they dislike, then they have no business complaining when other people violate the GPL while distributing GPLed software.
Did you ever consider that this partition may be what remains of the operating system shipped with the computer?
Define 'community'. 99% of all software is proprietary, and so if anybody has the statistical right to use that term, it'd be people like Windows users, OS-X users and so on. People who use GPLed software are an asterisk - and even the overwhelming majority of Android users, which is what gives Linux their numbers, don't care about source code. Or 'software freedom'. When someone can show statistical data that demonstrates that a majority of computer users know programming or people who do and want access to the source code for anytime they'd want something fixed, then start talking to us about the 'community'.
Then you should get out of your basement.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Friday (UNN) — Russian hackers have accepted €800,000 in donations from customers of Nordea, Sweden's largest bank, after a sophisticated "phishing" campaign recruited customers into downloading a Trojan horse program that recorded their account login details.
The Russians had looked up the definition of "hacker" in the Jargon File and been inspired to leverage the creative power of open source Free Software. The first campaign took place in August 2006 and was detected a month later, having affected around 250 Nordea customers.
The emails claimed to be from the Nordea Open Trojan Foundation, telling recipients to install an anti-spam and donation tool. Their computers were then infected by the Trojan HaxDoor.RMS.w32, which installs itself in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 and sends your passwords to its creators, but only after you have read through and accepted the GNU General Public License and checked the README file for known problems. The email also included full source code.
Swedish police traced the attacks to Russia by looking at the contact details, including address and phone number, included in the README. They have filed over 100 bugs on the creators' SourceForge project and joined the mailing lists on the grass-roots marketing and publicity site SpreadHaxDoor.com.
A Nordea spokesman said the attacks have "quietened down" after the initial influx last Autumn. "We are constantly looking at the security of our online banking and many different measures are taken. We are updating our systems behind the scenes. Many already run on enterprise Linux distributions, but we will be moving desktops to Linux as well for more efficient funds transfer with less reverse engineering required, and may recommend that our customers do the same."
The Trojan only affects computers running Windows. "For unsupported platforms, we have an 'honor system' which gives our details so you can send some money in," said a spokesman for the hacker group. "We hope this will help and encourage contributors interested in porting the Trojan to other operating environments."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
That's a piece of software. There is no such thing as "a software," "a hardware," or "a clothing."
Between all the ad hominems and non sequitars in this article's comments, I'm shocked at the lack of logical thinking the FSF proponents are using!
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
The only other case where it makes (less) sense is if a standard is coded, and one wants it to be open. If the goal is to encourage its use, BSD is better, but if the gual is to have it just as a teaching tool but not commercially viable, then GPL is right for it.
Never had any of those fine BSD or MIT or ISC folks so much as say anything inpolite, let alone gate crash a party.
But those GNU-zealots? Wow, not just gate crash the party, they start mooching all the beers and snacks claiming that is all free and has to be shared on demand because my crappy DSL router had some linux code or other open sores code running on it.
What? Was I trying to be logical?
Maybe we could simply encourage the companies to put their code changes in a repo, such as GitHub and just provide a link to their profile?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Damn, I knew I missed something on my computer, I have no win anything partition...
But then it's my bad I'm not playing video games, which is the usual excuse...
And if i did have a partition, it would be one I paid with my computer (although I would have prefered not to pay it but in practice had no choice, so I delete about 100$ when I cleaned my disk...
And did you ever wonder, why they "had" to have such a partition ? (usually not pirated because it's unfortunately not necessary ?)
For instance a friend of mine has an "educational management application" that only runs under windows that she is forced to use because the school she is working for has been conned into a agreement by the local microsoft "partner"....
Does that make her an hypocrite, or somebody who has the choice between keeping her job or not ?
Greed is good, It always has been always will.
Couple of questions I've always had about the GPL: a) Do developers understand the GPL when they license their code with it? b) Do open source projects choose the GPL as a default because its the most common open source license? Do they understand the alternatives like Apache or BSD, for example? c) Do companies using open source GPL code understand their obligations? My general comment on use of commercial use of open source is that often, especially where its embedded in products, companies are using it because it's perceived to be free (as in free cost but also free-to-do-what-you-want.) Often companies don't understand the viral nature when GPL code is embedded in a product and that their obligations under the license extend to each and every product they ship. Many of the cases of chasing after infringers have been related to redistribution in products where the main vendor is unaware of the implications (Cisco/Linksys, Westinghouse HDTV.) The important point is that most (all?) open source software is licensed and thus carries obligations.
I'm not fond of the GPL in the context of GPLv3, since v3 tries to assert rights that make it legally impossible to use in a business.
Untrue.
The grey area comes from GPL programs that create content (eg the GCC compiler, Gimp, Inkscape, and various other content creation tools) since in a legal context there is no difference between source code and content when it comes to copyright.
Untrue.
So oddly, enough the reason you can't get people to use the Gimp, or Inkscape over photoshop and illustrator.
Untrue.
the GPL licence requires them to release their original files if it was created in the program.
Untrue.