The GPL license does not in any way have anything to do with "developer freedom".
I think there's a fallacy here. If you have every freedom except the freedom to keep slaves, people in the aggregate are more free than they would be if you had the freedom to keep slaves. You as an individual might consider yourself less free if you can not keep a slave, but only if you don't value the freedom of others.
That is to say, even if the GPLed code makes up less than 1% of the end product, you may still be forced to GPL the other 99% that is your code.
That's never happened. Indeed, there has been no situation where a software producer was forced to free a work that comes even close to the value than the GPL code included, and there are few cases where any software producer freed code of much lesser but significant value. The biggest one I can think of is when NeXT freed up the Objective C front-end to GCC.
The point that most people don't realize is that freeing up your code is one of your choices if a GPL developer actually sues you (which is itself rare). Your other choices are to negotiate a fair payment for a commercial license with the GPL code's copyright holders, or write out their portion of the overall work. Surely, if the GPL piece is 1%, writing it out is what you'd do.
Consider the analogous situation regarding proprietary software. If you get a copy of Microsoft Office and put it on your computer, you're supposed to pay for it. If you don't pay for it, and you get caught, you can be subject to both civil and criminal prosecution that is much worse than anything GPL folks have ever done. You can lose your savings, job, home, car, freedom, credit rating, etc.
It seems to me that the peril is far greater than that connected with the GPL. GPL folks don't have the Business Software Alliance advertising for disgruntled employees to rat on their employers, etc.
But most folks think that charging money for proprietary software is fair. If that's fair, the GPL developers request for another form of payment, an exchange of software rights, should be just as fair.
One more clue: you need to know the difference between "use" and "create a derivative work of". GPL does not require anything for "use", it explicitly says that use is unrestricted.
The GPL is "fair" only if you buy that it's okay to demand that others kowtow to you when dealing with software you didn't write.
This is what I'm given when asking people to actually tell me what they think is wrong with the GPL. They don't, really, tell me anything. Nowhere in GPL does the word "kowtow" appear. Please just point to some of the text of the GPL, quoting it, and provide a coherent argument of why it isn't fair.
Microsoft (along with other companies like, say, Apple) don't like the GPL because it has way too much potential to be massively unfair.
Dear Drsmithy,
This assertion doesn't really stand on its own, it's more like saying "nyah nyah" than an argument until you write down why you think GPL might be unfair. Be assured that I've handled such arguments before, they are easy to refute.
I'm having a hard time seeing the open-source community actually being capable of doing something new and interesting.
You're not looking. Start with the web server and browser. The first ones were Open Source. If you want something more recent, look at Ruby on Rails. Much faster than Java as far as time-to-market is concerned. Look at Linux. Runs on an incredible number of architectures, from watches to supercomputers. Nobody knew you could do that before. Look at the Open Source development paradigm itself. Did anyone know you could build software with a distributed team of people who never met, and the result would be fit for mission-critical work so well that it would fly in space? I could go on.
The problem with employees is that their direction is set in advance. The people who do not have those constraints are free to innovate.
The GPL is "fair" only if you buy that all software must be open source
You're confusing what GPL says and does with what Richard Stallman thinks but did not put in the GPL. GPL's effect is that software that is linked to the GPL-licensed code - not all software - must be GPL or you must negotiate another license with the copyright holder. MySQL and other companies use GPL in a dual licensing scheme, where people who want to link in non-free software pay for the privilege, and those who want to put their code under GPL can do so without a fee. This seems very fair to me: those who want to share can do so, those who don't want to share pay for the value that they're getting.
It's really important to look at GPL from the perspective of the entity offering the code, as well as the entity receiving it. Making all you create a non-strings gift isn't always a good idea for the software author, and a no-strings gift is more than is required for it to be Open Source.
Add an awesome future to Microsoft's LGPL version, and relicense it as GPL.
You're missing something. With LGPL, Microsoft's additions don't have to be under LGPL. They can be under a proprietary license. They don't have to come with source. And when you convert the LGPL code to GPL, you can't convert the proprietary part. That's how LGPL differs from GPL.
So far, we've won the game because they've been aggressive to us. And this is not talking about the distant past, the OOXML debacle is still going on and as far as I can tell they committed real, actionable fraud in connection with it which has gone unprosecuted.
I think we should fight Microsoft, not Sam Ramji. We should just make it clear that Sam works for a company with a monopoly conviction and a long record of dirty fighting.
Microsoft's joining Apache, to a great extent, as an anti-Linux play. They still can't stand the GPL, it's too fair for them, but they think they can take some of the oxygen from Linux by being more of a platform for Apache-style software. And the Apache license lets them "embrace and enhance".
Don't give up now, folks. Only your vigilance and your willingness to point out when Microsoft plays dirty tricks will keep them from getting away with even more of that.
Anyone who wants to spoil that buisness model can take the trouble to build good binaries. Once the source is GPL, nobody can prevent you from building your own binaries and making them free.
On 9 March 1999, Gore gave an interview for CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, in which he stated: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."[95] UCLA professor of information studies, Philip E. Agre[96][97] and journalist Eric Boehlert[98] both argue that three articles in Wired News led to the creation of the widely spread urban legend[99] that Gore claimed to have "invented the Internet," which followed this interview. The urban legend became "an automatic laugh. Jay Leno, David Letterman, or any other comedic talent can crack a joke about Al Gore 'inventing the Internet,' and the audience is likely to respond with howls of laughter."[100]
In response to the controversy, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn argued that, "We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he 'invented' the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet."[101] In addition, Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, stated: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is -- and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a "futures group" -- the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen." - Wikipedia
Oops, I'm getting whipped for "heat in a thermodynamic sense is not the same thing as temperature". But yes, the point here is that they've invented better thermocouple wire and thus possibly an improvement in thermoelectric generation and maybe the Peltier effect. Doubling the efficiency of those things would not necessarily make them competitive with other processes for heating and cooling.
Yes, they took what they wanted to do and worked out a strategy to avoid anti-trust issues. So they backed SCO.
Some have suggested that they want to beat Linux as a platform for Open Source applications in the server market. Which isn't going to work without some form of dirty fighting being connected to it. We'll see.
This became public on Newsforge a few years after I left HP, that's where I got this copy.
During much of the time I was at HP - hired to be an Open Source leader first and an HP employee second - I knew about this and had to keep it secret. It was a pretty big hardship for me, obviously I felt I was being disloyal to my own community. I'm pasting it in here today so that we don't forget Microsoft's previous intentions toward Apache. - Bruce
From: Campbell, Gary [mailto:gary.campbell@hp.com]
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2002 7:27 PM
To: Stallard, Scott J; CTO Office Directs; Chaffin, Janice; Denzel, Nora; McDowell, Mary; Elias, Howard; Fink, Martin R; Becker, Rick (ISS);
Beyers, Joe
Cc: Blackmore, Peter; Robison, Shane
Subject: Microsoft Patent Cross License - Open Source Software Impact
Microsoft Patent Cross License - Open Source Software Impact
Today we agreed on a new patent cross license with Microsoft that protects
HP in the short term, but it has significant impact on HP's use of Open
Source software in the long term. More importantly, we now understand
that Microsoft is about to launch legal action against the industry for
shipping Open Source software that may force us out of using certain
popular Open Source products. We need to create a cross-HP staffed
program to understand the implication by product group and to provide
the short term and long term steerage. I'll hook up with Martin tomorrow
and start planning next steps for a cross-HP planning team.
Background:
HP is we believe, protected by our previous cross license for patents
filed by Microsoft up to June of 2001, to ship open source software
that violates Microsoft patents that was developed or shipped prior to
today. This means that we can freeze on today's open source functionality
and we are protected.
The new cross license does not protect us against new Microsoft patents
filed after June 2001 against new open source product functionality
shipped or created after today. So we have a two year window before HP has
exposure on new Microsoft patents against new open source functionality,
but we have exposure because of the MAD clause in the GPL if Microsoft
attacks another entity with existing patents. See next section.
Open Source Software is described as a license that follows the intent
and process of GPL or GPL lite. Additionally several major products are
explicitly called out as not protected by the cross license, such as
Samba, Wine, KDE, Gnome, Apache, Sendmail, and Linux.
Microsoft's Intentions:
Microsoft could attack Open Source Software for patent infringements
against OEMs, Linux distributors, and least likely open source
developers. They are specifically upset about Samba, Apache and
Sendmail. We believe Samba is first, and they will attempt to prove it
isn't covered by prior patent cross as a so called "clone"
product carve out in the previous agreement.
OEMs that don't have a cross(like SUN), or OEMs like HP that they force a
change in their cross license to exclude open source software are probably
the first target. Intel, Red Hat, SuSE, UBL, Oracle are probably in the
first wave as well.
IBM we don't know what the status of termination of their Microsoft
cross license is. They could be protected by their previous OS/2 deals?
Mutually Assured Destruction Clause:
But it probably doesn't matter, because the GPL license has a mutually
assured destruction clause in section 7, if anyone is sued over a
patent infringement, no one is licensed under the GPL to ship GPL-ed
products. This is probably what Microsoft intends to do.
Basically Microsoft is going to use the legal system to shut down open
source software, and for all of its cleverness, the GPL makes it fairly
easy unless a white knight steps in.
Best guess on the timing, this fall when they are finished settling with
DOJ and the states.
Industry Reaction:
At this point we have no information on who would defend open source with
This means that Microsoft has to commit to keeping their protocols open to the open-source community,
Actually, just using Open Standards would be better. And sometimes there are no Open Standards, and then publishing what they are using without restrictive IPR agreements is all we need them to do. They don't have to spend much money on this. We can make things interoperable without any more help than that.
Rather than an ext3 driver on Windows, any network-attached storage device using an open protocol (like Samba) would be a better solution unless you're dirt-poor. Such devices sell below $250 these days.
And despite the fact that it only costs $1.50 to ride the bus, most businesses and individuals still rely on cars. This is a poor example.
People ride cars because they are convenient - they go from point to point as desired and they don't make the user bend to their schedule. They are private. They are comfortable, they don't have the smelly guy in the next seat.
Regarding OpenOffice, I think part of it is marketing, part is the retail channel, and we still have some functionality issues.
It's not a zero-sum game and never has been. The bazaar model is not a replacement for the cathedral model, both can exist and flourish. The attitude that you are either with us or against us is flawed.
Well, sorry, but those are three platitudes that I wasn't really discussing.
To put the issue of Open Source overconfidence in better perspective, though, I'd like to see one legislative change in the United States that is designed to help protect Open Source software. Just one. That would be a measure of our wins or lack thereof.
Sorry to take so long on that. Obviously making a living has to come first sometimes. Yes, I am soliciting for funding for that project, and the prospects are good. I will update the web site, as I'm preparing for papers at TAPR and AMSAT's conferences.
This means they are starting to see the possibility of defeat.
Let's not get overconfident. Whatever gains we once made on the desktop have been blown away by Apple. Despite the fact that we give away a wonderful compatible office suite in OpenOffice 3 for free, most companies and individuals are still buying MS Office. The software patent system is still tilted against us, and may be getting worse depending on an upcoming treaty - assumptions that the Bilski case will solve the problem for us are unrealistic to say the least. And it looks like they will get ISO to publish Office Open XML.
So, sure Microsoft is positioning itself for future strategy, but I bet they still see themselves winning. And they may well do so.
The story you are referring to is written by a software patent proponent who would like to reverse the USPTO's new position on software patents. He is choosing google as his example in order to inflame other corporate attorneys into working on the problem in favor of software patenting.
I would be overjoyed if the Bilski case and other recent cases solved the software patent problem for us. But I think the reality is that congress is ready to repair the situation and restore whatever software patenting the courts and USPTO administrators take away.
They may have lost the fight, but ISO's leadership shows every sign that it will dismiss the four national protests and publish the standard. That's really all Microsoft needs. Regardless of whether their future software will read ODF, it's going to write OOXML unless you go through significant pain to stop it from doing so. So, it's somewhat likely that Microsoft will still pull a victory out of this one.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there's a fallacy here. If you have every freedom except the freedom to keep slaves, people in the aggregate are more free than they would be if you had the freedom to keep slaves. You as an individual might consider yourself less free if you can not keep a slave, but only if you don't value the freedom of others.
So, let's turn this around. It sounds like you assert:
That's never happened. Indeed, there has been no situation where a software producer was forced to free a work that comes even close to the value than the GPL code included, and there are few cases where any software producer freed code of much lesser but significant value. The biggest one I can think of is when NeXT freed up the Objective C front-end to GCC.
The point that most people don't realize is that freeing up your code is one of your choices if a GPL developer actually sues you (which is itself rare). Your other choices are to negotiate a fair payment for a commercial license with the GPL code's copyright holders, or write out their portion of the overall work. Surely, if the GPL piece is 1%, writing it out is what you'd do.
Consider the analogous situation regarding proprietary software. If you get a copy of Microsoft Office and put it on your computer, you're supposed to pay for it. If you don't pay for it, and you get caught, you can be subject to both civil and criminal prosecution that is much worse than anything GPL folks have ever done. You can lose your savings, job, home, car, freedom, credit rating, etc.
It seems to me that the peril is far greater than that connected with the GPL. GPL folks don't have the Business Software Alliance advertising for disgruntled employees to rat on their employers, etc.
But most folks think that charging money for proprietary software is fair. If that's fair, the GPL developers request for another form of payment, an exchange of software rights, should be just as fair.
One more clue: you need to know the difference between "use" and "create a derivative work of". GPL does not require anything for "use", it explicitly says that use is unrestricted.
This is what I'm given when asking people to actually tell me what they think is wrong with the GPL. They don't, really, tell me anything. Nowhere in GPL does the word "kowtow" appear. Please just point to some of the text of the GPL, quoting it, and provide a coherent argument of why it isn't fair.
Dear Drsmithy,
This assertion doesn't really stand on its own, it's more like saying "nyah nyah" than an argument until you write down why you think GPL might be unfair. Be assured that I've handled such arguments before, they are easy to refute.
You're not looking. Start with the web server and browser. The first ones were Open Source. If you want something more recent, look at Ruby on Rails. Much faster than Java as far as time-to-market is concerned. Look at Linux. Runs on an incredible number of architectures, from watches to supercomputers. Nobody knew you could do that before. Look at the Open Source development paradigm itself. Did anyone know you could build software with a distributed team of people who never met, and the result would be fit for mission-critical work so well that it would fly in space? I could go on.
The problem with employees is that their direction is set in advance. The people who do not have those constraints are free to innovate.
You're confusing what GPL says and does with what Richard Stallman thinks but did not put in the GPL. GPL's effect is that software that is linked to the GPL-licensed code - not all software - must be GPL or you must negotiate another license with the copyright holder. MySQL and other companies use GPL in a dual licensing scheme, where people who want to link in non-free software pay for the privilege, and those who want to put their code under GPL can do so without a fee. This seems very fair to me: those who want to share can do so, those who don't want to share pay for the value that they're getting.
It's really important to look at GPL from the perspective of the entity offering the code, as well as the entity receiving it. Making all you create a non-strings gift isn't always a good idea for the software author, and a no-strings gift is more than is required for it to be Open Source.
You're missing something. With LGPL, Microsoft's additions don't have to be under LGPL. They can be under a proprietary license. They don't have to come with source. And when you convert the LGPL code to GPL, you can't convert the proprietary part. That's how LGPL differs from GPL.
LGPL isn't GPL. You can still "embrace and enhance" LGPL code. GPL is the real test.
I think we should fight Microsoft, not Sam Ramji. We should just make it clear that Sam works for a company with a monopoly conviction and a long record of dirty fighting.
Microsoft's joining Apache, to a great extent, as an anti-Linux play. They still can't stand the GPL, it's too fair for them, but they think they can take some of the oxygen from Linux by being more of a platform for Apache-style software. And the Apache license lets them "embrace and enhance".
Don't give up now, folks. Only your vigilance and your willingness to point out when Microsoft plays dirty tricks will keep them from getting away with even more of that.
Bruce
Anyone who wants to spoil that buisness model can take the trouble to build good binaries. Once the source is GPL, nobody can prevent you from building your own binaries and making them free.
I think the Bush administration's motto is "Don't tell us about the truth! We're making the truth!"
In response to the controversy, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn argued that, "We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he 'invented' the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet."[101] In addition, Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, stated: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is -- and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a "futures group" -- the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen." - Wikipedia
Oops, I'm getting whipped for "heat in a thermodynamic sense is not the same thing as temperature". But yes, the point here is that they've invented better thermocouple wire and thus possibly an improvement in thermoelectric generation and maybe the Peltier effect. Doubling the efficiency of those things would not necessarily make them competitive with other processes for heating and cooling.
It's not possible to make electricity directly from heat. It is possible to make it from a difference in heat between two points.
Yes, they took what they wanted to do and worked out a strategy to avoid anti-trust issues. So they backed SCO.
Some have suggested that they want to beat Linux as a platform for Open Source applications in the server market. Which isn't going to work without some form of dirty fighting being connected to it. We'll see.
During much of the time I was at HP - hired to be an Open Source leader first and an HP employee second - I knew about this and had to keep it secret. It was a pretty big hardship for me, obviously I felt I was being disloyal to my own community. I'm pasting it in here today so that we don't forget Microsoft's previous intentions toward Apache. - Bruce
From: Campbell, Gary [mailto:gary.campbell@hp.com]
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2002 7:27 PM
To: Stallard, Scott J; CTO Office Directs; Chaffin, Janice; Denzel, Nora; McDowell, Mary; Elias, Howard; Fink, Martin R; Becker, Rick (ISS); Beyers, Joe Cc: Blackmore, Peter; Robison, Shane
Subject: Microsoft Patent Cross License - Open Source Software Impact
Microsoft Patent Cross License - Open Source Software Impact
Today we agreed on a new patent cross license with Microsoft that protects HP in the short term, but it has significant impact on HP's use of Open Source software in the long term. More importantly, we now understand that Microsoft is about to launch legal action against the industry for shipping Open Source software that may force us out of using certain popular Open Source products. We need to create a cross-HP staffed program to understand the implication by product group and to provide the short term and long term steerage. I'll hook up with Martin tomorrow and start planning next steps for a cross-HP planning team.
Background:
HP is we believe, protected by our previous cross license for patents filed by Microsoft up to June of 2001, to ship open source software that violates Microsoft patents that was developed or shipped prior to today. This means that we can freeze on today's open source functionality and we are protected.
The new cross license does not protect us against new Microsoft patents filed after June 2001 against new open source product functionality shipped or created after today. So we have a two year window before HP has exposure on new Microsoft patents against new open source functionality, but we have exposure because of the MAD clause in the GPL if Microsoft attacks another entity with existing patents. See next section.
Open Source Software is described as a license that follows the intent and process of GPL or GPL lite. Additionally several major products are explicitly called out as not protected by the cross license, such as Samba, Wine, KDE, Gnome, Apache, Sendmail, and Linux.
Microsoft's Intentions:
Microsoft could attack Open Source Software for patent infringements against OEMs, Linux distributors, and least likely open source developers. They are specifically upset about Samba, Apache and Sendmail. We believe Samba is first, and they will attempt to prove it isn't covered by prior patent cross as a so called "clone" product carve out in the previous agreement.
OEMs that don't have a cross(like SUN), or OEMs like HP that they force a change in their cross license to exclude open source software are probably the first target. Intel, Red Hat, SuSE, UBL, Oracle are probably in the first wave as well.
IBM we don't know what the status of termination of their Microsoft cross license is. They could be protected by their previous OS/2 deals?
Mutually Assured Destruction Clause:
But it probably doesn't matter, because the GPL license has a mutually assured destruction clause in section 7, if anyone is sued over a patent infringement, no one is licensed under the GPL to ship GPL-ed products. This is probably what Microsoft intends to do.
Basically Microsoft is going to use the legal system to shut down open source software, and for all of its cleverness, the GPL makes it fairly easy unless a white knight steps in.
Best guess on the timing, this fall when they are finished settling with DOJ and the states.
Industry Reaction:
At this point we have no information on who would defend open source with
Actually, just using Open Standards would be better. And sometimes there are no Open Standards, and then publishing what they are using without restrictive IPR agreements is all we need them to do. They don't have to spend much money on this. We can make things interoperable without any more help than that.
Rather than an ext3 driver on Windows, any network-attached storage device using an open protocol (like Samba) would be a better solution unless you're dirt-poor. Such devices sell below $250 these days.
People ride cars because they are convenient - they go from point to point as desired and they don't make the user bend to their schedule. They are private. They are comfortable, they don't have the smelly guy in the next seat.
Regarding OpenOffice, I think part of it is marketing, part is the retail channel, and we still have some functionality issues.
Well, sorry, but those are three platitudes that I wasn't really discussing.
To put the issue of Open Source overconfidence in better perspective, though, I'd like to see one legislative change in the United States that is designed to help protect Open Source software. Just one. That would be a measure of our wins or lack thereof.
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Let's not get overconfident. Whatever gains we once made on the desktop have been blown away by Apple. Despite the fact that we give away a wonderful compatible office suite in OpenOffice 3 for free, most companies and individuals are still buying MS Office. The software patent system is still tilted against us, and may be getting worse depending on an upcoming treaty - assumptions that the Bilski case will solve the problem for us are unrealistic to say the least. And it looks like they will get ISO to publish Office Open XML.
So, sure Microsoft is positioning itself for future strategy, but I bet they still see themselves winning. And they may well do so.
Bruce
The story you are referring to is written by a software patent proponent who would like to reverse the USPTO's new position on software patents. He is choosing google as his example in order to inflame other corporate attorneys into working on the problem in favor of software patenting.
I would be overjoyed if the Bilski case and other recent cases solved the software patent problem for us. But I think the reality is that congress is ready to repair the situation and restore whatever software patenting the courts and USPTO administrators take away.
They may have lost the fight, but ISO's leadership shows every sign that it will dismiss the four national protests and publish the standard. That's really all Microsoft needs. Regardless of whether their future software will read ODF, it's going to write OOXML unless you go through significant pain to stop it from doing so. So, it's somewhat likely that Microsoft will still pull a victory out of this one.