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Understanding the New Red Hat-IBM-Google-Facebook GPL Enforcement Announcement (perens.com)
Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond -- and he's also Slashdot reader #3872. Bruce Perens writes: Red Hat, IBM, Google, and Facebook announced that they would give infringers of their GPL software up to a 30-day hold-off period during which an accused infringer could cure a GPL violation after one was brought to their attention by the copyright holder, and a 60 day "statute of limitations" on an already-cured infringement when the copyright holder has never notified the infringer of the violation. In both cases, there would be no penalty: no damages, no fees, probably no lawsuit; for the infringer who promptly cures their infringement.
Perens sees the move as "obviously inspired" by the kernel team's earlier announcement, and believes it's directed against one man who made 50 copyright infringement claims involving the Linux kernel "with intent to collect income rather than simply obtain compliance with the GPL license."
Unfortunately, "as far as I can tell, it's Patrick McHardy's legal right to bring such claims regarding the copyrights which he owns, even if it doesn't fit Community Principles which nobody is actually compelled to follow."
Perens sees the move as "obviously inspired" by the kernel team's earlier announcement, and believes it's directed against one man who made 50 copyright infringement claims involving the Linux kernel "with intent to collect income rather than simply obtain compliance with the GPL license."
Unfortunately, "as far as I can tell, it's Patrick McHardy's legal right to bring such claims regarding the copyrights which he owns, even if it doesn't fit Community Principles which nobody is actually compelled to follow."
To be fair to the Kernel Team, the major thing they objected to in GPL3 back then was the anti-TiVo-ization terms. These would prevent lock-down of the software such that the end user would be blocked from updating it. I am told that a number of products gained a "developer mode" just to comply with GPL3. This is something we should encourage, IMO. But perhaps the Kernel Team are still more oriented to having companies use Linux than keeping it as Free as I would like.
Bruce Perens.
To be doubly fair to the kernel team, it's borderline impossible to relicense linux even if they want to. When someone contributes code, they do *not* transfer ownership of the code's copyright to the kernel team, they simply make available their code under the GPLv2 and then the kernel team pulls the changes. The kernel doesn't include an "or later" clause in its license, and neither do most contributions, so the kernel team can't legally relicense the kernel without first obtaining approval from every contributor (or removing the parts for which approval can't be obtained).
Without copyright there is no such thing as the GPL. There is no such thing as copyleft,
Without copyright, there would be no need for copyleft. Somewhat counterintuitively, it's GPL (v2) rather than BSD/MIT that emulates a world without copyright better: we'd have decompilers.
Decompiling is merely an optimization problem: make a front-end that takes x86/etc code (these already exist), output C/etc code, optimizing for human readability; you lose comments and (without debug info) function and variable names. The only reason no one wrote a serious decompiler yet is that cases when using source recovered this way are so niche it's not worth the effort.
For pretty much any interesting program, people would clean up and comment such source, thus there'd be no commercial benefit for keeping the code closed. And, releasing real source means you get better outside contributions, thus cooperating with your users is a win. Ie, we'd have an all-GPL world.
I specified GPLv2, as there exist a way around decompilers: DRM. Of course, doing so on a general-purpose CPU would be mere pointless obfuscation (just run the thing in an emulator and dump memory when decrypted), thus such evil CPU would need to include sealed DRM chips. But, the corp would still have to give the user both the lock and the key: decapping is not that simple, but it can be done, immediately breaking all DRMed code runnable by the chip that got decapped. DRM is physically impossible, it serves merely as a stumbling block. At this point, it'd be so niche that no company would really bother, turning the tables to what we have now with decompilers.
We'd end with a prisoner dilemma world where everyone cooperates, instead of current population of defectors.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Here's the Wikipedia relicensing. Definitely not easy. I objected to GFDL applied to Wikipedia before this, and they knew that, but I didn't play an active role in this change and there must have been many other people who objected too.
Bruce Perens.
The point of Open Source isn't really to have source code. That source is a means to an end, but not the end itself. The end goal is to have software that end users can modify to suit their purposes. And even further, the ability to legally share those modifications with other end users.
It is difficult to share modifications with binary patch schemes, and it is difficult to write those modifications. And I say this as a someone who spend a lot of time on 8-bit computers in the 80's where we did this sort of thing.
I wish decompilers were better. I've used them before, and HexRays is the best I've used but it's still sub-optimal. This is partly because the act of compiling discards much of the annotation that we enjoy in source code. You can find many obfuscators for your source code that basically discard annotation and mutate the structure of your code to make it difficult for a human being to comprehend. Distributing obfuscated source code is not really any better than distributing binaries, and is not at all in the spirit of the GPL.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire