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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.'"
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?
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.