Re:Bullshit and baloney-Giving to the trough
on
Why I Love The GPL
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· Score: 1
Are GNOME and KDE licensed under the BSD license for BSD use? No? Then how is this "giving back"? If you're not licensing your code so that BSD can make use of it under their license, you're not truly "giving back".
Re:Bullshit and baloney.
on
Why I Love The GPL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You're confusing SGI's 4dwm, Sun's OpenWindows, NeXTStep, and CDE with X. This is as inaccurate as confusing KDE and GNOME with X.
All of the proprietary desktops I mentioned were built on top of X. They would all run on top of a generic X, assuming they could be linked against its libraries.
Having X be GPLed would not have prevented the development and deployment of the proprietary desktops. It would simply have prevented its own adoption by computer manufacturers. Having X be LGPLed, as would be much more appropriate for an OS component, would not have forced SGI et al to open-source their desktop code either.
GPL zealots listen to each other too much. Having something fundamental be GPLed does not, in the general case, lead to the license's viral effects opening up code someone else wants to keep proprietary. IBM isn't open-sourcing their entire software portfolio. Far from it. Neither is anyone else. They sank lots of money into developing that code, and they have a (totally reasonable) expectation of seeing a return on that investment.
I don't agree that X would be better served by the GPL. X is as much a protocol as a program, and protocols that aren't BSD-licensed wind up on the trash heap of history, unless they have some other compelling reason for their adoption.
Yes, you can get commercial companies to work to help the commons, but it's an exception, not the rule.
The fact that something is difficult does not give corporations the right to own it. It does if the corporations are paying for it and it can reasonably be sold as a product. Much as the FSF types hate the fact, that is true of software, while it is not true of mathematical proofs or human languages.
What's different between X and the kernel is 20 years of history and a grass-roots movement that hadn't happened when X began its rise to prominence.
If the FSf had its way, users would not have the ability to buy a commercial program.
My sig is consistent...I believe the GPL is insidious, in no small part because people like many who have posted to this very article believe a falsehood: that the GPL is the only way to keep their software from being "taken private" - when, in fact, any OSD-compliant license does so. It's designed to promote one political philosophy with which I have profound, basic disagreements. Nonetheless, if someone believes that the GPL is, in fact, the most consistent with their goals, then they are perfectly free to choose it with my blessing. Just don't ask me to support it.
which is he backing away from I am in no way backing away from it.
The simple fact is that anyone could have taken the X code and adapted it to Sun, HP, SGI,... hardware. (Indeed, some folks actually did that.) The original code was still available and freely redistributable. X was not taken private. Indeed, it could not have been; if it were, there would have been nothing for XF86 to port to Linux.
If X had been GPLed, it probably would not have been as ubiquitous as it is. It was only because the world had picked it up that Sun eventually jettisoned NeWS in its favor.
It's easy to say in 2005 that GPLing X would not have prevented it from becoming ubiquitous. Saying that in 1990 would have gotten you laughed out of the building.
you develop a software and make it available for free under the BSD license, but the ones who make money with your software are free to close the source?! They can't close my source. They can only close their source. To deny them this freedom is nothing less than to assert ownership over their code.
Nobody has been harmed by Microsoft's ability to embrace and extend open standards in a proprietary fashion?! Nobody has been harmed by the ability of M$ to use BSD-licensed code because the code is still freely available to all. M$ has not, and cannot, take it away.
M$ users have, in some people's view, been harmed - but that is their choice to make. Period.
The users of the MS TCP/IP stack, Kerberos or a non-free Unix are not using free software. They are lacking the basic freedoms that are required for a program package to be considered free software. That is their choice to make, and that is the choice the FSF would deny them.
(And you're wrong about Kerberos not being "free software": RMS himself says the BSD license is "free" by his definition.)
If a user surrenders his freedom voluntarily, in order to achieve some other benefit that he considers more important, that's his decision to make. Not yours. Not mine. Not RMS's. His alone.
The Kerberos changes were serious enough (although they were allowed by the literal reading of the RFC) that the Kerberos RFC authors threatened to reopen the spec and specifically rewrite it to make Microsoft's changes incompatible if they didn't publish the changes and release them free of patent problems. MS backed down after that. Even so, were it not for the fact that their license kept the original code freely available, this making it possible in the first place for Samba to incorporate it, M$ would have succeeded. The same features that allow M$ to use the code also protect it from M$'s attempt to lock it up incompatibly.
Your use of the subjunctive suggests that a condition would have to be met for this to happen. What is this condition? The condition is the achievement of the FSF's goal: have all software everywhere be covered by the GPL. This is the explicit goal of their organization, and the goal to which the GPL was expressly designed.
Freedom from proprietary software. More correctly, the freedom to choose proprietary software. What the hell gives them the right to make that choice for me, or demand that I give up such freedom? Yet it's blatantly obvious that, in the FSF's dream world, this would be the exact case. Just read the discussion of when they recommend the GPL vs. the LGPL for one example.
I fail to see why needing a group to take stewardship of a freely available software base and maintain and extend it is a Bad Thing. Yes, most X implementations were commercial, but that's because X took a lot of work to adapt to other environments. Those who invested time and effort into making the adaptations (think Hummingbird, WRQ, and so on) deserved to be compensated for that effort.
Just who would you have maintain and enhance X? Someone has to. XF86 is a logical outgrowth of the fact that it was available.
In fact, I would argue that having X be available to all to use as they wished guaranteed its ubiquity. Had it not been so, it wouldn't have been adopted by Sun, HP, IBM, yada yada yada, and become as widespread as it is.
If it had truly been locked up, it would not have been possible for XF86 to even happen in the first place. This is the scary part of the GPL zealots' FUD: that they keep spreading it even in the face of well-known counterexamples.
Not every company selling software is M$, nor should they be treated like them.
Yes, Bill Gates should be strung up by his balls. The litany of his evils is long and well-known.
However, that M$ incorporated the BSD networking stack in their OSes isn't among them. If the folks who wrote BSD didn't want that to happen, they could have chosen a different license. They didn't. Why is it that those who claim that people should be free to choose the GPL howl when others exercise their freedom not to?
If they could have taken X proprietary, there would be neither XF86 nor X.org. Users have the freedom to choose commercial implementations, supported by folks who actually get paid for the software, or freely available implementations, supported by unpaid volunteers, based on their own needs, not some zealot's utopian politics.
This is the ultimate freedom.
The FSF would remove people's freedom to choose commercial implementations, and claim that they're fighting for freedom. This is the same kind of logical error as "fucking for virginity".
The bugs I was referring to were the bugs in the M$-developed, non-BSD-originated IP stack. By using the BSD stack, M$ got rid of their bugs. They didn't fix any in the BSD stack - they didn't have to.
You benefited because your system didn't have to be broken to coexist with bugs in the IP stack M$ developed
But software in the public domain, and software covered by a BSD-style license, is not afforded any protection whatsoever to ensure those same freedoms exist for the next user, or the next, or the one after her. Joe's article perpetuates the falsehood that non-GPLed software can, somehow, be taken away from the public and locked away.
Bullshit.
He even goes so far as to cite the cases of the BSD networking stack (used by M$ in current versions of Windows) and Kerberos, despite the fact that absolutely nobody has been harmed and despite the fact that both software suites are still freely available.
If M$ could lock Kerberos away from the rest of us, don't you think they would have? Instead, they're just sticking their own users with gratuoitous incompatibilities, while the rest of us can use the real thing.
This is even more true in the case of the Windows IP stack. All M$ did by "stealing" the BSD networking stack is keep the rest of us from having to work around their bugs. This is a win for everyone.
Any Open Source Definition-compliant license guarantees that the covered code will, always and forever, be freely available for all to use, modify, and redistribute. The GPL is not required to achieve this goal.
The only goal the GPL works toward beyond those of other OSD-compliant licenses is the perpetuation of the FSF utopia, which calls for nothing less than the destruction of the software industry as we know it. It claims to work toward freedom, while it actually works to deny freedom to those who do not share its goals.
They're posting a bunch of messages in news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting about how they've terminated a bunch of spammers, and would the blocklist operators pretty please de-list them? Maybe this is part of that effort, either deliberately or accidentally.
The GPL version 2 doesn't say anything about patent licensing either. Thus, it's no better than the BSD license (there's just one, now; the advertising clause has been rescinded) to answer your objection.
Copyleft, while claiming to be about preventing others from taking away freedom, does so by destroying freedom to derive at all except on very stringent, and to many objectionable, terms. To many (including myself), even though we do not wish to modify GPLed software and release it in non-open ways (a common accusation, and one that is in my case unequivocally false), the GPL's destruction of freedom while claiming its mantle is the same kind of heinous abuse of the language as the PATRIOT Act. Destroying freedom in order to preserve it is like the classic "screwing for virginity".
My framing of the issue is no less fair than RMS's perversion of the word "free".
Cygwin is GPLed as an explicit attempt to force programmers to adopt the GPL for their own programs. This is by their own admission.
As it happens, it's licensed for free use with any program licensed under an Open Source Definition-compliant license, which includes some ones that the holy RMS says aren't "free" - including the QPL, which is the license Hercules uses.
Interesting. I find it especially interesting that GPL zealots complain that the Sun license will effectively prevent them from borrowing from Solaris, while simultaneously demanding that nobody borrow from Linux without buying into their utopia. Am I the only one who sees a big glaring inconsistency here? If GPL zealots have the right to demand that nobody borrow their work without buying their politics, shouldn't Sun have the same right?
you are perfectly free as a programmer to write more software incorporating parts of free software, provided that your derived software is free This is intellectual slavery. It's a naked attempt to force everyone into following one particular vision, whether they wish to or not.
Programmers are users too, indeed. They deserve the same degree of freedom as everyone else. The GPL denies them that freedom.
Of course that one got modded down. It challenges the orthodoxy of the FSF zealots, which are heavily represented on Slashdot.
The point is still valid. The only people still using the term "free software" are FSF zealots. If you don't believe me, go look at ESR's analysis of usage of the two terms on the web. If you don't believe him, he's provided the links to the searches he did; perform them for yourself and disprove the numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Are GNOME and KDE licensed under the BSD license for BSD use? No? Then how is this "giving back"? If you're not licensing your code so that BSD can make use of it under their license, you're not truly "giving back".
You're confusing SGI's 4dwm, Sun's OpenWindows, NeXTStep, and CDE with X. This is as inaccurate as confusing KDE and GNOME with X.
All of the proprietary desktops I mentioned were built on top of X. They would all run on top of a generic X, assuming they could be linked against its libraries.
Having X be GPLed would not have prevented the development and deployment of the proprietary desktops. It would simply have prevented its own adoption by computer manufacturers. Having X be LGPLed, as would be much more appropriate for an OS component, would not have forced SGI et al to open-source their desktop code either.
GPL zealots listen to each other too much. Having something fundamental be GPLed does not, in the general case, lead to the license's viral effects opening up code someone else wants to keep proprietary. IBM isn't open-sourcing their entire software portfolio. Far from it. Neither is anyone else. They sank lots of money into developing that code, and they have a (totally reasonable) expectation of seeing a return on that investment.
I don't agree that X would be better served by the GPL. X is as much a protocol as a program, and protocols that aren't BSD-licensed wind up on the trash heap of history, unless they have some other compelling reason for their adoption.
Yes, you can get commercial companies to work to help the commons, but it's an exception, not the rule.
The fact that something is difficult does not give corporations the right to own it.
It does if the corporations are paying for it and it can reasonably be sold as a product. Much as the FSF types hate the fact, that is true of software, while it is not true of mathematical proofs or human languages.
What's different between X and the kernel is 20 years of history and a grass-roots movement that hadn't happened when X began its rise to prominence.
If the FSf had its way, users would not have the ability to buy a commercial program.
My sig is consistent...I believe the GPL is insidious, in no small part because people like many who have posted to this very article believe a falsehood: that the GPL is the only way to keep their software from being "taken private" - when, in fact, any OSD-compliant license does so. It's designed to promote one political philosophy with which I have profound, basic disagreements. Nonetheless, if someone believes that the GPL is, in fact, the most consistent with their goals, then they are perfectly free to choose it with my blessing. Just don't ask me to support it.
which is he backing away from
I am in no way backing away from it.
The simple fact is that anyone could have taken the X code and adapted it to Sun, HP, SGI,... hardware. (Indeed, some folks actually did that.) The original code was still available and freely redistributable. X was not taken private. Indeed, it could not have been; if it were, there would have been nothing for XF86 to port to Linux.
If X had been GPLed, it probably would not have been as ubiquitous as it is. It was only because the world had picked it up that Sun eventually jettisoned NeWS in its favor.
It's easy to say in 2005 that GPLing X would not have prevented it from becoming ubiquitous. Saying that in 1990 would have gotten you laughed out of the building.
you develop a software and make it available for free under the BSD license, but the ones who make money with your software are free to close the source?!
They can't close my source. They can only close their source. To deny them this freedom is nothing less than to assert ownership over their code.
Nobody has been harmed by Microsoft's ability to embrace and extend open standards in a proprietary fashion?!
Nobody has been harmed by the ability of M$ to use BSD-licensed code because the code is still freely available to all. M$ has not, and cannot, take it away.
M$ users have, in some people's view, been harmed - but that is their choice to make. Period.
The users of the MS TCP/IP stack, Kerberos or a non-free Unix are not using free software. They are lacking the basic freedoms that are required for a program package to be considered free software.
That is their choice to make, and that is the choice the FSF would deny them.
(And you're wrong about Kerberos not being "free software": RMS himself says the BSD license is "free" by his definition.)
If a user surrenders his freedom voluntarily, in order to achieve some other benefit that he considers more important, that's his decision to make. Not yours. Not mine. Not RMS's. His alone.
The Kerberos changes were serious enough (although they were allowed by the literal reading of the RFC) that the Kerberos RFC authors threatened to reopen the spec and specifically rewrite it to make Microsoft's changes incompatible if they didn't publish the changes and release them free of patent problems. MS backed down after that.
Even so, were it not for the fact that their license kept the original code freely available, this making it possible in the first place for Samba to incorporate it, M$ would have succeeded. The same features that allow M$ to use the code also protect it from M$'s attempt to lock it up incompatibly.
Your use of the subjunctive suggests that a condition would have to be met for this to happen. What is this condition?
The condition is the achievement of the FSF's goal: have all software everywhere be covered by the GPL. This is the explicit goal of their organization, and the goal to which the GPL was expressly designed.
Freedom from proprietary software.
More correctly, the freedom to choose proprietary software. What the hell gives them the right to make that choice for me, or demand that I give up such freedom? Yet it's blatantly obvious that, in the FSF's dream world, this would be the exact case. Just read the discussion of when they recommend the GPL vs. the LGPL for one example.
I fail to see why needing a group to take stewardship of a freely available software base and maintain and extend it is a Bad Thing. Yes, most X implementations were commercial, but that's because X took a lot of work to adapt to other environments. Those who invested time and effort into making the adaptations (think Hummingbird, WRQ, and so on) deserved to be compensated for that effort.
Just who would you have maintain and enhance X? Someone has to. XF86 is a logical outgrowth of the fact that it was available.
In fact, I would argue that having X be available to all to use as they wished guaranteed its ubiquity. Had it not been so, it wouldn't have been adopted by Sun, HP, IBM, yada yada yada, and become as widespread as it is.
If it had truly been locked up, it would not have been possible for XF86 to even happen in the first place. This is the scary part of the GPL zealots' FUD: that they keep spreading it even in the face of well-known counterexamples.
Not every company selling software is M$, nor should they be treated like them.
Yes, Bill Gates should be strung up by his balls. The litany of his evils is long and well-known.
However, that M$ incorporated the BSD networking stack in their OSes isn't among them. If the folks who wrote BSD didn't want that to happen, they could have chosen a different license. They didn't. Why is it that those who claim that people should be free to choose the GPL howl when others exercise their freedom not to?
If they could have taken X proprietary, there would be neither XF86 nor X.org. Users have the freedom to choose commercial implementations, supported by folks who actually get paid for the software, or freely available implementations, supported by unpaid volunteers, based on their own needs, not some zealot's utopian politics.
This is the ultimate freedom.
The FSF would remove people's freedom to choose commercial implementations, and claim that they're fighting for freedom. This is the same kind of logical error as "fucking for virginity".
The bugs I was referring to were the bugs in the M$-developed, non-BSD-originated IP stack. By using the BSD stack, M$ got rid of their bugs. They didn't fix any in the BSD stack - they didn't have to.
You benefited because your system didn't have to be broken to coexist with bugs in the IP stack M$ developed
But software in the public domain, and software covered by a BSD-style license, is not afforded any protection whatsoever to ensure those same freedoms exist for the next user, or the next, or the one after her.
Joe's article perpetuates the falsehood that non-GPLed software can, somehow, be taken away from the public and locked away.
Bullshit.
He even goes so far as to cite the cases of the BSD networking stack (used by M$ in current versions of Windows) and Kerberos, despite the fact that absolutely nobody has been harmed and despite the fact that both software suites are still freely available.
If M$ could lock Kerberos away from the rest of us, don't you think they would have? Instead, they're just sticking their own users with gratuoitous incompatibilities, while the rest of us can use the real thing.
This is even more true in the case of the Windows IP stack. All M$ did by "stealing" the BSD networking stack is keep the rest of us from having to work around their bugs. This is a win for everyone.
Any Open Source Definition-compliant license guarantees that the covered code will, always and forever, be freely available for all to use, modify, and redistribute. The GPL is not required to achieve this goal.
The only goal the GPL works toward beyond those of other OSD-compliant licenses is the perpetuation of the FSF utopia, which calls for nothing less than the destruction of the software industry as we know it. It claims to work toward freedom, while it actually works to deny freedom to those who do not share its goals.
They're posting a bunch of messages in news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting about how they've terminated a bunch of spammers, and would the blocklist operators pretty please de-list them? Maybe this is part of that effort, either deliberately or accidentally.
That was a fun evening. How many of you folks have gotten to sit on a coucn on the side of the stage at a rock concert?
Now, there's a thought: Have Tarantino direct. That would be...uhm...interesting.
I'm reserving judgment until we know a lot more about it.
I'd kill to have a part, though.
The GPL version 2 doesn't say anything about patent licensing either. Thus, it's no better than the BSD license (there's just one, now; the advertising clause has been rescinded) to answer your objection.
Copyleft, while claiming to be about preventing others from taking away freedom, does so by destroying freedom to derive at all except on very stringent, and to many objectionable, terms. To many (including myself), even though we do not wish to modify GPLed software and release it in non-open ways (a common accusation, and one that is in my case unequivocally false), the GPL's destruction of freedom while claiming its mantle is the same kind of heinous abuse of the language as the PATRIOT Act. Destroying freedom in order to preserve it is like the classic "screwing for virginity".
My framing of the issue is no less fair than RMS's perversion of the word "free".
Cygwin is GPLed as an explicit attempt to force programmers to adopt the GPL for their own programs. This is by their own admission.
As it happens, it's licensed for free use with any program licensed under an Open Source Definition-compliant license, which includes some ones that the holy RMS says aren't "free" - including the QPL, which is the license Hercules uses.
Interesting. I find it especially interesting that GPL zealots complain that the Sun license will effectively prevent them from borrowing from Solaris, while simultaneously demanding that nobody borrow from Linux without buying into their utopia. Am I the only one who sees a big glaring inconsistency here? If GPL zealots have the right to demand that nobody borrow their work without buying their politics, shouldn't Sun have the same right?
you are perfectly free as a programmer to write more software incorporating parts of free software, provided that your derived software is free
This is intellectual slavery. It's a naked attempt to force everyone into following one particular vision, whether they wish to or not.
Programmers are users too, indeed. They deserve the same degree of freedom as everyone else. The GPL denies them that freedom.
Of course that one got modded down. It challenges the orthodoxy of the FSF zealots, which are heavily represented on Slashdot.
The point is still valid. The only people still using the term "free software" are FSF zealots. If you don't believe me, go look at ESR's analysis of usage of the two terms on the web. If you don't believe him, he's provided the links to the searches he did; perform them for yourself and disprove the numbers.