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What about the Artistic License?
Swordfish asks: "Despite the avid discussion of the merits and vulnerabilities of the GNU lincense, almost no one discusses the Perl Artistic License
in slashdot. Why is there so little discussion of the Artistic License? It seems to me that the GNU License allows forking, but all forks must be free. The Artistic License seem to allow commercial, closed-source forks. But if preventing forks is important, GPL doesn't seem to stop it. So why not just use the Artistic License? Then the authors can some day make money out of a commercial fork if they need to pay the bills!"
It's also true that there is not much discussion of the BSD-style-licenses in here - I think that perhaps the /. crowd is a bit closed-minded about other licenses. Not everything worth using comes under a GNU license. The artistic license, as well as other licenses, have their uses. The GPL-style licenses are not applicable to all situations. Even the Sun Community Source license has its place.
Visit
The whole point of a movement be it communism, christianity, or that of jimmy's secret club is to have a world view which is compatable. Spies wear black suits and most people use the GNU/GPL.
More seriously I think that it will allow all changes to be free regardless of forking thus allowing all development to contribute to the whole. This is a model which supports project centric thinking versus developer centric or corporate centric thinking.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Using Gnu, or any other method or means to produce something, shouldn't make any difference as to whether someone can package it commercially. The time and creative effort to compose the package has to be worth something.
Giving away a product on the premise that you can sell support is fine, if it can fly. But I'd rather have cash in hand.
Mike Eckardt meckardt@spam.yahoo.com
Keeping the source freely available is more important than preventing forks.
Can you sum it up in a word? *No.* In a noise? *Whuuuurghhhhh!*
I think one reason may be that Larry Wall (and the Perl community in general) don't seem to focus on the license. The FSF has an ethical/political agenda that their license encourages, so they have to advertise it. It also happens that licensing ends up being on of the points in the BSD flame wars.
:)
If asked about the merits of Artistic License, Larry would probably just tell you that there's more than one way to do it
Dana
The GPL allows forking, but it also implicitly prevents it, because any forks must also be released under the GPL. If the new features in the forked version are better than the original, there's nothing preventing the author of the original version from stealing those changes an integrating them back into his version. Meanwhile, he's been doing development, so now he has his changes PLUS the other guy's changes, and he comes out on top.
To answer your other question about being able to create a commercial, closed source version of the authors need to pay the bills: the GPL allows this as well (as does any other license) The original author of the program retains the copyright to the code and can re-release it at any time under any license he wants. What the GPL prevents is OTHER people stealing GPL'ed code and selling it as a commercial, closed source program. (this doesn't, however, prevent other people from selling it as a commercial, Open Source product)
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
-Linus Torvalds
The Right to Fork (RtF) is important because it ensures that in the event that the code maintainers go crazy, decide they refuse to incorporate features that many users want, etc. that otthers can take the codebase and fork it.
For example this happened with GNU Emacs, which forked into Xemacs over design and philosophy disputes.
The end result of forking is usually good, in the way in which the GPL allows it. Because all the resultant code must be open and Free, the incentive is to maintain compatibility so as to get people to actually use your forked code. And The GPL is Compatibility-Wise Viral (or some such buzzword enabled thing).
I guess my point is that forking isn't inherently bad, and the GPL doesn't intend to prevent it, just make sure it is done by a set of rules that encourage Freedom and compatibility.
IANAL, but the GPL and LGPL seem to me quite adequate for non-commercial work, and I don't see why you'd want to release source at all for a commercial work (it just encourages competition). And if you don't object to your open source code being used in commercial products, why bother copyrighting it at all? The public domain is a viable alternative if you don't care what anyone does with the code.
As I read it, someone can take my program and modify it and choose how he wishes to release his modifications. He can make them available under the same license. He can make them available only in binary form.
What he cannot do (under the license) is to distribute his 'non-standard version' (my program WITH his changes) in binary only form without also including my 'standard version' and the copyrights and disclaimers. It's like a mixture of the BSD (you can do anything you want with it, even make it commercial and secret) and GPL (you can do anything you want with it as long as you allow anyone else the same right with regard to your own modifications). It seems to allow commercial usage while still crediting me for my own work.
There are places where it's more appropriate than others, of course, especially for Perl middleware, where someone is likely to grab a bunch of components and modify them slightly to fit a particular task.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
As a Linux user, I'm always glad I can look at the source code. So, when discussing something like a license, I think it would be a good idea to read the actual license. The http://www.opensource.org has the text of all the licenses we are discussing here, specifically at this page.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
...so as I was daydreaming at my desk one day in the large, evil, multi-megacorp I work for, I was considering ways that Microsoft, or some other "interested party", might pervert Linux to its own ends. A comment I had heard some little time previously came to mind, likening Windows to a "booster stage" of a rocket that could now safely be discarded that Microsoft had acchieved dominance in applications programming.
I thought to myself, how could Microsoft parasitize the Linux hype in the popular media, and at the same time destroy the organized movement against it? The answer struck me: port IE to Linux, close the source, throw on a few bells, and sell an MS distro. Consumers leery of a new OS would prefer the MS-sanctioned copy, and a port of IE would allow gradual porting of the MS Office APIs and apps.
The only pitfall is the "viral" property of the GPL, under which much (all?) of Linux's code is licensed. Microsoft naturally would not undetake a port of its cash cows, or even IE, if that entailed opening their source. Despite criticisms from men like Tom Christiansen, it seems evident to me that the viral GPL is serving to protect open source "while we sleep" in ways many of us never imagine.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
But if preventing forks is important, GPL doesn't seem to stop it. So why not just use the Artistic License? Then the authors can some day make money out of a commercial fork if they need to pay the bills!"
The author of GPL code is not subject to GPL requirements, so I'm confused where you're going with this. If an author--like Alladin of Ghostscript--wishes to sell non-GPL licensed copies of his software, there's nothing preventing him, except the degree of code that hasn't had ownership signed over to him.
Small patches can be presumed to have ownership signed(though it really should be explictly stated), and large ones will end up getting a shared-ownership scenario, one way or another. But the GPL just doesn't do anything to stop commercial forks if the author needs to pay the bills!
Honestly, people genuinely don't realize how much work has gone into closing loopholes with the GPL. No matter how esoteric each clause seems, there really are good reasons for them to be there. The problem lies in the fact that overly simple licenses--of which I'm not necessarily saying the Artistic License is one of--have just as much potential for being Gotcha Source as the most complex, overwrought, and landmined license that you can find.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I think your intro misses the point. The most pressing issue is that people start to use a license that allows code of other licenses to be used in the same program. Look at the Reisefs issue on linux-kernel. The author has every right to include further restrictions on his own code, as long as he does not affect other people's code. But he is not allowed to by the GPL to which he must obey to get his code into the Linux kernel. Ironically, his move was *towards* the GPL but the GPL doesn't allow it. I'm afraid I get used to events like this as long as noone gets the problem of the GPL. As your initial article shows: people care for code splits and whatnot while there are more pressing issues. Even the (old) LGPL is fine for those who want to protect their own code. it is nobodies business to protect other people's code.
I think that some people consider the Artistic License to be ambiguous and possibly not as watertight as the GPL or XFree86 licences. What is a bug fix, for example?
Also, rightly or wrongly, it suffers from being YAL and it's a good idea to choose the XFree86, LGPL or GPL licences instead, to let other free programs reuse your code. (Dual-licensing, as with perl, solves this problem.)
IMHO, all the fuss the AL makes about non-standard executables having non-standard names is unnecessary - it's unlikely there would be a conspiracy to replace your program with a different version without telling anyone. The requirement of the GPL to make it clear when code is modified, or Apache's requirement that you can't call your version 'Apache', seem like a better way to do things.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I think that people don't discuss the artistic license because it isn't ideologically motivated. The Artistic license strikes me as entirely pragmatic, allowing people to modify the work in question so long as they distinguish between their version and the standard version or make their modifications available. This discourages philosophical flamewars - not many people can argue with a pragmatic license, especially one which is so strongly concerned with rights of authorship and proper attribution.
The point of the GPL is not to discourage forks. So far as I know, and so far as I've read and reread, the point of the GPL is to encourage forks and code reuse. In other words, they have almost totally opposite goals. The Artistic license doesn't even touch on code reuse, which speaks volumes.
GPL authors can still make money ("to pay the bills") by rereleasing under an alternative, proprietary license. I'm not sure if that's possible under the Artistic license - for that matter, I don't think that that's necessary under the artistic license. Which one has the potential to be more profitable is up for argument, of course.
--
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Ok, I admit this is offtopic, however, this is the closest story I can think of that's come up recently....
.000000001 per record returned... something like that.
Recently there has been lot of discussion of databases, and who owns them. The US either is considering or passed a law saying a Database(and info contained there-in) is owned by the creating person/company. [I honestly can't remember.]
At anyrate, this got me thinking of a the (possible) need for DGPL. Basically the same as the LGPL, but adding that the database host (i.e. the owner of the server hosting the specific instance of the db) can put restrictions on access allowing them to offset the cost of hosting the machine (administration, i'net connection, etc.). Examples of acceptable restrictions would be 1) any program accessing this database must display the advert. provided, 2) a cost of
Is there a lic. that allows this kind of thing, or should I be working on one?
I'm aware this would be hard to enforce, but I think it has some potential...
[Yes, this directly related to something I'm currently working on....and no, I don't want to give out specifics, I will talk in generalities though...]
Myddrin
It seems like the right to fork, far from being a liability of the GPL, is a signifigant strength. Its a way to get a bunch of random people to work very hard to reconcile their visions of what a system should be like- nobody wants a code fork, so people try very hard to work together.
On the other hand, when visions are really irreconciliable, the option to fork can be a good thing- Lots of people like Xemacs, and lots of other people like emacs classic, and this code fork let those people do there thing where it was needed. And both emaxen are open source. Everybody still wins.
With the Artistic license things seem to become much more difficult. A lot more responsibility rests with the community- If MegaCorp markets 'MegaPerl', complete with non-standard name & clear documentation of differences, the perl community has to catch up, and quick. Especially when MegaCorp starts introducing Value Adding Incompatabilities® That nobody else gets to see... If one fork of emacs dies tomorrow nobody loses. If perl dies and MegaPerl continues everyone does.
The way to deal with this is aggressive development and promotion. Perl has this, thanks to an amazing community with great leadership. Ad as long as that keeps up, and new features keep getting added to the system, MegaPerl is doomed to failure. But they live in a much more dangerous place than their GPL'd bretheren.
Its the Ideology(tm)!
I'm a big fan of the GPL precisely because it doesn't allow proprietary forks. In fact, without the GPL I probably wouldn't be developing open source code at all.
If I write code and give it to the world, I'm doing it because I choose to, I think people might appreciate my work and maybe I'm feeling a little bit altruistic.
But I wouldn't do this if it were possible for somebody to take my work, make it into proprietary software and make a profit off my labour. I like the GPL because this is precisely the abuse it is designed to prevent. It's important to know that your code won't get ripped off.
As for open source forks, I actually think these are a good thing. Good ideas will flourish, unsucessful forks won't last long. This is the key to evolution, and as long as forks are guaranteed to stay free, I'm quite happy to see them happen.
The GPL was designed as a defense against commercial software, it seems. Its one of these 'property is theft' things - anyone care to explain what that means?
The GPL basically turns the traditional license on its head - it protects the users instead of the producers. So long as they don't break the license, there is nothing to stop anyone that gets hold of something GPLd from doing something the author doesn't like. Because it provides some safety for users, it is attractive to developers who want to gain users.
Personally I like the idea behind the BSD license - that it promotes the use of quality code by allowing anyone to borrow bits for use in anything, regardless of the next license, so long as it is acreditted. I think the GPL's political nature will ultimately prevent its apparent greatest ambition - to move to a world where everything is GPLed. It works fine for hobby projects, labour of love stuff, like Linux. But at the same time it excludes the larger part of the software producing world - industry - from benefitting unless they are prepared to change their whole business model to the one advocated by RMS and his wandering carrier bags. But it is doing us a great service by bring the whole open source thing back into relatively common use, like it was when Unix was young.
Thanks for asking the question. I will make the effort to look at the Artistic license and see if I can learn from it. It sounds like a fair solution.
Well, the GPL doesn't stop you from making money on your work, you just have to supply the source code of the original and what you've changed. This is in my opinion the Right Thing(TM). If you are using someone elses code, and they're open-source believers, it's not more than right, that any derative of their work also should be open-source. And if it's not the case of using some previous code, you can always set your license yourself, so then it's no problem.
Nothing in the GPL prohibits authors from releasing commercial versions of their own software -- or closed-source versions either.
In fact, you can't write a license that limits your rights as the author; the GPL is based on copyright law, which says that authors can do anything, but other users have to do what the author says (thus the "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the software" note in the GPL).
So you're free to release your software under as many different licenses as you want, closed and/or open. IIRC, perl itself is a good example of this -- it's available under both the GPL and the Artistic License, so people who want to incorporate it into GPLed projects can do so, while people who need more flexibility have that option as well.
Some of the confusion may arise because if you want your program to become part of the GNU project (as distinct from part of the larger category of "software distrubuted under the GNU GPL") you have to assign your copyright to the Free Software Foundation (give the software to them, in other words). By doing that you relinquish your rights as author and can no longer release closed-source versions.
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
--
Xenu loves you!
GPL allows forks, indeed ENCOURAGES forks, in many ways, but with all forks free and open (UNLESS the code is significantly re-written, and the amount of GPLed code used is small). This works in the same way as evolution. If something has an advantage, it'll thrive. If it doesn't, it'll die. This leads to the digital equivalent of bio-diversity (electro-diversity?), with a large proliferation of specialised tools, all performing similar, but usefully different, functions.
The BSD licence makes some fundamental assumptions IMHO - that well-designed and well-maintained programs fork rarely and that evolutionary forces are not as significant in programming as market forces (although both exist). This leads to having a relatively small number of variants, all performing a wide range of functions and all very similar (if not identical).
Each of these has a place. The GPL is -not- useful for producing "office" applications, IMHO, because the needs are too structured. There's no room for evolution to take place. Also, each application has to do too many things, and there's little room for diversity. The BSD licence is -ideal- for this kind of application, for the very same reasons.
On the other hand, something like speech synthesis or speech recognition, search engines, toolkits, etc, would be horrible to try under a BSD licence. The drive to fragment, and the fact that any of those fragments can close & become commercial, would rip the project apart, before long. The GPL, though, is perfect for this, encouraging and promoting the very things that would destroy the work, under a BSD licence.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
forking is good. It's good because if a project is forked, like the gnu compiler was, the result is competition between the 2 or more sides.
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/dev/zero .sig
When you have the competition, 2 things can happen, either the fork from the original makes some additional value/better product, or it cant keep up with the original project, and thus will not get used and thus die off.
I really like that the GPL license doesnt prevent forking. If the leader of the old project are stuck in a unrealistic view of the project and it's devellopment, then a fork might make the project survive, where the old project would have died because it didnt renew itself and made no progress.
Also, if the majority of the users wants a feature, that be a better way, quicker, smaller, more pretty... then a fork can do that for the users. Hopefully the original project can realise it's mistake and incorperate the new features.
From the gcc vs egcs fork, i think we have learned that a fork is a good thing, but this doesnt mean that we should fork every time there is a disagreement in the project devellopment. Sometimes there is a technical reason for not incorperating a feature. If this is the case, then i'm sure the fork from the original project will fail, and prove the technical decision correct.
I'm sure there has and will be lots of successfull forks that will either differentiate themselves ammoung different paths, so different, that they can be said to be 2 project after a while, and not just a fork and the original. Amoung these could be a situation, where someone made a KDE/gnome interface to some program running under X, which the original creator didnt want to make because he, or she doesnt use KDE/gnome/
ion++
ps: perhaps i should see and make that account at
ln -s
GPL doesn't prevent forks, in fact, the right to fork a project is something the GPL was designed to protect.
However, since all forks must be GPL'ed as well, it will always be legal to remerge the forks. This is a big difference compared to licenses that allows proprietary forks, for example the BSDL. The many proprietary BSD derived operating systems can not be remerged without permission of all the copyright holders.
Earlier today I was reading this article on IBM's developer site about Larry Wall and idly wondering if we should try to persuade Sun to adopt the Artistic License. What would be the advantages / disadvantages of this?
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
Does the Artistic License, or any other license, allow for commercial forks that must be free for personal/educational use, but puts a cap on the price of the commercial product? If a piece of software is tooling along and suddenly several vendors decide to grab it for commercial forks, all but one go belly up, and the last one turns out to be really really good, I'd hate for them to gouge the rest of the world by charing $1K+ fees for the software. How to set the cap would be the question.
Another license restriction that would be interesting for commercial forks is for each major release, the vendor must relase one major feature back into the open-source foundation, to make sure it doesn't lag too far behind.
It really comes down to the original programmer, what does he intend to get out of this code. As you've pointed out, the original programmer can always re-release their code under a different license - so the difference between GPL and Artistic is fairly moot...
The key is what the programmer wants the code to become in the long run. I've got nothing against BSD, but if I write a piece of code, the GPL offers the advantage that I know it will always be free in the future, no matter who or how it is modified. The artistic license doesn't offer this.
Frankly, I don't see the code forking as being an issue....
And I thought I was the only Black47 fan...
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
Who on Earth do you define as "most people"?
I use as little GPL code as possible and certainly do not write it. I use the BSD License which is a lot more "free" than the GPL.
Just my two cents.
-sirket
- This source code is free.
Of course, this leaves the restrictions and legal remedies somewhat unclear, but I think the license's brevity and artistic merit (cough) make up for that.One flower becomes many.
Make your code free too.
Who on Earth do you define as "most people"?
I use as little GPL code as possible and certainly do not write it. I use the BSD License which is a lot more "free" than the GPL.
I don't mean everyone just a majority. People use the GPL because it protects the project and not just the interests of the developer developing it. If the developer dies, has problems, or is brainwashed he just can't take the project and run.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I'm still amazed that open source software is considered separate from commercial software. Does Red Hat not make huge gobs of money from open source software? Is there anything in the GPL that prohibits commercializing a GPL'ed project?
Repeat it with me: One does not have to be closed to be commercially viable. That's just more FUD to be discarded.
Read the full text my book Perl for the Web
Interesting idea, however they can't "infect" us merely by porting IE to Linux. Conversely, we can't "infect" them unless they are foolish.
...
If MS did release "MS Linux - All Singing, All Dancing and Whiter Whites" then I think they would come under a great deal of scrutiny which would (hopefully) prevent them from subverting the GPL.
Assuming they can't subvert the GPL, then if they wish to keep their code secret the only way they go is port their own set of libraries (and only link to LGPL libraries) and maybe produce a binary-only kernel module(*) or two. I imagine their stuff would only work on their own distribution if at all possible, though even that might prove difficult as a lot of people would try and reverse engineer it if they tried
* - this could/would become an issue the next time the kernel team changed the interface and everyone's MS Office installs stopped working!
RMS is not out to stop companies making a buck on their software. Their licence is not there to stop people forking their software, then selling it. The GPL is not defined as it is because they want to stop these things.
The GPL is about freedom. The whole point of it is that, once a piece of software is GPLd, that source will forever be available. We want our software to be freely available to all. If you use the GPL, you are stating that you will not allow someone to close off your source and distribute their derivation.
If all we cared about was whether commercial forks were possible or not, why not just stick "you may not sell this software for a profit" lines in your source? It's about more than that: GNU wants software to be free. Remember the concept of copyleft?
How many times is this debate going to come up on Slashdot? A summary of the two main licences:
1) GPL - use this licence if you want your software to remain Free as long as you decide to keep it that way. You do not have to license subsequent versions with the GPL; you may relicense at any time. However, no-one else may relicense your software, or distribute binaries without source.
This means that, in simple terms, your source code and any derivations will be available to anyone who has access to the binary.
2) BSD - use this licence if you want to get a protocol, standard or ethos popular. For example, if you want people to use your software as widely as possible, and the source is not as important as the idea behind it, this may be applicable to you.
If this is wrong, please correct me.
just a thought ..
Start with a broom handle and the work up. I think larry is a little out of your league.
Not that I am an rabid supporter of the GNU license, but it seems that the questions, especially as worded, is flame bate on this forum.
If you want to eat, you have to write some software that is so hard to use, that it requires significant documentation. Then you can sell that documentation. You first have to develop some evangelical devotee's to install the software en mass, so that people will need to buy the documentation.
Or you could just make it hard enough to use that people need to call you for help. Then instead of writing software for a living, you can write once, sell support for ever.
But never mention selling software with closed source code here, it is almost a certain death sentence. How dare anyone make money for their efforts.
Because, lets face it, once you have free speech, you have free beer. No matter what license it is under, if I can download the source, and compile it, why pay for it.
You are a weirdo!
Why do you give special rights to the Regents of Berkeley? (who have since said that they don't want them)
Or do you mean "I use yet another incompatible variant of the BSD license that causes even more headaches, but might one day get me a line of 8pt text at the bottom of a half-page advert in an obscure magazine"?
If you use a non-obnoxious BSD variant, like the X license, why not say that -- the stupid BSD license should have died long ago.
What do you write anyway? And what makes you think anyone will need to make a proprietary fork and then return some of the changes to you later?
What if we had a license that stated that someone could build a commercial fork off of an open source product, only if they sent their code changes to the original author of the product. The original author could then choose to add what he liked to his own product or not, credit would be given to the proprietary company for the code changes and life would go on.
I don't know if this would actually fix things, but in the eyes of marketing ( and thus the average consumer) it might.
Non gratis rodentus anus
The AL certainly doesn't purport to stop you from adding your own extensions. And if you do that, it certainly doesn't tell you under what conditions you can or cannot distribute or charge for this work, nor does it say anything about whether you must provide source for your own work. (Actually, it says that it doesn't say that. :-) That would be wicked because it would mean trying to exert control over some other software besides the original; that is, stuff that whoever issued the licence didn't themself write. I don't even know whether it's legal, but it's certainly not programmer-friendly.
As I dimly understand these matters, Larry just doesn't want you to write something and then pretend that it was Larry who really wrote it. I don't blame him, and I'd be surprised if anybody did. I doubt you'd want somebody other than a legitimate owner of that name putting "written by [your name here]" all over their own software.
fraud, not about restricting anybody's freedom. I hardly see these two matters as alternate faces of the same issue, but perhaps some people do.
If you intend to make your software as useful as it can be to as many people as you can, then you should make it free software. Which is a terrible word, because of word games from the FSF. I mean free as in "gift". As in "free of restrictions" or as in "no strings attached". There are plenty of licences out there that do this. Short licences are better than long ones. The best license is "do as thou wilt".
Here's one that's been floating around:
And here's another:As you see, a free licence is simple, to the point, and generous. It is not an insidious imposition of your person moral choices upon others. If you decide their choices for them a priori, they can make no moral decision. There is no goodness in being automata. You must let people choose for themselves.
Some people prefer to install poison-pills in their licences. Usually, this poison pill is about using the software to make money with. Sleepycat Software has that, the GPL has that, and so do lots of others. I suppose some selfish people have good reasons for this, but let's not be pretending that software with a poison-pill in it is somehow "free", or that it does the most good. It doesn't. A selfish poison pill tries to make sure that the original authors' socio-economic-political dogma gets spread through the world at the cost of helping fewer people. "Use" licences like this hamper code reuse and hurt programmers. A gift, on the other hand, comes without a price tag on it.
Every author has to make up their own mind here. I personally prefer software freely given away--without restrictions, without legislated morality, without poison pills, without any agenda beyond trying to help to make the world a better place. The AL seems to do a good job at that.
Try, please, to remember what the greatest gift of all is. If you know what it is and why, then you'll understand. If you do not, then I'm not sure I can convince you. But the answer is charity.
Using the standard GPL/LGPL saves reinvention of the wheel. All these companies that feel a pressing need to invent their own license are in fact often restricting the utility of their code as it prevents integration into a GPL'd whole.
E.g. you would find it difficult to put an MPL'd html widget inside a GPL'd application without a license conflict.
The (L)GPL and BSD licenses are standard, so use them.
-- Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
My understanding of the XEmacs situation is that this WAS originally a closed-source commercial fork of Richard Stallman's emacs, and that this fork was the event that caused Stallman to invent the GPL to protect his work in the future!
Xemacs is now Open Source: for more history see www.xemacs.org. But, personally, I'm not interested in using it. I have been a GNUemacs user since 1986, and I think the GPL is crucial to keeping Open Souce software open.
For some projects that I have written, I used a modified Artistic License, a "General Artistic License".
Parts of the Perl Artistic License seemed to me to be specific to Perl, so I removed them.
If you have time, look at it, and tell me if its ok.
http://www.dma.org/~dma hurin/files/software/wkn/doc/LICENSE
Of course, there are ways around that, effectively converting the GPL into the LGPL as applied to libraries. Better not to use the viral version in the first place, though.
OK, the big Free Software licenses are: GPL, LGPL, Old BSD, New BSD, Artistic and X Consortium. All of them allow the author to release the software under a proprietary license. The author can do anything they want with the software. All of them assert copyright and require that copyright be included when redistributing the software. The differences boil down to: additional restrictions, advertising and linking to software under other licenses.
-> The New BSD license and X Consortium license allow additional restrictions, and linking to anything. I see no functional difference between the two.
-> The Old BSD license is the New BSD license plus the advertising clause. It (and the many unique BSDesque licenses derived from it) are the only ones which requires notice during advertising, so I won't bother mentioning each one that has no advertising clause.
-> The Artistic license prevents additional restrictions (i.e. relicensing by others), but allows linking to anything
-> The LGPL prevents additional restrictions. It allows non-(L)GPL apps to link to it, but it's unclear whether or not it can link to non-LPL libraries.
-> The GPL prevents additional restrictions. It also prevents linking to software under any license that doesn't meet very strict requirements, which the GPL, LGPL and X Consortium license definately meet, the New BSD license probably meets, but few others do.
Thus the Artistic license does not allow switching to a proprietary license any more than the GPL does. What it does allow you to do is develop Free Software in a proprietary world. Free software developers on Windows should consider it, as many libraries and tools there are proprietary, and Artistic offers better protection than, say BSD. Also, Free Software developers developing for Qt and/or KDE should consider it, as it works very well with the QPL, with no arguments from GPL developers.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
haha
Ok, who gave moderation points to the monkeys again.
Well, certainly an interesting idea. However, Microsoft would have about as easy a time porting IE or Office to Linux as I would have trying to document Windows from the machine language.
There is just no way that Microsoft engineers (albeit they have some very smart people) can adjust to living outside the box of their Windows environment - or make the move from inside the box to outside. There is just too much cruft built up - even Microsoft can't dig down to the bottom of it anymore.
Microsoft has chained themselves to a big rock with a Windows view. Where I can learn to work in the Windows world they are in too deep to learn how to move their code to the Unix world. It just won't happen.
Thinking about that some more - maybe that's part of the reason why the Office port to the Mac was dropped. In addition to the political reasons, maybe they just got too tied to Windows to be able to port to the Mac anymore?
Hmmmm.....
In terms of why people don't use it, the reason is forks: a commercial company can take your work, and rerelease it as proprietary, without really even acknowledging you much. This has happened a bit with many programs under BSD/artistic-style licenses, so many people avoid them. The GPL allows you to rerelease proprietary versions, but no one else has the right, so people like it.
Now, its very interesting the one thing that made RMS's underwear tighten was clause #3.
But go look at the BSD licence here. As you will note at the bottom
* 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
* must display the following acknowledgement:
* This product includes software developed by the University of
* California, Berkeley and its contributors."
Effective immediately, licensees and distributors are no longer required to include the acknowledgement within advertising materials. Accordingly, the foregoing paragraph of those BSD Unix files containing it is hereby deleted in its entirety.
RMS gets his wish and *STILL* has his undies in a bunch...because its not GPL.
Instead of following in RMS's path, why not take learn some tolerance for the licencing views of others. The rising tide of OpenSource Code raises *ALL* boats. Your time would ALL be better spent if, instead of running about drilling holes in other boats, you worked on making the boat you happen to sail on BETTER.
Besides if you want to drill holes in boats, might I suggest you point out this licencing clause taken from 1197 part No X03-52207 (f) indemnify, hold harmless, and defend Microsoft and its suppliers from and against any claims of lawsuits, including attorney's fees, that arise or result from the use or distribution of your Application.
Yuppers. Point out that if you use Micro$oft products as the base for your products, and you get sued, even if it WAS Micro$oft's fault, you have to defend them in court. Doing that should work to re-direct your licence flaming tendancies in a more constructive manner.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
You are right, but not for the reasons you gave. Microsoft is bound legally by agreements from their transaction with SCO regarding Xenix. They cannot sell a Unix operating system and therefore have a vested interest in the success of Windows. They have had IE ported to Solaris for quite some time now. They have enough capital and enough good minds there to crank out a Unix/Linux/whatever port of any app very quickly, they choose not to as it would not be in their best interests.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
- To ensure that the FSF has standing to sue for GPL infringement against the GNU project, and
- The formality of the process helps ensure that the copyright status of the work is completely clear.
You can grandfather in previous grants to use the software that you have made, and the FSF will license the work right back to you for any future grants you might want to make. I have done this. It's easy. The FSF does not want to make contributors' lives any more difficult than necessary.
Mostly, the FSF just wants to be in a position to enforce the GPL and assigning copyright puts them in the best position to do that, at the expense of some legal paperwork rigamarole.
The Artistic License, to me, seems to be much more of a nice concept for a license as opposed to an actual legally binding and sealed up license. I read through it and it looks pretty good, but it seems as though it was written by a programmer as opposed to a lawyer, and with that being the case it doesn't seem even to have been reviewed in depth ever by a lawyer. Taken that way, it seems a more restrictive license than the GPL, being that the concept for the GPL (as I see it) is "You can use my code, but if you change it I want to see and be able to use your changes." That's not a legally acceptable way of stating that concept though, hence the rather long and tedious wording of it in the actual GPL. The artistic license just needs to make that jump from a concept (albeit a much better described concept than my simplification of the GPL) to a fully-reviewed, legally sealed license. That's my take on it
-Mike
The problem with the BSD and the Artistic for me is that I'm not interested in facilitating someone else's proprietary software without getting something back from them - I am only interested in sharing with people who give me the same rights that I give them. I can still make my own proprietary software with my own work, because I hold the copyright and can issue my work with any number of licenses. If I want to use someone else's work in proprietary software, I can buy a license from them, just as I can sell a license to other people who want to make proprietary use of my work. This is hardly anti-commercial. In fact, you could say that the GPL is neutral regarding proprietary work, because it allows you to buy and sell separate commercial licenses and do pretty much what you'd do with conventional software licensing if you wish.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Since most companies seem incapable of releasing a product as open source without building their own personalized license plate, I propose the following guideline:
3 or 4 licenses are chosen as "definitive". Seems to me these would be Artistic, BSD, GPL, MPL.
ABC Company chooses which of the 3|4 most closely aligns with their needs, and then writes a license which contains only the differences from the definitive license.
Then those of us trying to understand the new license and choose whether we want to work within it or not can focus straight in the new/changed areas.
Comments?
One of the great license myths is that the GPL prevents authors from making money and less restrictive licenses permit it. My experience is exactly the opposite. I wrote a GPL'd program which a big corporation wanted to use part of in a commercial product, which they did not want to GPL. They asked for a special license which I granted for a nice fee. If I had used the Artistic or BSD licenses, I would never have heard from them and never even known they used my code.
This is a big advantage of the GPL which is not often mentioned in these discussions.
So "Let's work on a GPL Napster/javac/VMWare/X/..." comes up a lot, but "let's make a GPL Perl" hardly makes any sense.
He missed the point entirely.
These are not "loopholes". They are permission to make your own ethical decisions.
Larry Wall has a strong belief that people must be allowed to make their own ethical choices. He will give away his code, because this makes him happy. He does not expect you to feel obligated to him by this. If you are obligated to anyone, you are obligated, in his words, to the Author of his story.
Don't like it? Don't use perl.
I think Perens has made a totall ass of himself. "use of Artistic waning"? Perl is still out there, and doing quite well. And, personally, I think Artistic is the best of the licenses.
:)
Don't let the fact that you don't want to allow people certain choices blind you to the fact that allowing them those choices isn't a "loophole".
GPL is a demand letter with a court date; Artistic is a polite request.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I agree, and there is a lot of confusion among Slashdot readers because of the dual meaning of "Linux" as kernel and operating system. As far as the desktop is concerned, the OS and distribution as a whole are much more important than the kernel, and the GNU GPL does little to protect them from commercial attempts at subversion. A majority of the code on most Linux boxes is not covered by GPL, and the GPL limits its own application to code that is ``linked'' with GPL-covered code. Apparently linking means not involving a context switch or system call.
This is one of my pet peeves about the GPL: that the definition of modifications is too strict. If I write a set of programs and scripts that form a system when used together (for example, RCS), I'd like to be able to use the GPL to ensure that no company can enhance the system by adding more programs to my collection, and then release the enhancements as proprietary.
Developers of official GNU packages are not required to do any such thing. Please do not spread misinformation like this. I am developing an audio application for GNU, and although they encourage assigning them the copyright, they do not require it.
Here are some relevant quotes from the GNU maintainers' info documents:
(those are from the copyright sections of the maintainer's document at gnu.org)
From the GNU Coding Standards, in the Accepting Contributions section:
The little project I'm doing is at www.gnu.org/software/octal/ -dto@qwsi.net>The whole point of a movement be it ... christianity, ... is to have a world view which is compatible.
Uhhh... under how many moreorless incompatible licenses is Xianity distributed lately? I know if you plunk this UBC in an RC or CoE cathedral he gets lost and itchy...
Its seems that not too many people remember the Bad Old Days when the only two options available to a developer were to claim full ownership via copyright or release his software public domain. Public domain had the serious problem that, if the program was any good at all, nearly everyone that made an enhancement would re-release the whole package as privately-owned software. This goes against the spirit of giving back to the community what you took from it, which was the intent of what many authors had wanted when they released their software public domain. Now, with the GPL, that desirable attribute can be accomplished. Calling this effect virii I feel is a complete misdirection of the intent and the accomplishment of the GPL.
There is already a Unix version of IE, it's for Solaris. Microsoft could always hire more Microserfs that know Unix/Linux to do the porting if they were really serious.
Shinma
Section 5 prevents other people from charging a fee for your work, not you from charging a fee for your work. The idea is to prevent someone just packaging it up and selling it without modifications.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Personally, I'd doubt that Microsoft would ever take this course of action. In so doing, they would have to admit to themselves that everything they've done for the past 2/5/10 years was _wrong_, and the Linux model is the _right_ way to do it.
I for one think that MS is far too caught up in its own arrogance to ever consider that point of view. Maybe a big, stinging slap in the face from the Justice Department would have some effect on that pride, but I doubt that anything else would have an effect. Even seeing their marketshare begin to erode.
"UNIX" is never having to say you're sorry.
Nothing, assuming you're willing to provide the source code. If you won't or can't, then you ask the author(s) of the GPL program for their permission (i.e. license) to do what you want to do. The GPL doesn't prevent you from using GPL'ed software in closed source products, it just prevents you from doing so without the author's permission! This seems fair to me. If you're going to profit from his/her code, the author ought to have a right to as well. Negotiate with him/her for rights to do what you want with his/her/their software.
You're screwed, and must reinvent.
Only if you can't come to agreeable terms with the author(s)...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Suppose programmer A writes a program. The program is still in alpha, but when it becomes complete, programmer A plans to market it.
Since programmer A has other things to do, and the program is already somewhat useful, he releases the program under the GPL, so that others may benefit from his brilliance.
Programmer B finds a bug in the program and fixes it, following the GPL and releasing his bugfix to the code under the GPL.
Now, if programmer A wants to release the final version, he either has to 1) find another bugfix to correct the problem, or 2) convince programmer B to release that bugfix to programmer A under other terms than the GPL.
Programmers C, D, E, and F all find additional bugs and submit fixes, all under the GPL. At this time, programmer A would either have to find alternative solutions or else convince programmers B-F to release their changes to him under terms other than the GPL.
As those who understand statistics and human behavior, the chances that programmer A can either convince all of the other programmers to release those changes to him or have enough time to rewrite his code so that it neither contains the bug nor includes GPL fixes--approaches zero.
GPL has effectively "poisoned" the development of the product. Programmer A dumps the project in disgust and resolves never to use the GPL again. Programmer A has just lost his time, efforts, and an idea for a project which is now polluted by the GPL.
Some enterprising programmer *might* pick up that code and reuse it or fix it. But it is unlikely that the code will reach anywhere near what it could have been, had programmer A not dropped the project.
The bottom line is: if you use the GPL, you're stuck with it. It locks you into that licensing scheme, and unless you have the time, energy, and will to completely rewrite a piece of software released under the GPL, you will lose control of your idea and your software, even if that was not your original intent.
-CD76
Consider what happens when you want to sell a program that uses both GNU DBM and an Oracle library. You're screwed, and must reinvent.
Here comes Tom selling more snakeoil. The GPL ensures that innovation is never usurped by greedy people or corporations. The GPL puts everyone on a level playing field by mandating that free software remains free. The real problem in your pathetic example is the Oracle library.
You need to get a life Tom. You are tired.
Good luck getting permission from Oracle. Do you really not understand the problem?
You write: If the new features in the forked version are better than the original, there's nothing preventing the author of the original version from stealing those changes an integrating them back into his version.
You're over-simplifying things. For trivial changes, yes you're right, but for non-trivial ones it's as likely as not to be impossible to integrate the changes back into the original tree. For example, some idiot could reformat the entire package to his preferred style when he grabs it to make changes and then publish "his own improved" version. And even if such pathological modification hasn't happened, why is the onus of back-integration on the original author? His time is better spent on continued development rather than on tracking code forks.
The GPL is generally good, in my estimation, except in the single area of code forking guidelines: namely, it doesn't provide any. At the very least, it should state somewhere that public forking is discouraged when the software is still in active consensual development by the primary author or group.
Currently it's only because of the goodwill and commonsense of the community that we don't have a forking nightmare on our hands. The GPL ought to enshrine that commonsense in its preamble.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You can't steal something that's free.
That's an interesting statement; who could possibly restrict my freedom in writing my own code? I do not see how the GPL would restrict me in using code I wrote from scratch sitting here at home. I wrote it, I can do as I please.
In other words, I'm not sure how ANY license can restrict what you do with your own work; you choose which license or whether you even use one.
But I don't think you came on to /. to deliver obvious tautologies. So you must mean something very different than most people when you say "your own work." Otherwise your statement (as with all tautologies) has no content.
So what do you mean?
Let's say I were to make a small contribution to the linux kernel. Your argument against the GPL would be that I must now release the improved version under the GPL (or not at all), and that's a restriction on my freedom.
I agree with you that it's wrong to restrict what others do with their own work.
But I would belong in a mental institution if I thought the new version of the program was "my own work." I didn't write linux. I would have contributed to other's work. My changed version would constitue a derivative work, not an original "personal" work.
So your argument against "restricting what others do with their own code" has zero force here, since that is literally impossible to do anyways.
The GPL doesn't coerce anyone into anything. If you don't like it, don't touch it. It is only the vast amount of great and useful and ubiquitous GPL software available that makes people resent it. The creative developers of the world have chosen the GPL. Respect the wishes of those brilliant, altruistic people when you create derivative works--or write your own software.
People who like the BSD license are doing so. Join them. Have fun. But don't bitch when the commercial world exploits your talent without reward or real acknowledgement. This happens, and will always happen, because it CAN happen.
By the way, I always have the "free choice" of what to do with myself. It is another matter whether or not what I do respects the rights of others--the missing piece of your argument, I suspect.
Well my flavor of ethics is not the same as yours. Please tell me: Would you sue me if I put your AL-only code and someone else's GPL-only code in the same program and distributed it (under GPL as the GPL would require)? Would the AL-only author be likely to win such a case?
Thanks
-John
Your assertion that the GPL "forbids you from using GPL'd software in conjunction with commercial software" is laughable. Surely you do not mean that you can't run emacs on the same desk with Linux Netscape, or that the GPL says you can't exchange a text file you wrote in emacs with Microsoft Word, or that you can't ask queries of GNU SQL from a Windows box.
The restriction applies to directly linking software code together into a new executable. That's a derivative work, once again. Derivative works aren't your work. They're my work plus your work.
You have heard this term in what I would presume is your (at least cursory) familiarity with copyright law... right?
I should start a "GPL Myths" page, to go along with the Linux myths debunking sites out there--people seem to say the same stupid reactionary things over and over again.
Look at what happens in the real world. When I see GPL projects, I see developers working together for practical goals, and making successful projects like Linux. There is a minimum of bitching about licenses, since they know the GPL will keep their project free through its whole development life and beyond (not just the "original source" which you exalt). They are willing to acknowledge that they are creating a derivative work, which isn't hard for them since it's a fact anyway.
When I look at AL projects.... ahhh... what are some AL projects? Perhaps you could tell us how they go, since I never seem to hear about them.
> maybe that's part of the reason why the Office port to the Mac was dropped
Where did you read this? Microsoft has been staggering releases of Office between Windows and Macintosh platforms. Office 97 was released for Windows, Office 98 was released for the Mac. The file formats are compatible.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft released the next Mac version of Office in about a year.
Microsoft has a major financial investment in Apple, not to mention a contract. They also have substantial investment of programmer time, etc., in Macintosh development. They make lots of money off their Mac products. (And, if Microsoft dropped Office for the Mac, the Feds would accuse Microsoft of trying to use its monopoly power to drive Apple completely out of the business world.)
So it's hard to see why Microsoft would eliminate Office for the Mac.
A version of Office for Linux will make sense for Microsoft when it has more to gain by selling it than it has to lose by giving corporate credibility to Linux. It probably won't happen until Linux has, though other means, developed a much greater level of corporate credibility than it has now.
Doesn't this mean that the CEO of a certain big company could get RMS drunk and get him to sign the artistic license for ALL GNU project source and "steal" if for use it all in a commercial project!
Is their a clause in the document which signs over copyright to the GNU project which says "I hand over copyright to the GNU project but only if my source is distributed under the GPL and no other licence"
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me!
Most people are just to greedy to risk letting someone else receive some benefit that they're not. Thus, they won't use a license that allows the author of a change to benefit from the change more than they do.
He's right. Doing so it's bad. It's unethical. It's even against the law of copyright(IANAL). So you can't, AL or not, pretends to have wrote the code of other people or let pretends that someone else have wrote the software in place of you (or anyone else) without their explicit permission.
So the AL is not necessary and just confused people, IMO. It tries to replace the law, even the very specific idea of Justice and, by doing so, it gives a false impression that your work is protect better than on Public Domain. Is not all true because PD laws vary from country to country but almost with the most common PD and Copyright Laws around the world.
The GPL is not only a licence, it's a tool. A tool to promote FSF. A WEAPON (yes, GPL is not kind, I agree on Tom on this) to get more Free Software. The FSF is true activist movement. The GNU manifesto just state this way. However, the weapon is not an offensive one: it doesn't prevent you for doing your own way. It doesn't invade your territory without your permission. But it's a defensive weapon: it prevents people from stealing the ressource of your territory without giving back.
But this weapon as a side effect: if you simply accept its conditions, not only only you will enriched the ressource of your opponents, ressources that can enriched you by their functionnalities (no body would say that gcc, cvs or linux aren't enriched they life, GPLed or not) but you will now got a share from it! The ressource will now also be a part of your own territory making it even more precious, more valuable! The weapon is now a tool. A building tool.
Yes, letting people has ethics choice is good. But some person, especially corporation, aren't mature enough. They're just selfish kids. The GPL helps them to learn that they can receive something if they share. You can let them learn this by themselve. But, which one does more good? Your choice is YOUR personal decision.
BTW, if you really want to make a true gift for Christmas, as TC understand it, either choose one of the two short lines suggest by him or used the MIT/BSD style licenses. They has less loopholes and contradictions than the Artistic one.
Fabien Ninoles -- Debian GNU/Linux Developer
This little philosophy, which no-one could possibly disagree with, doesn't square with the sheer amount of shrill bitching you have done here. Were you really so satisfied to give away your gifts, you'd be posting an URL to the source code instead of telling slashdot readers what to do with theirs (i.e. in what license to choose.)
Fine. You do your thing; I do mine. Then don't come around and bitch about how immoral our actions are or how snowed we are by the gnu virus. We know how GPL works--we read it word for word, unlike you. We're doing what we see fit with our work, and you are doing as you see fit with yours.
The only difference is, when we criticize other licenses (which we don't always have time to do, since we're busy working on real projects) we do it in terms of practical concerns about software staying free and developers not being raped by industry and robbed of their work.
When you criticize licenses, you seem to use a lot of moralistic terminology (I believe you mentioned church at some point?) about what is right and wrong in licensing, and how wrong it is to ask others to respect your rights by abiding by your wishes should they choose to use your work.
>Either you are spreading FUD, or you don't understand what you are talking about. In the first case, please stop being lame. In the second --- > read a little, if you really are concerned about how licences affect *you*, you should have at least a little understanding of them. Here you go in laymen's terms---
The idea is that GPL infects everything that you write that uses any source that is GPL. If you use GPL for anything you have to make your source GPL also. It spreads and infests everything. If people decide to use your source, even the part that wasn't initially GPL'd but is now because it used some GPL licensed source, now your course has to be GPL. It's just plain lame.
---------
Swearing is the crutch of inarticulate mother fuckers.
I used to release my works under the AL, but have switched to the BSD. But I still have a warm spot in my heart for the AL nonetheless.
In order to understand the Artistic License, you first have to understand where it comes from. The AL first arrived on the scene with Perl. Perl, as you are aware, is a multi-disciplinary language. The hallmarks of Perl hackers are hubris, laziness and impatience. There is more than one way to do anything is the Perl motto. The Artistic License reflects all of these things, as well as the linguistic legerdemain of Larry Wall's humour.
Perl was release under a dual GPL/Artistic license. Larry wanted the hacker community to embrace Perl, but understand that there was a large contingent of "GPL or Go To Hell" reactionaries within it. He also wanted it to be used by the suits, but also understood that many in the corporate world are frightened of the viral nature of copyleft. By releasing Perl under a dual license, the user could choose whatever license they wanted and no one would ever know. You could be secretly using Artistic Perl while everyone else around you thought you were using the party line GPL. Or vice versa. Talk about subversion!
Bruce Perens perenially states his dislike for the AL because he thinks it is a "sloppy" license. Bruce Perens should take some classes in linguistics. "Artistic License" has a meaning beyond the mere name of a software license.
The main gist of the Artistic License is that you can do anything you want with the software, but you must let the user know you're doing it. Thus, you can take AL's software proprietary, but the user can't be hoodwinked into thinking he's running the real stuff, and you have to let the user know where to get the real stuff if he wants it.
If none of the above makes any sense, then just visualize the Artistic License on the middle of an imaginary line stretched between the BSD and GPL licenses.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The relevant document is Legal issues about contributing code to GNU. In it they list three methods of allowing your software to be incorporated into the GNU project (allowing it, that is, in terms of copyright law):
- Assigning the copyright to the FSF. (This is the easiest.)
- Licensing the software to the FSF. (From context this seems to be more specific than just releasing your software under GPL. The main disadvantage of this is that if someone violates the terms of the license, the FSF can't sue them -- you have to do it yourself. Also, this doesn't work for modifications to existing GNU software.)
- Putting the software in the public domain. (This allows anyone to do anything they like with it, including repackaging it under the Joe Bloggs Private License, though that would of course only apply to copies received from Joe Bloggs. This lets in all the evil the Artistic license keeps out.)
Apologies for my erroneous oversimplification.-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
I'm fairly sure that you're perfectly free to take your patches to a GPL'd app and compile them and then sell that as proprietary software under a conventional copyright-protected scheme.
What it doesn't allow you to do is to compile the other people's work and include it with your own as proprietary.
Big difference. The mere fact that your patches won't do anything useful on their own is irrelevant (as is the fact that they probably won't even compile). You can do what you want with your own work. You just can't do what you want with other people's work.
The free in Free Software refers to everyone's freedom, not just yours. The idea is to promote the most freedom among the most number of people. And it's just a license. You can always break it as you want, just as you can break the law for other crim. Simialar idea, too. You're not chained up before you do anything to prevent you from comitting murder, you're just chained up afterwards. You have freedom until you abuse it to do things that are anti-social.
Your subsequent lack of freedom would be regretable and sub-optimal, but less so than the effects of your unchecked actions. We're still on the earth-bound side of heaven, so we do have to recognize that fact. It doesn't do us any good to pretend that everyone's perfect. People will abuse public domain software. They always have the freedom to do so until we chop their fingers off, we just won't let them get away with it.
It's just a matter of the lesser of two evils, really. In the eyes of a lot of people, whether or not software is free is more important than whether or not you can make unimpeded moral decisions about it. And the reason why isn't about you, but about the hundreds and thousands of people who will have to deal with the consequences of your actions. RMS would prefer that the public not be allowed to be hurt unimpeded.
Maybe it's a bit utilitarian, but you have to be utilitarian at some points, especially when you don't want to have a theocracy. The only other alternative is anarchy, and that's not very attractive.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I place this code in the public domain.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Then say some of the grep maintainer went out and became convicted to change the nature of grep, to make it a regular expression compiler instead of the mighty searcher that it is (I'm reaching here with the grep example..) well to hell with them, I'm going to fork grep and keep grep the way it is, the way I like it and my group of followers will support me if they like grep the way it is. That's the freedom forking gives you.
It goes further, I don't like what Stallman or Lucid is doing with EMACS. Then I'm going to start YEmacs. The community will keep forking in check, if I'm the only one who cares about the fork then I'm the only one who will use it, add to it, and it will end up not really being a fork so much as my own custom emacs. If the fork is worthy, then it will truly branch off and become a unique fork of the product and if it has users and supporters then it serves a purpose. Forking is good and it can only happen if it is needed and if it's needed then it is a good thing when it happens. (The Emacs/XEmacs fork is a great example, both products are better, both products are used and have communities, both serve a purpose and I think the community as a whole is happier since there isn't as much fighting over what should be done and what shouldn't be done) If you can't fork then forget it, that's your defense if your product or license ever comes under attack, that's what keeps the product in check with the community (the most important thing is that the community has a product they like and use)
As for the GPL and the Artistic and BSD licenses. BSD falls short in some key aspects. It does absolutley nothing to protect my freedom as a developer to make sure my users and I can have access to my source code, period. GPL protects my rights as a developer to use my own code in any shape it may get transformed in to, within some reason, and it further goes on to grant that to my users. If I BSD my code then anyone can grab a copy of it, fork it, do whatever to it, and reship the product without source and they can include as much or as little of my code as they wish. BSDers will turn around and say it's really free because the only restriction it places is that you have to say it uses BSD code and UCB wrote some of it. But we have to examine the the nature of "restriction." The people that BSD gives freedom to that the GPL does not are the people who don't want to propagate freedom. The BSD debate comes and goes, Gosling and some other Sun guys wrote about it a few months ago. It operates under the assumtpion that you can only sell software for money if the source code and software aren't free (libre) and then goes on to place that capability on the altar as one of the great rights that need protection. That assumption is proven false everytime somebody buys a copy of Redhat Linux. At this point you can easily see that the only rights affored by BSD that aren't afforded by the GPL are the rights of a few greedy people to take credit for other people's work. The question is pushed, if somebody doesn't want to give source code out because it will hinder their ability to sell something then what business at all do they have using my source code? Under the BSD license the author of the code doesn't even get rights to use the code in some circumstances, much less look at the source. How's that for freedom?
Artistic is a slightly different beast but it does the same thing. It's intent is to allow you to do whatever while protecting the initial product it covers. Like the BSD license, I can take Perl, mish-mash it up a bit, compile it, call it "gerl" or something and sell it with no source. My obligation, as I understand it, is to make sure I also provide perl. So if you contribute to an artistic licensed package, it is possible that you will not have a license to use your own code in some situations.
These are worst case type scenarios. Is it possible that they'll ever happen? Probably, it seems like a company tries to provide binary-only versions of tweaked GPLed code from time to time, I'm sure they'll do it again. Is it a big deal? Not until somebody comes along with something that starts to take market share away from perl or one of the BSDs and they refuse to share it, then people will start to feel differently. Does the GPL have similar problems? Yes, the original author of GPLed code can change the license but there are ways to protect against that, like by giving your code over to the FSF. You can also protect against it by raising the list of authors to something that is impractical for the license changer to deal with, once 50 or 60 people are involved and have added significant pieces of code it's impossible to change the license. I'm not trying to bash BSD or Artistic, I'd rather have code released under those licenses than not at all, but if you're going to do an opensource project why not use the GPL and protect your access to the code? If you're going to solicite for help from the world the least you can do is make sure the world can use the code they contribute.
People keep telling me that the GPL is not a religion. Then along comes an anonymous coward deeply and profoundly offended to his core being because someone disagreed disgreed with it. And because his religious faith has no foundation in reality, he can't even issue a well formed rebuttal. Instead he resorts to spewing filthy imagery.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The GPL isn't about "infecting" it's about maintaining freedom. And by wanting freedom, you have to take the chance of choosing a license that maintains freedom. The whole point is that when using GPL code, you have to maintain the GPL. Otherwise, what the hell is the point?
I write some GPL code, someone uses it, changes it to BSD, and suddenly my code is available for commercial use, without my consent. Well if I wanted to give my code away for commercial use, I would have chosen the BSD license in the first place. That's the whole reason for choosing the GPL, is if you want to guarantee perpetual freedom.
Now, as per the definition of 'freedom', the BSD could almost be called more 'free' then the GPL because BSD code can be used anywhere for anything. But as far as 'freedom' in the sense that I want my code to be free, but I don't want some commercial entity using my code without even acknowleging my existance.. Then I choose the GPL because it gives me more freedom.
Now, your trolling on the GPL license is just dumb. The 'infectous' nature of the GPL is one of it's strongest points, that it is guaranteed to stay free.
GPL clause 3b.
Once more: YOUR CODE IS GUARANTEED TO REMAIN ALWAYS FREE. The GPL is not the way to make that happen. The BSD licence does that, too, but the GPL does something else.
The GPL is a way to immorally coerce others into making the choices that you want them to make. The LGPL, being non-infective, is much less evil.
Remember that there are many ways to avoid GPL'd libraries, too, so the library might was well be LGPL'd. Notice how the bc program is handled on OpenBSD. It manages to use the GPL'd program without contamination.
If you give something away, it is free. If you tell them what to do with it, it is not. Free is better.
We seem to be having a language problem here. Of course the GPL exerts control over MY software. The GPL allows me to link MY software to YOUR software, but only as long as I use it myself and don't distribute the result. The GPL prohibits you from using MY code because my code isn't GPLed. In other words, the GPL exerts control over my code.
Uh, I forgot that they can't sell a UNIX variant (because, apparently, of an agreement with SCO) That might also have something to do with it.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Well, then consider someone wanting to make an embedded system using the Linux kernel with parts replaced with secret real-time code that can't be "moduled". He can't even determine who the copyright owners are, let alone get them all to agree and arrange payments. One could do that with a BSD-licensed kernel.
I do understand the problem, that's why I object to your misstatement of it. Your claim that "the GPL requires..." is false. Now, if the authors of the programs in question refuse to work with you, be they the authors of GNU DBM or the authors of Oracle, then they, by refusing you permission to use their code in the manner you specify, are requiring you to reinventit. The GPL does not require it (which was your assertion), nor can either party (the authors of the GPL program or the authors of the closed source program) be given greater blame for your problem. Either one has the option to grant you license to do what you wish. If neither does, you're screwed, but it's a wild distortion of the situation to say the GPL is to blame for this.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Bzzt. Thanks for playing.
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2
above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above
on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing
source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on
a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for
noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b
above.)
Therefore, you can charge as much as you want for the binaries, as long as you make the source available seperately for free.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Don't let the GPL promoters corrupt your language with their efforts to make their closed, GNU-world software seem to have the advantanges of open, public software.
One thing to consider is that preventing forking in this way immediately curtails the number of lawsuits which may erupt over the ownership of code should commercial forking be permitted.
Say commercial forking is implimented. Bob Smith writes a open source implimentation of protocol A. Company B takes the implimentation, adds hooks to their API, and sells it knowing that the license protects them. Suddenly, Bob has to fight to get some sort of compensation from the company, costing a bunch of money which, as an open source author, he doesn't have.
Yes, commercial forking puts some heavy resources into making code golden, but it also tends to make it proprietary and unusable, and one of the goals of the GPL is to write programs which can, with some sweat, work anywhere. I prefer that over a proprietary distribution anyday.
Dan S.
Dan S.
They are all too short. Those huge licenses you see on commercially-licensed software are huge for a reason. I wish there was a hero (a student?) who would develop a good version of the BSD license which would only have the self-protection crap plus optional attribution clauses.
Your argument is pure sophistry. I don't care about angels dancing on the head of a pin. The reality of the matter is that this is a royal pain in the posterior, and no weasel words are going to change that. It's unnecessary, and unbecoming in a free gift.
Now how did I know this would be yet another license war? :)
Now let me say something that seems to be very misunderstood. I am a free software advocate. Now, most people who like free software have nothing against using software under the BSD, X, AL or any other free software license. The important part is that it is free, that is the rights of redistribution, modification, and use. Free Software does not equate to GPL-only.
Now when you are developing things are different. A lot of people don't want to contribute to propietary software. Just as many propietary software developers don't want their code to end up in free software. There are also people who want their code in either free or propietary software. Hence the copy-centered (thanks for the word, some AC) licenses. Now copy-centered software can be either copy-lefted or copy-righted (turned into propietary software I mean in this context). The problem is, when either happens, the code gets stuck. So you end up with at least three forks eventually, a copy-lefted that always demands complete openness, a copy-righted that always demands complete closedness, and a lesser copy-centered fork that continually gets sucked into the other two.
The real irony here is that you'd think that authors of copy-centered software wouldn't care about what license is used. Yet there are advocates everywhere.
My main point here is that the user should only be concerned that it is free software he using. I, for instance, will have no problem using KDE 2 and qt 2. If it is great software then I will use it because it is free. But the developer of that software is the only one who may choose the license. Contributers remember must choose to reuse the developers code. Just as I may choose not to develop qt because of the restrictions in its licensing. There are many people who do not mind the restrictions and code it any. Since qt is not the only choice, it is not a huge problem.
But remember folks. The issue is freedom. There is nothing morally or ethically wrong with any free software license. Remember, developers must reuse his/her code.
When you're considering your "spirit of giving back" in your use of the GPL, please consider this quote from the US (copyright) Code, Section 17, Section 101 (at http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/101.html):
"The term ''financial gain'' includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works."
GPL use is not about "giving back"; it's about "I won't share with you unless you share with me."
It's a difference between freedom and a form of economic coercion.
The sort of licences that Tom Christenson is advocating are an extension of the idea that when we give we should give freely and without conditions or restrictions. I agree with him. However, it's a crooked game, it turns out that as a pragmatic matter, if conditions are not put on our gift the "free rider" problem emerges. So paradoxically we give more by requiring some conditions on our gift as the GPL does. The history of Unix as compared to the history of Linux should be enough evidence for anyone!
Why does everybody talk of forking like it's bad?
Why do people think that the GPL discourages Forking?
Why is there at least one story per month with a headline like "Linux kernel might fork!" and everybody panics?
NEWS FLASH! The linux kernel has forked! Many times even... That's how we got MkLinux, uClinux, and others... It's also how the first ports got started... Forks happen! Get over it.
-sam
It tends to... Aha. So can you give us asome examples when this has happened?
I want a license that does all of the following:
- Allows me to distribute my programs and ideas ("public stuff") if I want.
- Allows me to distribute source with my public stuff.
- Allows other users to use my public stuff. I don't care whether they make money from it or not.
- Does not allow other users to distribute programs that use my public stuff unless they:
- make the source publicly available, with various bits clearly labelled as to author, and
- grant all of these rights to their paying users.
It seems that the GPL and possible the MPL grant these rights; the AL and the BSDL don't, to the best of my knowledge (IANAL!!!). That's why I prefer them.I'll say it again, in case you missed it: I don't care if someone makes a million dollars, pounds or Tongan pa'angas off my work, as long as every bit of the source code they use is available to me and everyone else. So: if you take a program I've written and improve it, you can sell it to people who don't want to download and compile it (eg people without copies of Delphi) but you can't stop me getting at your changes and using them myself without paying for them. Otherwise, you owe me royalties, and that would be a pain for everyone to handle. This way is fair.
: Fruitbat :
I have discovered a truly remarkable
If I can't understand a licence, I'm not going to use it for my own code, and I'd think twice about contributing code for a project under a screwy licence.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If I write a shell script that calls out to getopt(1fsf), that shell script is still my work, and their virus has no hold upon me. The FSF will be quick to agree to this.
Now, if I write a program that links to readline(3fsf), it is certainly my work.
I know this. You know this. Even the FSF knows this. But then they realize that they're about to let the cat out of the bag, so they backpeddle. They try to pretend that the foofunc(1fsf) program doesn't infect the calling program or script, but that the equivalent foofunc(3fsf) does. That's where they screw up.
When I use foofunc(3fsf), they would really, really like all the world to believe that they've now infected me, that they get to tell me what I can and cannot do with the software I wrote.
Guess what? That's bunk. They haven't infected me. I'm merely using a library function in the way that library functions are meant to be used: they're an API, and you link to them. It is of no consequence whether it's statically linked at link/load-time, dynamically linked at start-up, or accessed at run-time during execution via any one of myriad forms of RPC. It's API only, not material inclusion. APIs aren't viral.
This is really no different than the situation with the Linux kernel: its GPLness doesn't infect privately-held commercial device drivers linked against the kernel. This is good. Sure, it pisses off the FSF (read: Stallman, as with nearly any reference to the FSF). But so what? Lots of things piss him off. Tough. Linking to drivers like this only makes Linux more useful to more people.
BSDI found this out a long, long time ago. They wanted to completely open source, but couldn't get the drivers they needed that way. Vendors refused, important vendors whom they really needed. So they made an exception. I think folks have forgotten that lesson.
The FSF pretend not to try to control an API. They pretend not to try to control fair use. Very well. These false pretenses are a two-edged sword. Nice people don't play with knives, but since they're waving theirs around, so be it. It can cut them, too.
Most Linux operating systems ship with all of these various functions, like strlen(), getopt(), or readline(). It is ludicrous to believe that some infect and some do not. It's complete hypocrisy with no basis in reason. Libraries are for using. You can't control use through copyright. No copyright will let you require someone who buys your book to shelve it only with other books you approve of, or to read the book only under a full moon, or to stop you from reselling the book at a used bookstore.
It was this that this hypocrisy that inspired me to expose the fact that libraries cannot be infectively GPL'd, because that's trying to use copyright to dictate use. Thinking of the issues of getopt(1fsf) and getopt(3fsf), I as a simple demonstration, liberated readline from its erstwhile nonfree state.
And there was much rejoicing.
No, really--there was. I've received a good bit of joyful mail for this blow against tyranny and for freedom. I don't think it was as heroic an act as the mail often phrased it, but it was something that definitely needed being done. I also learned that at least two (and I think three) other implementations exist, so it's all water under the bridge now. You've an API you can link to freely. Enjoy. That's what freedom's for.
People needed to see that you cannot control employ the GPL to dictate use of libraries. And you shouldn't want to. That's not free. That's coercive. Be charitable. Set your software free.
Think about it. Microsoft has spent ten years copyingApple, which has now gone to a *BSD with macos/X. Do you really think ms will make a separate decision *this* time? A different *BSD, perhaps. Linxu? why on earth would they do that?
If you intend to make your software as useful as it can be to as many people as you can, then you should make it free software. Which is a terrible word, because of word games from the FSF. I mean free as in "gift". As in "free of restrictions" or as in "no strings attached".
Speaking of word games, there is no such thing as a "license" which is "free of restrictions." To license your software ipso facto restricts the way it is used, copied or distributed; if there were no restrictions on these things, there would be no need to license it.
If you want your software to be free of restrictions, place it in the public domain. Anything else is a restricted license and is "non-free" by this definition. I happen to think that's a silly, pointless way to define "free", but YMMV.
It doesn't invade your territory without your permission.
Ever heard of the "network effect"? I'm sure you have, Slashdot reader and all.
The network effect is what makes people use Office: Because everyone else uses it. If you don't use it, you can't exchange documents with them.
"So what?" you say. "I *want* everyone to use GPL'd software, and to GPL their software." Because after all, you use the licence.
But to then also make the claim that "it doesn't prevent you for doing your own way", well. That doesn't quite work, does it? The GPL does prevent me from doing things my own way, or will. Because one day, I will need a certain bit of code, or a library, or a class, for a program. And the only way to get it is to go to a GPL'd program. If I don't want GPL, I'm screwed.
Go right ahead and use the GPL. But don't sit there and tell me that it's not an attack, merely a refusal to help.
---
END OF LINE
Sheesh. How the hell does the GPL coerce people? You always have the choice of not using GPL code. When you show me some circumstance in which you have no choice but to use GPL code at every decision point then we can talk about coercion.
If you give something away, it is free. If you tell them what to do with it, it is not. Free is better.
Even if we accept your very original definition of "free" (let's not get into that; I'm not right now in the mood to discuss the whole history of western civilization from the greeks up to us), it still doesn't indict the GPL.
The GPL basically says that you can't tell others what to do with the code that is licensed under it, if you give it to them. (Unless you are the copyright holder, of course...)
Having said all this, I must add that I do believe you deserve recognition for putting your code where your mouth is with freedline.
---
Stallman says: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
They could, but not without lots of effort. They would have to re-write everything. And that's how the GPL protects us.
Interesting license:
* This is free and open software. You may use, modify, distribute,
* and sell this program in any way you wish, provided you do not
* restrict others from doing the same nor remove this notice, and that
* you clearly mark any modified copies as such, with the explicit
* understanding that you do not have to provide the source for your
* own modifications.
*/
At least he has the integrity to follow his own advice. Since it is free, I wonder whether it would piss him off if I sold his anti-GPV condom?
Protects whom and what? You're making no sense. Why the hell should I make other people work for me for free? Isn't that communism?
"When you show me some circumstance in which you have no choice but to use GPL code at every decision point then we can talk about coercion."
:)
Well, the same is nicely true for, say, Windows
Yeah, I can avoid GPL'ed code - I simply have to be willing to pay more, much more sometimes to develop something just like it.
You say this isn't coercion - that it is my choice. I, personally, agree.
The same is true for Windows. Don't want windows on your box? Fine, you might pay a little more.
Morally - the same situation.
&sign($AC[0]);
I can certainly write a GPL program that uses the Oracle libraries.
I cannot sell a program that uses GPL code, under most circumstances, without also licensing my product under the GPL, whether it uses the Oracle libraries or not. (The Oracle libraries are a strawman in this argument.)
What's the problem?
If I wrote a program and just sold it, would you complain? In that case, you do not get the source, and the program is closed to you. If I license the code under the GPL, you get the code, *and* you get to reuse the code, assuming you license your additions under the GPL.
If you are unwilling to license under the GPL, treat the program as proprietary. You lose nothing. Actually, you gain something-- you can at least study the source code to figure out How They Did It.
I don't see the problem.
And I haven't heard you complain because Oracle locked up their source code, or that Sun locks up the source code to SunOS (which was taken from the original BSD code). So if you have no bitch about proprietary software, I fail to see your bitch about the GPL. Yes, the GPL advances an ideology-- so does proprietary software, the ideology of It's Money That Matters.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Okay, readline is under the regular old GPL instead of the LGPL.
Let's say I write a program that uses readline. Unfortunately for me, I must GPL that program. This is an example of the agenda of the FSF to make ALL software free software. It does not mean that Stallman suddenly owns your code, but it does mean that you must keep your code open. This is definitely an example of restricting freedom, but let's look at the flip side.
Let's say I write a program based on some LGPL library. In that case then I do not have to GPL my code. But I am using the work of someone else, but that someone else chose to allow me to use their library. That seems fair though, if the person writing the library was okay with people using it in non-GPL programs that is fine. Especially if it's a fairly standard type of library (like a GUI toolkit or something).
It all depends on the wishes of the library author, which IMO it should. Let's say I write some sort of specialized library.. for a bad example I am going to use a 3d rendering library. I LGPL my code instead of GPLing it. Some company makes billions off of a 3d game that is a very thin program around my library. I would be pretty pissed (mostly out of jealousy and greed) but damnit I would have every right to be, they used my work to make their money and I am not getting any cut of it. First of all, that would be shitty of someone to do that, but you gotta realize that people are evil, so someone would. So you should GPL that library (and maybe hang on to the copyright so you can also sell a non-GPL version to some company for use in that 3d game).
In my opinion, that fits halfway okay with the agenda of the FSF. You still have free access to the code, but you can at least negotiate with proprietary companies if you want to. Of course, part of the terms could be that they could not modify the library unless they actually modified the GPL version of it. And hey, that would be fine, you want to remain proprietary, well, sorry, you are gonna have to at least give some of your work back. Though that is still less restrictive than a lot of proprietary library licenses.
A Perl guru who apparently have made positive comments about Python, and is therefore an UNCLEAN HEATHEN to the Perlaholics.
(Oh, and Perl is apparently a proprietary language from O'Reilly and Associates. :-P)
This thread has provoked me to think about the viral nature of the GPL. I began to wonder of its effect on commercial use of Linux.
;0) ). By far the biggest use of PCs is in the workplace. Additionally, a large proportion of PCs in the workplace are used to run software custom written for their organisation. It is not usual to release the source because the users would have no use for it, and it could prove a security risk to the organisation because it would make it much easier to make trojans among other things. It may also contain business secrets or actually embody the main value in the business - I know of a business that operates a software porting service, which is actually 99% automated by their in-house software.
There is a very vocal group who would like to see Linux replace Windows as the PC desktop OS of the majority of all users worldwide (and throughout the Universe
What I want to ask is, can a business run in-house closed source software across their organisation on any of the current Linux distributions, developing using the development libraries provided? Are all the core libraries (libc5, glibc2.x, gtk, gnomelibs, kdelibs, maybe even the kernel api) licensed such that you can link a non-GPL program to them?
Is there a web-site anywhere which audits distros for this sort of thing? Are any distros particularly good or bad with this respect? Red Hat has links with big corporate suppliers, but does their distro provide for this important business requirement? Caldera and Corel are aimed right at this market, so is there a full audit of these? This of course not only applies to all the libraries, but what the libraries themselves link to. It is a pretty complex problem.
If this audit information exists, and it reveals any problems for closed source in-house business software, is it documented anywhere so that in-house developers can work safely without infringing? Or is it simply the case that these people cannot work with a GNU/Linux distribution?
One more thing. If libraries that are GPLed rather than LGPLed cannot be linked to by an appropriately open license, what is the situation with a shell script that calls GPLed programs? A shell script is open to inspection by nature, but must it also be available for free distribution by anyone to whom it is distributed?
It looks to me from my current knowledge of the situation that the safest option is to use a BSD rather than Linux. But you don't see hordes advocating BSD Everywhere (tm).
Gee, I simply can't imagine why people think they're a cult. :-)
"I would be pretty pissed (mostly out of jealousy and greed) but damnit I would have every right to be, they used my work to make their money and I am not getting any cut of it. First of all, that would be shitty of someone to do that, but you gotta realize that people are evil, so someone would."
I'm glad you used the terms jealousy and greed. Nothing to be too ashamed off, because none of us are perfect. I might even feel the same way if it happened to me.
However, there is nothing wrong with earning a living. The usual course of doing so involves trading what you have for what you want. It is perfectly natural for a developer to use his development skills to earn a living with. He creates a cool game program and trades it to gamers for money.
Now why did he use your 3D toolkit instead of forking over hundreds or thousands of dollars for a proprietary one? Easy. You already said your toolkit was free, free and in free beer and free as in free to use. Nowhere in your license did you say "you can only use this if you write free programs." If that was your intent, then make your toolkit under the GPL. But by putting it out under the LGPL you are explicitly giving the game manufacturer permission to make money off of it.
Instead of getting jealous of the game designer, you might think instead of how cool your toolkit really is. After all, with only a "very thin" client program gamers from all over paid good money for it. Maybe you should consider writing your own game with it and selling it. After all, who better than the toolkit creator to write the perfect game for it.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Great post. You make it 100% clear to me that the GPL isn't there to help programmers, but rather, to further a political agenda to annihilate a particular business model. And it's a model that a lot of us need in order to live. The FSF isn't really concerned with free software at all, are they? Why was I so tricked?
The GPL shouldn't be there to annihilate a particular business model. But it makes an excellent license for those people who don't want to be part of that model.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The BSD or AL licenses can't benefits from the Network Effect as effectively than the GPL. That's not a flaw. Just a capacity not present by choice of the authors. Why this choice was made first? Currently, I don't care much about the answer. I don't used the GPL because of the Network Effect. Simply because I think the license is better construct and can do more good than harm. But that's only my opinion. YMMV ;)
I understand that sometime the network effect is strong and the efforts need to avoid it is too much for the benefits/value that we want. Sometime, it can even be better to follow it just to be able to change it. Even RMS know this. That's why he created the LGPL.
However, saying that you must always follow the network effect is a refusal of your Freedom to say no. It's a deny of your capacity to change things. I don't think MS believes this when they decided to buy those less popular browser when Netscape already has the majority of the market. I don't think that what rms taught when he began gcc and emacs. Lot of people in the BSD team aren't getting screwed by the GPL. They create their own version of grep and of many other GPL utilities.
I believe in the Network Effect. It's powerful but it's nothing compare to the volonty inside any people. That's where I thing I think I disagree with you. BTW, the only software I used at home who's not DFSG free is Netscape, and only from when it falls under the NPL. Sure, I will use Mozilla as soon as it will go in beta. Most of my friends around me used Windows and MSWords or WordPerfect and we are able to exchange e-mail and documents. All we need is some good will. Hope you 'll got some. You'll need it to remove any GPL soft on your PC. And you'll miss lot of good things ;)
Good luck!
Fabien Ninoles -- Debian GNU/Linux Developer
God dammit you whore, I see why there are entire /. threads devoted to your destruction.
I agree that this touches on the issue of bundling. (Doesn't Aladdin Ghostscript have this kind of license?) But I'm not convinced that it wouldn't work. RMS claims that the GPL applies to enhancements in the form of dynamically loaded libraries, which may be distributed independently of a program. If he is right, I see no reason not to extend it to executable files that use a GPLed programs interfaces, be they command line or dynamic linker-based.