Not all of us can make a living being open source gasbags, you know. If it weren't for software patents, I would be a poor man.
Prove it.
I looked, and could not find any patents issued to "Anonymous Coward".:-)
And by the way, my employer makes Open Source software for Wall Street investment banking firms. I am, however, also paid by customers (usually also Wall Street investment banks, but sometimes other entities) who want me to teach or lecture.
It's Sunday again, and there's another out-of-left-field editorial about Open Source just like last week. I wonder if Slashdot editors have a "flame schedule" to amp up the readership during what would otherwise be slow periods.
His argument is putting up a straw man that doesn't
really represent what RMS and FSF think, and then knocking it down.
The FSF stance is that good software comes with source code and with a
particular set of rights which should be yours regardless of whether copyright can be used to enforce those rights or not. Perhaps it would be
some other sort of law, or perhaps an ethical norm.
But IMO it would make about 100 times more sense to argue about software patents at the moment, because they are by far the worse evil.
Suppose his reasons are none of our business, and he never shares. What use is it to speculate (other than my speculation that the anonymous story submitter wanted to kick the Novell pariah yet again)?
Well, the problem has not gone away. Can you state a better case regarding why it should be off-limits to raise it again?
When Jeremy Allison resigned from Novell, the fact of his resignation was known by the public for some weeks before his last official day as a Novell employee. Jeremy had to refrain from doing or saying certain things until he was actually off the payroll - for example he did not sign the petition until then. Love is probably in the same situation right now: known to have resigned, but still to some degree responsible to the company.
We might not get to know how Love feels about the Novell-Microsoft agreement for some time, and should not make assumptions. It may well be that his strongest feelings are about wanting to continue to develop a great desktop, and that Novell might not be such a great place to do that any longer. That's all he mentioned in his blog.
That said, the agreement is a big honkin' elephant in Novell's living room that is not going away. It's unfair to ask people not to speculate, we just have to make it clear that such speculations are vapors until Love himself comments.
"It turned out that he thought Free Software was software they don't charge for."
That's what the rest of the world thinks when they hear "free"
Yes, but he was speaking at a conference organized by FSF Europe and organized by people like Ciaran O'Reardon. He very clearly had not done his homework.
Old movies of the 60's and 70's used to portray a drug pusher giving someone a hypo of heroin with a 500-dollar bill wrapped around it. Shoot up and the money's yours, but the pusher will get it back soon enough, 'cause you'll be hooked.
I think of a lot of zero-initial-cost proprietary software that way. If you're not going to pay for it, you'll pay for the limited set of stuff that it's compatible with. It's interesting how many corporations are addicts, and how their management isn't faulted for that.
IBM's talking about an "Open Client Solution"
doesn't mean Open Source at all. It might mean Open Standards, it
might just mean multi-platform. This one happens to use Linux, but it is
clearly Linux hosting propreitary software.
Lots of companies use Open Source to make a buck in some way, and some of
them either mis-represent what is Open, or they don't get it at all. I
saw an Oracle representative give a talk on "Free Software from Oracle"
in Belfast last year. It turned out that he thought Free Software was
software they don't charge for. Fortunately, Richard Stallman was out
getting a massage, he gave his own talk an hour later. The audience
tore the Oracle guy to shreds and insisted that he say "cost-less"
instead of "Free" for the rest of the talk. IMO it was a pretty low
moment for Oracle.
But what does this have to do with the Open Source / Free Software
community? Not too much. IBM and Oracle would say the same thing about
"Data Mining" or "Self Healing" if that was the buzzword that would
help them make a buck that day. It's just outsiders misrepresenting
themselves. Yes, outsiders. Even if IBM participates in Open Source
projects, selling Lotus is an outsider activity. The best thing you can
do is point it out, but don't blame it on Open Source.
His sympathy for Red Hat being "exploited" is wildly absurd and shows his failure to understand who made the software in Open Source products. Red Hat did
not, for the most part, make the system they are selling. People like me did,
and Red Hat did not pay us for it.
And if you want to use that software in Debian or CentOS, that's fine with us.
Overall, he doesn't show much of an understanding of how Open Source is paid
for and where the innovation comes from.
So, "cdanzig" the original poster, finally chimed in and said in this comment that it's "a very informal agreement, mostly verbal". Not the way I'd want to run a company. But IMO this is the exact condition in which one might have a hope of successfully treating it as a work-for-hire.
I'd say you have a right to own the copyright, and there is even a chance that work-for-hire applies, dispite the narrowness of work-for-hire in the copyright title that others have pointed out. But I'm not the judge, or even a lawyer.
You are assuming that they companies failed to negotiate the disposition of the copyright properly but succeeded in making sure to do everything necessary so that they wouldn't be statutory employees. For all we know there might not be a contract.
It could also fit under a contribution to a collective work.
And even if it is not a work for hire, the contract could be to convey all rights as if it were.
My own company often negotiates to own the copyright to something it creates. But we make it very explicit when we do that, and we would be loath to even sign a contract in which the other party had no lawyer participating, because we would have little assurance that there was a "meeting of the minds". I don't really approve of a vendor who does that. In this case it sounds as if the customer thought they were buying more than the vendor thought they were selling. Is the vendor taking advantage? Maybe. Contractors very often try to sell the same work multiple times, it's a basic play in how to leverage your consulting business. I think it's fair for the customer to negotiate from a position of strength rather than be a dupe, which is what they've been doing so far. What I suggested was that they get a lawyer to call the other company. If the other company knows they've been playing fast and loose with the customer, they'll give in at that point. If they haven't, they will probably hold the line.
It's really easy to make first posts when you are a subscriber. Just type in a response and stick it in the clipboard, and then wait for comment posting to be enabled. I've made at least one other.
It really is possible to vend a separate and independent copyright to a work. I've done it as a contractor. So, I am not clear that this is a problem unless there is code the contractor does not own.
That's a really charming line of reasoning. For all the complaining people do about Big Evil Corporate Lawyers, I've never heard one say anything even close to the sleazy cynicism of that comment.
Hm. This is pretty basic material about negotiation, something I'd expect any manager to know, not just a corporate attorney.
A while back I had some stockholders in a small business of mine threaten to bring suit. Not because they had a real complaint, but really just to get more stock out of me. It turned out they were playing "who will blink first". My side won. But it taught me that this is not limited to corporate attorneys at all.
Owning the exclusive right to vend the software probably increases its value as an asset. If the development company isn't assigning the copyright, they probably aren't giving that, either, and plan to leverage upon this software with other customers. This is a game that most contracting developers play.
I think they need a lawyer to at least explain to them what they signed. They may have explicitly signed their rights away, in which case they may have little recourse. If they did not sign their rights away, they need to have the lawyer explain that, too. They might actually be right. And even if they are not right, they get to play "which side blinks first". A lawyer can look at the other company and tell them the probability of that game being successful or not. Also, the development company might not have much in the way of grounds for a counter-suit, and may prefer to have repeat business and good references to having a lawsuit on their record whenever anyone else checks up on them before choosing their company.
This kind of question pops up on Slashdot quite often. It's usually of the
form "I should have had a lawyer when I started this, now what do I do?"
If your company didn't negotiate this when you hired the development
company, it's your company's fault. But all is not lost. You may
be able to prove that the software is a work-for-hire. Get a lawyer.
Your laywer
might be able to negotiate in a way that you can not, because it will
be clear when the lawyer calls that you would consider a lawsuit. Tell
the lawyer you want the other company to provide the copyright, and
your legal fees.
Next time, have a lawyer work with you before you sign a contract with
any company.
FYI: I am an expert witness. I get paid to testify in lawsuits when engineers
don't call laywers before they accept a license or sign an agreement.
Haven't you done just that? Sure, you haven't practically given up most of your private life, but i would say that your years in the Debian-Project, the OSI etc. did not leave your life untouched;-) Thank you for the great work you did and are still doing!
You're welcome! My son is 7 years old now, and of course it's important to spend time with him - you can't go back and fix mistakes you made with your kid. This is the major limit on how much I travel, why I haven't ever succeeded in getting time to go to Debconf or some of the other community conferences, etc. - I've got to be there for my kid. My wife wants some of my time too. And I have a job, so that I can put a roof over their heads. This is what Richard sacrifices, that I won't.
It is true that RMS gives his whole life to his cause. I respect and admire him for doing so, and at the same time I wouldn't want to do that to my life. The load of causes upon FSF is not unusual for any organization that tries to enact social change. Look at some of the environmentalist organizations, for example. There are good parallels there, you might think of RMS as someone fighting against pollution in idea-space.
A license is compatible with another if the terms of both licenses are not mutually exclusive. The BSD/MIT licenses, at least the later ones without the advertising restriction, are GPL compatible because they don't restrict anything that the GPL would permit.
Having the ability to convert one license to another, or having the software available under multiple licenses, is a short-cut to compatibility with those licenses.
We have our own tool-chain, and one that is very portable to new architectures. I think that GPL3 draft 3 would require the disclosure of some data regarding how the toolchain would interface to the hardware of a consumer device in which GPL3 software was embedded, including the instruction set, if that was not already public knowledge.
First-to-file (in the article you cited) is not about prior art. It just means you can't pre-date your date-of-invention by 364 days. The US patent law currently lets you do that.
If this is the way RMS would rather it be, he's certainly free to put all his work in the public domain, isn't he?
The problem with putting his work in the public domain is that you can take the work and make a copyrighted modified version. So, public domain unfortunately plays into the hands of people who want to make copyrights with restrictive licensing.
Slashdot Mirror
And by the way, my employer makes Open Source software for Wall Street investment banking firms. I am, however, also paid by customers (usually also Wall Street investment banks, but sometimes other entities) who want me to teach or lecture.
Bruce
His argument is putting up a straw man that doesn't really represent what RMS and FSF think, and then knocking it down.
The FSF stance is that good software comes with source code and with a particular set of rights which should be yours regardless of whether copyright can be used to enforce those rights or not. Perhaps it would be some other sort of law, or perhaps an ethical norm.
But IMO it would make about 100 times more sense to argue about software patents at the moment, because they are by far the worse evil.
Bruce
I think we have to respect that he isn't talking to the press about this yet, without letting Novell off of the hook.
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
When Jeremy Allison resigned from Novell, the fact of his resignation was known by the public for some weeks before his last official day as a Novell employee. Jeremy had to refrain from doing or saying certain things until he was actually off the payroll - for example he did not sign the petition until then. Love is probably in the same situation right now: known to have resigned, but still to some degree responsible to the company.
We might not get to know how Love feels about the Novell-Microsoft agreement for some time, and should not make assumptions. It may well be that his strongest feelings are about wanting to continue to develop a great desktop, and that Novell might not be such a great place to do that any longer. That's all he mentioned in his blog.
That said, the agreement is a big honkin' elephant in Novell's living room that is not going away. It's unfair to ask people not to speculate, we just have to make it clear that such speculations are vapors until Love himself comments.
Bruce
Bruce
I think of a lot of zero-initial-cost proprietary software that way. If you're not going to pay for it, you'll pay for the limited set of stuff that it's compatible with. It's interesting how many corporations are addicts, and how their management isn't faulted for that.
Thanks
Bruce
Lots of companies use Open Source to make a buck in some way, and some of them either mis-represent what is Open, or they don't get it at all. I saw an Oracle representative give a talk on "Free Software from Oracle" in Belfast last year. It turned out that he thought Free Software was software they don't charge for. Fortunately, Richard Stallman was out getting a massage, he gave his own talk an hour later. The audience tore the Oracle guy to shreds and insisted that he say "cost-less" instead of "Free" for the rest of the talk. IMO it was a pretty low moment for Oracle.
But what does this have to do with the Open Source / Free Software community? Not too much. IBM and Oracle would say the same thing about "Data Mining" or "Self Healing" if that was the buzzword that would help them make a buck that day. It's just outsiders misrepresenting themselves. Yes, outsiders. Even if IBM participates in Open Source projects, selling Lotus is an outsider activity. The best thing you can do is point it out, but don't blame it on Open Source.
His sympathy for Red Hat being "exploited" is wildly absurd and shows his failure to understand who made the software in Open Source products. Red Hat did not, for the most part, make the system they are selling. People like me did, and Red Hat did not pay us for it. And if you want to use that software in Debian or CentOS, that's fine with us.
Overall, he doesn't show much of an understanding of how Open Source is paid for and where the innovation comes from.
Bruce
Bruce
I'd say you have a right to own the copyright, and there is even a chance that work-for-hire applies, dispite the narrowness of work-for-hire in the copyright title that others have pointed out. But I'm not the judge, or even a lawyer.
Bruce
It could also fit under a contribution to a collective work.
And even if it is not a work for hire, the contract could be to convey all rights as if it were.
Bruce
Bruce
It's really easy to make first posts when you are a subscriber. Just type in a response and stick it in the clipboard, and then wait for comment posting to be enabled. I've made at least one other.
Bruce
Bruce
It's really up to what the contract says.
Bruce
Hm. This is pretty basic material about negotiation, something I'd expect any manager to know, not just a corporate attorney. A while back I had some stockholders in a small business of mine threaten to bring suit. Not because they had a real complaint, but really just to get more stock out of me. It turned out they were playing "who will blink first". My side won. But it taught me that this is not limited to corporate attorneys at all.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
If your company didn't negotiate this when you hired the development company, it's your company's fault. But all is not lost. You may be able to prove that the software is a work-for-hire. Get a lawyer. Your laywer might be able to negotiate in a way that you can not, because it will be clear when the lawyer calls that you would consider a lawsuit. Tell the lawyer you want the other company to provide the copyright, and your legal fees.
Next time, have a lawyer work with you before you sign a contract with any company.
FYI: I am an expert witness. I get paid to testify in lawsuits when engineers don't call laywers before they accept a license or sign an agreement.
Bruce ~
You're welcome! My son is 7 years old now, and of course it's important to spend time with him - you can't go back and fix mistakes you made with your kid. This is the major limit on how much I travel, why I haven't ever succeeded in getting time to go to Debconf or some of the other community conferences, etc. - I've got to be there for my kid. My wife wants some of my time too. And I have a job, so that I can put a roof over their heads. This is what Richard sacrifices, that I won't.
Bruce
A license is compatible with another if the terms of both licenses are not mutually exclusive. The BSD/MIT licenses, at least the later ones without the advertising restriction, are GPL compatible because they don't restrict anything that the GPL would permit.
Having the ability to convert one license to another, or having the software available under multiple licenses, is a short-cut to compatibility with those licenses.
We have our own tool-chain, and one that is very portable to new architectures. I think that GPL3 draft 3 would require the disclosure of some data regarding how the toolchain would interface to the hardware of a consumer device in which GPL3 software was embedded, including the instruction set, if that was not already public knowledge.
Bruce
First-to-file (in the article you cited) is not about prior art. It just means you can't pre-date your date-of-invention by 364 days. The US patent law currently lets you do that.
Bruce
The problem with putting his work in the public domain is that you can take the work and make a copyrighted modified version. So, public domain unfortunately plays into the hands of people who want to make copyrights with restrictive licensing.
Bruce