If all else (like legal actions) fails (or should legal actions not be feasible): Remember that companies who incorporate GPLed code into their products without making the product GPLed are nevertheless producing a legally GPLed product, which means that we can copy this product freely and "safely" ignore their licensing terms. If enough people do this (and maybe even let that company know) their losses in revenue and reputation will soon dissuade them or any potential followers. This is probably not true for other Open Source licenses and I don't know how "safe" it would be to do as described above as I am no lawyer (disclaimer!), or how risky this might be in the U.S. where the lawsuit craze rocks...
> Comment Submitted. There will be a delay before the comment becomes part of the static page. What you submitted appears below. If there is a mistake, you should have used the Preview button! That's what I did, and that's why it appeared as posted by "Anonymous Coward", although I *did* enter my login and password! Please have this:-) form fixed! Thank you! BTW, I have disabled cookies for security reasons...
And you think that Joe Averell Manager will be able to make this distinction? I don't think so! Otherwise they'd use good software (e.g. Apache, Linux, etc.) in the business world instead of software with fancy labels ("Intel inside") and brand names ("Microsoft certified") in the first place... So they have already proven to be mostly clueless...
IMO, the "OSI Certified" label will be mistaken for a quality certification label (provided it will be adopted at all, that is, of course) even if it doesn't mean no such thing. Therefore I agree with the first poster in thinking that the whole certification is probably a bad idea altogether.
I mean, we developers don't care about the label anyway, and the suits will be misleaded by it. So what real (and good) purpose does it serve?
I think you are mistaken. It's written "OSI Reference Model" in all my books, and entering "OSI reference model networking layers" into a search machine like AltaVista gives you a lot of hits with the exact phrase "OSI Reference Model".
BTW, the abbreviation "OSI" for "Open Source Initiative" conflicts with the "OSI" for "Open Systems Interconnection" (from the "OSI Reference Model" of networking layers), so the name choice was already unwise (if not incompetent) in the first place.
I'm the author of several widely used modules from CPAN. I also work together with the german section of O'Reilly for some book projects. In the scope of these activities, I also deal a lot with Perl on the Win32 platform.
What I witnessed in the Perl newsgroups lately is that more and more people are asking for help with installing modules using ActiveState's PPM (Perl Package Manager). Those people (and they seem to be a majority) are obviously unaware of the fact that they do not have to rely on ActiveState's precompiled modules but that they actually can install them in the standard Perl way:
perl Makefile.PL nmake nmake test nmake install
(or "dmake" instead of "nmake", with Borland C++).
IMO, this is precisely the kind of "embrace" that threatens the freedomware (ingenious new term, BTW!) from commercial companies like Microsoft.
As a consequence, I think I will release future versions of my modules under the GNU GPL only (and not optionally under the Artistic License as well anymore).
As an aside information, I was the one to complain about the license of the original Perl Resource Kit, Win32 Edition, which stated that the whole Kit was proprietary, its use restricted and modification and redistribution forbidden, in violation of both the Artistic as well as the GNU GP License (just read it if you don't believe me).
After much arguing with O'Reilly, they admitted that their license was in violation and that future editions of the Kit would have a different license, stating clearly that the Perl core was evidently Free Software.
As you can see the danger is real, and commercial companies will - intentionally or uncaringly - start nibbling away the freedom from Free Software if we don't pay attention.
It is my opinion that the General Public License is not so much about ``keeping free software free'' as it is about forcing us to accept the extreme Communistic political philosophy of Richard Stallman and others at the Free Software Foundation. The very spirit of the GPL is to attack the very concept of Capitalism and individualism. There is no concept of intellectual property under the terms of the GPL. Your hard work is no more your property than everyone else's.
This last bit simply is not correct. As an author you retain *all* rights of the software you wrote. Remember, it's copyrighted to you as the author. You (as the author) can even make modifications and sell those as a proprietary product (example: sendmail). The paragraph above is mainly political diffamation; the author closes his eyes before the facts.
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Make that "freedomware", please, for example, because Free Software is *NOT* "freeware"! :-)
See also http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/wor ds-to-avoid.html
If all else (like legal actions) fails (or should legal actions not be feasible): Remember that companies who incorporate GPLed code into their products without making the product GPLed are nevertheless producing a legally GPLed product, which means that we can copy this product freely and "safely" ignore their licensing terms. If enough people do this (and maybe even let that company know) their losses in revenue and reputation will soon dissuade them or any potential followers. This is probably not true for other Open Source licenses and I don't know how "safe" it would be to do as described above as I am no lawyer (disclaimer!), or how risky this might be in the U.S. where the lawsuit craze rocks...
> Comment Submitted. There will be a delay before the comment becomes part of the static page. What you submitted appears below. If there is a mistake, you should have used the Preview button! That's what I did, and that's why it appeared as posted by "Anonymous Coward", although I *did* enter my login and password! Please have this :-) form fixed! Thank you! BTW, I have disabled cookies for security reasons...
So they have already proven to be mostly clueless...
IMO, the "OSI Certified" label will be mistaken for a quality certification label (provided it will be adopted at all, that is, of course) even if it doesn't mean no such thing. Therefore I agree with the first poster in thinking that the whole certification is probably a bad idea altogether.
I mean, we developers don't care about the label anyway, and the suits will be misleaded by it. So what real (and good) purpose does it serve?
P.S.: "OSI" stands for "Open Systems Interconnection" - just enter "OSI Open Systems Interconnection" into AltaVista and see for
yourself...
I think you are mistaken. It's written "OSI Reference Model" in all my books, and entering
"OSI reference model networking layers" into
a search machine like AltaVista gives you a
lot of hits with the exact phrase "OSI
Reference Model".
BTW, the abbreviation "OSI" for "Open Source Initiative" conflicts with the "OSI" for "Open Systems Interconnection" (from the "OSI Reference Model" of networking layers), so the name choice was already unwise (if not incompetent) in the first place.
What I witnessed in the Perl newsgroups lately is that more and more people are asking for help with installing modules using ActiveState's PPM (Perl Package Manager). Those people (and they seem to be a majority) are obviously unaware of the fact that they do not have to rely on ActiveState's precompiled modules but that they actually can install them in the standard Perl way:
perl Makefile.PL
nmake
nmake test
nmake install
(or "dmake" instead of "nmake", with Borland C++).
IMO, this is precisely the kind of "embrace" that threatens the freedomware (ingenious new term, BTW!) from commercial companies like Microsoft.
As a consequence, I think I will release future versions of my modules under the GNU GPL only (and not optionally under the Artistic License as well anymore).
As an aside information, I was the one to complain about the license of the original Perl Resource Kit, Win32 Edition, which stated that the whole Kit was proprietary, its use restricted and modification and redistribution forbidden, in violation of both the Artistic as well as the GNU GP License (just read it if you don't believe me).
After much arguing with O'Reilly, they admitted that their license was in violation and that future editions of the Kit would have a different license, stating clearly that the Perl core was evidently Free Software.
As you can see the danger is real, and commercial companies will - intentionally or uncaringly - start nibbling away the freedom from Free Software if we don't pay attention.
It is my opinion that the General Public License is not so much about ``keeping free software free'' as it is about forcing us to accept the extreme Communistic political philosophy of Richard Stallman and others at the Free Software Foundation. The very spirit of the GPL is to attack the very concept of Capitalism and individualism. There is no concept of intellectual property under the terms of the GPL. Your hard work is no more your property than everyone else's.
This last bit simply is not correct. As an author you retain *all* rights of the software you wrote. Remember, it's copyrighted to you as the author. You (as the author) can even make modifications and sell those as a proprietary product (example: sendmail). The paragraph above is mainly political diffamation; the author closes his eyes before the facts.