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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."
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.)
As far as I know, no serious GPL advocate actually says that infringing others' copyrights is good. They mostly say "use the free alternative".
Yes, there are a few debacles like some people accidentally (or on purpose for that matter) taking say BSDL code and making it GPL (you're allowed to make your modifications GPL, but not the original code itself, if I understand correctly). But nobody advocates piracy.
The "double standard" is because EULAs are designed to restrict what you can do with a piece of software over and above what copyright does to restrict you. The GPL and other FOSS licenses give you rights you don't already have.
I respect the GPL because it recognises one thing that EULAs never recognise -- the unlimited right to run the program.
Another job well-done, by the alleged editors. That link goes to the second page of a two-page article.
First page.
I think the double standard come from the simple fact that no "serious" GPL advocate has ever tried to sue or extort money from mere users of GPL programs. On the other hand, the "evil" studios or their henchmen (army of lawyer types) appear hellbent on making every freeloading downloader pay. Typical targets of GPL "threats" tend to be companies not individual users.
The people who support your ideal are the good guys, the people who don't are the bad guys.
This is moral relativism patronization. Didn't these kind of theories get debunked a few years ago? And can you give a concise view of how exactly this applies to the current situation and not just some shit you're flinging on the wall to sound oh so hipster cynical cool?
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.
This is so far in the camp of oxymoron as to be a caricature. You cannot be a serious GPL supporter and advocate infringing proprietary software. Of course Slashdot stopped being an Oasis of common sense long ago so I fully expect your FUD to make it to +5 and me to get modded to oblivion.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
the typical argument is 'we are robbing those evil studios so its ok'.
No, that's just a straw man. I suspect most people here wouldn't even call it "robbing." And there are people who are against copyright in general but believe that as long as copyright should exist, so should the GPL. I know simplifying the matter makes it easier to attack your opponents, but do lay off the straw men.
Maybe, but I'm sure there are hardcore people out there who would break even the lax license of FreeBSD. Surely someone is on their team to give the legal equivalent of "lol GTFO" when a user decides to e.g. offer it stripped of the copyright notice or try to claim a nonexistent warranty.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
You cannot be a serious GPL supporter and advocate infringing proprietary software.
Sure you can (No True Scotsman there). "I don't want you violating the GPL, but I don't mind you violating the copyright of proprietary software." It's simply a preference. And because they're two different things, a contradiction doesn't exist. Call it a double standard if you wish, but it's entirely possible to believe that.
Also the merits of any given argument are not invalidated by the company in which they are held by individuals.
"It is OK to pirate Closed Source tool,"
No, it isn't.
"but if a company breaks a rule in the GPL they should be fully punished."
Of course it has to.
But even if you are not so 'dura lex sed lex' as I am, just an example about why it might be good to break some laws but no others:
It is good to unslave people even if slavery is legal.
It is still good to make sure taxes laws are applied on slave plantations.
There was a time when it was common for most slashdot readers to be GPL advocates who wouldn't touch Windows with a 10 foot pole. That was long ago. Now, there are many, many Windows users. Some of them are GPL advocates, and others hate Linux. Nobody knows what the split is, since the vast majority of Slashdot readers don't post very often if at all.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Well, the "average Slashdot commenter" is a fictional entity - an average between trolls, spammers, real commenters, with massive variation in how informed they are. There are all kinds here - conservatives, liberals, die-hard anarchists, windows users, mac users, linux people, and most importantly for this discussion, supporters of every single license ever made by man or troll!
If you could show a statistical correlation between the people here (or elsewhere) who advocate GPL and those who advocate infringement of proprietary software, I'd accept your point. Until then, it's hearsay and borderline slander.
Anyway, by "serious", I meant people like Stallman and Eben Moglen, who are actually doing the advocacy in a long-term, sustained manner.
Most importantly, the people running this operation are SFLC, FSF and others, who are definitely in the "use free alternatives, don't pirate" camp.
The danger with BSDL is that since there's no incentive for a company to give back, often critical pieces get closed off, reinvented and you can't really share code. In other words, you just saved the salary of a compliance officer, but didn't gain the advantage of community testing/improvement of your code, unless you release your code back, in which case you still need a compliance officer and code audits (to ensure that you don't accidentally release something you want to keep proprietary), anyway.
In general though, I prefer the BSDL/LGPL for libraries - the choice isn't that important in most cases, and GPL for any community-developed end-user applications. You get to develop closed-source frontends, but don't ever think of closing our frontends.
To expand upon this...
If someone's primary justification for decrying GPL violations is that its wrong to violate copyright, then it would indeed be hypocritical to support piracy of closed-source software. More generally, if the moral argument is that intellectual creation endows people with some intrinsic 'control' or 'ownership' of their creative works, then this moral argument applies equally to open-source and closed-source creations.
However, that is not the only argument in favor of respecting open-source licenses. In fact it may not be the most prevalent. Many people support open-source software because they fundamentally believe in the particular freedoms that are espoused by open-source licenses: that end-users should be unrestricted; that end-users should in fact be empowered to completely control their hardware, which means having the ability to see and edit all source-code; that sharing should be encouraged. Under the moral axioms of 'sharing is good' and/or 'users should be unrestricted' it is not inconsistent to encourage people to respect open-source licenses while simultaneously not respecting restrictive closed-source (or all-rights-reserved) copyrights/EULAs/etc.
My point here is not to promote any particular viewpoint. Rather, I'm responding to OP's assertion that it is hypocritical to support open-source licenses while simultaneously decrying closed-source licenses (or even going to far as to violate them). It may be hypocritical, or it may be consistent. (There's no lack of hypocrisy in this world, Slashdot included.) Many things look hypocritical only because one is making an assumption of the moral precepts that should be followed (normally, one thinks people are hypocritical because their morals are different from your own).
So you need to use software licenses for any FOSS you use that allow you to use their compilers, tools, operating systems and whatever other tools you need in addition to the unique elements you develop on your own to produce a saleable package that customers will be willing to buy, without giving up any right to control copyright of your own work. I think we're all fine with conveying the license to the FOSS software that's included in our packages to the end user without restriction. You want to use the Linux distribution that's included in my package for stuff I didn't envision? Go ahead. I never owned that anyway and I don't care what you do with it as long as you don't drag me into liability issues for your modifications. I just don't want you to copy the elements I made without paying me for each installation.
Fud fud fud!
It's perfectly legal to build proprietary apps on top of Linux, glibc, and other friends. What you have to do is to provide the source to any modifications you make to the FOSS tools or packages, and convey the license to the user.
The elements you made which are not under GPL/similar, you can do whatever you want with them. The author of the GPLed package on the other hand, intended that you give back, as payment for his having built something you can use for free, any modifications you make. Are you saying that I should respect your right to your own license, but you won't respect mine?
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.
Got any numbers to back up that claim? I know of several cases where vendors have, from the get-go or after legal action, made source code available. At least some of those vendors still ship devices + GPL code (DLink is an example of a vendor that initially resisted, but now provides access to the source code). I don't know of any vendors that have stopped shipping GPL code when made to comply with the license. But that's just what I know. If you have data that shows there is a significant trend in either direction, please share.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
That screen is for information. In fact, several rights (and duties) are conferred on you when you accept the GPL. It's not only a source license - you received a binary of the software, and in that action, you received certain rights to the software. You should be informed of your rights and obligations under the GPL, same as under any other license.
If they don't want to follow the simple rules, then they don't have to use the product. Sure there are other OSes, but few are as cheap, widespread, and as easy to use as the GNU/Linux and BusyBox/Linux combinations.
In fact, I would love for all the people who don't want to follow the GPL when it comes to Linux, BusyBox and the GNU tools to stop using them. Start using costly alternatives like QNX, or whatever. If the products are better, people might buy them. But the cost of the OS will make the cost of the hardware go up.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Now, supposing MS made some fantastic improvement to the BSD stack, and didn't contribute those changes back... Which they may have done, but we'll never know.
The community benefits are demonstrably less in this case.
Whereas, if it were under the (L)GPL, MS would be forced to pay back into the community, for the service that they received in the form of not having to reinvent their own TCP stack, or buy it from someone else.
Essentially, it's a Free Lunch for them. Some creators or authors may be fine with that, but I, personally, am not.
You are ignoring the fact that the community did benifit. Which you previously said did not. And MS got to get the stack out without worrying about lawyers hassling them about the license, which was a benifit to them.
You are quite free to license your own software under as restrictive a license as you want, no one said otherwise. Just don't spout off that the BSD license doesn't benifit the community.
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.
[citation needed]
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.
If the company depends on the success of the product and it will otherwise go out of business it will release the source and then sell the product. Otherwise, you are correct. Not my problem, or yours either.
Thus the end result of GPL enforcement is not more open source devices, but fewer.
No, and also no. The end result of GPL enforcement is more open source devices, because some of them will release the code, whereas without the enforcement, none of the offending parties will release the code, and thus the source remains closed.
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?
Who is "them" in this case? Try harder.
The result for users is fewer available choices, each running on a proprietary OS with weird UIs.
[citation needed]
There's lots of companies "making" hardware without doing any R&D at all. They license designs, or they steal designs. Then they contract someone to build the parts, assemble the devices and so on. When it comes time to assemble a software stack they're looking for whatever is going to enable them to make the most profit. If the hardware supports Linux and they think their market will embrace Linux then it's a no-brainer; the software stack is free. They customize some graphics, and offer the source from their website for at least as long as they hope to have it on the market, or as long as the company is in existence which is sometimes even shorter. More and more cheap Linux-based devices are showing up all the time in spite of your assertions and in spite of ongoing GPL enforcement efforts. Your statements are thus utterly unfounded.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd put it a little differently:
It is illegal to pirate.
But, it may not be immoral or unethical to pirate.
It certainly is completely impractical to forcibly prevent or punish piracy. Even extreme measures such as monitoring every packet on the Internet, or just shutting it down altogether could not stop piracy. There is always sneakernet. Two people could swap flash drives with a quick handshake.
GPL is very much a matter of hoisting copyright extremists in their own petard. If they've played hardball with copyright and patent law, then they have no grounds for complaint when they are caught in a GPL violation. If they weren't complete hypocrites, they'd admit they erred and do their best to make amends. Instead, we often see them trying to deny they did anything wrong, using laughably weak arguments to make their case.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
It's almost as ridiculous as people calling this a "free country" when you're not even allowed the freedom of owning slaves, right?
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.
Yes, he does, but you missed the point. That's his reason for never using proprietary software: if you do, you're put in the position where you must either do the wrong thing and deny helping your neighbor, or do the wrong thing and break the license of the proprietary software.
That's not the only point here. If you look @ the GNU project website, they define their 4 freedoms, which are
Most businesses, like yours, would have no issues w/ Freedoms 0 and 1. Freedom 0 is the very idea why they're selling it in the first place. Like you might be selling a spreadsheet, but your customer might be using it as a database. You wouldn't care - you've got your payment, and are happy. Similarly, let's say that you wrote a C compiler, which your customer wanted to tweak in order to include support for OpenRISC. You are more than happy to let him do it, and since you don't have other OpenRISC customers, you're fine w/ them using it in-house.
It's w/ Freedoms 2 and 3 that you run into problems. Let's say you priced your software - based on your business plan - @ $50.00, when people can start giving away copies of your software to their neighbors, instead of sending them to buy it from you, it devalues your software. So you might decide that okay, all my paying customers will get the source code w/ it, but they're not allowed to 'help their neighbor'. At that very moment, the GPL is not for you. You then have to scour for unLiberated Open Source licenses, or write your own. Then there is the question of what if you deliver your software on a locked down box, like TiVo does? Sometimes, Freedom 1 & 3 cannot be respected either, or else, the content providers could have problems w/ the device and refuse to support it, making it totally unviable in the marketplace.
It's not a mere question of how many lawyers do you need to figure it out. It's that 2 of the 4 very fundamental assumptions on which the GPL is built is completely unsuitable for business - at least business that requires selling software.
>Work for a company that sells software.
Form my own company to sell software.
>Work for a company that sells software.
Form my own company to sell software.
>In the latter two cases, you need to use copyright to control the distribution of the software. If you don't control the distribution, the price you can get for the software is zero or damn near that and your kids are going to starve.
Wrong. There are quite a few successful companies that do free software, and have been for decades. I am myself an example of the contrary. For quite some time I ran my consultancy company that developed completely free software (at the time the most popular free software in it's market) - there was a lot of people who used it for free in their small businesses.
But a few people wanted additional features - not least one company who wanted to start a franchise of the type of small businesses my software was aimed at. These people were my bread and butter. While they COULD hire anybody to add the features they wanted -the truth is that I knew the code better than anybody and I could do it faster and cheaper than any outsider.
So they came to me - I charged an hourly rate for the task of developing the feature they wanted. I travelled around the world sometimes to work for customer's onsite and I earned a very nice income, while having lots of free time in between and all done under the GPL.
There were one or two customers who insisted they didn't want their custom features made available to the rest of the community, that they felt it would give them a competitive edge in their neighbourhood. For those customers I was willing to develop their requested feature under a closed private license. Since this didn't harm anybody (the only people actually restricted had the source anyway) - when that happened however, I charged tripple my usual rate.
The reason of course was simple: I could never again add that feature to the main program, the only way to legally do so was for a volunteer contributor to write the same feature without any help from me (effectively a clean-room reimplementation) - for denying the feature to other users, I charged tripple rates. It happened very rarely anyway, most customers recognized that they benefit from features other customers had paid for and were happy to let those customers benefit from the ones they paid for in turn.
Sorry - but your argument is just plain wrong. I did ultimately close the business but that wasn't because the model wasn't working, it was simply that technology changed and the kind of small businesses I sold to were no longer viable in the market - so my customer base was shrinking. I didn't at that stage feel up to creating something new and finding a new market to target - it was easier just to get a normal job. But guess what the company I work for now does to make it's money ?
Yep, same thing, only difference is, I'm not the one who has to stress when a customer takes 3 months to pay. I can spend my time doing what I'm good at - which is writing code.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
OK, let's try to understand the point of the essay, since reading the title is not enough. At the beginning of the conclusion, he wrote:
If you stop reading there, you might get the impression he's advocating breaking proprietary licenses. But if you keep reading, you see that, immediately after that (in the same paragraph!), he wrote:
Is it too hard to see that he's not saying that you should help your neighbor by violating proprietary licenses, but instead that you should not use proprietary software in the first place?
If it's for information, why must you click the "I Agree" button to continue?
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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.
Because whoever made the installer did it wrong. When presented with the GPL in an installer, the button should read "Next" or "Continue".
You do not need to accept the GPL just to use GPLed software.
Dude, the GPL is one of the most simple licenses out there. Perhaps this isn't an issue with the other licenses because everyone just assumes that they will not be enforced, which strikes me as odd. But I still do not get how people miscontstrue the GPL in such a variety of ways.
If you make an image with GIMP the image does not need to be released under the GPL! You are free to use the GPLed program, in this case GIMP for any purpose (seriously, for *any purpose*). An image created using GIMP is not a derivative work of GIMP, since no part of GIMP exists in the image. If you were to modify the source code of GIMP, then that would be a derivative work, but so long as that work is not distributed, you still do not have any oblications under the GPL. If you release your modification of GIMP then you must provide the source code licensed under the GPL and not use patents/copyrights to sue anyone over their use of your modified GIMP.
So the GPL is completely viable for software that is used to create content, because it has absolutely no restrictions on that created content. You do not need to give people a copy of GIMP with every image you create with it, that is not what the text of the license says. Seriously, where did you get that idea? And just in case you need a citation, behold the GPL FAQ!
Seriously, where do you get this sort of misinformation?
On a side note, the ffmpeg issue is not as clear cut as you claim, since they don't use a normal GPL, but use a modified LGPL v2. I haven't read the ffmpeg license, but the LGPL allows linking, so they don't have to distribute ffmpeg, and it most likely doesn't properly exist in their software product anyways (remember, linking).
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Just plain not true, you can use gcc to write non GPL software, and emacs to write a non CC nor FDL book.
You are bound by the GPL only if you redistribute the GPL code (modified or not), in the case of the GCC it even says explicitelly that the "chunks of code" it might reuse in the generated code are not GPL, since they are just a "traduction" of your "code"..
The patent issue that you allude to in the video media comment is just the main reason the GPL V3 was created to avoid that people on one hand create liberties using GPL code, and then take them away with software patents..
The issue there is not the GPL but the minefield the US Patent code has created for IT, software patents are always a bad idea.
Yes, I DO like controlling people who are intent on committing murder. And your point is WHAT exactly?
The GPL controls what people can do with the code they get. Period
Please buy a cluebat and whack yourself with it.
The GPL controls what people can do with the code they distribute. Receiving the code is completely free and unburdened, end-user licences are explicitly disallowed iirc.
And please, stop insulting the intelligence of most old-time /. readers. Of course a license places limits on what you can do, that's the point of law. If you want to advocate anarchy, then do so explicitly, or at least stop pretending like you don't.
And before you even think of a reply, consider that "complete freedom" includes the freedom to control other people. "Complete freedom for all people" is a paradox in itself.
It's only hard to figure out the GPL if you are trying to skirt it. As long as you stay within the intent, i.e. all downstram users can can run, receive complete source code (including build scripts), modify, distribute modified versions and, in case of GPL3, run modified versions on the hardware you shipped them on, you are very unlikely to run into problems.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
There certainly are some, but what proof do you have that this is universal (in the face of the specifically defined four freedoms from the originators) or even particularly common?
There's plenty of people who are never aware of any conflict, so I guess they don't exactly pretend... However there is still a significant subset who choose to advocate punishment of murders by defining it outside of freedom or similar doublethink.
In short, black and white thinking will get you nowhere is this argument. Either way, your other problem is that you want to force a language double standard, when you advocate for people to disclaim freedom with CONTROL of how people can interact every single time and call them hypocrites for doing it. Well, then you start approaching an argument.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
This goes well with my point. It's not that I'd consider violating GPL. It's that I consider the terms of the license so objectionable that I wouldn't want to use it at all for any software I intended to sell. BSD license terms, on the other hand, I have no problem with.
You would license software you sell as BSD? Since that would be even worse for restricting redistribution I can only assume you mean that when you want to use other people's code in your proprietary program you prefer BSD.
Obviously proprietary software vendors like to use other people's work for free without reciprocating as it gives them a competitive advantage. I trust you understand that people who illegally copy your work are just applying the same principles as you, sans license compliance.
I'm not saying I approve of copyright infringement, I don't. I use predominantly software under GPL or similar license because I want to use software legally. The license conditions are not at all onerous to me, unlike some EULAs and copy protection schemes etc.
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http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ClickThrough
Honestly, I find that pathetic. This is not like conscientous objectors hiding Jews when Nazis came looking for them. It's just declining to help somebody b'cos it violates another agreement. Do we always do everything our friends and neighbors ask us to do? If my neighbor asked me to help set up a forgery outfit to help him out of his poverty and joblessness, would it be right or wrong of me to refuse?
You know, buddy, hyperbole that stupid doesn't belong here. First you take Stallman completely out of context, then you resort to extreme hyperbole. When you have to resort to either tactic, you already lost the debate.
Don't let the screen door hit your ass on the way out, MAFIAA shill. You're outed!
Free Martian Whores!
If you ever work for a living, you will understand my point. Until then, keep looking for an employer that will pay you to develop software they can't sell.
Since you've immediately resorted insults based on unfounded assumptions about my working life I don't hold out much hope for any type of reasoned discussion from you. I do work, but my work isn't easily duplicated by everyone. If I decide to go into programming, I would be programming industrial robots I would own, not selling copies of a program. I understand your point just fine.
You want to sell proprietary software. That's fine by me. If you were not a freeloader, your position would be that you prefer proprietary licenses to Free/Open Source licenses. You aren't releasing your work as either GPL or BSD. It's other people's work you prefer to be licensed as BSD instead of GPL, so you can use it in your proprietary program. Therefore your preference for BSD over GPL is not based on your desire to sell your own work at a profit, it is based on your desire to sell other people's work at a profit without recompense to them.
Your distaste for the GPL is not a deficiency of the license. You don't like it because it has the intended effect.
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