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Stallman's Legacy Halts At Hardware (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: To say Richard Stallman had a profound effect on free software is not a bold enough statement. The power of the GPL, and his advocacy for software freedom have changed the world. But there is one frontier that has yet to hear this gospel. These days, no hardware is an island. Almost every type of electronics we use is running some type of code, and in almost every case some of that code is secret in more ways than one. From beefy processors to graphics controllers, boot ROMs and binary blobs run in the silicon we base our systems upon. The code is not published and in the rare case that you are able to view the source it is only under strict NDA. This represents one of the biggest barriers to true open hardware.
Stallman has always had the right idea IMHO, but that 'ideal' put up against Corp Profit will never win sadly.
"Those who don't understand code, will be owned by those who do"
I'm all for a hardware manufacturer who creates and promotes 100% open hardware with public code provided.....................know any?
His legacy also stopped at bathing as well.
The biggest barrier to true open hardware is the fact someone has to pay for a tangible good, and that tangible good - hardware - is designed for a specific purpose. The BIOS and bootloaders and such are immaterial, and do not limit you from using a piece of silicon as you desire. The block is silicon that does what you want to do in the first place. And that carries with it costs beyond just software creation.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
When you start missing the days when every piece of hardware you bought came with schematics and firmware listings, instead of six page license agreement printed in four point fonts and written in incomprehensible legaless (and indeed, demanding adherence to reprehensible terms.)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
What's the point? CPUs have hardware interface and instruction set specifications that allow reverse engineering. Sure, some things are microcoded, but microcode is slower than hardwiring and is mostly useful for working around design flaws.
GPUs, on the other hand, are clouded in secrecy and there would be a benefit from opening them up much more than they are now.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I think patents are why this can never work.
Pretty much EVERY industrial process is patented by someone. That patent is guarded by a corporation who wants to ensure they get paid ... either through sales, or licensing the patent.
IBM makes a zillion patent applications every year.
There's simply no way you can bypass the sheer quantity of "intellectual property" which encumbers the world. And since pretty much every aspect of the hardware is probably covered under a patent, you're not going to get it.
Hell, even with software, Microsoft used to insinuate that Linux violated a bunch of their patents, but wouldn't ever name them.
The modern world has been structured to serve the needs to greedy corporations. They're not going to allow you to sufficiently change the rules of the game to take that away.
Which is why every treaty these days is having the intellectual property pushed even harder, because governments are on the payroll of entities which want to further entrench their rights as superseding ours.
Keep dreaming.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Nothing is stopping you making and using your own hardware, rather than putting expectations on other peoples products. Of course, making your own hardware isnt cheap or trivial, whereas putting expectations on other people is both of those things.
Say what you want about Richard Stallman, no one's ever accused him of being too willing to compromise on his principles in the name of pragmatism and expediency.
Oh, wait, they totally just accused him of that.
Source: e-mail exchange with him, based on my shmoocon presentation on hacking USB flash drives.
In short: I said there's no way you can have open source firmware for a proprietary undocumented ASIC, that has to keep track with new developments in flash memory every 3 months.
He want on to ask if there was a way to buy a USB flash drive that wasn't field-reprogrammable, or to "convince a company to make USBs [sic] that way". I'm not aware of any, and it's impossible as-is to A) ask a vendor "What chips are you using?" and B) have the vendor use the same controller/flash chips on the same device.
Dude wouldn't listen, and I gave up trying to educate him.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
the reason a legacy of GPL can be attributed ot stallman is because of the egregious error of computing in capitalism. Namely, the means of production of code were given to coders themselves and in doing so they were empowered to construct the terms of that softwares use.
Hardware has enjoyed this luxury for quite some time, however its days may be numbered. open source firmware for routers and mp3 players has existed for a while, and open source chip design and hardware is slowly coming to fruition with the open hardware laptop by bunny huang and programmable keyboards from input.club.
expect a future of open hardware to seem eerily familiar to the future of open source software. First its ignored, then its laughed at, then its attacked as inferior and dangerous, and finally its either embraced by hackers and business or outlawed through a combination of DMCA style legislative chicanery and thoughtcrime akin to aaron schwartz.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I remember a lot of people back in the 90s and 2000s that tried to use public domain or BSD, MIT, ISC license and where extremely upset when their software was used commercially without anything given in return. The code was often warped and hacked until it was a bug ridden mess, and totally out of control of the original authors.
I'm fine with this, I use an ISC license on things I write, but I know first hand that someone can take the software and never give anything back. And for some programmers, this is their worst nightmare and hugely demotivating to them. Many of those old projects forked into more restrictive licenses, often as GPL. (wine being the most famous)
I guess whatever device we're talking about here has had limited scope until this wearable/beacon/smart bubble started. We effectively have known that specific devices (think: a clock, a fridge, an AC unit) did and still do very specific things, and until now we see them doing those things clearly, not transparently, because they are usually one-task devices. So what point was there really in open-sourcing that stuff or requiring any form of software-bound compliance? Not much really.
Now that we're getting super smart watches that are basically computers, with a lot more IO into and from our immediate lives, we need to start caring what they run and who they share with, but to me this is just the smartwatch getting closer to the router in effective "influence" on our privacy, security, and other GPL-centered concerns. Whatever has been said about software for computers, that started applying to servers, routers, set-top-boxes at some point, can now apply to all "hardware", because, well, that hardware runs and does what a generic-purpose personal computer runs and does. And then some, if you add all those sensors, it gets access to a lot more stuff than those Spring Break pictures you're embarrassed about. Richard Stallman needs not say one thing
Off-topic: why is this article's tone sound like RMS is no longer alive or active?
I just made the exact same remark in my comment :D
Unfortunately Open Source Soap, http://opensourcesoap.com/ , is only OSS and not GPL or LGPL.
How was it a "right" idea? The society — and generations of programmers — were spending considerable efforts on software, which could not be used by all. This caused a substantial duplication of efforts and repulsed a substantial body of programmers, who preferred the truly free BSD-license instead. Instead of cooperating, people and groups ended up competing. And when the original GPL proved to not be "enough" — for example, it was still possible to use GPL2-licensed gcc in a BSD-project, Stallman doubled down with GPL3, forcing FreeBSD, for example, to switch from gcc to BSD-licensed clang.
Yep, these denunciations of "profit" is the very core of the problem. Generations of young idiots do not realize, that profit is simply a reward for doing something people want. There is nothing wrong or shameful about it and all efforts to "fight" it are misguided and destructive.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Nice trill, shill. GPL is by far the most popular license on the planet, and it's growing. Whaaa whaaa, BSD, whaaa whaa, MIT. Nope. GPL is the code you'll find in just about every non-Apple consumer electronics device; even though the manufacturers could take vanity-ware licensed projects and keep quiet about them. They don't, though. Wonder why?
If you want to steal another's code, and pass it off as your own, hunt out the substandard and abandoned BSD equivalents.
Manufacturers only use GPL code when it pretty much already does what they need it to do. GPL and other open-source software is nothing more than the commoditization of software.
Which is why software that isn't a commodity - small user bases with stringent requirements that make "good enough" not good enough - is still mostly closed-source. Such as truly redundant highly-available shared-storage databases or WORM archiving for SOX compliance.
Commodity software works like commodity hardware. How often do you have to reboot your Android phone?
I don't think it's possible or even desirable for every piece of software to be open source. That would result in a lot of useful software not being written, as many smaller developers will not figure out how differentiate themselves from legal copycats.
Nevertheless, FSF made a huge positive contribution by making compelling critical mass of free software available and forcing commercial companies to share improvements that they make to Linux kernel, compilers and other key infrastructure. We can't even imagine how sucky and insecure commercial products would be today if they were not built on shared community foundation. GPL essentially helped overcome tragedy of the commons where it's better for everyone if there is, say, a good OS kernel available for everyone to build their own UI on top, but it's in immediate interest of any one company to withhold improvements from competitors.
I can see a similar need in hardware - a set of copyleft hardware, firmware and 3D printer designs that anyone can use as a base for an innovative product while sharing improvements to reusable components.
It's an important secondary benefit that people will be able to run 100% open systems to learn, because of concern about government backdoors or just because of philosophical objections to not having source, like RMS. I just don't see it as a primary motivating factor for most people in the position to actually contribute code.
Well, open hardware is pretty crippled. When you consider patents, almost across the board hardware innovation patents are a non-started for a small-ish open hardware company trying to cook their own gear. If you're successful enough, someone will sue you into the ground. Software on the other hand can be served from countries which don't have software patents and still get downloaded everywhere. Would x264/ffmpeg exist today if purely developed under US laws? Probably not, but who's to say...
Its hard to shut down an individual sending a scrap of code over the web vs. a small hardware shop shipping their devices through the mail. If anywhere 'open' hardware flourishes, it'll be China which has historically been more or less indifferent of patents in general.
Bye!
Uhhh...no, it's not the most popular:
https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-source-licenses
And no, it's not growing:
http://osswatch.jiscinvolve.org/wp/files/2015/02/figure2.png
It's not freedom that in todays society we are not free to kill anyone we want, or take anything we want from anyone else...
Sometimes you have to give up freedoms which would allow you to harm others, and thats what the GPL does... You are given a limited set of freedoms by the GPL, and the primary limitation is that you must grant the same level of freedom to anyone else, you're not free to limit someone else's use of the software.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
From beefy processors to graphics controllers, boot ROMs and binary blobs run in the silicon we base our systems upon. The code is not published and in the rare case that you are able to view the source it is only under strict NDA. This represents one of the biggest barriers to true open hardware.
this is incorrect! the giant barrier that prevents people from having true open hardware is the obscene cost of having your design made into a silicon chip. if you could suddenly get a one-off chip made for $100, we would all be running much different systems and few of them would be related to x86.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Nothing in the GPL forces you to contribute back changes. You can download GPL'd code, change it however you want, and use it on your own systems to your heart's desire, without having to contribute anything.
However, if you download GPL'd code, modify it, and distribute a binary, you must distribute your code changes under the GPL. If you don't want to do that, write your own damn code from scratch. None of this is forced upon you.
APL is very different from GPL. The most successful GPL-program is gcc — which is waning now that there is clang, to which the evil KKKorporations can contribute without fear. You seem to conflate all open-source licenses together — and that's a mistake.
The MIT-licensed X11 is very "end user", Mozilla-licensed Libreoffice — even more so (do I need to mention firefox?) No, it is perfectly possible to have a popular open-sourced software offering. But adoption of GPL is a kiss of death.
What Stallman must've hoped for 30 years ago was the thinking like: "Ok, they use GPL, so we'll do so too to be able to use their code." What happened instead is: "Oh, they use GPL, so we'll have to implement the same functionality ourselves."
GPL is a failure, open source is not.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Dude wouldn't listen, and I gave up trying to educate him.
I was under the impression that sums up his particular strength and weakness. He isn't interested in the particulars of his grand vision that are impractical or impossible. With RMS it's always a "Damn the torpoedoes..." mentality.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I respect what Stallman has contributed to free software, but at the same time, his views are ridiculous. He is to FLOSS what fundamentalists are to religion. His untenable ideals and overwrought goals drive people away, and do more to hurt the more reasonable open source options than to help free software.
You would be amazed at some of the 'low level' libraries that GPU manufacturers have and license to other such companies. These companies have Math Phd's still trying to get better precision and faster computation at Sine and Cosine functions, etc... I'm sure they are not in a hurry to open source this type of research which took plenty of money and time.
Without the GPL we wouldn't have much of the freedom we now enjoy. Would Linux be so popular, would it get as much contribution from private companies if they were able to release their own proprietary versions? Look at BSD. It doesn't benefit much from Sony using it on their games consoles and in their smart TVs, because they don't have to give anything back.
Without GPL software, software that wouldn't exist in the way it does without the GPL, we would be much more reliant on non-free products. We would be less free to compute.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Linux was the first Unix like OS that I could download for my PC for free that just worked. "Just working" is a rare quality of software.
If you want to contribute them back, then you can do it. If you don't want to distribute the modified source code, then you don't have to.
You have that freedom with the GPL! It's only if you distribute copies of your compiled binaries to others that you're required to supply the source code. And in that instance, not supplying them with the source code is restricting *their* freedom.
The only freedom the GPL restricts is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others.
It was Linux being out there while BSD was still locked in that AT&T lawsuit. Once BSD 4.4 derivatives - FreeBSD and NetBSD were out, they were just as available to anyone interested.
This doesn't affect me because I always talk in code anyway.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The BSD and MIT licenses offer true freedom. The GPL offers restriction and the elimination of freedom.
this is a very subtle and dangerous perspective that has one extremely large software project which has ended up in complete chaos, causing headaches for many people, including misunderstandings and ignorance by vendors who assume that because the majority of the software is BSD/MIT, the linux kernel's GPL license is somehow magically transmuted to a BSD/MIT license as well.
that software is android.
the only reason why we have things like cyanogen, thank god, is because there is one last bastion of fundamental GPL code left in android devices: u-boot and the linux kernel. without that, the smartphone industry would be viewed with extreme hostility. it's *already* bad enough in cases where companies such as Mediatek blatantly and continuously violate the GPL.
look at what happened with Fairphone, for example. great product, yes? envisioned as being sustainable, yes? and after 2 years, what happened? well, there turned out to be some security vulnerabilities in the version of android that was supplied (by Mediatek). it was *critical* that the users upgrade. but, because Fairphone had naively bought a binary-only GPL-violating OS from a 3rd party OEM company that *DIDN'T EVEN HAVE THE SOURCE CODE*, there was no way to provide updates of *ANY KIND*. the buyers therefore had to abandon their products for security reasons. bear in mind that this is supposed to be eco-conscious *sustainable* hardware that's supposed to be re-usable. it was extremely embarrassing for Fairphone, and a very hard lesson for them.
so that's even when there's a GPL kernel. imagine what it would be like - imagine the situation if the linux kernel *wasn't* GPL? you would end up with the exact same situation as with apple. apple _used_ to release the kernel source code (based on FreeBSD) back to the community... they stopped recently. the end result: people no longer actually own their own hardware.
the GPL is, at its heart, a recognition that collaboration is better than competition and secrecy. the BSD and MIT licenses were developed when everybody released source code *anyway*. the licenses were therefore more about fighting the liability that is inherent in releasing code as "Public Domain". everyone *trusted* that the code modifications would be released.... and then suddenly they weren't [did you even *know* for example that Windows 95's TCP/IP stack is actually BSD-licensed?]
google's insistence on using BSD licenses - to the point of re-implementing entire GPL-based pre-existing libraries - has resulted in untold very subtle harm to end-users and to software freedom in general - harm that is very difficult to quantify and explain because it's long-term, and the consequences are ongoing.
the one thing that really really stinks about what google did with android is summed up in this simple question: they replicated dozens of critical low-level libraries and applications that had perfectly-functional GPL versions that were proven and had stable communities based around them (that could really have done with the financial support of google).... so why did they not replicate the Linux Kernel as a BSD-based project as well? that hypocrisy - that they did not also re-create the Linux Kernel as a BSD/MIT project - tells you everything that you need to know.
How did GP "dictate" to somebody else how they should license code? Are there legal consequences if they chose to ignore the instructions? Jail? Fines? A refusal to fulfill some obligation that is owned unless the licensor bows GP's will?
Or have you simply decided that advocacy is a dictat because you need it to be one?
I think you have no real understanding of the meaning of the words dictate, hypocrite, and irony. I thkn that you are merely throwing those words around because you have no better argument to make.
This reminds of labor unions claiming credit for us not working on weekends... Bullshit, in other words.
Sometimes I read a thread here and just spot the most amazing, untrue bullshit - like this line.
I've been in the office Monday through Saturday for the past 3 months - involuntarily. The project manager just had to send a simple email requesting additional resources when the goals on his timeline started slipping. HR and my direct boss walk over to me and tell me that I'm expected to be at work Monday through Saturday from 8am to 6pm. I don't get paid extra for the extra hours. I don't get comp time. I'm not allowed to use vacation days during crunch time. The contract I signed when I started here said nothing whatsoever about involuntary unpaid OT. My recourse is to find a new job (it's hard to interview on a Sunday) or initiate legal action which will end badly for me.
My neighbor is a UAW worker in a Ford plant. He gets Saturdays and Sundays off - except when they allow him to volunteer for weekend OT at 1.5x rate or even higher. I'm willing to bet his annual salary is higher than mine when you factor in his OT pay.
Please hop on the clue bus when it comes to unions. Please, I'm begging you.
It is lack of access to * the means of production*. Gee, where have I heard that before? But in this context it is true. And since it won't be given to us, we have to create our own. Uh oh... there's that 3D printing nonsense again. But... it is the only way to "democratize" things.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Perhaps you should focus your efforts closer to home?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
BSD existed since 1970-ies.
But was it free in 1984? Wikipedia says it didn't start to become free software until 1991. And was it a complete free operating system, entirely free of AT&T encumbrances, in 1992? Once Linux was combined with what the GNU project had produced by the early 1990s, it succeeded in part because of the legal uncertainty surrounding BSD prior to the 1993 settlement.
You control the silicon that postprocesses the signal.
The Commodore 64 computer's VIC-II GPU outputs S-Video signals using a 90/11 = 8.18 MHz pixel clock, which is 16/7 times the frequency of the color subcarrier. Put code on an FPGA that samples the luma and chroma signals at twice this rate, and it should be able to guess which color the VIC-II is producing. Then store lines of pixels in a circular buffer in block RAM feeding a line tripler circuit on the same FPGA. Kevin Horton did something like this for the NES.
Or clone the VIC-II. (If you dare.)
Then get an FPGA development board and write your CPU in Verilog.
Would Linux be so popular
If Linux were GPL it would most definitely not be so popular, it's popularity stems from some of the clauses in the GPLv2 combined with the explicit exclusion of GPL provisions in the license preamble. The GPL is good in some respects and bad in others. Linux would also not have been anywhere near as popular had the GPLv3 provisions regarding Tivoization existed in the GPLv2.
As Linus has repeatedly said, Linux isn't about Free Software ideals, it is about "tit-for-tat" code contributions (hence the reason he sees Tivoization as a good thing) and the GPLv2 offers that.
Argue the principles all you want, reality is people are moving away from GPL (esp. v3). Maybe GPL did help spread Linux and all the great tools better than MIT-style license would have, maybe it didn't, impossible to tell. Question is what do you do now. If you have too many people leaving, something is likely in need of a fix.
The sales of computers are going down last years, and there are more other devices in the age of "Internet of Things" that are harmful for the freedom of the users. Even simple climate control is not your device, but is designed to spy on your family habits, "phone home" - all in the name of optimizing your utility bills. In the US the practical disadvantage of this unfreedom can likely be just unsolicited junk mail, in other countries with higher corruption levels this data can be sold to burglars who will visit your home when the heating/AC is set on "vacation" level. Freedom of the users of the devices (including all 4 classic components) is much broader then just that of the computer operators, and the choice if free/non-free is not only about your philosophy, but be a matter of survival.
As for Richard Stallman - I just can not see, where is that his one mistake. For years there are continuing attempts by others to create "hardware GPL" but there is no universal solution (we use exactly the combination mentioned in the article: GPLv3 for software/firmware/FPGA and CERN OHL for the hardware) caused by fundamental differences of the software and hardware. His last year article http://www.wired.com/2015/03/r... provides a lot of practical instructions how to build free hardware in a not-yet-so-free hardware world, there are "levels of design".
Find the cpu thats fully understood.
Buy the motherboard thats been fully examined and found to be open and usable for a developers needs.
Tell the world about it on the web and grow a user community.
Move away from the devices and brands that expose IP's while selling an expensive VPN related product.
Stop buying tame and junk crypto turn key products that have trap doors and backdoors design in as sold and shipped.
Secure and understand what can be as a user and developer.
The cpu, motherboard, OS can still be secure, fully documented and developer ready.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Nobody did due to inertia, as you point out. But what standards compatibility? Linux made quite a few departures from both SVR4 and BSD Unix, but that didn't matter, since there wasn't a real standard as far as the market went. At that time, GPL won by virtue of being the only game in town: there wasn't an FOSS BSD license, that came later. Everything Linux adapted was new - be it bash (as opposed to bourne or C shell), X11 (as opposed to X) and KDE (as opposed to Motif and OpenLook). Not that it hurt Linux
With Google's switch from Apache Harmony-based runtime libraries to GPL-with-Classpath-exception-based code, we have an ever-so-slight uptick in the copyleft nature of AOSP. True, the Classpath exception is a huge exception that makes it arguably lesser than the LGPL (Bradley Kuhn apparently half-seriously argued at the time of its creation for it to be called the "Least GPL"), but even if it's a slight shift, at least it's in the right direction. And it shows that Google at very least isn't actively working to diminish any further the usage of GPL code in Android.
But, yeah. The use of a new software stack rather than a standard glibc-based one has seriously rather counterproductively bifurcated the Linux world.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Generations of older idiots do not realize, that corporations are shafting you and laughing all the way to the bank based on *your* hardwork, and you just accept it. There is nothing wrong or shameful about asking for higher compensation, and joining a union to strength your demands by putting workers and executives on an even playing field, and all efforts to "fight" it are misguided and destructive.
FTFY.
Look, I don't mean to be rude in the above statement, but it really irritates me when people refer to younger generations as idiots, just because we have a different philosophy than you do.
In my view, BSD allows corporations to fork the code and never contribute back. They can essentially take everyone's hard work, say "So long and thanks for all the fish", and package up a proprietary version of it and sell it for oodles of money. They don't owe you a thing. They don't owe the open source project a thing. Just because some of them currently do contribute code/effort doesn't mean they will indefinitely. Once they have obtained what they want, what incentive do they have to keep working with the community?
The GPL, meanwhile, protects your hardwork. If you write free software (in RMS's terms; or open source if you prefer), you can still build a community around it and have anyone contribute, including corporations. You can use it for whatever you want, including commercial software (i.e., you can sell software that is GPL, that's not against the license). HOWEVER, there is one important exception: any changes/add-ons MUST be available under GPL license for others. While you can sell GPL software, you can't make it solely proprietary, ever. I look at it as demanding compensation -- if you worked hard (for free in most cases) to develop some open source library, and a corporation takes it to use in some product they sell, why should they solely profit off your work? Requiring them to give back to you and community -- so you can turn around and sell too if you wish -- keeps an even playing field. Everyone contributed so everyone gets it. No one can unilaterally decide they're done contributing back; it's a requirement of the license.
Imagine being the author of a library that becomes used in OS X, and then Apple says "Sorry, that's proprietary, you can't reverse engineer our code" -- they took your code, the code you wrote 99% of, and effectively removed your freedom to use your own library just because they made a few changes and reissued under a new license. BSD allows this; GPL doesn't.
The only thing GPL really requires is that changes also be released GPL, so everyone can use it. Otherwise, it's the same as BSD. How is that taking away freedom? You can do anything you want with GPL, including launch a commercial company and sell it, EXCEPT screw people over by taking your ball and going home. Does it not occur to you as being a little suspicious that corporations, after years working with GPL software, are starting to turn to BSD in some cases? You use it as an example of GPL's "failure", but I see it as an impending crisis among BSD software, where in a few years corporations will fork and close these libraries and leave BSD'd software to decay. Remember that old "extend-embrace-extinguish" memo? Did you not learn from history? BSD can't prevent that, but GPL can because of its viral nature.
Now if you really think corporations getting to take your code for proprietary stuff is important, then by all means pick BSD. I'm not going to sit here and tell you what to do with your own hard work. It's a free country. But stop spreading such lies about the GPL. The GPL protects your freedom by preventing others from taking away your freedom.
Stallman is indeed a fundamentalist. His goals are just fine - but he's about as remote from what a typical software engineer is as it's possible to be. That's OK, he's the idealist - and that lets the rest of us be pragmatists.
GPL is great for complete software packages - emacs, gcc...that kind of thing. But for libraries, it sucks. That's why we have LGPL. Sadly, there is a lot of anti-LGPL rhetoric out there https://www.gnu.org/licenses/w...
I think we need something like that for OpenHardware. The ability to use a piece of OpenHardware design in a closed-hardware ensemble without hiding the open part of the design...putting a BeagleBone inside my (commercial) 3D printer perhaps.
Keep that in mind - while I consider why LGPL is a good thing for *parts* of systems.
I get paid for writing software - I need that money to by food, clothing, housing, transport, etc. When I put something out into the public domain it's because I expect to get a fair trade out of it - I give you my software - some of you give me back bug fixes, improvements, etc. My gift to you is repaid to me - possibly in just a small way - but possibly many, many times over...it's a fair trade for some kinds of software - but not for others.
Yet when I open-source a game (I've actually done this) - I got 300,000 downloads in the first month - a lot of thanks and ego-boosting praise - but almost zero actual tangible benefits in return (one guy - a musician - sent me a new, original music track). But if I open-source a library (and I've done that too, on many occasions), then with only a tenth the number of downloads - for years to come, my library was polished, fixed and improved - for free! That's because users of libraries are software engineers, and they are capable of helping out - players of games are typically not.
I learned my lesson - and I mostly OpenSource library code - or complete applications that programmers are likely use the most - these things give me a return on my work.
With a library, we need to allow the maximum number of people to use it in order to get constructive input. If I use GPL, it effectively causes all users of my library to have to license their application via GPL (or similar) too. That cuts out 100% of all commercial users and a large chunk of potential OpenSource users. The only people who can use my code are those who are working on GPL'ed applications - and those are a small minority. With LGPL, I can force the library sources to remain free - while allowing the maximum possible number of users to want to help with the maintenance. This gives me my best return on investment.
So it makes sense to have an LGPL-like license for hardware components - the BeagleBone inside my 3D printer design, for example. Keep the BeagleBone "open" and "free" while allowing me to use it in some larger project that I can sell to keep the lights on.
But for Stallman, this is a religious matter - he's trying to get me to use GPL on my library in an effort to leverage more GPL'ed applications out there. That's a nice goal - but it not one that a typical working programmer can rationally cope with. Closed source code pays the rent.
-- Steve
www.sjbaker.org
If I recall correctly, the Assembler source code listing for the original PC BIOS was included in the IBM Personal Computer Technical Reference, but not the source code for the ROM BASIC, licensed from Microsoft.
SOMEONE has to stand out at the extreme edge.
No, they don't. Extremists always do more harm than good.
You're either saying RMS isn't an extremist or he has done more harm than good. I disagree with both views. He's pretty crazy on some things. But without him there is no (GNU/) Linux, and probably no free software movement as we know it today. Sure open source would exist, but not the legally binding licensing that has helped to keep open source open.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Not to quibble but I feel that this is essential to having a discussion along these lines.
The fact of the matter is that I am free to kill you. I am not at liberty to do so. If you are trying to take my freedom then I have a right to kill you.
Freedom is taken by force, more or less. Assuming you are not physically prevented from doing so, you're free to kill any one you want. There will be penalties for doing so and you shouldn't do it - but that's what freedom is all about. That's why they say, "Give me liberty, or give me death."
Carry on then... I just figured it salient and of moderate importance.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."