It also depends on the license, which I'm not too familiar with. Copyright law is what governs redistribution, and my understanding of such law is that you can't redistribute without explicit permission, and you can't redistribute derived works without explicit permission. Use is governed by the software license, which may or may not be similarly confusing:)
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It doesn't have to imply it at all - under copyright law, you have no rights to redistribute derivative works without the explicit permission of the original works' author. Any rights you have to redistribute a copyrighted work (modified or unmodified) must be explicitly granted to you by the copyright holder(s).
A comment above this had the statement but it included "with or without modification", which would make everything OK and would mean that Darren is changing the rules at this point. I don't know which original license is the real one, though.
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Sorry, it's the other way around - you can't distribute derivative works without explicit permission. The lack of a clause preventing you from doing something doesn't give you carte blanche to do it. The "redistribution and use" you describe doesn't include modified source and binaries.
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This is in response to a quote from Ransom Love in Mundie's speech, where Love was expressing doubts about the use of open source. Of course Ransom Love (whom I agree is pretty much a waste of flesh) isn't making a whole lot of money selling GPL'd software; the advantages of GPL'd software go primarily to the users of such software, not to the purveyors of it. In that sense, Ransom Love is a lot closer to the Microsoft viewpoint than the RMS viewpoint.
No company will become Microsoft-sized based on GPL'd software. It remains to be seen if the GPL will support even a Caldera-sized company. But the GPL allows software innovation to come from the grassroots users rather than from Microsoft on high, and in the end GPL'd software will provide more of what users want.
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I don't want to get into the whole rock-em sock-em battle over commercial vs. GPL, but you have missed something:
The notion that the GPL model will do anything is laughable, considering
how many companies are making money on GPL software (a handful at most)
Of course companies that try to sell GPL'd software aren't doing so well; but those aren't really the parties the GPL is designed to help anyway. The GPL is user-focused; users of GPL'd software will have lower costs and/or more value in the long run, and so it is an advantage to use GPL'd software and to contribute back into that community. It's a Good Thing for software users that it's tough to make a profit on GPL'd software - Microsoft is an example of what you get when it's easy to make a profit on software.
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IIRC Mentor Graphics (a VLSI design tool) included gesture control. Since most of the time you were mousing components around anyway, it was convenient to use gestures for cut, copy, paste, etc. There were special selection "strokes", and other tool-specific commands. In fact, as I read about libstroke it sounds like the author of that library was inspired by similar CAD programs.
Really, the only thing you need to add for great gesture recognition is another mouse - one for each hand would really improve the gesture complexity you could generate, and make things much faster too. Ultimately I foresee some sort of VR glove (like in the oft-maligned Johnny Mnemonic) where you can type, move things around with your hands, and set up specific hand motions to do certain actions (a karate chop or a scissors motion means "cut", etc.). That would be the real convergence of the mouse and keyboard.
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And just to help Eris out, I shall
henceforth be sprinkling my telephone conversations with random outbursts of "nu-coo-luhr terrorism", "anthrax",
and "Backstreet Boys."
Yes, because if you don't pronounce it like only the President and Homer Simpson do, the computers probably won't pick it up:) Hmmm, I wonder if Springfield is really in Texas...
I wonder if the estimates of costs of industrial espionage are like the "Kevin Mitnick costs" - sure, our source code is worth X, and so even though we're not out any actual money and no one's really used the code against us, we'll just assume that Mitnick stole $X. Not that I necessarily defend the guy, but the charges weren't really proportionate to the actual results of his actions. So it may be with industrial espionage in general.
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Huh, I just thought: "What are we going to fnord do tonight, Brain?" I guess that it would make sense for mice that intend to take over the world to qualify as "elaborate conspiracy" theorists.
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I'm so confused - how was that offtopic? Did you actually read the post before clicking on the little box? Are you maybe moderating the wrong article by mistake?
It's things like this that lead to "shaken moderator syndrome". The urge to discipline is just too strong in me, I guess:) Anger at poor moderation leads to hate, and hate leads to very vindictive meta-moderation (I hope).
...and I had even worked in AYBABTU, too. Damnit.
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Hmmm, user #106880 makes an ad hominem attack against user #1046. And you seem to think he or she's a cheetah, or maybe a leopard. Now I really have seen everything.
Just 'cause something's "common usage" doesn't make it correct or right
Is it really stealing data if the original owner still has a perfect copy, and they sent me another copy free of charge? I agree that perhaps redistributing it is questionable, but I don't see any problems with viewing the satellite feed.
Even if there is unauthorized redistribution, it's still not stealing. Not because "nobody gets hurt" which we both know isn't really true, but because nobody's been deprived of their property. Stealing really only applies to physical property; there should be some sort of laws concerning intellectual property, but it's confusing and unmaintainable to overload old terms like "stealing" to describe new and totally different offenses. A nice short term would be nice; personally I like "horking" - it's unused at present, and the appropriation of the term wouldn't really anger any community at present.
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Maybe I'm not thinking of the same thing, but I don't recall the Black Ice stopping someone from "Burning Chrome":)
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Re:Some people always want what they don't have ..
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 1
I've submitted modifications to two open source products, but unfortunately my changes have only been picked up by one:(.
That's one of the reasons that I don't use the other product now - if a maintainer rejects an (IMHO at least) perfectly reasonable bug fix just because "hardly anyone will see that error", then what other useful bug fixes have they rejected? I can't tell anyone else how to run their projects, but if I can't get a good explanation for why a submitted bug fix wasn't accepted, then I acknowledge that I'm probably not a valued contributor to such a project, and I move on to more productive pursuits.
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How is it forced - has anyone required you to use GPL'd code? If you don't like the terms of the GPL, then by all means don't use it and don't use GPL'd software. The GPL is a legal tool for enforcing the mostly common-sense and commonly acknowledged standards of the free software community. If you don't want to be part of that community, that's fine. But if you do want access to the community's hard-earned code, then you're expected to play by the same rules as anyone else. You're free to join or not join the community, and once you're in you're free to use others' code as long as you grant the same freedom to others.
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their "ethical position" is that selling people
useful software is evil.
Not at all - AFAIK, RMS et al. have no problems with RedHat, SuSe, or Debian selling people useful free software. As has been wisely pointed out above, their position is that providing software without the source code and the right to make and distribute changes is unethical.
The GPL is not about gaining some consideration for use, but denying a certain use to a certain group. It is
designed purely as a deliberate attack on proprietary software developers.
It denies a certain use, which would by default be denied anyway under a normal software license, to a certain class of developers who are only interested in profiting off of the free software community. Any software developer who is willing to give back to the community is allowed additional rights to GPL'd software that would not be otherwise available to them.
they deliberately
prohibit the use it's wanted for.
TANSTAAFL (look it up). Heaven forbid we deny proprietary software developers anything that they want...
By traditional contract standards, this is not at all reasonable.
That's good, because the GPL isn't a contract, it's a license. You don't even have to accept the license in order to use the software, so it's still a more open licensing scheme than almost all proprietary software.
It's not an offer of contract in good faith, it's an attempt to place something essentially in the public domain, except
restricted from the use of people and businesses they are politically opposed to. The other party can hardly be
blamed for not treating it as a sincere attempt at a mutually-agreeable arrangement.
If the FSF feels politically opposed to someone using their work without contributing back something of their own, then they are entirely within their rights to take that position - a position which isn't particularly unreasonable, either. The other party can hardly bitch if they were planning to pull a fast one using GPL'd code, and are now being required to give back something in exchange for all the benefits they've gained from using other peoples' code. The GPL enforces a mutual exchange of code as opposed to what would otherwise be a unilateral taking code without giving anything back. "Our code for your code" sounds pretty mutually even-handed, but if you don't like those terms, don't use our code and quit whining about it.
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Their argument against open-sourcing the client has always been that this would allow cheaters and that people would use modified clients that didn't crunch the numbers right. To which I have always responded that with any distributed computational task running on untrusted clients, you would have to do this sort of redundant analysis on each data block anyway. Even a closed-source client can be hacked fairly easily if you really wanted to, so not releasing the source doesn't magically guarantee the validity of any client-side processing. It's nice to see SETI@Home finally acknowledge what some of us have known all along.
So, when will we be seeing the client source code available for download? I'm all ready to start working on an Xscreensaver module for it.
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Illegal search and seizure laws would apply just as they would to any other search for anything else. It's ludicrous that you can get in trouble for illegally possessing hard drugs (which, according to you cops could already shake down teenagers for) but not for tobacco, which is considered equally dangerous to teens (although not apparently to adults).
I just think it's hypocritical - if tobacco is really that bad for teens (not that I have any reason to think it isn't) then why isn't it treated with the same heavy-handed authority as other drugs which are illegal for teens? Surely if the War on Drugs is such a winning strategy, we can use it for tobacco too...
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But the GPL was never a click-through license in the first place. It never imposed any limits on use of the software, just on distribution, whereas most click-throughs work over the use of the software very thoroughly (no reverse engineering, don't use on Sundays, no liability of the author, etc.) and don't even touch distribution, because the existing copyright laws already handle that quite nicely.
The GPL is a license that adds to the usefulness of a software package, rather than detracting from it as normal licenses do. A defeat for the GPL doesn't seem to have much of an upside to me.
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These are the same legislators who (in some states like Illinois at least) have made it illegal for minors to buy tobacco but not to possess it. Morons.
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Not quite. The GPL grants you additional rights to distribute (not use) the software if you follow all of the terms of the license. Normally you would have no such rights to redistribute, other than the normal rights of Fair Use (getting smaller by the day, I might add). None of the terms of the GPL kick in until you attempt to distribute the software or a derivative of it.
The right to use is given to you by your supplier of the software at the same time they give you the software, either through selling it to you or providing it as a free download.
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The big question in my mind is: what kind of ISP purchases incomplete connectivity through Abovenet, and doesn't let on to their users that they may not be able to visit sites like macromedia and PeaceFire on a basically unpredictable schedule? Abovenet and MAPS can do whatever the heck they want, but if they're not letting on that they're not selling "the whole Internet" as it were, or their customers who resell connectivity aren't passing this info on, then someone's committing fraud. I'd be going postal if it were my ISP or their upstream.
Actually, another question: even if PeaceFire knew that Media 3 was about to be blocked, why would it necessarily be an evil motive for them to go ahead with the transfer to Media 3? Perhaps (and this is a mere supposition on my part) the proprietors of PeaceFire wanted to make this exact point, that sometimes the RBL blocks legitimate access to web sites which aren't spammers. Surely pointing out a fact that is acknowledged to be true by all can't be considered a "smear" campaign, can it? The truth will set you free, and all that...
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True, I've never met the guy. He could be one of those androgynous anime-looking men. (today on "It's Pat" - Pat talks about Free Software with Hans Reiser.)
But judging from his flame potential on the lkml, I still would have guessed male:).
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Slashdot Mirror
It also depends on the license, which I'm not too familiar with. Copyright law is what governs redistribution, and my understanding of such law is that you can't redistribute without explicit permission, and you can't redistribute derived works without explicit permission. Use is governed by the software license, which may or may not be similarly confusing :)
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It doesn't have to imply it at all - under copyright law, you have no rights to redistribute derivative works without the explicit permission of the original works' author. Any rights you have to redistribute a copyrighted work (modified or unmodified) must be explicitly granted to you by the copyright holder(s).
A comment above this had the statement but it included "with or without modification", which would make everything OK and would mean that Darren is changing the rules at this point. I don't know which original license is the real one, though.
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Sorry, it's the other way around - you can't distribute derivative works without explicit permission. The lack of a clause preventing you from doing something doesn't give you carte blanche to do it. The "redistribution and use" you describe doesn't include modified source and binaries.
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This is in response to a quote from Ransom Love in Mundie's speech, where Love was expressing doubts about the use of open source. Of course Ransom Love (whom I agree is pretty much a waste of flesh) isn't making a whole lot of money selling GPL'd software; the advantages of GPL'd software go primarily to the users of such software, not to the purveyors of it. In that sense, Ransom Love is a lot closer to the Microsoft viewpoint than the RMS viewpoint.
No company will become Microsoft-sized based on GPL'd software. It remains to be seen if the GPL will support even a Caldera-sized company. But the GPL allows software innovation to come from the grassroots users rather than from Microsoft on high, and in the end GPL'd software will provide more of what users want.
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I don't want to get into the whole rock-em sock-em battle over commercial vs. GPL, but you have missed something:
Of course companies that try to sell GPL'd software aren't doing so well; but those aren't really the parties the GPL is designed to help anyway. The GPL is user-focused; users of GPL'd software will have lower costs and/or more value in the long run, and so it is an advantage to use GPL'd software and to contribute back into that community. It's a Good Thing for software users that it's tough to make a profit on GPL'd software - Microsoft is an example of what you get when it's easy to make a profit on software.
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IIRC Mentor Graphics (a VLSI design tool) included gesture control. Since most of the time you were mousing components around anyway, it was convenient to use gestures for cut, copy, paste, etc. There were special selection "strokes", and other tool-specific commands. In fact, as I read about libstroke it sounds like the author of that library was inspired by similar CAD programs.
Really, the only thing you need to add for great gesture recognition is another mouse - one for each hand would really improve the gesture complexity you could generate, and make things much faster too. Ultimately I foresee some sort of VR glove (like in the oft-maligned Johnny Mnemonic) where you can type, move things around with your hands, and set up specific hand motions to do certain actions (a karate chop or a scissors motion means "cut", etc.). That would be the real convergence of the mouse and keyboard.
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Yes, because if you don't pronounce it like only the President and Homer Simpson do, the computers probably won't pick it up :) Hmmm, I wonder if Springfield is really in Texas...
[Homer, correcting Pepe] "Nuke-yu-lar", it's "nukyular".
I wonder if the estimates of costs of industrial espionage are like the "Kevin Mitnick costs" - sure, our source code is worth X, and so even though we're not out any actual money and no one's really used the code against us, we'll just assume that Mitnick stole $X. Not that I necessarily defend the guy, but the charges weren't really proportionate to the actual results of his actions. So it may be with industrial espionage in general.
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Huh, I just thought: "What are we going to fnord do tonight, Brain?" I guess that it would make sense for mice that intend to take over the world to qualify as "elaborate conspiracy" theorists.
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I'm so confused - how was that offtopic? Did you actually read the post before clicking on the little box? Are you maybe moderating the wrong article by mistake?
It's things like this that lead to "shaken moderator syndrome". The urge to discipline is just too strong in me, I guess :) Anger at poor moderation leads to hate, and hate leads to very vindictive meta-moderation (I hope).
...and I had even worked in AYBABTU, too. Damnit.
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Hmmm, user #106880 makes an ad hominem attack against user #1046. And you seem to think he or she's a cheetah, or maybe a leopard. Now I really have seen everything.
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Maybe I'm not thinking of the same thing, but I don't recall the Black Ice stopping someone from "Burning Chrome" :)
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I've submitted modifications to two open source products, but unfortunately my changes have only been picked up by one :(.
That's one of the reasons that I don't use the other product now - if a maintainer rejects an (IMHO at least) perfectly reasonable bug fix just because "hardly anyone will see that error", then what other useful bug fixes have they rejected? I can't tell anyone else how to run their projects, but if I can't get a good explanation for why a submitted bug fix wasn't accepted, then I acknowledge that I'm probably not a valued contributor to such a project, and I move on to more productive pursuits.
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How is it forced - has anyone required you to use GPL'd code? If you don't like the terms of the GPL, then by all means don't use it and don't use GPL'd software. The GPL is a legal tool for enforcing the mostly common-sense and commonly acknowledged standards of the free software community. If you don't want to be part of that community, that's fine. But if you do want access to the community's hard-earned code, then you're expected to play by the same rules as anyone else. You're free to join or not join the community, and once you're in you're free to use others' code as long as you grant the same freedom to others.
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Not at all - AFAIK, RMS et al. have no problems with RedHat, SuSe, or Debian selling people useful free software. As has been wisely pointed out above, their position is that providing software without the source code and the right to make and distribute changes is unethical.
It denies a certain use, which would by default be denied anyway under a normal software license, to a certain class of developers who are only interested in profiting off of the free software community. Any software developer who is willing to give back to the community is allowed additional rights to GPL'd software that would not be otherwise available to them.
TANSTAAFL (look it up). Heaven forbid we deny proprietary software developers anything that they want...
That's good, because the GPL isn't a contract, it's a license. You don't even have to accept the license in order to use the software, so it's still a more open licensing scheme than almost all proprietary software.
If the FSF feels politically opposed to someone using their work without contributing back something of their own, then they are entirely within their rights to take that position - a position which isn't particularly unreasonable, either. The other party can hardly bitch if they were planning to pull a fast one using GPL'd code, and are now being required to give back something in exchange for all the benefits they've gained from using other peoples' code. The GPL enforces a mutual exchange of code as opposed to what would otherwise be a unilateral taking code without giving anything back. "Our code for your code" sounds pretty mutually even-handed, but if you don't like those terms, don't use our code and quit whining about it.
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Their argument against open-sourcing the client has always been that this would allow cheaters and that people would use modified clients that didn't crunch the numbers right. To which I have always responded that with any distributed computational task running on untrusted clients, you would have to do this sort of redundant analysis on each data block anyway. Even a closed-source client can be hacked fairly easily if you really wanted to, so not releasing the source doesn't magically guarantee the validity of any client-side processing. It's nice to see SETI@Home finally acknowledge what some of us have known all along.
So, when will we be seeing the client source code available for download? I'm all ready to start working on an Xscreensaver module for it.
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Illegal search and seizure laws would apply just as they would to any other search for anything else. It's ludicrous that you can get in trouble for illegally possessing hard drugs (which, according to you cops could already shake down teenagers for) but not for tobacco, which is considered equally dangerous to teens (although not apparently to adults).
I just think it's hypocritical - if tobacco is really that bad for teens (not that I have any reason to think it isn't) then why isn't it treated with the same heavy-handed authority as other drugs which are illegal for teens? Surely if the War on Drugs is such a winning strategy, we can use it for tobacco too...
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I know, but on the plus side it's clickable, so it's not like you have to cut and paste it.
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But the GPL was never a click-through license in the first place. It never imposed any limits on use of the software, just on distribution, whereas most click-throughs work over the use of the software very thoroughly (no reverse engineering, don't use on Sundays, no liability of the author, etc.) and don't even touch distribution, because the existing copyright laws already handle that quite nicely.
The GPL is a license that adds to the usefulness of a software package, rather than detracting from it as normal licenses do. A defeat for the GPL doesn't seem to have much of an upside to me.
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These are the same legislators who (in some states like Illinois at least) have made it illegal for minors to buy tobacco but not to possess it. Morons.
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Not quite. The GPL grants you additional rights to distribute (not use) the software if you follow all of the terms of the license. Normally you would have no such rights to redistribute, other than the normal rights of Fair Use (getting smaller by the day, I might add). None of the terms of the GPL kick in until you attempt to distribute the software or a derivative of it.
The right to use is given to you by your supplier of the software at the same time they give you the software, either through selling it to you or providing it as a free download.
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The big question in my mind is: what kind of ISP purchases incomplete connectivity through Abovenet, and doesn't let on to their users that they may not be able to visit sites like macromedia and PeaceFire on a basically unpredictable schedule? Abovenet and MAPS can do whatever the heck they want, but if they're not letting on that they're not selling "the whole Internet" as it were, or their customers who resell connectivity aren't passing this info on, then someone's committing fraud. I'd be going postal if it were my ISP or their upstream.
Actually, another question: even if PeaceFire knew that Media 3 was about to be blocked, why would it necessarily be an evil motive for them to go ahead with the transfer to Media 3? Perhaps (and this is a mere supposition on my part) the proprietors of PeaceFire wanted to make this exact point, that sometimes the RBL blocks legitimate access to web sites which aren't spammers. Surely pointing out a fact that is acknowledged to be true by all can't be considered a "smear" campaign, can it? The truth will set you free, and all that...
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No, and I'm so damn jealous. Why, do you know where I can get one? ;)
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You're kidding - FedEx didn't have to pay for that? It was practically "Fedex: The Movie"...
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Sorry, I was referring to Billy Dee Williams selling Colt 45 liquor :)
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True, I've never met the guy. He could be one of those androgynous anime-looking men. (today on "It's Pat" - Pat talks about Free Software with Hans Reiser.) But judging from his flame potential on the lkml, I still would have guessed male :).
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