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Corel Beta now GPL-compliant
SilentReproach writes "According to Bruce Perens at Technocrat.net, the latest version of the Corel beta license is up to par - victory declared for the GPL!"
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Information is either valid or not. There's no such thing as a valid information source. You can keep their track record and self-proclaimed methods, but that only tells you whether to guess them right or wrong if you can't be bothered to check.
And remember, if you must pay firefighters by the day, it is most efficient to let your property burn until a full day of their labor is required to extinguish it.
(By memory from "management myth #nnn", probably pulled off Usenet.)
where can we download it from?
Hmmm, maybe we can "test" the GPL somehow by someone pretending to ignore the GPL, then we sue them and they give up according to plan saying the GPL is indeed valid. Thus we have set precedent for enforcing the GPL!
(A) It's "Your" (B) It's not misquided, as you yourself pointed out. Anyone with the beta is free to redistribute it under the GPL. Thus, I want to know where I can download it from.
Corel for everyone!
How long until we see CD images floating around?
Do you know anyone out there who'll be willing to foot the bill for a civil courtcase? Call RedHat, I think they've got some money floating around.
no offense if english isn't your native or primary language, but "you're" is a contraction for "you are". "Your" indicates possesive. You mean "Your question is misguided".
My real beef with it is that breaking someone's argument into pieces and then arguing them individually is not really the same as arguing the piece as a whole. It's much easier to manipulate someone's words when you're doing the editing, wouldn't you say?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
And neither do you hear of motorists who are pulled over by police to congratulate them on staying below the speed limit, indicating before changing lanes, stopping at stop signs and having their tail lights intact. Positive reinforcement should be reserved for actions which go above and beyond doing The Right Thing.
Corel fixing their license-violating beta distribution certainly does not go above and beyond doing The Right Thing.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
well if you're only going to use Corel Linux and Corel's office products it will be easy. But if you want other apps-especially those designed for the gnome environment that Redhat is pushing (or just plain x apps), then you can't expect everything to be so consistent.
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Looks like it was an honest mistake, honestly corrected. Those of you who were calling Corel names a few weeks ago ought to be ashamed now.
Then why not set up a test? One of us can purposely violate the GPL and be hauled into court for it, then we will see if it holds up or not.
I'd prefer not to test this by taking a nice company, like Corel, and hitting them with a lawsuit because they made a mistake that they quickly corrected.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Gee, then maybe its for me :)
:)
I have never sat down to figure Linux out just because I have no time, just so much other shit to do, so all 5 of my machines have been running Win9x/2k (Not to mention, I don't like partitioning my drives).
Another positive is I just bought a new HD and I got a hard drive rack....now, who needs partitions ???
www.atacomm.com - The Leader in VoIP Product Distributi
I beleive it has to do with Corel targetting the home users not geeks.....
i.e. easy to install, better interface, etc
www.atacomm.com - The Leader in VoIP Product Distributi
Wrong. Everything under GPL is able to be redistributed. About 25% of Corel Linux from what I have heard was written in house and is NOT GPLed. What does this mean? Try distributing an operating system where a quarter of it is missing.....it just doesn't work like that.
www.atacomm.com - The Leader in VoIP Product Distributi
As for testing the GPL? Why? Why do we need to test it? I for one think it won't suceed in court because it forms a pseudo-trust, in which all entities work together against its' competitor (Closed source.) But that's my personal opinion.
Corel's on the ropes as is. Let's not ruin them.. their stock already took a beating for what we did a couple weeks ago (And what their CEO did.. that will affect their stock when it starts actively trading again.)
Magnwa
Because if it gets tested, it will scare a LOT of potential supporters who are on the edge away. If it gets tested and fails, then Linux will spiral down and BSD will skyrocket. Why? Cause businesses will see the legal trouble, the same way they did with the BSD/AT&T stuff, and they'll jump ship as fast as they did with BSD. Once Linux gets more market penetration, maybe then it'd be a good time for a test. But in the middle of Microsoft's antitrust suit (They are the ones more than likely to try to subvert GPL), in an upswinging economy, with over valued Linux stock making everyone who jumps on it rich? Nuh-uh. That's not the business way. Once the Linux stocks begin to collapse, and the major computer companies buy out the floundering Linux companies.. then it'd be time to have the GPL tested.
Magnwa
Yes indeed - so how come we have lots of different ways of slagging them off all marked up as "insightful" and various other things, and yet we're no good at praise where it's due?
Sure it was the wrong thing to start with, but at least Corel listened to the community, or something, and have now rectified it. This is not bad - it's not necessarily as good as it could be, but it *does* show "something stirs", or whatever.
It's a misfeature of slashdot, IMO, that there is neither room for duplication of feeling nor for going that far off-topic.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
If you want the gpl'd part, go download Debian. For the rest you'll have to wait.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Last post (it's a new trend).
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
To your other point: BSD, of course, is not dead. BSD is just now picking up some very major momentum, as you've said. But they'd be a lot farther along now if they hadn't been put through so much legal crap with AT&T.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
You mistake me - Bruce had just about 100% support from /. (and me). I think what he did was very appropriate and he has my grattitude. I was simply saying that he did most of the work.
Are you trying to say that a fire department shouldn't be tested? If you can think of a way to test one without using fire, I'd be glad to hear it.
You are right, of course - I don't know that it wasn't intentional. I also don't know that it was. To be fair to Corel, I make the assumption that it wasn't and give them the benefit of the doubt.
You go on to say that when a company tries to test limits we push them back onto the "straight and narrow" - If a company isn't willing to cooperate then the only way to do that is through legal action. I am not suggesting that the OSS should've taken legal action against Corel. What I am saying is that we might have been better off if legal action had been necessary. Corel did the right thing - good for them. The GPL still hasn't been tested in court and that's something that needs to be done. Yes, I'm willing to set fire to my house - if only to keep the town from burning down.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
So if Linux doesn't get accepted by businesses? Fine, they can jump through hoops for all I care. Let them go back to NT or Solaris, but I'll stick with an OpenSource OS regardless. And I'll be damned if the code that I write, and the code that others write, will be taken advantage of down the road because the GPL was never put to task.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
problem with that is - when it comes to crunch time and the GPL doesnt hold out - youre in deep shit. witness the AT&T BSD thing that basically killed BSD by killing its license.
I installed redhat 6.1 and it was massively easy. Though the kde workstation install was screwed, I tried again and chose gnome-only and it was splendid. Give it a try. Just remember to type 'startx'
Juln
If you can prove all the pieces to be incorrect, then the whole must be incorrect... yes?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Point-by-point rebuttals work better and are easier to understand than any of the more difficult to wright alternitives.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Female Prison Rape in NY
But what if they sit with 2 monitors and re-type the GPL code from one monitor to the other? Is that still GPLed code?
Yes, it is - the question here is, how much of a block of code can be reasonably considered to be "common discovery", "common progenitor" or simply "read it once, and forgot where you got it". If it is a technique you read, and later on think "Ah, I *know* how to do this" are you a monster for forgetting where you learnt it? Block copying (by whatever method) of other people's code is theft.
And exactly HOW will the GPL help you if you never see the closed source product sourcecode?
It won't - but then, that wasn't the question asked. The question I replied to stated it as "if someone steals their source".
>This means they are wrong, but does not prove they are the Bad Guys.
If they are wrong, arn't they 'bad guys'?
Nope - you are wrong occasionally, and that doesn't make you a bad guy. People make mistakes, misunderstand instructions (particularly those in foreign languages) or make assumptions without reading the manual, based on what other people have told them. To be wrong isn't bad - to LEAVE things wrong after they have been gently pointed out to you is.
What I see it boiling down to is this: The GPL falls under the same concept of 'locks keep honest people honest'. If you are going to STEAL source, consider it gone. Because, to date, nothing is being done to 'stop' the 'thiefs'. (because there is nothing that anyone is willing TO do.)
And if people can take GPL code and do what they want with it, what good is the GPL?
The GPL is enforcable (I hate to think how much money it would take in the US courts though) but that isn't the point. The point is, taking ANYONE else's source code is a crime - even the GPLed source, so a firm must balance the risk of doing so with the financial and possibly criminal penalties if someone with a little integrity or an axe to grind in their company, at ANY time in the future, decides to leak the information to the world - Quite possibly the entire profit of the product would be forfeit to the Licence holder, and I can't see the GPL being an exception to this.
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-=DaveHowe=-
Not really (and this is a point-by-point rebuttal <Grin>). One of the things most complained about in responses from companies with Marketing Divisions is that they DON'T ANSWER THE QUESTIONS. They make up their own questions, biased towards the things their product or service is good at, and blandly ignore the ones that make them look bad. The only way to correctly answer a set of statements is to go down each and say "yes, this is correct" or "no, this is wrong, for these reasons". the "for these reasons" bit is important, though
Having said that: < Schnipp > You go on to say that when a company tries to test limits we push them back onto the "straight and narrow" - If a company isn't willing to cooperate then the only way to do that is through legal action. I am not suggesting that the OSS should've taken legal action against Corel. What I am saying is that we might have been better off if legal action had been necessary. Corel did the right thing - good for them. The GPL still hasn't been tested in court and that's something that needs to be done. Yes, I'm willing to set fire to my house - if only to keep the town from burning down.
I half-agree - It does no-one any good if we jump into legal action when a newcomer to the OS arena makes a newbie-style mistake - This will get the Lawyers rich, and just maybe a few legal precedents set (and if the case is borderline, maybe even the wrong ones). The correct response is to start with a switch, and work your way up to the heavy grenades - Start with a polite letter, then a polite letter in legalese, then... well, you get the idea. at least then, if it does make it all the way to court, you can show intent to break the GPL, not just a technical breach. I think it would be a really bad idea to come down hard on firms that are making mistakes, in order to try and prove your weapon works - particularly with one as expensive and inefficient as the courts - this is "send a message" philosophy, not correct treatment of the case in hand.
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-=DaveHowe=-
It depends on the licence (LGPL, for example, is a lot more lenient on closed-source packages, as are things like OS compilers - would you use GCC to compile your code if it automatically became Open Source by doing so? Making or not making a project Open Source should be a decision available to the company - along with encouragement to make the right choice, of course
Are they a bad guy? Are they a bad guy if someone steals their source and shows GPL code?
It depends on the code - if you look in the source , and here are a few lines that remind you of lines that do a similar job in a GPLed product you have seen - then the programmer may well have seen how the process was done in that product, or even both projects may have drawn on a common methodology (I can remember when four students were pulled up for "cheating" by a lecturer, because two subroutines were identical in each submisson. Turns out they were supplied as standard "example" routines with the compiler the students used, and as it was just a GUI routine (rather than fundimental to the problem) the students had just cut-and-pasted it from the helpfiles...) Obviously, if you find entire subroutines copied from the GPLed product and just pasted in, they should be hung from the yardarm.
That chinese Linux release that was claimed to not follow the GPL, are they a bad guy? :+)
It still hasn't been shown they are intentionally violating the GPL - iirc, this is their first distro and it is almost entirely unmodified OS software, but with Kernel Patches for chinese localisation. Yes, they should have supplied and / or placed on their website the source (or diff files) of the modifications; Certainly, they should be sending out to each user a letter telling them how to obtain the source for themselves. This means they are wrong, but does not prove they are the Bad Guys. If they continue to be wrong because being wrong is profitable for them, then they should be joining the previous offender on the yardarm
Or, are they un-touchable because of international copywite issues? :+)
No idea - but here in the UK, you can claim back all the profits from the violating products - a fairly effective remedy
Or, is the only bad guy Microsoft?
No, just the usual target - Mostly because as it IS so big, it's lawyers should be better able to check that a given event (like the Stak Technologies thing) is well beyond the pale before it ever makes it to the door. Of course, those PERFORMING those acts may well not bother asking the lawyers first....
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-=DaveHowe=-
Why is their distro going to be any better than the others out there?
Anyways, if it is that much better, it will encourage the others to grow more, even if they have to borrow the code.
EC
EverCode
It would be analogus to quoting another usenet post...
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Or, dare I say, a slashdot article? Trust no one. Learn for yourself.
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>Obviously, if you find entire subroutines copied from the GPLed product and just pasted in,
But what if they sit with 2 monitors and re-type the GPL code from one monitor to the other? Is that still GPLed code?
And exactly HOW will the GPL help you if you never see the closed source product sourcecode?
>This means they are wrong, but does not prove they are the Bad Guys.
If they are wrong, arn't they 'bad guys'?
What I see it boiling down to is this: The GPL falls under the same concept of 'locks keep honest people honest'. If you are going to STEAL source, consider it gone. Because, to date, nothing is being done to 'stop' the 'thiefs'. (because there is nothing that anyone is willing TO do.)
And if people can take GPL code and do what they want with it, what good is the GPL?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
You are clearly confused. Compliance with the law is not a Good Thing, just general good sense. Violation of the GPL is a violation of copyright law against somebody else's copyrighted code (just because code is GPLed doesn't mean it's not copyrighted still). Patting somebody on the back for not breaking the law is not something that intelligent adults should need. The reward of not getting their asses hauled in front of a judge should be sufficient. Sorry, but ultimately that's the only sort of GPL (one with teeth) that's gonna work to keep software truly Free.
(Emphasis added)
Those who are the quickest to flame for speling andt gramatik erors...
- -- --- Rene --- -- -
finally they learn it. well, everybody makes mistakes... can happen.
yeah.. nice
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
First, perhaps next time before flaming a company everybody could wait a couple of days to see how they respond to complaints, and consider their intentions.
Second, everyone keeps commenting that we need a big court battle to uphold the GPL, and every time some big company messes up everybody goes "This is it!" No matter how sure they are that they can win no big company is going to go about it like that. If I were say MS, and I wanted to get the GPL ruled worthless I would take some little tiny subsidiary I don't care about, and have them try to redistribute "Tom's Tetris" or something of the sort. The GPL specifically states that if you violate it you lose all rights to the software whatsoever, including useing it. No large company is going to risk losing the right to use Linux ever, just in case it gets big.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
Here on Slashdot, in one of the discussions of CodeWarrior, someone made a claim that they used GPL code in their closed-source product.
Are they a bad guy? Are they a bad guy if someone steals their source and shows GPL code?
That chinese Linux release that was claimed to not follow the GPL, are they a bad guy? Or, are they un-touchable because of international copywite issues?
Or, is the only bad guy Microsoft?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
...but wasn't it ESR that gave the initial notice that Apple's Public Software License was "open source"?
It's nice that Bruce Perens thinks Corel's being GPL compliant, but how about a second opinion?
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
Most likely YES. Technocrat.net is edited by Bruce Perens. Perens was the author of the Open Source Definition amongst other things. He was in contact with Corel about the GPL violations in their beta test agreement earlier. Makes sense that he'd know doesn't it? Steve
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Is it really a victory?
Yes it is.
I'm as glad as anyone that Corel saw the error in their ways and fixed it when we (read: Bruce) asked them nicely.
Hmm, putting it that way makes it sound like Bruce didn't necessarily have the support of the communittee. That is just plain wrong IMHO - to convince yourself of that, look here and here - the original slashdot discussions.
But part of me thinks that a trial-by-fire would have been useful. We need the GPL to be tested.
You could also test the efficiency of the fire department by burning your house down.
We need legal precedents to establish a secure position.
Yes, but we don't need to get them by entrapping those that are supporting us.
Corel wasn't intentionally trying to steal rights,
You don't know that. My take on it is that it is natural enough for a corporation, as it is for an individual, to try and carve out a little extra turf for itself wherever it can. Children do it, Corel does it, even you and I do it. It's called testing. When testing happens, with children and friendly corporations, the correct response is a gentle push back to the straight and narrow.
but what if a larger company tried something like this (not mentioning any names: Sun, AOL, MS) - maybe it would've been easier to take Corel to task.
In other words, you're suggesting that we collectively beat up on the weakest guy out there. I for one wouldn't support that - that is the kind of tactic we despise when those big bad corporations use it on little tiny corporations and private individuals. Not something to be emulated. When the time comes for the fight, we will fight fairly. I sincerely hope.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
When the news first came out about Corel`s beta violating the GPL, everyone fell over themselves to lambast and denigrate it. Now they`ve done the necessary and amended the licence - and where are all the comments commending their actions? It seems that now that they`re doing the Right Thing, people aren`t interested any more. We ought to be pulling out all the stops to let Corel know that we appreciate what they`ve done. Can you say "positive enforcement"?
On that note, I wish to say, Well done Corel!
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Nowhere does the GPL state that a GPL product has to be freely distributed to every one. An entity can be entirely selective about who it distributes the product to, but retstrictions are not allowed to be place on further distribution.
Maybe one or more of the beta testers will upload the distribution somewhere. But they will more than likely have to first remove the non-GPL portions such as WordPerfect.
Corel is a huge company, they claim to be right behind Microsoft in size in the market sector they address, and they are the largest software company in Canada. For a company of that size to act on an issue like this in 4 days is excellent. That's how long it took from when they first became aware of the problem to when they made a policy-change announcement. I got the impression that they sincerely cared about what the Free Software community wanted.
I'm also pleased that they based their system on Debian. It's nice to see that Debian is finally being appreciated for the fine system it is, by Corel, by SGI/VA/O'Reilly, by Storm Linux, etc.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
4) I'm from the government and here to help.
3) I won't ____ in your mouth.
2) Micros~1 products are stable.
1) I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
I would feel more comfortable actually reading the GPL in this story.