Slashdot Mirror
EFF Defends Bruce Perens In Appeal of Open Source Security/Spengler Ruling (perens.com)
Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond -- and he's also Slashdot reader #3872. "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed an answering brief in defense of Bruce Perens in the merits appeal of the Open Source Security Inc./Bradley Spengler v. Bruce Perens lawsuit," reads his latest submission -- with more details at Perens.com:
Last year, Open Source Security and its CEO, Bradley Spengler, brought suit against me for defamation and related torts regarding this blog post and this Slashdot discussion. After the lower court ruled against them, I asked for my defense costs and was awarded about $260K for them by the court.
The plaintiffs brought two appeals, one on the merits of the lower court's ruling and one on the fees charged to them for my defense... The Electronic Frontier Foundation took on the merits appeal, pro-bono (for free, for the public good), with the pro-bono assistance of my attorneys at O'Melveny who handled the lower court case...
You can follow the court proceedings here
"Sorry I can't comment further on the case," Perens writes in a comment on Slashdot, adding "it's well-known legal hygiene that you don't do that." But he's willing to talk about other things.
"Valerie and I are doing well. I am doing a lot of travel for the Open Source Initiative as their Standards Chair, speaking with different standards groups and governments about standards in patents and making them compatible with Open Source."
The plaintiffs brought two appeals, one on the merits of the lower court's ruling and one on the fees charged to them for my defense... The Electronic Frontier Foundation took on the merits appeal, pro-bono (for free, for the public good), with the pro-bono assistance of my attorneys at O'Melveny who handled the lower court case...
You can follow the court proceedings here
"Sorry I can't comment further on the case," Perens writes in a comment on Slashdot, adding "it's well-known legal hygiene that you don't do that." But he's willing to talk about other things.
"Valerie and I are doing well. I am doing a lot of travel for the Open Source Initiative as their Standards Chair, speaking with different standards groups and governments about standards in patents and making them compatible with Open Source."
Another quality first post by Anonymous Coward!
People who really have injustices done to them and REALLY need a good lawyer, can't seem to get one. I wonder why.
Keep up the good fight. People like the Grsecurity folks are the scourge of the industry in my opinion.
Here, on the other side of the pond, I would have expected to have to pay 3k-6k EUR (about $3.5k-7k) legal costs in such a case. $260k is something you pay for six months to year of corporate overhaul and reorganization to a high flyer consultant.
It is Security-through-clarity.
Giving up mod privs for this thread by posting in it and IT'S WORTH IT!
Bruce, I've been an FOSS advocate in every company I've worked in, for, managed, ran, owned, started, and directed.
YOU are the champion of living the word.
Thank you!
Ehud Gavron
Tucson AZ
FAA CPL-H
Hope Perens gets sued into the poor house.
He has been a leech on the software development world for far too long.
I am glad companies aren't being bullied into his trademark extortion racket over the industry term Open Source.
Perens gets sued into the poorhouse, Musk commits securities fraud and RMS doesnâ(TM)t understand personal hygiene.
Time for a motberfucking swirly, nerds!!
Not sure who this Bruce guy that everyone keep talking about but to assert my superiority, I demand to fight him in an epic battle for the ages! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The entire proceeding reads like a personal grudge unsupported by facts and yet executed in the public court system. That would be the very textbook definition of frivolous.
You can't sue someone just because they made you look like a tool.
Especially if they're right. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
This was a defamation lawsuit. It didn't settle the issue of whether the copyright issue itself is prohibited.
Perens' argument on the legal issue itself strikes me as dubious. He's claiming that GPL copyright automatically extends to separately distributed patches that, themselves, do not contain any of the GPL'ed code. I'm not sure why that would be the case, and I'm not convinced that that would be a ruling that would be in the interest of open source software, because it seems to put a lot of other open source software at risk of being considered "derivative works" of proprietary software.
...Perens would claim that any program you code for Linux or even the product you create with those programs is automatically GPL. Imagine, i use a text editor to write a novel, and automatically it is GPL?
That's what Gates meant when the GPL is like a virus.
Suppose you write a novel. Perhaps, like Stephen King, you're living in a broken down trailer with no telephone when you're book sells 13,000 copies, netting you $2,500. Then someone turns your book into a movie. The movie doesn't have any pages of the book read aloud in the movie. It doesn't "contain" the book per session, it's a transformation, an adaptation, of the book. The author is entitled to a share of the movie revenue because it's his novel, adapted to the screen. That's a derivative work. "Derived from" doesn't mean "contains".
See subject & APK Hosts File Engine 2.0++ 64-bit for Linux h t t p : / / a p k . i t - m a t e . c o . u k / A P K H o s t s F i l e E n g i n e F o r L i n u x . z i p (remove spaces between characters & download).
Yields more security/speed/reliability/anonymity vs. any SINGLE solution (99% of threats = hostnames vs. IP address that most firewalls use) more efficiently/FASTER + NATIVELY 4 less!
(Vs. "Bolt on 'MoAr' illogic-logic" competitors slowing you, hosts speed you up 2 ways (adblocks + hardcodes u spend most time @) vs. competition loaded w/ bugs (DNS/AntiVir) + their overheads (messagepass ('souled-out' to advertiser addons) + filtering drivers) & their complexity leads to exploitation).
* ONLY 1 of its kind in GUI on Linux/BSD!
(Much better vs. Windows model in speed & efficiency + new "merge" feature)
APK
P.S.=> You love Bruce Perens but I'm world-class and better than him. You stupid níggers can benefit from my greatness as God's gift to you... apk
Your software is just fine - well written, functional... I'm going to continue using the Host File Engine by mmell February 17, 2017
Your premise that hostfiles are a good way to deal with advertising and malvertising is quite valid - by JazzLad April 20, 2016
his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant August 10 2015
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg September 25 2015
I like your host file system by Karmashock September 09 2015
that APK guy, I use his host file by rogoshen1 Tuesday March 03, 2015
I personally use a HOSTS file blocker produced from a genius called APK by 110010001000 October 27 2017
* Best part = Linux 64-bit model's faster/more efficient (2x work in 1/2 the time)
APK
P.S.=> For a faster/safer/more reliable internet. Even you stupid níggers can benefit from my greatness. God's gift to Slashdot will NEVER be silenced... apk
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)...
You can't help you're an immature little BUTTHURT no-mind, lol! I blew you away in TONS OF PLACES and easily dust your no-mind bullshit blatherings.
APK
P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME do-nothing selves like you that I can ALWAYS CASH IN ON (lol) is that I can use FACT/TRUTH on them to SHATTER their all TOO fragile delusional egos that they actually know A DAMN THING in computing, lol... apk
Have you never seen kernel patch? Or any patch for any project? If not, it made be good to stop making assertions about things you've never even seen in your life.
> A kernel patch is not a transformed version of the original
Actually that's EXACTLY what a patch is - the relevant section of code, with some lines marked out and the new version of those lines added. Here's a trivial patch as an example:
printk("comedi%d: ni_labpc: %s, io 0x%lx", dev->minor, thisboard->name,
iobase);
- if (irq) {
+ if (irq)
printk(", irq %u", irq);
- }
- if (dma_chan) {
+ if (dma_chan)
printk(", dma %u", dma_chan);
- }
printk("\n");
if (iobase == 0) {
It starts with a couple lines exactly as in the original, unchanged. Then where a like is changed, it has the original line, with a "-" mark added, then the transformed version, marked with a "+".
Hope you win, and I hope the linux kernel people sue Spengler for copyright infringement.
by lawyers I mean. It's really a shame that so much money is spent on things like this, and other frivolous legal actions. While hopefully the right people are vindicated by this (you know who you are, Bruce), the only ones who really win are the lawyers. Their profession is such a twisted self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You're not allowed to call just any license "GPL". Only the GPL license can be called by that trademark name. The GPL does not allow adding clauses. Therefore it cannot be licensed "GPL with additional clauses".
They have said their software is GPL licensed. Therefore if they try to say "no, we mean our own special 'GPL', with extra terms added", that would violate the GPL trademark.
PS I forgot to say they COULD legally use a license that is similar to thr GPL, but different, and call it by a different name. They haven't chosen to do that. At least, under trademark they could.
If they chose to do that, they wouldn't be violating trademark, but since they are distributing things copy-pasted from the GPL kernel, it's a derivative work and would violate the license.
Bottom line:
If you sell a modified version of GPL software, it as to be GPL licensed, and you can't change the GPL to whatever you want it to be. Playing games doesn't work, you just end up falling into a different kind of violation.
But they aren't. They are neither selling kernel sources nor are they distributing kernel sources. All they are distributing is their own patches. It is the end user that creates the "modified version of GPL software".
How do you know what license they distribute their kernel patches under to paying customers? Are you a paying customer?
> How do you know what license they distribute their kernel patches under to paying customers?
It's stated quite plainly on their web site. It'll be the top result if you Google "grsecurity license". (Kinda sad you didn't bother to Google it before arguing about it.)
> They are neither selling kernel sources nor are they distributing kernel sources. All they are distributing is their own patches. A patch IS modified kernel sources. Here's a trivial kernel patch so you can see what they look like:
printk("comedi%d: ni_labpc: %s, io 0x%lx", dev->minor, thisboard->name,
iobase);
- if (irq) {
+ if (irq)
printk(", irq %u", irq);
- }
- if (dma_chan) {
+ if (dma_chan)
printk(", dma %u", dma_chan);
- }
printk("\n");
if (iobase == 0) {
It starts with a couple lines exactly as in the original, unchanged. Then where a line is changed, it has the original line, with a "-" mark added, then the transformed version, marked with a "+".
It's not only the new lines derived from the original (a derivative work), but also which lines to remove, copy-pasted exactly from the original GPL kernel. You can't copy-paste from the original kernel OR distribute your modified version of those source lines without complying with the GPL. A kernel patch generally does both.
This issue was settled by FSF and NeXT in the 1980s.
NeXT wanted to distribute their Objective-C compiler as a user-installable plugin to GCC. FSF nixed it, on the basis that the combined pieces create a "single program."
If your patches don't work on their own, and to work must be combined with the kernel code, you are creating a single work that is a derivative of the kernel. The fact that the user does the combining doesn't change this fact; it's a single program (according to the FSF) and thus must be GPL-licensed.
Since you obviously failed to read the original blog post, let me quote it for you:
Grsecurity is a patch for the Linux kernel which, it is claimed, improves its security. It is a derivative work of the Linux kernel which touches the kernel internals in many different places. It is inseparable from Linux and can not work without it. it would fail a fair-use test (obviously, ask offline if you don’t understand). Because of its strongly derivative nature of the kernel, it must be under the GPL version 2 license, or a license compatible with the GPL and with terms no more restrictive than the GPL. Earlier versions were distributed under GPL version 2.
Clearly the patches contained GPLed code. You can look at the source code of the older versions to determine any derivative nature from kernel sources.