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On Being Pro-GPL
just_another_sean writes: Christopher Allan Webber, recently returned from OSCON, shares his thoughts on the GPL and why he dislikes people pitting one type of software license against another. He says, "I am not only pro-copyleft, I am also pro-permissive licensing. The difference between these is tactics: the first tactic is towards guaranteeing user freedom, the second tactic is toward pushing adoption. I am generally pro-freedom, but sometimes pushing adoption is important, especially if you're pushing standards and the like. But let's step back for a moment. One thing that's true is that over the last many years we've seen an explosion of free and open source software... at the same time that computers have become more locked down than ever before! How can this be?
And notice... the rise of the arguments for permissive/lax licensing have grown simultaneously with this trend. ...The fastest way to develop software which locks down users for maximum monetary extraction is to use free software as a base. And this is where the anti-copyleft argument comes in, because copyleft may effectively force an entity to give back at this stage... and they might not want to. ... Copyleft's strings say, 'you can use my stuff, as long as you give back what you make from it.' But the proprietary differentiation strategy's strings say, 'I will use your stuff, and then add terms which forbid you to ever share or modify the things I build on top of it.' Don't be fooled: both attach strings. But which strings are worse?"
And notice... the rise of the arguments for permissive/lax licensing have grown simultaneously with this trend. ...The fastest way to develop software which locks down users for maximum monetary extraction is to use free software as a base. And this is where the anti-copyleft argument comes in, because copyleft may effectively force an entity to give back at this stage... and they might not want to. ... Copyleft's strings say, 'you can use my stuff, as long as you give back what you make from it.' But the proprietary differentiation strategy's strings say, 'I will use your stuff, and then add terms which forbid you to ever share or modify the things I build on top of it.' Don't be fooled: both attach strings. But which strings are worse?"
Over and over this is repeated. It is false. A better statement would be: "you can use my stuff, as long as you pass along your freedoms to anyone you give it to if you modify it"
Just look at whats happened in the hardware arena. We've ended up without sources because we've let the non-free proponents in. Are there not bugs in firmware? The reality there are a lot more bugs in the firmware that we can't fix. Be it binary blobs loaded by the Linux kernel or BIOS related. Some of these bugs open up huge security holes which have allowed third parties to remotely access systems too. It's scary that EVERY system is vulnerable and we can't even take one of them and begin fixing these holes.
2015 is the year of the Linux Desktop!
"Well... two wrongs don't make a right. When you talk about getting sued by supposedly "free" software projects... it doesn't make you look too good."
That is a problem. The solution would be a copyleft license that gives the copyleft violator the option not to pay damages provided that they (1) release the source within a reasonable period from the time they're notified of the infringement (no, 1000 emails before compliance) and (2) don't initiate the court proceedings.
A problem with #1 is how to ascertain the notice has been received. With #2, in case the alleged violator loses the case, compensation should be provided the software authors with regard to time and lawyers' fee. Howver I find it defeats the spiritual purpose of copyleft to impose hefty damages for a GPL violation except perhaps in the case of repeat offenders, but mainly as a deterrent and not a money-making extortion scheme. Apparently the GPL has a provision where if you don't accept the GPL you can get sued for any amount allowed under NORMAL copyright law, and in certain jurisdictions that can be very high indeed.
Pretty much. Linux is actually really popular and everywhere. Just not on the desktop.
I remember reading this article that said that effectively almost everyone is a Linux user. Because almost everyone uses Google search.
Always read at -1, don't let others decide what you should and should not read.
copyright != license. The term "pro-copyleft" is with respect to the license - copyright is not involved.
I guess people can learn about society, thinking about music rights and torrent software.
.
Why all the angst and false drama?
You're being needlessly pedantic.
"We reserve the authority to restrict distribution and sue you if you don't follow our requirements" How do you do that? With a license.
How do you enforce said license? With copyright law.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
FTFA:
>One thing that's true is that over the last many years we've seen an explosion of use of screws
Screws in all houses, here on my desk, kitchens, door hinges, The International Space Station, government buildings, even on Android phones, etc.
People like screws in so many places therefore they must be applicable in all places therefore nails are death knell!
besttoolforthejob.com
When the license covers copying, modifying, and distributing, you're talking about copyrights.
All you're proposing is suing under fewer conditions. There's still the threat of a lawsuit if I use copyrighted (including copyleft) code in the "wrong way".
Conversely, if you're not going to ever sue someone for using your pastebin code on GitHub, or your project, you're essentially developing public domain, but not letting anyone enjoy the benefits of public domain code by putting it in writing. That's lose-lose for everyone.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
copyright != license. The term "pro-copyleft" is with respect to the license - copyright is not involved.
What category of law(s) do you suppose you use to enforce that license? You don't think it might be copyright law?
Also, you don't "accept" a copyright license. You distribute a copyrighted work; and either you're doing it under a license, or you're not. (Of course, sometimes it's the acceptance of a contracts that grants a license, e.g. possessing a CD or buying a license, but this isn't necessarily true, as seen in most F/OSS software. And sometimes we talk about "accepting the terms" to mean complying with the terms. But it's not the license that is accepted as such.)
If your act of distribution is neither licensed, nor fair use, then it becomes illegal.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Ironically, it seems to be the permissive crowd that does most of the division and pitting. You'd think the permissive folks would be more laid back, but they are constantly spreading FUD about GPL specifically GPLv3. The FSF, who has a vested interest in pushing GPL goes out of there way to recommend the Apache 2.0 license and extol its virtues, while Apache's site takes a very negative tone towards GPL.
The GPL is fine if it accomplishes what you want in a license, but really,
there isn't anything particularly good about the GPL. It isn't bad (usually),
it just isn't that great. And it's definitely overrated.
It doesn't prevent proprietary forks.
It violates KISS, a cherished engineering principle. Licensing is complicated
and technical (from a legal standpoint), but at least licenses like the BSD and
MIT can be read and understood quickly by laypersons.
The GPL is wrought with complicated incompatibilities with other reasonable
open source licenses and with other versions of itself. In this case, the GPL
really is kind of bad.
It tries to solve a problem that doesn't really exist; many companies actively
contribute to non-copyleft projects without needing a mandate from RMS.
It doesn't even support the ideals of the Four Freedoms any better than other
licenses. A company that owns the copyright of a GPL project can make it
closed-source just as easily as if it had any other license, and a non-GPL
project can be forked just as easily as a GPL project if that happens.
The GPL often gets credit for the success of a few great open source projects,
especially the Linux kernel. However, the role of the GPL in those projects'
success is far from clear, and it certainly discounts those projects; the
kernel really is a quality project regardless of licensing terms. It could
also be said that those projects were successful despite the GPL. It
would be difficult to prove either way.
I'm glad for RMS. He has done a lot of good with GNU software, especially
GCC. The GPL just really isn't one of his better accomplishments.
I've long believed the GPL has a major flaw that excludes it from wide adoption: there are too few ways to monetize GPL code. Now I'm sure some people are thinking "good, that's what the GPL is about", but they'd be wrong. The GPL is about freedom, and it's flaws force those interested in being paid for their work to often reinvent GPL code to monetize the software; closing it up entirely.
This problem is especially prelevant in industries like computer games, and hardware drivers; coincidentally two of the areas GPL code has constantly lagged behind. To fix this I would propose a provision, or perhaps a sub license that would allow a person or organisation to keep secret their source modifications for a period of time. Perhaps something like 1 or 2 years. This would give incentive to enterprise to build their products upon current GPL code as they could save money by not "reinventing the wheel", while also ensuring that their modifications would have a monetization period.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
this is by far the most beautifully to-the-point and most honest real-world representation about the requirements of the GPL that was ever put down in a single, brief sentence.
too bad it's not correct.
you aren't obligated to give anyone anything if you use GPL licensed software. Only if you try to sell the binaries of the code you took.
they use a BSD license and laugh all the way to the bank
(rather conspicuous lack of Apple wouldn't you say?)
At least the GPL requires people to give *something* back.
Oops, sexconker forgot to check the AC box. That said, free software is for tucows!
That's not how it works at all, and that's how FUD starts. If you use inkscape, you don't have to give away your drawings. If you use Linux, you don't have to give away stuff you do with the OS. Hell, even if you use GCC, your code is still yours.
And if you put something on a server (minus Affero), you still don't have to give anything back.
No, the only people who have to give back are those who write something that can interoperate in certain ways with GPLed software.
it is a purely commercial product with no pretensions of ideological purity or political correctness.
No pretentions of political correctness? My goodness, you really know NOTHING about Microsoft.
Computers are being locked down
yeah that's funny, with about 40 operating systems and 10 different hardware platforms to choose from, computers have never been less locked down. As a consumer you've never had such an opportunity to purchase so many different kinds of computers with so many different kinds of operating systems. You can buy a locked down windows system for your kids that won't let them surf porn, or you can get hacking gear that will find vulnerabilities in your systems. You can set up a linux system by compiling every single program yourself. You can buy computers and cell phones that are virtually all free software, every byte. Face it, computers have never been so unlocked and so easy for people to work with.
in a population this size more users are taking shelter in walled gardens of more manageable size
Meanwhile, back in reality, google, youtube and facebook are more popular than ever before.
So, no, the number of things you can do that would cause you to have to give back are, in the grand scheme of things, very small, which is why the GPL is sometimes called a communist license -- from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Because the number one thing openness generates is chaos and multiple competing claims about reality. Say, many Linux distributions, each claiming to be great, and in fact, many variants of Linux distributions often with many versions and many wrinkles, and many varations of packages, libraries, and so on.
If you want to build or customize things, openness is great. If you just one to pick something up, use it, and move on, a huge amount of confusion, overhead, and pain is involved in trying to pick the "right" version (particularly if you're unfamiliar with openness and wrongheadedly looking for the "real" version, as many early Linux dabblers were) and get it to work quickly and easily.
There is thus a huge amount of value added by anyone that quells the chaos—even in a tiny sphere or product—and that can quickly, clearly, and succinctly explain to users just what their version does, without ambiguity either within itself as an instance or over time. The nature of the beast—this value is the result of "closing the openness," if you will, means that it can't be opened, or the value will be lost.
End users want operating systems and devices that are not open systems with unclear edges that bleed into the ecosystem, but rather a single, coherent, object or product that they can acquire, use in predictable and stable ways, and then lay down once again. They want systems and devices about which books can be written (and bought, and referred to months down the road) without quickly becoming obsolete, and with the minimal risk that this book or that add-on that they purchase will fail to work becuase they'd misconstrued the incredibly subtle differences and variations in product naming, versioning, and so on.
In short, massive openness is incredibly generative and creative, but leaves in place a systems/software/hardware version of the "last mile problem" for computing. Having a fabulous network is one thing, but consumers just want one wire coming into the house, they want it to work, they want it to be predictable and compatible with what they have, and they want to know just where it is and what its properties, limits, and costs are. They are not interested in becoming engineers, the technology they use is only useful to them as a single, tiny, and managable facet of the larger ecosystem that is their life.
This "last mile problem" cannot be solved with openness in hardware or software any more than the last mile problem for wired providers can be solved by opening up all of urban geography to any comers and saying "lay all the cable you want, anywhere you want, to and from any building or system!" First off, it would result in a mess of wires (not un-analagous to what we see across much of free software's development space) and next because most consumers wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it, much less make a choice, and they'd probably resent the complexity in their backyard and try to do away with it.
Openness leads to closedness because to the extent that openness dominates in the development and engineering space, closedness increases as critical need for carrying whatever is developed to the average consumer space, in precisely the same measure.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Systems have only become more closed to NON-TECHNICAL users. iPhones can still be jailbroken and you can do anything with them. Hack, even non-jailbroken iPhones you can do quite a lot with simply by running your own locally developed app on your device (which anyone can do for free now BTW).
This is useful because we have seen historically that systems that are more open to non-technical users lead to a lot of self-harm. They simply do not have any way to filter what is reasonable and what is not as to what they are putting in the system.
In reality all computing systems are more open and hackable than ever before thanks to connectivity. When a hacker on his couch can stop a Jeep driving down the road, you don't have to worry that systems are too closed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Some people think GPL means you can use my stuff as long as you put my name in the credits and keep my stuff free. But GPL means,"If you use my stuff, you can't charge for your stuff and have to make all your code public." So if I write a 100,000 line of code game, and I am on opengameart.org and want to use someone's pretty butterfly picture under GPL, I can't use that picture unless I release years worth of source code. Thankfully there is a work around of contacting artists directly and asking for a different license. Some get surprised they didn't pick a friendly license to begin with since GPL gets pushed so much as the correct for sharing license.
God spoke to me
"The fastest way to develop software which locks down users for maximum monetary extraction is to use free software as a base"
Care to produce the names of any company, entity or individual user that were locked into an onerous monetary contract - though the use of free software?
Gift-style licensing like BSD licensing is for when you want everyone to use your code so badly that you don't care what they do with it. If you have an economic reason for that, fine. But it can create harm if you don't have your economics straight. Heartbleed was an economic failure of gift-style licensing. Very wealthy companies used OpenSSL and didn't contribute to its maintenance. There was some astronomical amount of economic damage in result. I think we all would have been better off had OpenSSL been dual-licensed and paid for by some folks, even if it had fewer users that way. And maybe that way its original developers would not have had to go to work for RSA, who prohibited them from ever touching their old code again. That's why we still have Eric Young's old, old license with the attribution clause nobody else uses any longer. He can't touch it.
GPL IMO does work best with dual licensing, because people who just hate the GPL can get what they want, and pay for making more Free Software. But if you don't care about money and don't want to use dual licensing, the growth effect you get from GPL is a lot better than making yourself some very rich company's unpaid employee by giving them all possible rights except for a very limited attribution.
Some people should pay. Some should get stuff for free. They aren't in general the same people, and they self-classify.
Bruce Perens.
I help GPL violators clean up their act, it's my main business.
Every one has had a total lack of due diligence. I will come in and find that they have violated the licenses of 21 proprietary software companies (this is a real customer example) by integrating their code into their main product, just like the GPL code. Some of them only had an "evaluation" license, some not even that, some wildly violated the terms of any license they got.
Most of them are in silicon valley. They seem to have the attitude that they will clean up their legal problems when they're rich, and nothing but getting their product out of the door matters until then.
They don't ask me to feel sorry for them. I bill them a lot, and in the end, they're clean and legal.
Bruce Perens.
Some confusion of concepts is evidenced by OP's indirect contrasting of "freedom" with "permissiveness". Freedom is permissiveness; the more you are permitted to do, the more free you are. More permissive licenses are thus by definition more free than less permissive ones.
One way to illustrate this is to consider what would happen if all copyright law suddenly went away. The permissive licenses that already let you do whatever you want would effectively still be in effect, because they were doing nothing but creating an exception to prohibitions put in place by that copyright law. The GPL, on the other hand, only allows those exceptions on the condition of accepting certain obligations; if copyright law went away entirely, there would be no prohibitions to need exceptions to, and thus no need to accept the obligations imposed as conditions to those exceptions by the license, and GPL licensing would collapse to completely permissive licensing.
The obvious balance point between the two would be a license that only imposes the obligation to permit the same exceptions to the prohibitions imposed by copyright law, because in that case if copyright law went away, nobody would have the ability to violate the required obligations, and would thus automatically meet the conditions of the license. Basically "I'll pretend copyright law doesn't exist if you do too; I won't sue you for distributing my copyrighted work if you won't sue anyone for distributing your derivatives of it". A lot of people seem to think that that's all GPL does, but it's not, because it treats binaries and source code as separate things with separate conditions. If we were talking just about source code and binaries weren't a thing at all, then GPL would be this kind of license: "you can copy and distribute this code, so long as you let anyone else copy and distribute any modifications you make to this code". If copyright went away, then you would be automatically permitted to copy and distribute it no matter what, but everyone else would be automatically permitted to copy and distribute any modifications you made too, so it would just be like everything was under such a license.
But with regards to binaries, GPL doesn't work like that. You can't just copy, modify, and distribute the binary files themselves without also accepting the obligation to provide source code with them, which means that without copyright law, people would be more permitted to do things than they would be under GPL; they would be more free. The GPL is withholding some freedom that it could grant, with the goal of making source code more widely available. And while the amount of freedom it withholds is minor, the benefits of withholding them are minor too; if you weren't allowed to withhold license of your modifications of the code you made, which would include binaries made from your modified code, then people would be free to copy your binaries, which is what end-users really pirate anyway, and what might make a financial difference, so what would be the point of withholding the source code? There would be no financial advantage to it, and I don't expect many companies would really bother, since it would make no difference in whether or not people were copying their finished product, the binaries.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
And yet Windows 10 on release day will have more users than Linux has gotten in 22 fricking years LOL.
BTW you are simply trading one master for another, as Google is in the process of pulling a EEE on Android, they have also cut off the funding they were giving to AOSP and if you bother to look online their OEM contracts make MSFT contracts of the 90s look like the GPL. And funny that so many talk about how "open" Google is yet I can take any bog standard Windows laptop right off the shelf at Walmart and be dual booting anything from BSD to Haiku in under 10 minutesyet on the exact same hardware thanks to Google DRM a ChromeOS "laptop" can ONLY boot a handful of Linux distros that have been specially modified to run on ChromeOS hardware (even though its made from standard laptop parts) and even then ONLY if you put in a page and a half of CLI bullshit AND completely wipe ChromeOS, no dual booting allowed...yet MSFT is supposed to be the "DRM happy" company and Google "open"...DaFuq?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Google should give the guy that wrote "don't be evil" a fucking BMWer as so many otherwise logical geeks have bought that bullshit hook, line, and sinker, that it makes Apple's hipster marketing look as amateur as New Coke. "Think Different" ain't got shit on them, no siree bob!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The definition of 'open platform' in terms of hardware primarily means the ability to load your own software, not on how many locked down options there are on the market.
The fact is, the majority of systems on the market now are closed. Examples include game consoles, cell phones, tablets, and embedded machines in consumer products of all types. The only exception is the desktop PC, and even there, many are now shipping with UEFI locked bootloaders, and we have only the 'magnanimous' promise from Microsoft to continue offering their signed stubs for use in loading alternative OSs. Initially, the ability to shut off signed loads was mandated, but MS has now changed that policy. It's really only a matter of time before most PCs are locked down with the OS they shipped with. Today, the open system is the minority, not the majority.
Popularity is often not a good measure of quality, openness, or freedom. It's just a measure of dominance. Youtube is dominant because it was one of the first, not because it is now the best. Even if it was the best when it launched, continued dominance does not imply that it continues to be the best.
computers have never been less locked down.
That's simply flat-out wrong. The ability to purchase a wide variety of locked down systems does not make those systems less locked down.
The most common computers for sale now (smartphones and tablets) are far more locked down than their laptop and desktop bretheren. There is no way to install another OS on an iPhone without having to bypass tools designed to prevent you from doing so. Likewise the majority of android phones sold.
A decade ago, the majority of computers for sale were PCs. They would and mostly still do boot any old crap you stick on them.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Don't be evil (r)(TM)(c) [1][2][3]
Terms and conditions apply. May be void worldwide.
[1] Unless there's money to be made
[2] or we coudn't be bothered to think of a better way
[3] or unless it's just too much fun
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's a shame that it's nonsense. Google was able to make huge changes to Linux for their server infrastructure and not compelled to share anything. Eventually they started upstreaming things because maintaining a fork is expensive. The GPL is often counterproductive. I've seen two fairly common paths from companies with regard to GPL'd libraries. The first is simply to say 'it's GPL'd, avoid it', and end up writing a proprietary version - causing more proprietary software to be written is hardly a win for free software. The second is to take it and never admit publicly to using it, which generally means keeping a private fork and not upstreaming patches, for fear of legal complications (is the GPL compatible with all of the other third-party code you're using in your in-house software? As long as you're not distributing it, probably, but no one wants to spend lawyer time on it). For BSDL software, the common pattern is to adopt it, maintain a proprietary fork, realise that this is an expensive waste of resources, and upstream everything that isn't a core competitive advantage (which, in a lot of cases, means all of it - or, at least, all of the bits that are actually useful to other people).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well, we found the cow-man.
When you say you're "pro-copyleft" you're implicitly saying you're pro-copyright
Being "pro-copyright" doesn't necessarily mean supporting the status quo of present copyright law, including inability to follow ownership throughout the entire copyright term and anti-circumvention provisions that make interoperability legally risky.
I have asked about video games a few times, and the most common reply has been to make the engine free and the assets proprietary. Assets include anything that is not legally a "computer program", such as textures, meshes, maps, and audio. Several first-person shooters from Id Software have gone to this model a few years after release.
The summary is completely confusing and decontextualized.
A few days ago at OSCON Shane Curcuru of Apache Foundation gave a talk: Why I don’t use the GPL which gave the standard BSD defense: I won’t use the GPL for new software, and you maybe shouldn’t either. “Heretic”, comes the cry from the back of the room! But no – I bleed and believe in open source and the public good as much as you do. The difference is, I want to share my code with everyone not just the believers.
Christopher Allan Webber is the creator of MediaGoblin. MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. http://mediagoblin.org/
He wrote an article in response to Corcuru's talk where he addressed the big failure of the BSD argument its now over 30 year track record including recently of creating platforms that are unfree using BSD software as a base. He also argued against pitting licenses against one another which is odd since he's defending a license. Webber's position is the standard GPL defense. Here is a longer article not specific to Curcuru. http://dustycloud.org/blog/fie...
Anyway the standard time tested argument but the summary was terribly unclear about who was talking to whom.
No, we found one bull. Just as there are proponents of /etc/hosts as a component of layered security other than APK, I don't think sexconker is the only bull here.
Do you know of ANY hardware manufacturer who SELLS their drivers to people???
I remember reading horror stories somewhere about Creative Labs distributing only patches through the Internet. The full driver was available only on the original disc, and replacements cost money. In addition, third-party drivers for well-known input devices may cost money, such as drivers to use the Wii Remote and Dual Shock 3 controller with an Android device.
Between embedded systems and servers Linux has about 10b systems running using it. Windows 10 total sales are likely to be in the order of a few hundred million over the course of the entire year, much less first day so well under 4% of the user base. First day you are at a fraction of that, so something like .1%. Moreover the user base for Linux during that time will skyrocket probably by a couple more billion which will knock the high point for Windows 10 to around 2% or so. Your statistics are BS.
But GPL means,"If you use my stuff, you can't charge for your stuff
I could explain everything that's false about that statement, but I'll let the FSF explain in the essay titled "Selling Free Software".
Since when has GPL ever claimed to be anti-copyright? The GPL is a software license whose form comes from copyright law, uses terms from copyright law and whose power of enforcement comes from copyright law.
So why hasn't GnuTLS gained more traction? Do developers of applications that use TLS see something wrong with the LGPL?
if copyright law went away entirely [...] GPL licensing would collapse to completely permissive licensing.
If copyright law went away entirely, it would also become lawful to produce and distribute commented disassemblies of any proprietary program. A "commented disassembly" is created when a person takes executable code, figures out how it works, and transforms it into a preferred form for making modifications. This already happens underground: look for "SMBDis" on RomHacking.net.
The FSF and RMS in particular never advocated for freedom for hardware.
Other than the "Respects Your Freedom" certification program, which lets computer hardware makers designate their products as compatible with free software.
This is why a free operating system for a mobile phone would need to be collected into a "distribution" just as one for a PC. In a world without locked bootloaders and undocumented chipsets, there would be a few distributions of Replicant OS that one could install on any given phone to replace the pack-in operating system.
You don't understand the purpose of the GPL. It's not intended to just give you things for free, but rather to give you freedom with your software. You want free stuff, and the GPL is good enough to provide you with that? Ok then. But the core premise of freedom with software should not be limited due to errors in design, and it currently is as you pointed out with games and other software, like hardware drivers.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Exactly. There is also one other problem. This can be happening at multiple vendors simultaneously each of which has added different core competitive advantages. They can fork to the point they can't upstream usefully with another. They just both evolved from some base product. The GPL mostly helps to prevent that problem.
I agree with your point entirely ethically.
However... I'm just going to nitpick. The hardware definition of open platform is a combination of interoperability, portability, and open software standards that allow you to have supplier choice. It has nothing to do with you personally being one of those vendors. The relative ease of being able to join the Android ecosystem (i.e. it becomes practical at a few hundred thousand units) makes it an open platform regardless of how locked down each of those units is individually. You may not like the definition but that is the definition.
I'd also like to mention three area you forgot which is incredibly open.
1) Clouds especially IaaS. Those are running lightweight OSes designed to freely run all sorts of client OSes. That's a huge area of freedom replacing the big box proprietary systems. .NET (if Microsoft wanted it which they are playing with) and Xiaomi's business model is based on this.
2) Moreover this server based technology scales down nicely to both server and desktop. So that while you may not be able to freely run different base OSes you can freely run different client OSes and those are free distributed on free VM managers.
3) Finally on phones Android itself is constructed to allow for different environments, Google Play is replaceable or combinable. You can have Android
If people are building something for distribution, they will often avoid the GPL'd project entirely. If they're building something for internal use, then they will either avoid the GPL'd project, or they will keep their changes private in exactly the same way (and often for longer because they're worried that if they upstream stuff then they'll be asked for a legal audit of everything or, often, they're linking against something proprietary with a EULA that prohibits linking with GPL'd code and don't want their supplier to know that they're in violation of this license).
It's far harder to start off not participating in the community and then join later if you use GPL'd code than BSDL'd code, and that's a route that I've seen a lot of companies following. Their choices aren't BSDL or GPL, they're BSDL or proprietary. If they go with a proprietary solution, then their only option if they want to become involved with an open source ecosystem is to buy their supplier. If they go with a BSDL project, then they can join in the community later.
If they're not the first to get their changes in, then they end up with a lot of pain on their next merge, which generally encourages them to become a bit better at upstreaming stuff early.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is NOT a complaint about the GPL, or any other license. An author of a work is free to choose whatever license they want to offer their work under, including a closed source license. Merely an observation.
IMO . . . when someone offers a Library, that is, a black box of code with well defined API that offers some useful capability, and offers it under the GPL, the author is deliberately trying to RESTRICT what the users of that library can do with their own code. The author is effectively saying that I only want authors of other GPL applications to use my library. If the library author were only trying to protect the freedom of his library and nothing more, then he would have used the LGPL. The LGPL protects the freedom of the library, as well as protects the freedom of the user of a closed source application to be able to re-link the application against a newer version of the library without access to the source code of the application.
I'm not saying this is right, or wrong, or anything else. It is merely an observation.
A library author that offers a library under GPL license has an ulterior motive. Usually a commercial motive to ensure they can make money from users of applications that are not under the GPL. This seems to be exactly the opposite of what the GPL was intended to do in spirit. A library offered under the GPL typically offers a "Commercial License" for applications that are not under the GPL.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
This is a copy/paste of this post: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
He didn't respond to my response to it, but *someone* did mod my reply to it down. This post really is worthless-- a disingenuous and half-hearted hit piece on the GPL , crammed full of vaguely reasonable-sounding disclaimers "I'm glad for RMS" and praise for GCC so that people will take it more seriously.
My original reply is given below. I acknowledge there is probably room for valid and reasonable debate on many of these points, but if you begin the debate by posting A/C and then modding down anyone who points out the massive effects the GPL has had... well, that's not a debate. It's a troll.
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I'm not sure what you expect to prove by listing a bunch of non-sequitur aphorisms. We have the facts in front of us, and it is very easy to imagine how the alternate universe would work by substituting "BSD" in place of "Linux". Does "Red Hat BSD" give away virtually their entire operating system for free, including modification and rebranding? No. No they fucking do not, and you cannot be taken seriously if you try to claim otherwise. I'm not talking about a minor permissive-licensed project (such as the kind that Apple or Google have been known to support) that doesn't affect the bottom line; we are talking about a software company open sourcing the lion's share of the code they write for their main/only product. There isn't a large, for-profit corporation in the world that does that kind of thing without some kind of legal compulsion. (Or perhaps you'd like to point out a sizable BSD-based for-profit distro that doesn't try to close source? They've had decades to come out with one.) So, admitting the absurdity of "Red Hat BSD" is step one.
Step two is admitting that while there are a number of decent home-grown options today, corporate-originated apps and sometimes core components are still very commonplace in your average distro and 10+ years ago they were even more prominent and important, particularly for business and other semi-technical users. Without corporate contributions, particularly from Linux-centric businesses like RHAT, Linux would be a pale shadow of what it is today, not just because it's hard to find full time volunteers but also because the whole thing needed a sustained kickstart before it reached a level where it was useful and appealing to people who weren't already hardcore Unix enthusiasts.
And... that's it. Admit those two things, and it's self-evidently true that the GPL was and is critical to Linux's success. This isn't philosophy any more; this is proven history. BSD gave us Apple's unholy reincarnation. GPL gave us Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, IBM, and dozens of other companies paying hundreds of developers to work on Linux full time, and every step along the way made perfect logical sense. There is no mystery as to why it happened this way.
If you want to argue otherwise, you're going to have to do a lot better than what you wrote there. For starters, you could try referring to reality once in a while.
I disagree the GPL does nothing, I agree with your case.
Another common case than the one you cite is this. A, B, C and D are all building software for some secondary goal. For example Apple computer was working on GCC's optimizations for PPC because they wanted Mac software including OSX to run faster on PPC hardware, not because they wanted to get into the complier business. The GPL forced Apple to release all their changes to GCC even though they may have seen these as a competitive advantages and didn't release similar code bases when the code was BSD. This GCC release allowed Sony to leverage them on their game design system. Apple was forced to cooperate with Sony even though Apple made had no desire to. Another example involving Apple is the release of Webkit because of the KHTML code BTW.
To an extent you make a valid point, but it's still extremely misleading to claim that "the GPL doesn't prevent proprietary forks". In a very large number of cases it can--if a company goes bust and another group picks up development, there is no longer any way to make a proprietary fork, because the entity that owned the original codebase are no longer around to consent to a non-GPL re-license. Similarly, any project that has more than one major contributor (even a now-inactive past contributor) is virtually immune to an attempted proprietary fork. This has huge ramifications. This is why so much of Android is/was GPL (though they're trying like mad to replace GPL components with Apache), this is why Linksys was forced to open source on their WRT router firmware, this is why Red Hat is open source, etc.
Finally, even in the case of a single entity controlling 100% of the code that goes into a project, the GPL does indeed prevent proprietary forks by third parties (such as NeXtSTEP, the proprietary fork of BSD Unix that eventually became Apple's OS X.) I happen to think this is a good thing--some people argue it's bad, and to a point I can respect that point of view. But what you cannot do is try to imply that the GPL simply fails at what it sets out to do and is therefore just a bit of unnecessary complication layered on top of what is ultimately a permissive license. It is not. We have dozens of high profile examples of the GPL's copyleft provisions in practice, and a good number of open source projects (not the least of which is the Linux kernel) are for all intents and purposes permanently GPL, with no possibility of a fork due to the sheer number of contributors involved.
Whatinthehell did I just read?
I've reread that post three times, and although I think he came down in favor of the GPL, that doesn't actually match what little I could get out of the meandering stream of consciousness of that post.
Why is that here?
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
The GPL forced Apple to release all their changes to GCC even though they may have seen these as a competitive advantages and didn't release similar code bases when the code was BSD. This GCC release allowed Sony to leverage them on their game design system
I have several 'huh' reactions to this.
First: Apple's changes to GCC were released, but mostly lived in a separate branch in GCC's svn. A lot of them were never merged into the mainline. The GCC code has subsequently changed enough that applying them is no easier than completely rewriting them (source: a colleague at CodeSourcey who is working on doing exactly this).
Second: Apple is one of the largest contributors to LLVM and Clang (BSD licensed) and has been since the project was quite small - they hired the lead developer of LLVM to use LLVM in their graphics stack and started the Clang project to replace GCC with something that was useable for refactoring tools, syntax highlighting, and so on.
Third: I guess you're talking about the PS2, but optimisations for the Cell PPU are not really very useful when encouraging people to run code on the SPUs (the PPU was pretty underpowered) and Sony did not use Apple's GCC branch. For the PS4, their toolchain is entirely LLVM based (and their OS is FreeBSD based).
Another example involving Apple is the release of Webkit because of the KHTML code BTW.
Not a great example. WebKit was originally released as a bunch of code dumps that were basically impossible to merge with upstream KHTML. It was the promise of outside developer interest (after many years of developing it with no community involvement), not the license, that caused them to release it as a proper open source project (i.e. with a public revision control system). Oh, and the Apple-original bits of WebKit (i.e. those not derived from KHTML) are BSD licensed...
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Just like with languages, use the best license for the job.
Of course you need to understand your tools and licenses in order to make a wise decision.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Apple was aggressively merging until November 2005 when their LLVM changes got blocked. June 2005 they had already announced the switch to Intel. I think we are disagreeing on facts here. Yes a lot of their changes weren't merged in the end but that was because the GCC developers didn't like the direction they were going. Early on they got merged. When really matters.
I'm not sure how second contradicts what I wrote.
As for Sony I was talking PS3 they used Apple's early work on GCC.
How does that disprove anything? The question is cooperation. Webkit clearly has lots of people working with it. That's what GPL does:
KHTML existed and was open
Apple used KHTML and developed Webkit.
Webkit existed and was open
Webkit attracted contribution
Under a BDS license for KHTML Webkit is never open source.
There are orders of magnitude more embedded devices than laptops and desktops. There are also more servers than desktop or laptops. So you can't make an appeal to quantity and then argue for desktops and laptops. Relative to those two categories the ones you are talking about are niche.
There are also far more Android tablets which appear to be replacing much of the consumer laptop / desktop space. There are more smartphones and even the Apple this year will outsell PCs Android having crossed years ago.
As for people in the developing world even excluding smartphones and tables given sales data and longer longevity about 20% are running Macs. In terms of profits Macs take about 85-92% for many years. So I'm not sure what the burn is. Windows is the dominant player in a large niche which is rapidly shrinking being successfully attacked from both above and below.
There were until recently niches were OS/2 thrived. You can always define things narrowly, but using most broad based metrics not constructed specifically to be a niche Windows is not dominant.
Android. It's the single most popular mobile OS in the world by a large margin (although not the most profitable), and the most popular OS, and if you add a detachable keyboard an Android tablet is perfectly adequate for the needs of a very large number of people. The desktop and laptop roles are slowly becoming less widespread. They'll continue to be with us, like IBM mainframes are, and they'll never be niche products in the same way mainframes are, but their heyday is past.
Android is a Linux variant, same kernel but much different stuff on top of it.
Does it burn you to know that Microsoft is making almost no headway in mobile, which is the coming thing?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
One of the improvements in GPLv3 was an automatic re-licensing under certain conditions. Under GPLv2, if you violated the license, you lost it permanently, although I haven't heard of this being enforced.
The GPL has no provisions for people violating it, except losing the use of the license. If you redistribute under non-GPL terms, you're redistributing copyrighted material without a license, and the authors of free and open source software licenses generally don't feel the need to provide a cushion for violators. If you don't like the penalties for violating the GPL, lobby for more reasonable copyright laws. The Free and Open Source communities will be behind you.
I haven't heard of a GPL copyright holder starting by suing a company for lots of money, although that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. What tends to happen is that the violator is told to come into compliance somehow, and if the violator refuses the legal fireworks can start. Starting negotiations with a lawsuit is definitely not in the spirit of Free software. Note that, while releasing the software under the GPL is a way of getting into compliance, it isn't forced, and can't be ordered by a judge. The risk of violating the GPL is limited to injunctions to stop distributing and potential monetary damages.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You've been here a fair number of years, and yet when it comes to understanding computers, you're still fresh and new.
Routers and watches are already counted under "embedded systems and servers." Routers, of course, bridging that gap completely.
Maybe the average user doesn't know to care about servers, but that is not the same thing as saying they're not important. There is lots of equipment in an ambulance that the average person doesn't know to value, even if it already saved their life.
If you're saying that linux users should care about how non-users feel about how many linux systems of value are in use, I'd have to say that even after all these years you don't understand the basics of why people use linux and where the value they claim to get is coming from. Notice, you don't have to agree to understand these things. You just have to know what you're arguing against. It seems to me like you've been here long to figure out, embedded systems using linux improves the system stability and general quality of linux systems. It is way more valuable than whatever Joe User has on his desktop. If there is some bug that affects that embedded system, an actual engineer from the company that makes it will file a bug report, and likely even submit a patch. I don't want a new paradigm, I don't want popular software, I want systems that work as reliably as an ATM or router.
As far as Scientology, this is just like it in the sense that you're badmouthing them both for no good reason. Even your proposed dialog that you place in the mouth of a Scientologist is just a fake conversation where you want to raise issues about their Faith in order to attack them, and they want to change the subject to something they think might provide common ground, or otherwise be more productive. A reader need not like or approve of Scientology in order to feel sympathetic to their imagined situation. And indeed, I doubt Ray Charles would have had any trouble rejecting arguments based in hatred and pejorative.
As for the last bit, you don't appear to be a cultist.
The arstechnica article is bull. AOSP is alive and well, and in no way is Google trying to extinguish it. The complaints in the arstechnica article mostly boil down to the fact that Google provides components that interact with its cloud services which aren't open source because they aren't useful except as an interface to those services. They're useful, but not essential to the operating system.
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
I think we are disagreeing on facts here
Yes, you're talking about projects that I worked on and actions of people that I collaborate with and claiming that things happened very differently to how I remember them.
Yes a lot of their changes weren't merged in the end but that was because the GCC developers didn't like the direction they were going. Early on they got merged. When really matters.
Most of Apple's changes were in Objective-C (not merged), blocks (not merged) and early stuff on PowerPC autovectorisation (also mostly not merged as GCC contributors at IBM blocked the AltiVec stuff from being merged while it was a Freescale-only feature). About the only stuff that was routinely merged was the Mach-O support stuff, and that was largely useless as the corresponding binutils changes often weren't, so it couldn't be used without Apple's build of the rest of the toolchain.
As for Sony I was talking PS3 they used Apple's early work on GCC.
Sorry, I meant PS3 - the SPU stuff (where the PS3 actually got decent performance) was all new. The PPU stuff may have used a little of the Apple stuff, but very little. Apple did not do the PowerPC bring-up, that was done mostly by IBM folks (who were shipping GCC on AIX on PowerPC, and later Linux on PowerPC). Apple only did the vectorisation work because FreeScale wasn't contributing to GCC.
How does that disprove anything? The question is cooperation. Webkit clearly has lots of people working with it. That's what GPL does
Because the GPL was completely irrelevant to this. Ignoring the fact that it's LGPL, for a moment (and that every iOS device is violating the LGPL, because stuff links WebKit and doesn't allow the recipient of the code to re-link the code against their own build of WebKit), the sequence of events was:
The LGPL was in no way responsible for WebKit becoming a successful open source project, that happened solely because external contributors with deep pockets approached Apple and offered to devote engineering manpower if Apple would collaborate with them. If the license had been BSDL, then the sequence would likely have been:
The steps that were enforced by the license were completely irrelevant to WebKit's success.
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When you say you're "pro-copyleft" you're implicitly saying you're pro-copyright, because you're necessarily using copyright law to say "we reserve the authority to restrict distribution and sue you if you don't follow our requirements (i.e. distribute the source)"
Well... two wrongs don't make a right. When you talk about getting sued by supposedly "free" software projects... it doesn't make you look too good.
The basic error you're making is that you're injecting absolutes where there aren't any. Let me explain it in abstract terms.
Joey is pro-square, but he doesn't like rectangles generally.
Oh, wow, that was easy. There is no conflict there; liking a subset of a category that is otherwise disliked is not actually contradictory or hypocritical. A mistake of such a basic nature, combined with an arrogant, "doesn't make you look too good," sure doesn't look too good.
If I write a library and GPL it, I'm depriving you of the freedom to use it in a proprietary application. That's a restriction. If I write a library and BSD it, you can deprive other people of the freedom to use your modifications. That's a restriction. There is no one license that's more free under all circumstances, and an author has to choose which freedoms are more important to him or her.
Somebody using the GPL for a library may have an ulterior motive, or they may have used a license they're familiar with. The ulterior motive is usually not to dual-license, GPL and proprietary (which Stallman encourages, by the way), but to encourage other people to make their software GPLed. If you look at early Gnu software, if it was better than its proprietary counterparts the FSF wanted it under the GPL, while other software was under more permissive licenses, typically GPL or LGPL plus additional granted freedoms. For example, Bison (a replacement for YACC) includes a fair amount of Bison code in the parsers it generates. There was nothing to be gained in restricting Bison to GPL use only, so the Gnu project put additional permissions so that a user of Bison was allowed to produce a parser, with the originally GPLed code, and not have the output be GPLed.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"We reserve the authority to restrict distribution and sue you if you don't follow our requirements" How do you do that? With a license.
How do you enforce said license? With copyright law.
I recall someone saying that companies can be wary of a 'bare license'. They prefer to have a purchase contract accompany a commercial software license, which elaborates inter-party financial or other penalties for violation, rather than relying on local and federal laws for enforcement.
I couldn't find the original reference, but this document describes some of the legal and situational differences between a bare license and one accompanied by a contract.
Why would a home user/consumer want there to be a monetization strategy? I get a whole OS that is totally free commodity. It has everything I could ever need, for free.
An OS on its own is useless, the fact that you can leverage the same OS that those corporations spend money developing is advantageous but it's just an operating system.
And I'm fine with that being non-GPL anyway. So GPL doesn't need to address monetization.
I'm not saying the GPL has to address monetization, I'm saying that the free software mantra of "software should be free" certainly will not work if you don't have a monetization strategy for the software that isn't funded by corporations as it stands.
yes, you are correct. copyleft is explicitly a subversion of copyright to safeguard the rights of USERS. it was deliberately designed to subvert copyright laws in that way.
So cultist, good to know. Would you like to blather on about the Rpi now? or maybe about the "soon to be as open as a TiVo" Android OS?
Ya know what is sad? Its the fact nobody can even talk about fucking DESKTOPS here without some FOSSies trying to move the goalposts, why do they feel they have to do that? Oh yeah just like Scientology they are a teeny tiny itsy bitsy minority, so small that most OS statistics now list Linux under "other" along with other hobbyist desktops like ReactOS and Haiku. Meanwhile the Hairyfeet Challenge is proudly celebrating 8 years of Linux not being able to pass simple tests like "can it update without shitting on its own drivers" and in its current direction I have ZERO doubt that if you are here in 12 years you can help me celebrate 20 years of Linux failure!
BTW be sure to get a little party hat and blow a noisemaker in celebration of the Hairyfeet Challenge lasting so long, after all it was guys like you making excuses and moving the goalposts that have let Linux devs get away with such sub par shite for so long so the challenge couldn't have lasted as long as it has without guys like you, thanks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ya know what is sad? Its the fact nobody can even talk about fucking DESKTOPS here without some FOSSies trying to move the goalposts
Actually people can talk about fucking DESKTOPS, if they fucking make it clear they are talking about fucking DESKTOPS. If you see the your post which you thought was talking about fucking DESKTOPS, it didn't fucking mention fucking DESKTOPS. Its parent didn't, nor grandparent. Grandparent's grandparent mentioned
Linux on all supercomputers, here on slashdot, Google, Amazon, The International Space Station, world governments, Android (eys, it's Linux) on the best phones, etc
- the only post in the ancestry of your post to define any context at all.
TFS and TFA also don't limit themselves to desktops. So it was you who fucking moved the fucking goalposts.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I could as well say: When you say you're "pro-self defence" you're implicitly saying you're pro-force, because you're necessarily using force... Endorsing self defence doesn't logically require you to endorse the use of force other than in self defence, and neither does endorsing copyleft logically require you to endorse the use of copyright other than in copyleft.
Right.
So you're wafer thin alibi is that someone else is cow-trolling every article as an AC, and you came to this article and found the cow-troll had forgot to do his work, so you did it for him. But just this one time.
My suspicion is that you are all sexconcker. Sexconker says cows say moo. (moo moo moo, moo-trolls say moo). You cow-troll!
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
I'm not sure this is really equivalent: The purpose of self-defense is supposedly to minimize the use of force by both you and the aggressor. You're not causing more violence, you're trying to put an end to it. (You might also shun violence in all forms, as taught by turn the other cheek.)
I make the comparison like this: In a world without violence, self-defense would not be necessary. If we generalize to the set of universes where violence is an option, then self-defense becomes a way of minimizing the damage.
Likewise, if we generalize to a body of law with copyright law, a license to minimize the damaging effects would look something like "You are allowed to distribute this work only if derivative works are also licensed under this license, and you agree not to reserve any other rights, neither is there is no warranty for this software." Yet the GPL goes way far and away above this; the BSD or MIT license seems closer, though fails to contain the viral clause.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
The point of GPL is not to keep GPL code GPL, but to make other code GPL as well. Like a virus, once tainted, you cannot go back. It does not give freedom, it takes freedom. It's like arguing the Robinhood was in the right. Not a perfect analogy because GPL doesn't really take anything, it just uses leverage to convince you to give up your freedoms.
Yes, I think I get what you're saying, and I'm not entirely sure where I stand on the GPL's source disclosure requirement. I think the analogy was good enough to counter the argument I objected to, though.
Yeah, but a society of cheek turners won't protect you from a serial cheek slapper.
I think the CC BY-SA is probably a pretty good fit for what you're describing. (I suspect the biggest problem in practice with using it as a software licence would be the chicken and egg problem that it is not popular as a software license.)