If the fonts aren't readable, that's a problem with your browser settings.
Indeed, thanks for pointing it out to me, and I should have viewed the HTML source myself, since it is quite simple, rather than bothering you.
Turns out the problem was that while I'd configured my Netscape 4.77 (yes, I know...) to use 18-pt fonts for the Western character set, your document uses Unicode, which I hadn't changed from 12-pt fonts.
I'd love to read that paper, but the fonts are so tiny I can't without straining, and don't want to take the time to download the HTML source, fix it myself, and try again.
Any possibility you could take the font specifications out of your HTML, or make the fonts more readable, or something?
I think every person with a tv claimed they were less then 1 year old and 5 inches larger
Huh?? I mean, I can understand the 5 inches larger part, but less than 1 year old? That's a combination I'll have trouble getting out of my mind's eye for awhile!
(Oh, you meant "it was", not "they were"? Nevermind!;-)
Hopefully all that "unused" genetic information will turn out to be code comments (as well as version control).
More likely: the license, and a highly-restrictive one at that. (No reverse engineering, modification, multiple backup, copying, or publishing performance data....)
You don't mean the kind that looks like jillions of tiny tires (or black donuts) intersecting with the wires of a chain-link fence, are you?
I thot that ended in the late 60's.
Nope; I heard it was possible to get a job as a "core-stringer", or whatever they called it, at a Digital Equipment Corporation plant in a Boston suburb around the mid-'70s.
(Considering applying for it myself, and maybe I did, but can't recall for sure. Not really the kind of work I'm good at, though, so it was just as well.)
when the average USian thinks 'BBC', they think depressing stories
Huh?? I'm an "average USian", but when I think "BBC", I think of thoroughly-researched, to-the-point documentaries like the one on the annual Spaghetti Harvest in Italy.
In unrelated news, President Bush's lawyers [yahoo.com] say he doesn't need Congress' approval to bomb Iraq. See any parallels here?
Nope, since Congress already has given the President the authority to bomb Iraq, if that's what he decides is best. (If Congress wishes to disagree, it can vote accordingly, rescinding, or whatever the proper term is, its 1991 and 2001 votes.)
As far as HP/Compaq, I'm unaware of any prior vote of stockholders in favor of the merger.
There's no comparison -- Gacy's killings were not in self-defense against a mob of toddlers. They were basically one-at-a-time murders.
Really, to suggest that what Hat was dealing with in any way resembled what Gacy did is to ignore the very real dangers posed by roaming gangs of toddlers.
Thank goodness sanity prevailed -- Hat's been freed, not Gacy, pathetic attempts at moral equivalency notwithstanding.
The problem is same with many other licensing methods, probably even most of them. GPL is just so common nowadays
Indeed, and your points are well-taken. Even though they've been made countless times over the many years in many forums, there's plenty of evidence people still need to be reminded of not only the basic issues surrounding the GPL and copyright law (on which it's based), but of the need to study the issues further, roughly to the same degree they're considering the ways in which they want their own GPL'ed code to be legally used and/or in which they want to legally use someone else's GPL'ed code.
It also seems to take constant attention to remind people that it is not the GPL that is "viral" -- it's copyright law that defines a work as "derived" from all the substantial sources of which it is composed. Pretty much every license relies on this "viral" nature.
What distinguishes licenses like BSD from the GPL is that the GPL preserves certain copyright protections, in order to preserve certain freedoms, that the other licenses give up.
In practice, the BSD license gives up so many protections that inhere in copyright that it's probably the case that lots of works deriving from BSD'd code do not meet the strict legal requirements of the license plus copyright. Since the few remaining protections amount to so little, and, unlike the GPL, there doesn't seem to be a strong contingent willing to defend its terms, it's not surprising many people and organizations incorporating BSD'd code into their own works find little impetus to follow both the spirit and the letter of the remaining tatters, so to speak.
That, of course, greatly simplifies, for both the original and derived-work authors, the task of determining whether there's some kind of infringement: the answer is, almost always, "never mind; even if there is, what could it matter?". My impression is that, in practice, BSD'd code gets treated a lot like public domain code, by both sides of the fence (original and derived-work authors).
For those putting code under the GPL and holding onto their copyright (not signing it over to the FSF, for example), who are unprepared to defend the licensing terms they've chosen or, upon discovering infringement, sign over the rights to do so to someone else who will (like the FSF), the main advantage of the GPL over BSD/PD is the appearance of a sort of "white picket fence" around their code, over which only someone fairly intent on infringing is likely to jump.
In my view, about the only way in which the GPL can be said to be "uniquely viral" is in the sense that it uniquely protects the ability of people in possession of GPL-derived works to freely modify and distribute them, as long as they do so under the terms of the GPL.
But the fact that it "claims" to apply to derived works is not, in itself, uniquely viral. Such claims are inherent in all licenses based on copyright, including typical shrink-wrap and click-through EULAs, and matter except in the cases of licenses that disclaim so many copyright protections that few people treat code licensed under their terms as anything more protected than public-domain code.
So most other licenses fully employ the "viral" nature of copyright law, but do so either:
To preserve the rights of the authors to be the only ones who can modify and distribute copies
To disclaim so many of the rights of the authors so as to allow derived-work authors to preserve their own rights to their contributions to their works to be the only ones who can modify and distribute copies
Because the GPL steers so carefully between these extremes -- neither rejecting the freedom to modify and distribute copies outright, nor allowing someone else to do so in derived works -- it comes under attack, as a concept as well as a license, from both sides.
And considering only the issue of non-author redistribution and relicensing privileges, the GPL does indeed seem to be less than perfectly free, just as it's certainly less than proprietary (though certainly not "less free" than typical proprietary licenses, despite what some might claim).
Of course, there are larger issues than just that one that drove the creation of the GPL, explaining its placement in the "middle" of that "degree of freedom to redistribute someone else's code" vector. These issues include the importance of having source code to a complicated product, of allowing anyone to enjoy the examination, modification, and redistribution privileges for a body of code, and so on.
The GPL's construction to serve these larger issues has led many to conclude, and, in my opinion, correctly, that the GPL's placement in that vector is "just right", neither too cold (proprietary) or too warm (so free that derived works can themselves be proprietary).
As far as how to determine at what point a work derives from another, I personally find the Golden Rule (which perhaps has different names in faith traditions other than the one with which I'm most familiar) to be very helpful.
If I want to use a "short snippet" of someone else's code in my work, I ask myself how I would feel if a comparatively short snippet of my own work, over which I'd labored mightily and, say, expected to get paid by others to use, was similarly incorporated into someone else's.
If I'd feel their work derived from mine in such a case, then it's clear I should consider my use of their short snippet to be a case of deriving my work partly from theirs. (If I don't, that doesn't mean I'm not deriving it, just that I wouldn't, presumably, care if the roles were reversed.)
This approach clarifies oft-put examples such as "suppose only.01% of the code in a program is someone else's [GPL'ed, not that it matters] code; wouldn't such a small percentage mean it isn't derived from that code?".
After all, if your only claim to fame was to have composed a one-hour symphony, would you feel its direct incorporation into someone else's 10000-hour piece of musical drek constituted infringement? I sure would; so the percentage does not matter per se.
And given how much "excitement" there has been in the music industry over uses of incredibly short samples of someone else's music, it's much easier to see why focusing on how "tiny" an amount of someone else's [GPL'ed] code is not really the sole basis upon which to assess the issue of whether a work derives from someone else's code.
On the other hand, I wouldn't consider someone writing a novel in which the sole text that could be claimed to belong to someone else consisted of the proper name in a sentence like "He was a spy, but not the James Bond type of spy" to have derived from my work, if I was Ian Fleming or his heirs, though I don't know how the courts would rule.
what in practise - makes the GPL spread to new code - when does your software become automagically governed by GPL?
IANAL, but I believe the answer is: when your software is considered a derived work of GPL'ed code, according to the copyright law of the land.
There is, as far as I can tell, no "bright line" between when this does and does not happen, nor can one be made to exist, short of "everything infringes" or, more practically, "nothing infringes".
I've written about this principle in length on USENET's gnu.misc.discuss group in the past, if you want to search for my posts from years ago.
But the main thing to remember is: just because we're dealing with technology here doesn't mean we can expect to, or expect the law to, draw us a nice, technologically clean "line" between infringing copyright and not infringing it.
So, the question being "does my program derived from GPL'ed code?", two things, at least, must be answered:
What actually constitutes your program, which, in copyright terms, is the "work"?
Does that work contain a substantial portion of someone else's GPL'ed code?
As you should be able to infer from the above, these questions cannot be trivially answered by resorting to redefining "work" as "single linked executable", since a court might reasonable rule that the work actually consists of two or more executables (or binaries generally) cooperating so closely as to consistute a single work, making that collective work a derivation of GPL'ed software if any one of its components is.
Anyway, since the GPL "protects" code no further than copyright law defines "derived work", it cannot definitely answer the question.
Instead, all it can do is limit the degree to which copyright law's view of a "derived work" might extend beyond what the GPL intended to protect.
Okay, the RIAA/MPAA copyright cartels have been annoying me for years with their heavy-handed tactics, and I'm not particularly impressed with the "in-your-face" attitude of folks who willfully traffic in illegally copied music (or software for that matter).
But something just occurred to me that is probably blindingly obvious to everyone else.
Technologies such as the printing press, radio, television, and the Internet have substantially increased the "connectivity" of people and organizations over the last buncha centuries.
Over that entire period, there has never really been a society that has been able to completely "stamp out" casual, unauthorized sharing of information between friends and neighbors. (Sure, some have tried: totalitarian regimes, communist regimes, and so on.)
That's because it's a hard problem -- asymptotically hard to stop sharing of information as you approach the "solidarity" of components of the communications matrix, i.e. neighbors physically close to each other (they can hear each other play music), friends and family who enjoy and trust each other enough to visit each other, and so on.
Put these two things together and, so far, all you have is what everyone else has been saying for awhile: "it's the new communications technologies that have enabled more and easier sharing of information of various shades -- white [legal], black [illegal & dangerous], and gray [illegal as a matter of law in that it infringes someone else's intellectual privilege]".
What just hit me is that the copyright cartels -- in fact, everyone who has any interest in holding copyright, patent, or trademark privilege (a term I use in lieu of "rights", which connotes something with which I'm uncomfortable) -- also enjoy the same kinds of improvements in ease, frequency, and amount of intercommunication as a result of these technological improvements.
For example, sure, FTP, email, chat, P2P, and so on make it much easier for 15-year-olds to have a vastly wider collection of "friends" with whom to share illegally copied music, but the same underlying technologies correspondingly enable the RIAA, MPAA, and all its members (artists, studios, movie houses, whatever) to communicate rapidly and effectively among its members, to increase its audience of members, and so on.
Given that fact, I'm now even less sympathetic to the argument that government should be in the business of assisting copyright holders in creating artificial scarcity in technology and its uses, by mandating digital-rights-management systems, by shutting down technologies like Napster, and so on, since there seems to be no corresponding limitations placed on copyright holders to not use these same technologies as effectively.
In essence, I'm coming more around to the view I've seen others propose, a sort of survival-of-the-fittest-user-of-new-technology view, that the government should leave the various players free to employ and exploit the technologies, and let market forces and the rule of law (a simpler, more practical law by far than we have, and especially than the RIAA/MPAA/software-producers are urging, in the area of intellectual privilege) iron things out.
Over time, those seeking to protect copies of information will find ways to employ technological improvements to hunt down and bring prominent, profiteering infringers to justice, a resolution for which copyright law has long provided.
Meanwhile, "ordinary folk" who now "illegally" share their favorite music with hundreds or thousands of friends, thanks to technology, instead of 10 or 20 as they would have a century ago, will continue to be able to engage in this sort of under-the-radar, relatively unimportant (compared to what other things governments must deal with these days), sharing. As long as individuals aren't taking the kinds of steps needed to make such sharing profitable, they'd be extremely unlikely to be targeted for prosecution -- and their use of technology to make friends and share with them all sorts of things, including illegally copied stuff, wouldn't be artificially crippled by government serving as a massively-funded militia for the RIAA/MPAA.
While there will be short-term instances of one side "winning" over the other, just as is the case in any reasonably free market, the government would never be able to move rapidly enough to legislate the solution before the "balance of power" is restored due to what would be an ongoing, nonviolent arms race anyway, so why even go further down this path, and why not roll back what "we" have done already (get rid of the DAT tax, any legal mandates for stuff like SCMS)?
In my opinion, it is much more important for our civilization (worldwide) that we let people freely use technology to make and keep new friends, using the wide variety of common interests that have worked for millenia, rather than seek to shut down certain types of interactions that by no stretch of the imagination pose a direct threat to civilization.
So if the RIAA, MPAA, and other copyright holders seeking to short-circuit technological progress and availability to the public, to protect their own "turf", want to have their way, we should insist that our government restrain them correspondingly by crippling their use of technology -- as a simple example, say "fine, if you don't let ordinary people buy computers that can freely copy information because it might contain music, then you can no longer use computers in your business at all".
(In general, I think if government legislators were empowered to impose greater restrictions on those seeking its power to restrict others without blindingly obvious cause, and expected to use that power, we'd see much less abuse of government, especially in ways that translate directly into abuse, or removal, of our own freedoms.)
But that's not going to happen -- it's just a "mind experiment" I find useful to play with myself when considering how I might want to limit someone else's freedoms to serve my own interests. (Which is why I've pretty much ended up in the libertarian camp; there's not much, in the form of behaviors in which people engage, that I'm willing to sacrifice my own property or life to prevent people engaging in. But that's just because I, personally, would rather live in a world with, say, more marijuana users than risk dying trying to win a war on drugs; others would certainly make different choices using the same "razor" to consider them. Imposing one's will on others is so much easier, and therefore so thoughtlessly engaged in, when one doesn't expect to ever face the hard task of the imposition itself, given one's access to government and other forms of policing.)
In summary, the rising tide of technology lifts all boats, so government interference in the form of trying to deny billions of "little boats", representing ordinary people sharing music and software with friends, their opportunity to rise with the tide, ultimately amounts to trying to selectively block a rising tide -- a futile attempt to block its benefits for the many while allowing it for just a few of the big boats (the RIAA, MPAA, SPA, and their members). The damage such a misguided effort, in an actual ocean, with nearly unlimited funds would likely do to the little boats and the harbor itself (imagine what sorts of approaches today's $Trillion governments and the means to acquire more funding by force would likely be encouraged to try), parallels what the government is likely to do to billions of innocent people and the civilization that cradles those governments if it follows the path it's been on for 10+ years now and heeds the recommendations of the copyright cartels.
(I realize this idea boils down to "let the free market rather than government intervention decide", which is a very old idea. Sorry about that; sometimes very old ideas are the best ones we have. And, in practice, it's going to happen anyway; I'm arguing mainly for limiting the scope, timeframe, and amount of the damage done by fruitlessly trying to legislate and prosecute the kind of sharing of information that is not directly harmful to copyright holders and the public.)
I think it's reasonable to conclude that if government had the integrity to "Just Say No" to restricting the public's use of technology when organizations like the RIAA and MPAA came to them, hat (and $$) in hand, those organizations would long ago have figured out how to employ advancing technology to better serve their interests.
(For one thing, instead of being run by lawyers, maybe they'd be run by people who actually understand and cherish technology as well as the forms of art they try to protect.)
In that scenario, maybe, just maybe, their members would be having more fun producing great art and appreciating the profits they do earn, and spending less time resenting the general public for using technology to do the exact sorts of things their predecessors have done for generations, just with lots more speed, frequency, and bandwidth.
Re:How to run your business into the crapper
on
Napster Not To Blame
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· Score: 1
they payed Mariah Carey some 40 million dollars not to produce anything new
Maybe they're just responding to market pressures?
I note how you are now attempting to use intimidation and harrassment to further your goals.
Hardly. I made no intimidating comments, nor did I "harrass" you in any way.
My conduct along these lines, of identifying what sort of "entity" you are, has been towards one fundamental purpose strongly related to the discussion at hand: exposing the importance of an open discussion of ideas to a free people.
This thread has seen its share of claims and counterclaims. I've "accused" you of lying and being a liar, yet all I can possibly be said to have actually done is accuse a spectre, a "/. identity", that is barely distinguishable, except by name and the presumed existence of an actual account, from "Anonymous Coward".
Now, after writing a long-winded comment assuming you were choosing to remain anonymous (a reasonable conclusion based on the content of your most recent comment), I just noticed that, in fact, you have added a URL to your web page on your/. identity.
So I'm modifying my comment accordingly, to take into account that fact, and I commend you for finally showing some real courage, if not in this thread per se, in revealing your real identity.
Prior to this, you'd accused me of all sorts of things, launching your attacks safe from public view, from public assessment of your other "works" outside of/., from even public determination of whether you really believe anything you say, perhaps being paid (by MS, say) just to write nasty, vicious lies about the GPL and about those who, like myself, defend it.
Yet I am wearing no such mask of anonymity. Yet, the whole time (and for a few years now), my identity has been clear to anyone willing to do even the tiniest bit of research.
In other words, it's entirely possible that, on my next interview for possible software consulting work, someone will ask me about my (to use your words) "highly impolite" behavior on/..
I'll have to handle that by looking them straight in the eye and responding.
Unlike you, I didn't post my comments thinking I could simply go about the rest of my life, secure in the knowledge that nobody knows about my/. identity, allowing me to trash other people's statements and reputations with impunity.
That's why I make very sure that my accusations are justified, documented, and rational.
And that's why I believe your counter-accusations are ill-informed, hate-filled, unprovable, and irrational (except probably for the "highly impolite" remark -- I'll grant you that one).
At least it's nice to see you're willing to take personal credit for them by pointing to your web site, Mr. Kraska, now that I've asked you to come out from behind your anonymous persona.
Yet, strangely, your answer to my simple challenge, for you to identify yourself, is to spew a few more insults and a few more baseless accusations, without acknowledging that you were revising your/. profile to include your web site.
No sane person is going to look at my online "profile" and conclude I represent anything approaching a threat to you via intimidation or harrassment.
Instead, they'll recognize, especially with my help in this comment, that I back up my claims (such as those about your statements and character) with my own personal reputation.
And that strongly parallels the differences between GPL'ed software development and proprietary software development.
With most GPL'ed projects, end users are fairly assured of being able to look at not only the source code, but at a history of just who made which contributions, introduced (or fixed) which bugs, wrote the best documentation, came up with the most wonderfully twisted, yet incisive, test cases, and so on.
Whereas with proprietary products, end users are usually presented with a monolith that reads "This Came From Proprietary Software Corp". They have no opportunity to view the source code, of course, nor can they make any reasonable attempts at assessing the competence of individual developers who contributed to the proprietary portions of the product.
A government authoring new software should definitely take this into account: will the proprietary developer, who wishes to cannibalize the public code for his own purposes, and having been found to have produced a buggy product, point the finger of blame at the public code without disclosing the exact interactions -- the source code and, further, the history of changes it made to it -- to back up his claims?
The answer was shown in this little thread of ours, until you revealed yourself.
You were given plenty of opportunity to back up your claims, which I consider to include some lies, with a combination of references to actual evidence (say, clauses in the GPL that forbid commercial use) and other factors, such as assurances that you know what you're talking about and are honest, based on your own personal history.
Until you changed your profile, even looking at your comment, you'd chosen to take the "proprietary" route: "My identity is of no concern. It is cburley [the one who is open and honest about who he is and what he believes] who is the real threat -- he is intimidating and harrassing people who attack his character!".
That is, in my experience, the proprietary vs. free-software story in a nutshell.
Sure, I've had some real serious fights with free-software people, especially RMS and Linus Torvalds, but these have been largely in the open, allowing the public to see just what I said and draw their own conclusions about me, my points, and my "opponents'" as well.
But nothing I've gone through in the free-software arena compares to the kind of cowardly hiding from responsibility that is typical of the proprietary-software world (and I'm not including Microsoft here, since I have no personal experiences working there).
In the proprietary software world, the whole point is to keep all sorts of stuff secret, supposedly solely for "profit", when, in reality, doing so serves a wider purpose of hiding data about culpability, responsibility, vulnerability, and so on.
Proprietary developers can pat themselves on the back as much as they like for what they're able to accomplish with the vast funding they're given.
But they're not even close to being in the same boat with free-software developers, who, at least down to the granularity of each individual's own workstation in most projects, have a fair likelihood of having to work daily under the bright lights of public view, with any random person taking issue with what or how they're doing usually able to email them, or complain to a public mailing list about their work.
The difference is like that between government beauracrats, who can pretty much write any regulations they want without close public scrutiny, and elected legislators, who have to at least put up with constant public attention to what they're doing on the job.
In line with my decades-long realization that the proprietary model is to the free-software model what the Soviet Union was to the USA -- closed vs. open; ridigly structured vs. loosely organized; and so on -- I've chosen to conduct myself on/. and other forums as a public figure just as I've done when developing public software, such as g77.
And, in line with your passionate love for proprietary software and its advantages, such that you feel government should cater to that specific software-distribution model or not develop software at all, instead of backing up your claims with evidence and your own personal reputation, you've chosen to suggest that I was somehow threatening you personally by asking you to reveal yourself after having attacked my character.
I realize none of this can possibly change your closed-source mind, miracles notwithstanding, but I hope it helps others understand why I'm so passionate -- not so much about the government GPL'ing code, which is not really a concern of mine per se -- but about honesty and integrity in discussions of public policy, which includes not "shading the truth" by making claims such as "GPL'ed software cannot be used for commercial purposes".
You see, in my view, one of the crucial differences between the American way of life and that of most of the rest of the world is the degree to which we value honesty and integrity in the dealings that we do allow to be in the open (which is a much larger set of dealings than many societies enjoy).
But if we, collectively, are unwilling to tell the God's honest truth about a matter as comparatively simple and unimportant as the degree to which the GPL is "anti-commerce" or "discriminatory", we show signs of having not much hope for openly and honestly assessing much more serious situations, such as the threat posed by Iraq.
What you have done is become increasingly shrill and aggressive, thrown around insults, stooped to name calling, and otherwise fully engaged yourself in the normal tactics of dominance
You haven't seen me "fully engaged".
Now, how about you come out from behind your cloak of anonymity so we can all learn who you actually are?
When did "to further progress of science and the useful arts" become "to further the profits of big business" anyway?
Thank you -- an excellent point.
Personally, I don't mind if the NSA or any other government agency chooses to use PD, or BSD, or GPL for distribution. If it's difficult to make a decision based solely on technical merit, but there happen to be substantial economic benefits to choosing, say, PD over GPL (say, if it might speed acceptance of a new protocol by making the implementation more attractive to software proprietors), I doubt I'd spend hours on/. screaming how that's "discriminatory" against GNU and the GPL.
So your point is well taken -- the government is not to be accused of "discrimination" simply because the public license under which it might choose to distribute software it writes happens to be inconvenient for a few existing businesses, thanks to distribution models to which they've grown accustomed.
The interesting thing, to me, about this whole discussion is how intent pro-MS types are on propagating lies and distortions about the GPL being "anti-business", "anti-corporate", "anti-commerce", and "discriminatory", rather than more calmly and rationally discussing the real issues, such as whether Linux is technically the best platform upon which to build a secure OS. (I'd have guessed OpenBSD, based purely on my impressions from reading stuff on the web, for what that's worth....)
Seeing the stack of cards upon which MS has built its anti-GPL efforts makes me wonder what they're really scared of, and what might be about to happen to their profitability, their stock price, etc. I mean, if they have nothing to fear due to having vastly more funding and all that other stuff, why propagate lies about the GPL?
The statement of character is yours, where you illustrate for the general public that the best you can do is become obusive when run out of intellectual ammunition. *sploink*. Omigosh, he's shooting blanks.
I have quite aptly demonstrated the way that GPL limits commercial organizations. This was my basis for observing that government should not be in the business of preferring or mandating such a license. Public domain is unrestricted, and should be the preferred model for works produced by the public's funds.
I have neither run out of intellectual ammunition nor have engaged in shooting blanks. I have ceased discussing the issues with a proven liar, who doesn't have the courage to admit that he's been telling lies, thus abdicating, in my view, any responsibility inherently necessary in a thoughtful discussion of the issues.
See this comment of mine for a more thorough rebuttal to your beliefs as stated by someone else not so insistent on telling lies and then pretending he didn't.
The GPL has one major restrictions. It requires that all derivative works also be released under the GPL, and that source code for those derivative works be made freely available.
That discriminates against against anyone who wants to take a public resource, which has been developed at the taxpayer expense, and add value to it through their own efforts, and then sell the finished product in order to support themselves and their development efforts.
How so? It might prevent them choosing a specific model for distribution of the software -- primarily, shrink-wrapped, proprietary, binary-only software under a highly-restrictive EULA -- but that's something they can choose to avoid, and still distribute the software.
After all, even Microsoft, the Poster Child for the "GPL Is Anti-Capitalist" argument, distributes (presumably MS-modified) GPL'ed software, as I pointed out in another comment.
In other words, businesses can choose to improve and distribute GPL'ed software. Just not in a way that takes away freedoms compared to the freedoms users would have with the original GPL'ed software.
That's not discriminatory, except in some sick, twisted mentality that believes there's no distinction between personal choices and individual rights, such that anything someone might choose to do must not only be their right to do, but must be fully funded by society if any other choice they might make is funded by society.
As an example, you presumably believe that since the government funded the building of roads for driving from point A to point B at moderate speeds, and since some people would rather drive in circles at 200mph, the refusal of the government to fully fund race tracks is discriminatory.
Now, in the sense that simply making a choice is "discriminatory", it might be, but you're clearly using it in the sense of immorality, or at least negative connoting public decision-making, which is utter nonsense.
If their additions to the software have no value, then no one would have any reason to buy thier software, because the baseline work that the government developed would be freely available to everyone if released in the public domain.
Following your line of reasoning, the government must never develop any public-domain code, since corporations like Microsoft, which prefer to distribute code for which it has a monopoly, would be discriminated against!
The government and public could see benefits from the use of such proprietary software.
But it'll never see the source, nor have the right to make copies, nor to discuss benchmark results, nor anything else placed in the EULA for the proprietary software, even though it contains code developed for and by the public on the public dime.
If the benefits are greater than the price the developer is charging for their software, then people will buy it, if not, then people won't. The proprietary software isn't getting anything for free that anyone else didn't get.
You seem to be confused -- proprietary software is not an individual or organization. So let's recast your argument in terms of actual entities to which governments are responsible:
The proprietary software
developer isn't getting anything for free that anyone else didn't get.
There, that's better, isn't it?
And, hey, that statement is 100% true when the publically-developed software is GPL'ed, or BSD'ed, or AL'ed, just like it is when it's PD'ed (public-domain'ed)!
GPLed software doesn't produce direct profits for it's developers.
It can, and sometimes it does. There's nothing in the license that prevents it from happening. In fact, the more end users learn to insist on having the source code and other GPL-style freedoms, the more opportunity businesses will have to profit from developing and distributing GPL'ed software. (Certainly, the profits to be had from developing and distributing proprietary software will evaporate!)
I don't see any need for the govenment to step in and support one over the other. The government should make ther results of it's efforts equally available to both.
The government's job is not to "balance" between models of distribution of software -- rather, it should seek to balance issues involving the best interests of the public, private interests, and so on. (Unless you're prepared to show me constitutional language specifying that the government must be business-model-neutral in all its transactions?)
I don't see that the private interests Microsoft has to distribute highly-restricted derivatives of public software for profit weigh enough over the public interest in having all programs containing certain public software come with source and related GPL-style freedoms.
But let's at least agree to honestly characterize the issue as that, rather than pretend as though the government is supposed to choose between distribution models as if they're all morally equivalent, when they're not.
It should be released into the public domain so that everyone has equal access to it. GPL is not in the best interest of all members of the public in all cases. If the governemnt allows equall access to everyone, the public can then decide what it wants.
Software released under the GPL is software to which everyone has equal access, despite your attempts to mischaracterize it. The GPL is in the best interest of all members of the public in many, though differently many, cases that PD is -- but PD distribution is not always in the best interests. (Consider software that performs a very critical life-saving task, which needs frequent checking of source by a wide body of people from various fields, a body that grows, changes, and learns, over time. If the software is PD, it'll find its way into proprietary distributions that will be unfixable when bugs are found in the PD version of the software, unless the single corporation that owns the copyright on the unfixable software agrees to fix it. The result? People will die. So PD isn't always the best option -- in this case, the GPL would be, among the choices being discussed.)
So, since distributing under the GPL is, as I have shown, non-discriminatory, then it is a valid option, and the public can choose how best to accept it, in what forms, etc. Just as with PD or BSD'ed software -- only the shape of the "freedom envelope" is different.
C, Ada, and FORTRAN are industry standards created by standards organizations with input from members of the public. THese languages do not put restrictions on how they can be used or how products that are created with them may be distributed. Linux is also created with input from the public, but the GPL places serious restrictions on derivative works.
This is almost entirely wrong, since those "standards" are, or at least for a time were, not free for the public to improve and copy on their own! And, of course, Linux place even fewer restrictions on itself as an implementation than did any of those language standards on mere copies of their documents! (Not that these are what I would considered "highly-restrictive" standards as a result, just that, if you're going to draw moral equivalences between a restriction such as "you must not prohibit any friends you share this with from sharing it with others" and "you must not discuss, look at, benchmark, or copy this for friends", then a restriction against making extra copies of a standard for friends for free is just as onerous as Linux not "allowing" itself to be cloned as a proprietary product.)
So, for the most part, Linux is as free and public an implementation of software as C, Ada, and FORTRAN are as standards for computing languages. There are subtle differences in terms of exactly what you are and are not free to do with them, but, again, for the most part, they are public projects which invite (or invited) public input, unlike any proprietary software or developer thereof.
The development of secure OSs is in the public's best interest. But there are many different OSs, and the govenment shouldn't be supporting one type of OS or License over another.
But it has to choose, if it is going to do something, unless you're arguing that it must fund identical changes to every single OS/license combination presently deployed on the planet to avoid being "discriminatory".
This is pure nonsense, <RANT>but seems to be the natural result of the mindless, judgement-free, multicultural elitist crap that's been taught in our schools too long</RANT>. (I feel better now.)
When government chooses to build roads for cars, it necessarily "discriminates" against other modes of transport, both real and mythical. Some of that can't help but hurt actual businesses.
But at least those businesses have a valid complaint in that it is incredibly non-trivial to re-engineer their planes and trains to use the new roads, now that there are more of them.
Software companies like Microsoft have nowhere near that level of hurdle to jump -- they can choose immediately to distribute GPL'ed software in its existing form, for profit, simply stamped with their own corporate logo. To the extent they modify it to coexist and cooperate with their own proprietary software, they will probably be able to sell even more of it.
Unix for Windows is a telling example of this: MS is selling this, presumably, for profit, chock full of GPL'ed code. For people who want some assurance that MS is standing behind a Unix compatibility layer for Windows, this is worth paying for, even though they might be able to legally snarf the GPL components from other sources.
Your other explanations and arguments, which I haven't quoted, stand, in my opinion, on their own quite well. They have almost nothing to do with licensing issues, and they don't explain, to me, why you waste a single moment trying to justify a pro-MS, anti-GPL position when it comes to government funding of software.
All I can suggest is that if the NSA believes producing a secure version of Linux is, from a purely technical perspective, in the best interest of the country, the fact that it's GPL'ed should not matter one whit, since the GPL is a nondiscriminatory license designed specifically for free public software (the "P" stands for "Public", after all).
You might feel that's a poor technical choice. I'm not prepared to disagree with that!
...
One final question: all governments on the planet, considered in totality, provide a vast source of funding for proprietary software developers, in return for software that they can't examine, can't discuss, can't share with the very people who provide the source for that funding (namely, the taxpayers), depending on the various EULA's and special exemptions.
Given that fact, and the fact that the comparative expenditures of all governments to fund public software probably amount to less than 1% of the total (but I'm guessing at that)...
...is it really fair to discuss the propriety (heh;-) of NSA's funding of improvements to Linux under the GPL in isolation, as if the government wasn't already massively funding one business model (represented by Microsoft and Oracle) to the exclusion of another (represented by the FSF and GNU) by virtue of its purchases of software?
I'm just wondering how "holistically" you're willing to apply your own interest in "balancing" the choices between distribution models and OS choices....
For someone who claims the high road and a position of reason, you certainly are prone to hyperbolous, inflammatory, and, I might add, highly impolite remarks.
You previously had the chance to concede that I was, in fact, telling the truth about GPL'ed code vis-a-vis corporate use, yet you chose to obscure the issues further by claiming I was actually misleading the public.
You could have simply agreed with me that the statement "GPL results in software which is restricted, and not available to everyone" was a lie (one that you told), and then gone on to explain how more-restrictive licenses prevented combining such software with GPL'ed software followed by distribution to others (which would have undercut your argument, I admit, since it'd put the burden of blame on the more-restrictive licenses), and how that inconvenience should be taken into account when considering public policy.
But, no, you chose to go with the Big Lie that the GPL is somehow inherently anti-commerce, anti-corporate, that GPL'ed software "isn't for everyone", and went on to spin a yarn suggesting that I was the one misleading people.
That was pathetic, and it will stand as an "eternal testament" to your character here on/..
So I stand by my previous remarks, which you castigate as "hyperbolous, inflammatory, and highly impolite". If you're going to play with the fire of deceit, expect to get burned.
A corporation cannot, as a matter of reduction to practice, incorporate a (full) GPL product in a release of its own software, because doing so
requires them to give up intellectual property rights on their own works (the linking clause, read it yourself). While a few corporations might
succeed based on a strict service model, this is the minority of them by a long stretch, and is otherwise inimical to the more normal conduct of
commerce.
Ah, so now we see how you modify your lies to make them a little more palatable.
But you're still lying, since "the more normal conduct of commerce", when it comes to software, is not to distribute it as shrink-wrapped, proprietary software. That's a minority model for software, in terms of developed lines of code, probably in terms of deployed lines of code as well. Most software is developed for in-house use only, which is a model with which the GPL is quite compatible.
And there's no real reason for the government to tiptoe around, as if on eggshells, specific business models employed by a minority of software developers in the commercial sector.
Further, as you seem to be aware, though you perhaps try to hard to avoid mentioning it, there is a history of corporations choosing to re-license their code specifically so it can coexist with GPL'ed software as a single executable. (Not merely so they can be "connected", as you suggest in another comment.) I believe IBM's Jikes and Next's Objective-C compilers are two such examples; the steady stream of corporate contributions of patches to GPL'ed code bases are less-prominent, but perhaps, on the whole, more substantial and contemporary ones.
Still, it's nice to see you're getting away from the lie that "corporations cannot use GPL'ed code", finally, though you're having to be dragged kicking and screaming to it. A sad permanent public commentary on your character. What a cowardly display.
SFU includes the Interix subsystem technology with both Korn and C shells, over 350 UNIX utilities and an SDK that supports over 1,900 UNIX APIs, giving programmers and system administrators the tools to easily migrate applications and scripts to Windows. Additionally, the GNU SDK and key GNU compilers and utilities are provided. All running natively on SFU.
This is even clearer evidence than "Windows Services for UNIX 3.0", which could possibly be interpreted as saying the GNU code isn't, itself, actually included, which is why I double-checked.
When I pointed this out to my MS-employee sister a month or so ago, her comment was something along the lines of "And you didn't get paid for it! Doh!".
To me, this is wonderful, because I can't think of a way to more clearly and forcefully illustrate as lies claims like "the GPL is anti-commercial".
But the pro-MS liars are, and will continue to be, out in full force on this and related issues. (I wonder how many of them actually gain financially from this relationship, which will permanently document them, on forums such as/., as liars?)
Sigh...that should read: Let me ask you this: if the public comes to decide that it won't, with rare exception, accept software without accompanying source code, exactly what would that mean in terms of this discussion?
Microsoft already does release GPL'ed code it did not write...
Not relevant.
It became relevant when you lied thusly:
So proprietary software vendors (like Microsoft) DON'T get to use the improvements - at least not verbatim. The improvements carry the
Gnu Public Virus and can't be integrated into the vendor's code base without risking a suit from the FSF for GPL violation.
The counterfact is, Microsoft has been using GPL'ed improvements to GPL'ed software, integrated into its own "code base", whatever you mean by that, and yet does not risk a suit, because they're following the simple rules of the GPL, I assume.
Here's another thing Microsoft can't do with any government code put out in the public domain: it can't monopolize access to that code the way it does to Windows code it writes itself
But we're not talking about code in the public domain. We're talking about code under the GPL.
Excuse me, apparently the concept of "analogy" is foreign to you.
Once I remove the lies from your case, all it boils down to is "Microsoft can't use the code in the context of the business model it chooses to employ with some of its software".
My point is that the same thing can be said of the government authoring and distributing public-domain code -- Microsoft can't use the business model of being the sole supplier of that code, and any of its derivatives, to the public.
I'm simply trying to get you -- or, since you appear to be willfully lying to protect Microsoft's business interests, others reading your "arguments" -- to see that it is Microsoft's, not the government's, Linus Torvalds, RMS's, or my, choice whether to integrate GPL'ed code into its "code base" and distribute the derived results.
Such code is "monopolized" by the Open Source Community.
Since that equals "the public", including all public and private corporations, businesses, institutions, charities, governments, as well as individuals, I fail to see how your use of the word "monopolized" is anything other than a Terrible Lie.
I guess you think the alphabet is "monopolized" by the "Open Source community" as well, since nobody else is allowed to copyright it?
If the code were in the public domain (or under some other licenses, such as BSD), Microsoft could integrate it, or its features, with the core of its own systems, and distribute them without revealing the source.
But not revealing the source is entirely their agenda -- it is not the public agenda by any means. (At best, the public might be said to be neutral on the issue. But when it comes to publically funded code, I think it's fair to say the public has more of an interest in ensuring that all programs distributed containing that code come with source, so the public can continue to benefit from improvements made thereto; can continue to help by fixing bugs found in it; can verify claims made about enhancements made to it by private parties; and so on.)
But the code is under the GPL. The GPL is a RESTRICTIVE LICENSE, based on copyright.
Yes, and the prohibitions against slavery are restrictive since they assure freedom.
Really, the only "restrictions" in the GPL are to ensure that freedom to use the code as you see fit is never taken away by a third party.
You seem to have a problem with that.
If Microsoft integrates such code into one of its OSes, that puts the whole OS under the GPL and requires Microsoft to release the source.
Then it shouldn't integrate such code into one of its OSes, or it should pick a different distribution model that allows source-code distribution -- clearly a feature that distinguishes Linux, which many claim is feature-poor, insecure, poorly written, etc. -- from competitors.
Surely Microsoft can be grown-up enough to deal with the choices life throws at it -- choices between contributing further to the public weal and simply continuing to distribute secret, proprietary code for profit, code that does not get to contain certain publically-funded improvements to free, public projects like Linux?
And the NSA's changes aren't ADDITIONS to Linux, but MODIFICATIONS to it. So they're a derived work, and if the NSA releases it it MUST release it under GPL. They don't have the option to release their enhancements into the public domain or under any other license.
False. They can certainly refrain from copyrighting their code, simply make it public domain. All they are required to do is distribute it as source, which allows anyone to use the combination of their enhancements plus the original GPL'ed product.
Linux is under the GPL, a restirictive license that makes its internals useful to the Open Source Community but not Microsoft.
You've already implicitly acknowledged that this is a lie, yet you restate it here. Microsoft can certainly use the internals of Linux in ways that are useful to it, just not all the ways that are convenient to its current business practices -- as is the case with BSD'd code, as is the case with PD'd code, and so on.
Microsoft's OSes are under the Microsoft ELUA, a restrictive license that makes them useful to Microsoft (and to some extent to its customers) but not to the Open Source community.
Ah, I just love your attempt at "moral equivalence" here. "GPL is a restrictive license which excludes Microsoft in favor of a small community; MS's EULA is a restrictive license which excludes the small community in favor of Microsoft; therefore they are morally equivalent, and the government, by choosing one, disfavors the other."
Of course, your arguments are based on lies, which you've apparently carefully constructed after studying the issues deeply, given how much verbeage and arrogance you're expressing in your "opinions" -- which might as well be fully funded by Microsoft.
Here's the truth: GPL's license restricts only, for all intents and purposes, private parties from adding other restrictions to software, so it favors everyone, and disfavors those who would take away freedoms from the public.
MS's EULA restricts people from viewing, talking about, benchmarking, copying, reverse-engineering, etc., etc., their code, so it favors only Microsoft (by easing their business-model issues) and disfavors everyone else.
Once a person understands the truth, it no longer seems difficult to understand why NSA choosing to enhance Linux is not morally equivalent to NSA choosing to enhance MS Windows with code available, subsequently, only to Microsoft, despite your claims to the contrary.
The NSA is just as much in the wrong when it uses taxpayer funds to enhance Linux and give the enhancements to the Open Source Community but not Microsoft as it would be if it used the same funds to enhance Windows 2000 and give the enhancements to
Microsoft but not to the Open Source Community.
Another attempt at equivalencing that, thankfully, marginally intelligent children would see through: Linux not being a corporation, but a free, public body of code, just like federal law, the FORTRAN, Ada, and C languages, and tons of other free-with-source software implementations the government has chosen, over single-vendor proprietary competition, to improve on the public dime.
I don't like it either. And I understand that the viral terms of the GPL exist explicitly to prevent a variation of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", to wit: "Embrace, Enhance, Exclude".
For someone who doesn't "like it", you seem to be engaging in plenty of pro-Microsoft deceptive advocacy.
But if the Open Source Community licenses its work in a way that excludes the closed-source community from using the result, it must expect to work without government subsidies.
No, again, you have it exactly backwards: if the closed-source community licenses its work in a way that excludes Free Software from using the result, it must expect to work without government subsidies.
The cost to a closed-source company for using GPLed code has been characterized as "more expensive than money".
Yet Microsoft continues to do it. As do Red Hat, IBM, and so on.
Let me ask you this: if the public comes to decide that it won't, without rare exception, except software without accompanying source code, exactly what would that mean in terms of this discussion?
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, thanks for pointing it out to me, and I should have viewed the HTML source myself, since it is quite simple, rather than bothering you.
Turns out the problem was that while I'd configured my Netscape 4.77 (yes, I know...) to use 18-pt fonts for the Western character set, your document uses Unicode, which I hadn't changed from 12-pt fonts.
Until just now, anyway!
Any possibility you could take the font specifications out of your HTML, or make the fonts more readable, or something?
Huh?? I mean, I can understand the 5 inches larger part, but less than 1 year old? That's a combination I'll have trouble getting out of my mind's eye for awhile!
(Oh, you meant "it was", not "they were"? Nevermind! ;-)
More likely: the license, and a highly-restrictive one at that. (No reverse engineering, modification, multiple backup, copying, or publishing performance data....)
GNU Genes to the rescue!
Guess nobody cares about the "little guys" in the aerospace industry anymore....
Nope; I heard it was possible to get a job as a "core-stringer", or whatever they called it, at a Digital Equipment Corporation plant in a Boston suburb around the mid-'70s.
(Considering applying for it myself, and maybe I did, but can't recall for sure. Not really the kind of work I'm good at, though, so it was just as well.)
"Sedated"?? Uh...not always the cause of not remembering the forecasts.
Unfair comparison. US citizens have inalienable rights given them by their Creator.
Subjects, on the other hand, have privileges granted them by their masters (today, called "governments").
And what governments grant today, they can take back tomorrow.
Huh?? I'm an "average USian", but when I think "BBC", I think of thoroughly-researched, to-the-point documentaries like the one on the annual Spaghetti Harvest in Italy.
Nope, since Congress already has given the President the authority to bomb Iraq, if that's what he decides is best. (If Congress wishes to disagree, it can vote accordingly, rescinding, or whatever the proper term is, its 1991 and 2001 votes.)
As far as HP/Compaq, I'm unaware of any prior vote of stockholders in favor of the merger.
There's no comparison -- Gacy's killings were not in self-defense against a mob of toddlers. They were basically one-at-a-time murders.
Really, to suggest that what Hat was dealing with in any way resembled what Gacy did is to ignore the very real dangers posed by roaming gangs of toddlers.
Thank goodness sanity prevailed -- Hat's been freed, not Gacy, pathetic attempts at moral equivalency notwithstanding.
Indeed, and your points are well-taken. Even though they've been made countless times over the many years in many forums, there's plenty of evidence people still need to be reminded of not only the basic issues surrounding the GPL and copyright law (on which it's based), but of the need to study the issues further, roughly to the same degree they're considering the ways in which they want their own GPL'ed code to be legally used and/or in which they want to legally use someone else's GPL'ed code.
It also seems to take constant attention to remind people that it is not the GPL that is "viral" -- it's copyright law that defines a work as "derived" from all the substantial sources of which it is composed. Pretty much every license relies on this "viral" nature.
What distinguishes licenses like BSD from the GPL is that the GPL preserves certain copyright protections, in order to preserve certain freedoms, that the other licenses give up.
In practice, the BSD license gives up so many protections that inhere in copyright that it's probably the case that lots of works deriving from BSD'd code do not meet the strict legal requirements of the license plus copyright. Since the few remaining protections amount to so little, and, unlike the GPL, there doesn't seem to be a strong contingent willing to defend its terms, it's not surprising many people and organizations incorporating BSD'd code into their own works find little impetus to follow both the spirit and the letter of the remaining tatters, so to speak.
That, of course, greatly simplifies, for both the original and derived-work authors, the task of determining whether there's some kind of infringement: the answer is, almost always, "never mind; even if there is, what could it matter?". My impression is that, in practice, BSD'd code gets treated a lot like public domain code, by both sides of the fence (original and derived-work authors).
For those putting code under the GPL and holding onto their copyright (not signing it over to the FSF, for example), who are unprepared to defend the licensing terms they've chosen or, upon discovering infringement, sign over the rights to do so to someone else who will (like the FSF), the main advantage of the GPL over BSD/PD is the appearance of a sort of "white picket fence" around their code, over which only someone fairly intent on infringing is likely to jump.
In my view, about the only way in which the GPL can be said to be "uniquely viral" is in the sense that it uniquely protects the ability of people in possession of GPL-derived works to freely modify and distribute them, as long as they do so under the terms of the GPL.
But the fact that it "claims" to apply to derived works is not, in itself, uniquely viral. Such claims are inherent in all licenses based on copyright, including typical shrink-wrap and click-through EULAs, and matter except in the cases of licenses that disclaim so many copyright protections that few people treat code licensed under their terms as anything more protected than public-domain code.
So most other licenses fully employ the "viral" nature of copyright law, but do so either:
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Because the GPL steers so carefully between these extremes -- neither rejecting the freedom to modify and distribute copies outright, nor allowing someone else to do so in derived works -- it comes under attack, as a concept as well as a license, from both sides.To preserve the rights of the authors to be the only ones who can modify and distribute copies
To disclaim so many of the rights of the authors so as to allow derived-work authors to preserve their own rights to their contributions to their works to be the only ones who can modify and distribute copies
And considering only the issue of non-author redistribution and relicensing privileges, the GPL does indeed seem to be less than perfectly free, just as it's certainly less than proprietary (though certainly not "less free" than typical proprietary licenses, despite what some might claim).
Of course, there are larger issues than just that one that drove the creation of the GPL, explaining its placement in the "middle" of that "degree of freedom to redistribute someone else's code" vector. These issues include the importance of having source code to a complicated product, of allowing anyone to enjoy the examination, modification, and redistribution privileges for a body of code, and so on.
The GPL's construction to serve these larger issues has led many to conclude, and, in my opinion, correctly, that the GPL's placement in that vector is "just right", neither too cold (proprietary) or too warm (so free that derived works can themselves be proprietary).
As far as how to determine at what point a work derives from another, I personally find the Golden Rule (which perhaps has different names in faith traditions other than the one with which I'm most familiar) to be very helpful.
If I want to use a "short snippet" of someone else's code in my work, I ask myself how I would feel if a comparatively short snippet of my own work, over which I'd labored mightily and, say, expected to get paid by others to use, was similarly incorporated into someone else's.
If I'd feel their work derived from mine in such a case, then it's clear I should consider my use of their short snippet to be a case of deriving my work partly from theirs. (If I don't, that doesn't mean I'm not deriving it, just that I wouldn't, presumably, care if the roles were reversed.)
This approach clarifies oft-put examples such as "suppose only .01% of the code in a program is someone else's [GPL'ed, not that it matters] code; wouldn't such a small percentage mean it isn't derived from that code?".
After all, if your only claim to fame was to have composed a one-hour symphony, would you feel its direct incorporation into someone else's 10000-hour piece of musical drek constituted infringement? I sure would; so the percentage does not matter per se.
And given how much "excitement" there has been in the music industry over uses of incredibly short samples of someone else's music, it's much easier to see why focusing on how "tiny" an amount of someone else's [GPL'ed] code is not really the sole basis upon which to assess the issue of whether a work derives from someone else's code.
On the other hand, I wouldn't consider someone writing a novel in which the sole text that could be claimed to belong to someone else consisted of the proper name in a sentence like "He was a spy, but not the James Bond type of spy" to have derived from my work, if I was Ian Fleming or his heirs, though I don't know how the courts would rule.
IANAL, but I believe the answer is: when your software is considered a derived work of GPL'ed code, according to the copyright law of the land.
There is, as far as I can tell, no "bright line" between when this does and does not happen, nor can one be made to exist, short of "everything infringes" or, more practically, "nothing infringes".
I've written about this principle in length on USENET's gnu.misc.discuss group in the past, if you want to search for my posts from years ago.
But the main thing to remember is: just because we're dealing with technology here doesn't mean we can expect to, or expect the law to, draw us a nice, technologically clean "line" between infringing copyright and not infringing it.
So, the question being "does my program derived from GPL'ed code?", two things, at least, must be answered:
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As you should be able to infer from the above, these questions cannot be trivially answered by resorting to redefining "work" as "single linked executable", since a court might reasonable rule that the work actually consists of two or more executables (or binaries generally) cooperating so closely as to consistute a single work, making that collective work a derivation of GPL'ed software if any one of its components is.What actually constitutes your program, which, in copyright terms, is the "work"?
Does that work contain a substantial portion of someone else's GPL'ed code?
Anyway, since the GPL "protects" code no further than copyright law defines "derived work", it cannot definitely answer the question.
Instead, all it can do is limit the degree to which copyright law's view of a "derived work" might extend beyond what the GPL intended to protect.
Hence things like the "mere aggregation" clause.
But something just occurred to me that is probably blindingly obvious to everyone else.
Technologies such as the printing press, radio, television, and the Internet have substantially increased the "connectivity" of people and organizations over the last buncha centuries.
Over that entire period, there has never really been a society that has been able to completely "stamp out" casual, unauthorized sharing of information between friends and neighbors. (Sure, some have tried: totalitarian regimes, communist regimes, and so on.)
That's because it's a hard problem -- asymptotically hard to stop sharing of information as you approach the "solidarity" of components of the communications matrix, i.e. neighbors physically close to each other (they can hear each other play music), friends and family who enjoy and trust each other enough to visit each other, and so on.
Put these two things together and, so far, all you have is what everyone else has been saying for awhile: "it's the new communications technologies that have enabled more and easier sharing of information of various shades -- white [legal], black [illegal & dangerous], and gray [illegal as a matter of law in that it infringes someone else's intellectual privilege]".
What just hit me is that the copyright cartels -- in fact, everyone who has any interest in holding copyright, patent, or trademark privilege (a term I use in lieu of "rights", which connotes something with which I'm uncomfortable) -- also enjoy the same kinds of improvements in ease, frequency, and amount of intercommunication as a result of these technological improvements.
For example, sure, FTP, email, chat, P2P, and so on make it much easier for 15-year-olds to have a vastly wider collection of "friends" with whom to share illegally copied music, but the same underlying technologies correspondingly enable the RIAA, MPAA, and all its members (artists, studios, movie houses, whatever) to communicate rapidly and effectively among its members, to increase its audience of members, and so on.
Given that fact, I'm now even less sympathetic to the argument that government should be in the business of assisting copyright holders in creating artificial scarcity in technology and its uses, by mandating digital-rights-management systems, by shutting down technologies like Napster, and so on, since there seems to be no corresponding limitations placed on copyright holders to not use these same technologies as effectively.
In essence, I'm coming more around to the view I've seen others propose, a sort of survival-of-the-fittest-user-of-new-technology view, that the government should leave the various players free to employ and exploit the technologies, and let market forces and the rule of law (a simpler, more practical law by far than we have, and especially than the RIAA/MPAA/software-producers are urging, in the area of intellectual privilege) iron things out.
Over time, those seeking to protect copies of information will find ways to employ technological improvements to hunt down and bring prominent, profiteering infringers to justice, a resolution for which copyright law has long provided.
Meanwhile, "ordinary folk" who now "illegally" share their favorite music with hundreds or thousands of friends, thanks to technology, instead of 10 or 20 as they would have a century ago, will continue to be able to engage in this sort of under-the-radar, relatively unimportant (compared to what other things governments must deal with these days), sharing. As long as individuals aren't taking the kinds of steps needed to make such sharing profitable, they'd be extremely unlikely to be targeted for prosecution -- and their use of technology to make friends and share with them all sorts of things, including illegally copied stuff, wouldn't be artificially crippled by government serving as a massively-funded militia for the RIAA/MPAA.
While there will be short-term instances of one side "winning" over the other, just as is the case in any reasonably free market, the government would never be able to move rapidly enough to legislate the solution before the "balance of power" is restored due to what would be an ongoing, nonviolent arms race anyway, so why even go further down this path, and why not roll back what "we" have done already (get rid of the DAT tax, any legal mandates for stuff like SCMS)?
In my opinion, it is much more important for our civilization (worldwide) that we let people freely use technology to make and keep new friends, using the wide variety of common interests that have worked for millenia, rather than seek to shut down certain types of interactions that by no stretch of the imagination pose a direct threat to civilization.
So if the RIAA, MPAA, and other copyright holders seeking to short-circuit technological progress and availability to the public, to protect their own "turf", want to have their way, we should insist that our government restrain them correspondingly by crippling their use of technology -- as a simple example, say "fine, if you don't let ordinary people buy computers that can freely copy information because it might contain music, then you can no longer use computers in your business at all".
(In general, I think if government legislators were empowered to impose greater restrictions on those seeking its power to restrict others without blindingly obvious cause, and expected to use that power, we'd see much less abuse of government, especially in ways that translate directly into abuse, or removal, of our own freedoms.)
But that's not going to happen -- it's just a "mind experiment" I find useful to play with myself when considering how I might want to limit someone else's freedoms to serve my own interests. (Which is why I've pretty much ended up in the libertarian camp; there's not much, in the form of behaviors in which people engage, that I'm willing to sacrifice my own property or life to prevent people engaging in. But that's just because I, personally, would rather live in a world with, say, more marijuana users than risk dying trying to win a war on drugs; others would certainly make different choices using the same "razor" to consider them. Imposing one's will on others is so much easier, and therefore so thoughtlessly engaged in, when one doesn't expect to ever face the hard task of the imposition itself, given one's access to government and other forms of policing.)
In summary, the rising tide of technology lifts all boats, so government interference in the form of trying to deny billions of "little boats", representing ordinary people sharing music and software with friends, their opportunity to rise with the tide, ultimately amounts to trying to selectively block a rising tide -- a futile attempt to block its benefits for the many while allowing it for just a few of the big boats (the RIAA, MPAA, SPA, and their members). The damage such a misguided effort, in an actual ocean, with nearly unlimited funds would likely do to the little boats and the harbor itself (imagine what sorts of approaches today's $Trillion governments and the means to acquire more funding by force would likely be encouraged to try), parallels what the government is likely to do to billions of innocent people and the civilization that cradles those governments if it follows the path it's been on for 10+ years now and heeds the recommendations of the copyright cartels.
(I realize this idea boils down to "let the free market rather than government intervention decide", which is a very old idea. Sorry about that; sometimes very old ideas are the best ones we have. And, in practice, it's going to happen anyway; I'm arguing mainly for limiting the scope, timeframe, and amount of the damage done by fruitlessly trying to legislate and prosecute the kind of sharing of information that is not directly harmful to copyright holders and the public.)
I think it's reasonable to conclude that if government had the integrity to "Just Say No" to restricting the public's use of technology when organizations like the RIAA and MPAA came to them, hat (and $$) in hand, those organizations would long ago have figured out how to employ advancing technology to better serve their interests.
(For one thing, instead of being run by lawyers, maybe they'd be run by people who actually understand and cherish technology as well as the forms of art they try to protect.)
In that scenario, maybe, just maybe, their members would be having more fun producing great art and appreciating the profits they do earn, and spending less time resenting the general public for using technology to do the exact sorts of things their predecessors have done for generations, just with lots more speed, frequency, and bandwidth.
Maybe they're just responding to market pressures?
That was a joke, son.
(You have based most of your arguments on the importance of closed-source software, y'see, so it's a pertinent play on "close-minded".)
Try reading it and thinking, instead of just typing insults and punching "Submit", for a change.
Hardly. I made no intimidating comments, nor did I "harrass" you in any way.
My conduct along these lines, of identifying what sort of "entity" you are, has been towards one fundamental purpose strongly related to the discussion at hand: exposing the importance of an open discussion of ideas to a free people.
This thread has seen its share of claims and counterclaims. I've "accused" you of lying and being a liar, yet all I can possibly be said to have actually done is accuse a spectre, a "/. identity", that is barely distinguishable, except by name and the presumed existence of an actual account, from "Anonymous Coward".
Now, after writing a long-winded comment assuming you were choosing to remain anonymous (a reasonable conclusion based on the content of your most recent comment), I just noticed that, in fact, you have added a URL to your web page on your /. identity.
So I'm modifying my comment accordingly, to take into account that fact, and I commend you for finally showing some real courage, if not in this thread per se, in revealing your real identity.
Prior to this, you'd accused me of all sorts of things, launching your attacks safe from public view, from public assessment of your other "works" outside of /., from even public determination of whether you really believe anything you say, perhaps being paid (by MS, say) just to write nasty, vicious lies about the GPL and about those who, like myself, defend it.
Yet I am wearing no such mask of anonymity. Yet, the whole time (and for a few years now), my identity has been clear to anyone willing to do even the tiniest bit of research.
In other words, it's entirely possible that, on my next interview for possible software consulting work, someone will ask me about my (to use your words) "highly impolite" behavior on /..
I'll have to handle that by looking them straight in the eye and responding.
Unlike you, I didn't post my comments thinking I could simply go about the rest of my life, secure in the knowledge that nobody knows about my /. identity, allowing me to trash other people's statements and reputations with impunity.
That's why I make very sure that my accusations are justified, documented, and rational.
And that's why I believe your counter-accusations are ill-informed, hate-filled, unprovable, and irrational (except probably for the "highly impolite" remark -- I'll grant you that one).
At least it's nice to see you're willing to take personal credit for them by pointing to your web site, Mr. Kraska, now that I've asked you to come out from behind your anonymous persona.
Yet, strangely, your answer to my simple challenge, for you to identify yourself, is to spew a few more insults and a few more baseless accusations, without acknowledging that you were revising your /. profile to include your web site.
No sane person is going to look at my online "profile" and conclude I represent anything approaching a threat to you via intimidation or harrassment.
Instead, they'll recognize, especially with my help in this comment, that I back up my claims (such as those about your statements and character) with my own personal reputation.
(It wouldn't be the first time I had to deal with such attacks.)
And that strongly parallels the differences between GPL'ed software development and proprietary software development.
With most GPL'ed projects, end users are fairly assured of being able to look at not only the source code, but at a history of just who made which contributions, introduced (or fixed) which bugs, wrote the best documentation, came up with the most wonderfully twisted, yet incisive, test cases, and so on.
Whereas with proprietary products, end users are usually presented with a monolith that reads "This Came From Proprietary Software Corp". They have no opportunity to view the source code, of course, nor can they make any reasonable attempts at assessing the competence of individual developers who contributed to the proprietary portions of the product.
A government authoring new software should definitely take this into account: will the proprietary developer, who wishes to cannibalize the public code for his own purposes, and having been found to have produced a buggy product, point the finger of blame at the public code without disclosing the exact interactions -- the source code and, further, the history of changes it made to it -- to back up his claims?
The answer was shown in this little thread of ours, until you revealed yourself.
You were given plenty of opportunity to back up your claims, which I consider to include some lies, with a combination of references to actual evidence (say, clauses in the GPL that forbid commercial use) and other factors, such as assurances that you know what you're talking about and are honest, based on your own personal history.
Until you changed your profile, even looking at your comment, you'd chosen to take the "proprietary" route: "My identity is of no concern. It is cburley [the one who is open and honest about who he is and what he believes] who is the real threat -- he is intimidating and harrassing people who attack his character!".
That is, in my experience, the proprietary vs. free-software story in a nutshell.
Sure, I've had some real serious fights with free-software people, especially RMS and Linus Torvalds, but these have been largely in the open, allowing the public to see just what I said and draw their own conclusions about me, my points, and my "opponents'" as well.
But nothing I've gone through in the free-software arena compares to the kind of cowardly hiding from responsibility that is typical of the proprietary-software world (and I'm not including Microsoft here, since I have no personal experiences working there).
In the proprietary software world, the whole point is to keep all sorts of stuff secret, supposedly solely for "profit", when, in reality, doing so serves a wider purpose of hiding data about culpability, responsibility, vulnerability, and so on.
Proprietary developers can pat themselves on the back as much as they like for what they're able to accomplish with the vast funding they're given.
But they're not even close to being in the same boat with free-software developers, who, at least down to the granularity of each individual's own workstation in most projects, have a fair likelihood of having to work daily under the bright lights of public view, with any random person taking issue with what or how they're doing usually able to email them, or complain to a public mailing list about their work.
The difference is like that between government beauracrats, who can pretty much write any regulations they want without close public scrutiny, and elected legislators, who have to at least put up with constant public attention to what they're doing on the job.
In line with my decades-long realization that the proprietary model is to the free-software model what the Soviet Union was to the USA -- closed vs. open; ridigly structured vs. loosely organized; and so on -- I've chosen to conduct myself on /. and other forums as a public figure just as I've done when developing public software, such as g77.
And, in line with your passionate love for proprietary software and its advantages, such that you feel government should cater to that specific software-distribution model or not develop software at all, instead of backing up your claims with evidence and your own personal reputation, you've chosen to suggest that I was somehow threatening you personally by asking you to reveal yourself after having attacked my character.
I realize none of this can possibly change your closed-source mind, miracles notwithstanding, but I hope it helps others understand why I'm so passionate -- not so much about the government GPL'ing code, which is not really a concern of mine per se -- but about honesty and integrity in discussions of public policy, which includes not "shading the truth" by making claims such as "GPL'ed software cannot be used for commercial purposes".
You see, in my view, one of the crucial differences between the American way of life and that of most of the rest of the world is the degree to which we value honesty and integrity in the dealings that we do allow to be in the open (which is a much larger set of dealings than many societies enjoy).
But if we, collectively, are unwilling to tell the God's honest truth about a matter as comparatively simple and unimportant as the degree to which the GPL is "anti-commerce" or "discriminatory", we show signs of having not much hope for openly and honestly assessing much more serious situations, such as the threat posed by Iraq.
You haven't seen me "fully engaged".
Now, how about you come out from behind your cloak of anonymity so we can all learn who you actually are?
Thank you -- an excellent point.
Personally, I don't mind if the NSA or any other government agency chooses to use PD, or BSD, or GPL for distribution. If it's difficult to make a decision based solely on technical merit, but there happen to be substantial economic benefits to choosing, say, PD over GPL (say, if it might speed acceptance of a new protocol by making the implementation more attractive to software proprietors), I doubt I'd spend hours on /. screaming how that's "discriminatory" against GNU and the GPL.
So your point is well taken -- the government is not to be accused of "discrimination" simply because the public license under which it might choose to distribute software it writes happens to be inconvenient for a few existing businesses, thanks to distribution models to which they've grown accustomed.
The interesting thing, to me, about this whole discussion is how intent pro-MS types are on propagating lies and distortions about the GPL being "anti-business", "anti-corporate", "anti-commerce", and "discriminatory", rather than more calmly and rationally discussing the real issues, such as whether Linux is technically the best platform upon which to build a secure OS. (I'd have guessed OpenBSD, based purely on my impressions from reading stuff on the web, for what that's worth....)
Seeing the stack of cards upon which MS has built its anti-GPL efforts makes me wonder what they're really scared of, and what might be about to happen to their profitability, their stock price, etc. I mean, if they have nothing to fear due to having vastly more funding and all that other stuff, why propagate lies about the GPL?
I have neither run out of intellectual ammunition nor have engaged in shooting blanks. I have ceased discussing the issues with a proven liar, who doesn't have the courage to admit that he's been telling lies, thus abdicating, in my view, any responsibility inherently necessary in a thoughtful discussion of the issues.
See this comment of mine for a more thorough rebuttal to your beliefs as stated by someone else not so insistent on telling lies and then pretending he didn't.
How so? It might prevent them choosing a specific model for distribution of the software -- primarily, shrink-wrapped, proprietary, binary-only software under a highly-restrictive EULA -- but that's something they can choose to avoid, and still distribute the software.
After all, even Microsoft, the Poster Child for the "GPL Is Anti-Capitalist" argument, distributes (presumably MS-modified) GPL'ed software, as I pointed out in another comment.
In other words, businesses can choose to improve and distribute GPL'ed software. Just not in a way that takes away freedoms compared to the freedoms users would have with the original GPL'ed software.
That's not discriminatory, except in some sick, twisted mentality that believes there's no distinction between personal choices and individual rights, such that anything someone might choose to do must not only be their right to do, but must be fully funded by society if any other choice they might make is funded by society.
As an example, you presumably believe that since the government funded the building of roads for driving from point A to point B at moderate speeds, and since some people would rather drive in circles at 200mph, the refusal of the government to fully fund race tracks is discriminatory.
Now, in the sense that simply making a choice is "discriminatory", it might be, but you're clearly using it in the sense of immorality, or at least negative connoting public decision-making, which is utter nonsense.
Following your line of reasoning, the government must never develop any public-domain code, since corporations like Microsoft, which prefer to distribute code for which it has a monopoly, would be discriminated against!
But it'll never see the source, nor have the right to make copies, nor to discuss benchmark results, nor anything else placed in the EULA for the proprietary software, even though it contains code developed for and by the public on the public dime.
You seem to be confused -- proprietary software is not an individual or organization. So let's recast your argument in terms of actual entities to which governments are responsible:
There, that's better, isn't it?
And, hey, that statement is 100% true when the publically-developed software is GPL'ed, or BSD'ed, or AL'ed, just like it is when it's PD'ed (public-domain'ed)!
It can, and sometimes it does. There's nothing in the license that prevents it from happening. In fact, the more end users learn to insist on having the source code and other GPL-style freedoms, the more opportunity businesses will have to profit from developing and distributing GPL'ed software. (Certainly, the profits to be had from developing and distributing proprietary software will evaporate!)
The government's job is not to "balance" between models of distribution of software -- rather, it should seek to balance issues involving the best interests of the public, private interests, and so on. (Unless you're prepared to show me constitutional language specifying that the government must be business-model-neutral in all its transactions?)
I don't see that the private interests Microsoft has to distribute highly-restricted derivatives of public software for profit weigh enough over the public interest in having all programs containing certain public software come with source and related GPL-style freedoms.
But let's at least agree to honestly characterize the issue as that, rather than pretend as though the government is supposed to choose between distribution models as if they're all morally equivalent, when they're not.
Software released under the GPL is software to which everyone has equal access, despite your attempts to mischaracterize it. The GPL is in the best interest of all members of the public in many, though differently many, cases that PD is -- but PD distribution is not always in the best interests. (Consider software that performs a very critical life-saving task, which needs frequent checking of source by a wide body of people from various fields, a body that grows, changes, and learns, over time. If the software is PD, it'll find its way into proprietary distributions that will be unfixable when bugs are found in the PD version of the software, unless the single corporation that owns the copyright on the unfixable software agrees to fix it. The result? People will die. So PD isn't always the best option -- in this case, the GPL would be, among the choices being discussed.)
So, since distributing under the GPL is, as I have shown, non-discriminatory, then it is a valid option, and the public can choose how best to accept it, in what forms, etc. Just as with PD or BSD'ed software -- only the shape of the "freedom envelope" is different.
This is almost entirely wrong, since those "standards" are, or at least for a time were, not free for the public to improve and copy on their own! And, of course, Linux place even fewer restrictions on itself as an implementation than did any of those language standards on mere copies of their documents! (Not that these are what I would considered "highly-restrictive" standards as a result, just that, if you're going to draw moral equivalences between a restriction such as "you must not prohibit any friends you share this with from sharing it with others" and "you must not discuss, look at, benchmark, or copy this for friends", then a restriction against making extra copies of a standard for friends for free is just as onerous as Linux not "allowing" itself to be cloned as a proprietary product.)
So, for the most part, Linux is as free and public an implementation of software as C, Ada, and FORTRAN are as standards for computing languages. There are subtle differences in terms of exactly what you are and are not free to do with them, but, again, for the most part, they are public projects which invite (or invited) public input, unlike any proprietary software or developer thereof.
But it has to choose, if it is going to do something, unless you're arguing that it must fund identical changes to every single OS/license combination presently deployed on the planet to avoid being "discriminatory".
This is pure nonsense, <RANT>but seems to be the natural result of the mindless, judgement-free, multicultural elitist crap that's been taught in our schools too long</RANT>. (I feel better now.)
When government chooses to build roads for cars, it necessarily "discriminates" against other modes of transport, both real and mythical. Some of that can't help but hurt actual businesses.
But at least those businesses have a valid complaint in that it is incredibly non-trivial to re-engineer their planes and trains to use the new roads, now that there are more of them.
Software companies like Microsoft have nowhere near that level of hurdle to jump -- they can choose immediately to distribute GPL'ed software in its existing form, for profit, simply stamped with their own corporate logo. To the extent they modify it to coexist and cooperate with their own proprietary software, they will probably be able to sell even more of it.
Unix for Windows is a telling example of this: MS is selling this, presumably, for profit, chock full of GPL'ed code. For people who want some assurance that MS is standing behind a Unix compatibility layer for Windows, this is worth paying for, even though they might be able to legally snarf the GPL components from other sources.
Your other explanations and arguments, which I haven't quoted, stand, in my opinion, on their own quite well. They have almost nothing to do with licensing issues, and they don't explain, to me, why you waste a single moment trying to justify a pro-MS, anti-GPL position when it comes to government funding of software.
All I can suggest is that if the NSA believes producing a secure version of Linux is, from a purely technical perspective, in the best interest of the country, the fact that it's GPL'ed should not matter one whit, since the GPL is a nondiscriminatory license designed specifically for free public software (the "P" stands for "Public", after all).
You might feel that's a poor technical choice. I'm not prepared to disagree with that!
One final question: all governments on the planet, considered in totality, provide a vast source of funding for proprietary software developers, in return for software that they can't examine, can't discuss, can't share with the very people who provide the source for that funding (namely, the taxpayers), depending on the various EULA's and special exemptions.
Given that fact, and the fact that the comparative expenditures of all governments to fund public software probably amount to less than 1% of the total (but I'm guessing at that)...
I'm just wondering how "holistically" you're willing to apply your own interest in "balancing" the choices between distribution models and OS choices....
You previously had the chance to concede that I was, in fact, telling the truth about GPL'ed code vis-a-vis corporate use, yet you chose to obscure the issues further by claiming I was actually misleading the public.
You could have simply agreed with me that the statement "GPL results in software which is restricted, and not available to everyone" was a lie (one that you told), and then gone on to explain how more-restrictive licenses prevented combining such software with GPL'ed software followed by distribution to others (which would have undercut your argument, I admit, since it'd put the burden of blame on the more-restrictive licenses), and how that inconvenience should be taken into account when considering public policy.
But, no, you chose to go with the Big Lie that the GPL is somehow inherently anti-commerce, anti-corporate, that GPL'ed software "isn't for everyone", and went on to spin a yarn suggesting that I was the one misleading people.
That was pathetic, and it will stand as an "eternal testament" to your character here on /..
So I stand by my previous remarks, which you castigate as "hyperbolous, inflammatory, and highly impolite". If you're going to play with the fire of deceit, expect to get burned.
Ah, so now we see how you modify your lies to make them a little more palatable.
But you're still lying, since "the more normal conduct of commerce", when it comes to software, is not to distribute it as shrink-wrapped, proprietary software. That's a minority model for software, in terms of developed lines of code, probably in terms of deployed lines of code as well. Most software is developed for in-house use only, which is a model with which the GPL is quite compatible.
And there's no real reason for the government to tiptoe around, as if on eggshells, specific business models employed by a minority of software developers in the commercial sector.
Further, as you seem to be aware, though you perhaps try to hard to avoid mentioning it, there is a history of corporations choosing to re-license their code specifically so it can coexist with GPL'ed software as a single executable. (Not merely so they can be "connected", as you suggest in another comment.) I believe IBM's Jikes and Next's Objective-C compilers are two such examples; the steady stream of corporate contributions of patches to GPL'ed code bases are less-prominent, but perhaps, on the whole, more substantial and contemporary ones.
Still, it's nice to see you're getting away from the lie that "corporations cannot use GPL'ed code", finally, though you're having to be dragged kicking and screaming to it. A sad permanent public commentary on your character. What a cowardly display.
This is even clearer evidence than "Windows Services for UNIX 3.0", which could possibly be interpreted as saying the GNU code isn't, itself, actually included, which is why I double-checked.
When I pointed this out to my MS-employee sister a month or so ago, her comment was something along the lines of "And you didn't get paid for it! Doh!".
To me, this is wonderful, because I can't think of a way to more clearly and forcefully illustrate as lies claims like "the GPL is anti-commercial".
But the pro-MS liars are, and will continue to be, out in full force on this and related issues. (I wonder how many of them actually gain financially from this relationship, which will permanently document them, on forums such as /., as liars?)
It became relevant when you lied thusly:
The counterfact is, Microsoft has been using GPL'ed improvements to GPL'ed software, integrated into its own "code base", whatever you mean by that, and yet does not risk a suit, because they're following the simple rules of the GPL, I assume.
Excuse me, apparently the concept of "analogy" is foreign to you.
Once I remove the lies from your case, all it boils down to is "Microsoft can't use the code in the context of the business model it chooses to employ with some of its software".
My point is that the same thing can be said of the government authoring and distributing public-domain code -- Microsoft can't use the business model of being the sole supplier of that code, and any of its derivatives, to the public.
I'm simply trying to get you -- or, since you appear to be willfully lying to protect Microsoft's business interests, others reading your "arguments" -- to see that it is Microsoft's, not the government's, Linus Torvalds, RMS's, or my, choice whether to integrate GPL'ed code into its "code base" and distribute the derived results.
Since that equals "the public", including all public and private corporations, businesses, institutions, charities, governments, as well as individuals, I fail to see how your use of the word "monopolized" is anything other than a Terrible Lie.
I guess you think the alphabet is "monopolized" by the "Open Source community" as well, since nobody else is allowed to copyright it?
But not revealing the source is entirely their agenda -- it is not the public agenda by any means. (At best, the public might be said to be neutral on the issue. But when it comes to publically funded code, I think it's fair to say the public has more of an interest in ensuring that all programs distributed containing that code come with source, so the public can continue to benefit from improvements made thereto; can continue to help by fixing bugs found in it; can verify claims made about enhancements made to it by private parties; and so on.)
Yes, and the prohibitions against slavery are restrictive since they assure freedom.
Really, the only "restrictions" in the GPL are to ensure that freedom to use the code as you see fit is never taken away by a third party.
You seem to have a problem with that.
Then it shouldn't integrate such code into one of its OSes, or it should pick a different distribution model that allows source-code distribution -- clearly a feature that distinguishes Linux, which many claim is feature-poor, insecure, poorly written, etc. -- from competitors.
Surely Microsoft can be grown-up enough to deal with the choices life throws at it -- choices between contributing further to the public weal and simply continuing to distribute secret, proprietary code for profit, code that does not get to contain certain publically-funded improvements to free, public projects like Linux?
False. They can certainly refrain from copyrighting their code, simply make it public domain. All they are required to do is distribute it as source, which allows anyone to use the combination of their enhancements plus the original GPL'ed product.
You've already implicitly acknowledged that this is a lie, yet you restate it here. Microsoft can certainly use the internals of Linux in ways that are useful to it, just not all the ways that are convenient to its current business practices -- as is the case with BSD'd code, as is the case with PD'd code, and so on.
Ah, I just love your attempt at "moral equivalence" here. "GPL is a restrictive license which excludes Microsoft in favor of a small community; MS's EULA is a restrictive license which excludes the small community in favor of Microsoft; therefore they are morally equivalent, and the government, by choosing one, disfavors the other."
Of course, your arguments are based on lies, which you've apparently carefully constructed after studying the issues deeply, given how much verbeage and arrogance you're expressing in your "opinions" -- which might as well be fully funded by Microsoft.
Here's the truth: GPL's license restricts only, for all intents and purposes, private parties from adding other restrictions to software, so it favors everyone, and disfavors those who would take away freedoms from the public.
MS's EULA restricts people from viewing, talking about, benchmarking, copying, reverse-engineering, etc., etc., their code, so it favors only Microsoft (by easing their business-model issues) and disfavors everyone else.
Once a person understands the truth, it no longer seems difficult to understand why NSA choosing to enhance Linux is not morally equivalent to NSA choosing to enhance MS Windows with code available, subsequently, only to Microsoft, despite your claims to the contrary.
Another attempt at equivalencing that, thankfully, marginally intelligent children would see through: Linux not being a corporation, but a free, public body of code, just like federal law, the FORTRAN, Ada, and C languages, and tons of other free-with-source software implementations the government has chosen, over single-vendor proprietary competition, to improve on the public dime.
For someone who doesn't "like it", you seem to be engaging in plenty of pro-Microsoft deceptive advocacy.
No, again, you have it exactly backwards: if the closed-source community licenses its work in a way that excludes Free Software from using the result, it must expect to work without government subsidies.
Yet Microsoft continues to do it. As do Red Hat, IBM, and so on.
Let me ask you this: if the public comes to decide that it won't, without rare exception, except software without accompanying source code, exactly what would that mean in terms of this discussion?