I think you mean you wish that Wayland would grow some support for FreeBSD. It was designed in the first place with the Linux kernel assumed in its target platform, which means some changes need to be made in Wayland for smooth porting to FreeBSD. That, at least, is my understanding (I haven't actually looked at the sources for Wayland).
The licensing issue is that both CDDL (the license for ZFS) and GPL (the license for the Linux kernel) are copyleft licenses -- and they're not the same copyleft license -- so they are legally incompatible with each other. It's a common problem when copyleft licenses meet. Unless you're playing tricks with shims and wrappers, such as by running ZFS in userspace somehow, or forcing end users to do all the work of setting up ZFS rather than making it quick and easy to set up, you're probably violating the CDDL and GPL by distributing ZFS with a Linux distribution.
ZFS has me locked in now. I wish the linux guys had gone for it instead of relying on btrfs.
Do you mean you wish Linux used a more broadly compatible license than the GPL so it wouldn't have had problems figuring out how to directly support ZFS without violating either license?
Yes, portupgrade is separate from the base system, available through the ports system itself. It's only "deprecated", however, in that it used to essentially be "the standard" for ports system front ends, and has been edged out in that regard by portmaster. There are other front ends as well, though, and they're there to provide choices, as is portmaster.
Any major OS may have an occasional problem. There is a difference between occasional problems and epidemic problems, though. Just about every piece of self-replicating malware created for Unix-like systems in the last twentyish years has required user intervention to allow it to execute (and thus replicate), in fact -- maybe all of them (I'm sure there are some I haven't read about, but all of them that I have read about require user intervention somehow). One of the big differences is Microsoft's reticence to admit to a vulnerability -- a problem Apple shares -- which tends to incent the vendor to hide or deny vulnerabilities rather than fix them a rather unacceptable percentage of the time. Another is the relatively small pool of people who know the system well enough to develop specific solutions (last I checked, a few years ago, Microsoft's fastest-ever turn-around time on a vulnerability from report to fix was longer than the average for core open source OS projects like OpenBSD and the Linux kernel).
Probably the biggest for Microsoft, though, is its refusal to consider many types of vulnerabilities as system issues at all. Instead, they are regarded as though they are unavoidable forces of nature, offloading the task of securing the system against these problems to detection and removal systems (e.g. antivirus software) rather than dealing with it at the source (addressing the system's flaws). As a result, there are always legions of viruses and other pieces of malware floating around out there that are largely identical to older viruses and other malware previously detected and protected against by those detection and removal systems. The new malware continues to work because it has been altered enough to escape immediate detection, even though it is basically v3.3 of a virus that has been through half a dozen other major and minor versions that attracted the attention of antivirus vendors in the past. New signatures and heuristic detection routines then need to be developed -- and, adding insult to injury, the new heuristic detection routines end up generating false positives a dismaying percentage of the time, resulting in occasional news items on Slashdot about some antivirus software flagging legitimate software as a "virus". All of this could be avoided by simply addressing the vulnerabilities at the source. Too bad some of those vulnerabilities are "features" that people who are aware of the dangers often try to turn off or otherwise render inoperable, an effort that is generally only partially effective (breaking the feature not not preventing all exploits of the underlying system behavior).
Examples of certain classes of software (notably including web servers) that are dominated by non-Microsoft (and especially open source) alternatives, where the Microsoft offerings still tend to be the most-compromised examples, point to a much more endemic problem with Microsoft's software development and maintenance policies than can be simply explained away by popularity making MS Windows a bigger target. An understanding of the architectural designs of various systems also lends itself to recognition of the fact that the kinds of problems "enjoyed" by Microsoft's software offerings seem pretty much inevitable at a technical level. Consider the fact that for almost thirty years Microsoft has failed to ever implement any kind of architectural privilege separation in an OS, merely laying a thin veil of permission-checking over a system without concern for privilege separation as a fundamental design principle, to the point where Microsoft's phone-home license verification has been found to literally turn off privilege checking so it can run. Even if it was merely a matter of popularity, though, that wouldn't change the fact that for security purposes you'd be much better served using something other than MS Windows, anyway.
Of course, some of this is changing for some Linux distributions, and the GNU project is a complicit contributor to the problem. Consider the case of Ubuntu's ro
I think you're confusing statutory damages with the kinds of penalties applied to criminal cases. If there are penalties, apart from those that must be specifically shown to have occurred by way of evidence in court, that is because they were specified by statute (thus the term "statutory damages"). This is not always the way it works, though; it depends on the specific violation committed. Sometimes (often, in fact) there simply are not any statutory damages for a particular violation -- and statutory damages are often less costly than buying a commercial license, so it's often a win just to have gotten statutory damages assessed rather than playing by the rules all along. Of course, that mostly only applies in cases where the license violation is not itself shown to be measurably damaging, because otherwise damages can be assessed above statutory damages. This is why the GPL (along with other restrictive "free" licenses) is kinda special when it comes to enforcement -- because it can be violated by the licensee, but does not have an easily applied standard for determining damages due to the fact there is no cost for the license, which is offered freely to the public.
Meanwhile, theft lands you in jail. It's a different ball of wax entirely. Ultimately, the difference is that civil cases are about damages -- a fact that leads to the possibility of someone being acquitted of a murder charge in a criminal court case, then found guilty of wrongful death in a civil court case, where the penalty assessed is . . . wait for it . . . damages.
At least, that's the case in the US, as far as I'm aware. Where are you located?
When fredprado said "the money the original owner can make diminished" he was talking about enforceability of a license in court, because pretty much all the courts can do in a civil case (like a license enforcement case) is either award damages or issue an injunction.
So . . . the reason I thought that is that it was true.
It only reduces artificial value, because copyright is a mechanism for manufacturing artificial scarcity in support of rent-seeking behavior.
Fallacy.
I'm not sure you understand that word.
If that were true, there would be no merit to copyrighting source code that a person decides to make freely available, whether under the GPL or BSD licenses.
If the only value from copyright came from monetary inducement, then for material that is supposed to be free, there is no advantage to it over public domain. Yet the majority of freely released works are not issued under public domain. They are copyrighted.
The fact you do not understand how copyright law works internationally, or how people benefit from various licensing models, is a failure in your argument, and not in mine. Some businesses use copyleft licenses to establish anticompetitive advantages over their competitors, to say nothing of the fact that there are many people who simply don't understand what the hell they're doing with licensing and as such end up using restrictive "free" licensing to serve ends that are actually undercut by their own license choices. Then, of course, there's the fact that something released into the public domain in the US (which hasn't really been comprehensively tested in court, as far as I'm aware, and the laws on the books that I've seen are hopelessly vague about that, but let's just assume it works) is not considered public domain in France, where the law does not recognize the power of individual people to release a copyrighted work into the public domain before the expiration of its copyright -- which is why SQLite, a supposedly public domain piece of software, still gets $1000 licensing deals in some countries for people who don't want to be sued when they use it.
That's pretty much the whole reason that copyfree licenses (including the Unlicense and CC0 License) exist.
You have been deluded into thinking that money is the only measure of worth or value. It is not. It is merely a very objective one.
Uh, no, I haven't. I fully recognize that there are things of worth other than money. In fact, I probably know better than you that the crap people tend to call "money" isn't even worth the ink in the bills. This does not change the fact that the courts measure the worth of something in a civil suit by its measurable dollar "value", which means that if you cannot attach a dollar value to something you aren't going to get anything in a lawsuit beyond statutory damages, which usually costs less than buying a license anyway -- and that assumes there are even any statutory damages for the case in question.
I'm really not sure why, but you've responded for some reason as though my commentary about artificial scarcity was a statement that the only way to measure the value of something is with dollars. That's absurd and, frankly, kinda irrelevant to my point. Perhaps you'd like to try again.
I didn't say reverse engineering was the same as getting the source code. I pointed out that you were ignoring what others had said about reverse engineering.
Eliminating copyright wouldn't eliminate the "need" for the GPL -- it would just eliminate the ability to place many systematic restrictions on what people can do with things they possess (including the restrictions in the GPL).
By the way, saying that eliminating copyright would make the GPL impossible in the tone of a doomsayer is kind of silly, considering I would rather the GPL (and all other copyleft licenses) just went away. The last thing we need is more restriction in the name of "freedom".
Technically, I think it would make it a license violation to combine the "or any later version" files with the project as a whole, and not just make the project license invalid.
The guy in the example was reverse engineering a physical device, not a piece of software. The point was that "IP" was not respected much in China, and potential patent violations with regard to machinery fits that just as well as potential GPL violations with regard to software.
Copyright license cases (as with GPL violations) are not about theft. They're about damages. This is why an apple theft would be a criminal case, but a GPL violation would be a civil case.
It's worth highlighting this as the best argument I've heard for GPL violation being translatable into monetary damages so far. I have a vague recollection of some kind of precedent that established the GPL as being enforceable in civil court through damages, but don't recall the specifics. Regardless of those specifics, though, your explanation is pretty damned cogent, I think.
The point made wasn't about whether you could make money on the software -- it was about whether violating the license causes any quantifiable damages according to the law. While there may be a reasonable argument that the $0 statement is wrong, your argument wasn't it. I don't even think it was relevant.
I think the point the previous coward meant to make (though made the effort in terms of "freedom" rather than actual economic effects of commercial activity using the GPL as leverage, which is understandably confusing) is that copyleft licenses create anticompetitive benefits for the copyright holder in that various business models built on holding copyright on copyleft licensed software creates asymmetries with recipients of the software in question. A common case is maintaining a public open source project with copyright assignment for all contributions, offering the software under a copyleft license, then producing commercial closed source "value added products" of some kind, as MySQL AB did with MySQL's multi-licensing scheme before Sun bought the company and all its assets. This sets any would-be competitors using the copyleft codebase of the software at a disadvantage, because their modifications have to be made public and, to take advantage of continuing development of the original codebase, they then have to either expend significant resources on continuous re-merging of custom modifications (which can be specifically targeted for manufactured incompatibility by the copyright holder of the original codebase, making that re-merging more expensive, because of the necessarily public nature of the competitor's modifications) or contribute their improvements to the project maintained for the original codebase by the copyright holder, complete with copyright assignment, so that the copyright holder can then incorporate those improvements into its own closed source "value added product". The upshot, then, is that I do not believe the lost value to which the previous coward meant to refer was limited to a feeling of warmth and fuzziness for altruistic sharing, even if altruism is part of his product's marketing.
Many opportunities for using copyleft licenses as leverage in anticompetitive business practices exist, and any violation of the copyleft license in those business models may then have a negative effect on the profitability of the copyright holder's business model, which could then be argued in court to constitute damages.
(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, et cetera, et cetera, et alii, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, insert further disclaimers here.)
Copying something that is copyrighted without permission *does* deprive the copyright holder of some of the value behind their copyright.
It only reduces artificial value, because copyright is a mechanism for manufacturing artificial scarcity in support of rent-seeking behavior.
And after all... if the mere right to copy wasn't really of any value to creators, then why would people who bother to make freely distributable works bother to copyright it at all? Why not just put the work into public domain?
Interestingly, that is increasingly becoming the case, as it becomes decreasingly possible to enforce copyright in a cost effective manner. That's a good turn of events, too, because (among other reasons) copyright stifles a lot of creative work that might otherwise flourish.
By the way, it's not "the mere right to copy" that is of value to copyright holders (who are usually not the creators themselves in the case of commercially profitable works) -- it's the enforced prohibition on copying imposed on the rest of the world that is of value to them.
Just because what is lost to the copyright holder is of no value to the person who takes it, doesn't mean that it isn't stolen.
You do not seem to understand the meaning of the term "stolen". Stealing is appropriating something for oneself by removing it from someone else, an act that has meaning only for rivalrous goods. When you talk about "stealing" in this context, you basically have three options for what you are saying is stolen. One is a physical representation or medium for a work, in which case what is stolen has nothing to do with copyright itself (as in the case of a meatspace dead-tree book, or of a physical optical medium like a CD regardless of what is stored on it). Another is the work itself, in the abstract, in which case it is non-rivalrous and can only be copied, not "stolen", thus increasing the wealth of the world through essentially cost-free replication. The third is the "value" of the work under circumstances of artificial scarcity, where some enforcement of circumstances of scarcity is imposed on a market where scarcity effectively has no natural meaning, but as you pointed out the value itself is not transferred in this act you describe as "stealing"; the recipient may not have the same value in the work that the copyright holder previously had. The closest you could reasonably get (at least if you try to be rational, honest, and consistent about it) to theft in the case of a wholly subjective sense of value is vandalism -- not stealing.
I doubt that. In my experience, many more users of Linux as a "desktop" OS started using MacOS than users of BSD Unix for the same purpose. Large numbers of members (as a percentage) of several LUGs with which I've been involved have started using Macs in addition to Linux-based systems, and none of the BSD Unix users I know have made the same migration. In the cases where people who used BSD Unix heavily started using MacOS laptops and desktops, they were people who used BSD Unix heavily for servers, but used Linux-based systems for desktops and laptops, only replacing the Linux in their lives with MacOS, which to me looks like a case of people who used Linux-based systems moving to MacOS, rather than people who used BSD Unix doing so.
I have, however, seen a few people go from Linux-based systems (only) to MacOS+Linux, and from there to MacOS+Linux+BSD, to MacOS+BSD, and finally to BSD Unix (only). Those people have also, I've noticed, generally tended to become more active contributors to open source projects, which I find interesting as a phenomenon. I suspect the only connection MacOS had to the ultimate path of migration was filling a third OS slot, because from what I've seen people who just move from MS Windows to Linux-based systems tend to be very limited in their thinking about operating system options (not as much as those who've always used MS Windows, period, but pretty limited nonetheless), while those who've moved through at least three OS families (pretty much regardless of what families they are) tend to be much more open to regarding the world as something other than a battleground between One True OS and a major competitor or two.
Unlike the legions of copyleftists who tend to describe Apple as some evil entity that can do no right, and never gives anything to open source software communities, many of the people who actually use Macs along with some open source OS realize that Apple not only regularly releases sources for software that uses copyfree or otherwise permissive licenses (e.g. the Darwin OS basis of MacOS), but also takes on maintenance of existing open source projects (e.g. CUPS) and creates new open source software it shares with the world (e.g. LLVM+Clang).
All of this is, of course, not a defense of all the evil Apple does. Malevolence in patent enforcement and suing customers for doing unauthorized things with hardware they bought with their own money is only the tip of the iceberg of stuff that Apple does wrong. It's just silly to make hand-wavy accusations that haven't much basis in truth the way a lot of copyleftists do when there are so many legitimate gripes to have with Apple. It similarly doesn't make any sense for copyleftists to pretend that BSD Unix users choose to defend Apple as a class, or to pretend they use descriptively accurate terms for a license longer than some Microsoft EULAs only as a means of defending Apple.
You go ahead and pretend that the only way anyone could ever disagree with you is by being consciously and irredeemably evil, though. See how far that gets your advocacy efforts.
I know people have not been extremely explicit about it, but I still managed to figure out there was some reference to reverse engineering and/or decompiling in preceding comments -- something generally disallowed by commercial, closed source copyright licenses.
That's because the GPL is essentially the antithesis of copyright, hence that whole "copyleft" thing.
That's only as true as the statement that Democrats are the antithesis of Republicans in the US.
It's essentially a way to fight copyright within the confines of copyright itself.
No -- it's a way to fight certain uses of copyright with other uses of copyright, like a nation of state socialists using nuclear weapons to fight against the use of nuclear weapons by a nation of fascists. A much less paradoxical way to fight copyright would be to choose neither copyright nor copyleft, but copyfree instead.
When your license imposes the overhead costs of a bunch of source archive management, bookkeeping, and so on, it creates incentives to plagiarize for people working on projects that do not turn a profit or for startups.
Once again, we might note that this isn't a property of the GPL; it's just as true for proprietary code. The only real difference is that GPL'd code is usually published openly and comes with a license that lets anyone use the code for free, while you typically have to pay for a license to use proprietary code -- if you can even get a license to use the code.
It is a property of copyright restrictions in general, yes. This is, in fact, sorta my point. The GPL does not provide nearly the level of greater ease of code reuse that many people seem to think.
. . . and you completely bypassed my point, which was the fact that plagiarism is incentivized for GPLed (and, yes, proprietary) code in ways that do not apply to copyfree and public domain code. In short, any copyright restrictions that impose any overhead on the reuser of your code serves as a trade-off between chances of plagiarism and chances of someone using your code without giving you anything (other than attribution).
Note that this also applies to supposedly "permissive" licenses that come with nontrivial restrictions, like the Apache License 2.0.
There is no difference in the legally required accountability when you use someone else's code. If you do this at all, you need to keep good records, or you are opening yourself and your products to serious legal problems. The GPL may "invite" this by making the code easily available, but GPL'd code is copyrighted, and is legally no different from proprietary code in regards to ownership.
Criticising someone because they make their code easy to copy, use, and build on is a rather bizarre sort of negativism. Do you really think it's better that you not be allowed access to the code at all, or that you be charged for non-commercial, personal use?
Your straw men are burning.
An honest person would consider it normal to keep track of what usage they make of other people's work, and would give proper credit to their sources. They would consider keeping proper records of such usage just a normal part of creating something new, not an unnecessary burden. Complaining about the need for something that's ethically required is a fairly clear statement of one's character.;-)
I wasn't talking about what honest people would or would not do. I agree that an honest person would make some effort to properly credit people on whose work he or she builds, but that does not in any way change the applicability of anything I said.
I hope you're not trying to insinuate that I personally object to giving proper attribution for others' work when I build on it. In fact, my approach is to just not use copyleft licensed code in my work so I never have to worry about its restrictions. Sometimes this makes things a little harder, but usually there's no extra difficulty at all, and I'm happy to give attribution for the copyfree licensed projects whose work I do use, and release my code under the terms of copyfree licenses any time I have a choice in the matter. So . . . no, I don't object to giving proper attribution. I just think people should stop equating copyright enforcement with attribution enforcement, and recognize that the two are actually opposed to some nontrivial degree.
Living in a fantasy land where as long as you talk about your intentions you don't have to worry about unintended consequences is kinda counterproductive, after all.
(Yes, I do normally work from copies of all software that I "borrow" from someone else, and archive the originals. There are good technical reasons for doing this, in addition to the ethical obligation. I don't consider it a burden at all. And I've ofte
It's also worth noting that the GPL actually encourages plagiarism in some cases. Consider someone wanting to use freely available code as the basis for a closed source offering (or maybe even open source, but doesn't want to deal with the hassle of the GPL's draconian source archive management requirements). If the code the person finds that best suits his or her needs is distributed under the MIT/X11 License (for instance), that person might proudly refer to the open source roots of the software. If it is distributed under the terms of the GPL, on the other hand, that person might instead decide to conceal the source of the code, thinking it won't be discovered so that all that source archive management overhead can be avoided (and even if it is discovered the worst result will probably then be having to start sharing the sources in accordance with the requirements of the license, still having given the person a grace period with no costs incurred by that overhead).
When your license imposes the overhead costs of a bunch of source archive management, bookkeeping, and so on, it creates incentives to plagiarize for people working on projects that do not turn a profit or for startups. This is just one of the many unintended consequences that can arise from the use of highly complex, restrictive licenses that try to micromanage how people modify and distribute derivative works.
That is because you selectively quoted what I said.
What I quoted implies everything you just restated, and it still doesn't dispute the fact that "BSD Unix ran into major legal hurdles in the early days of its migration to the x86-based commodity software sphere, thus helping Linux gain an early lead." You seem to have no (willingness to acknowledge, or conception of) the importance of timing. I suppose you've never heard the phrase "fist to market", either.
That is not the "early" days. That is well after the lawsuit.
This is not a substantive contribution to the discussion. It's quibbling over definitions. It has been about twenty years since BSD Unix and Linux kernels arrived on x86 architecture systems. It (and, explicitly so you don't just complain about selective quoting: including the stuff immediately following what I quoted) also doesn't substantively address what I said about the nature of those companies with regard to the "marketing" effects on growing popularity; it just confirms some of what I said about them.
Is that a euphemism for "wrong"?
Is that your substitution of snark for meaningful discussion?
No, it's not a euphemism for "wrong". It's a reference to the fact that his statement was incautiously phrased and overlooked key cases. Yes, what he said was factually incorrect, or "wrong" if you like, but what I said addressed more of the character of how he was "wrong". Unlike you, I don't have a vested interest in ridiculing anyone in this discussion.
Anyone who makes assertions of the form "all X is Y", or "no X is Y", "X is always Y", etc. in an argument like this, is almost always wrong (note: I said almost).
True (and noted). People make incautious statements like that quite regularly. There is, sometimes, quite a lot of truth in the thrust of the statement even when its literal meaning is false in some particulars due to overly absolutist use of language, though, and this is relevant here.
I mean, it's obvious that the data about uptake of every single GPL software compared with BSD software is basically unknowable, so making a blanket statement like that is ridiculous. Like the rest of his blanket statements.
If your only goal is to "win" by showing that someone is "wrong" a lot, I guess that's the most important thing about what he said. If it's to actually engage in some kind of exchange of information and possibly have a meaningful discussion, however, it pays to think not in terms like "your blanket statement is technically wrong", but rather in terms like "as a blanket statement, that is incorrect, but it is worth considering whether a strong trend exists before dismissing the ideas you raise".
Of course, I've seen libman around in other contexts before, and he has not only a tendency toward blanket statements where they are not strictly accurate, and toward imposing interpretations of non-blanket statements as though they were blanket statements on others' arguments (highly fucking aggravating when he does that) and using that to "prove" that person was "wrong" somehow. I doubt you know this from past experience with him like I do, though, and your response is counterproductive toward convincing anyone of anything, I think. In fact, in this case you seem to come off less reasonably than he does, by blowing past the meat of every point he makes to attack something peripheral, tied solely to phrasing, or otherwise well off the mark. You've done the same in response to my previous comment, too (see above, re: "early", for instance). Perhaps you could try looking for the meat of a statement rather than just looking for excuses to disagree in vague disagreements about use of nonspecific terms.
Nice strawman. I did not say that is all he does. I did not say everything he does is irrational.
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I think you mean you wish that Wayland would grow some support for FreeBSD. It was designed in the first place with the Linux kernel assumed in its target platform, which means some changes need to be made in Wayland for smooth porting to FreeBSD. That, at least, is my understanding (I haven't actually looked at the sources for Wayland).
The licensing issue is that both CDDL (the license for ZFS) and GPL (the license for the Linux kernel) are copyleft licenses -- and they're not the same copyleft license -- so they are legally incompatible with each other. It's a common problem when copyleft licenses meet. Unless you're playing tricks with shims and wrappers, such as by running ZFS in userspace somehow, or forcing end users to do all the work of setting up ZFS rather than making it quick and easy to set up, you're probably violating the CDDL and GPL by distributing ZFS with a Linux distribution.
ZFS has me locked in now. I wish the linux guys had gone for it instead of relying on btrfs.
Do you mean you wish Linux used a more broadly compatible license than the GPL so it wouldn't have had problems figuring out how to directly support ZFS without violating either license?
Yes, portupgrade is separate from the base system, available through the ports system itself. It's only "deprecated", however, in that it used to essentially be "the standard" for ports system front ends, and has been edged out in that regard by portmaster. There are other front ends as well, though, and they're there to provide choices, as is portmaster.
We probably shouldn't trust anything anyone who says "developper" says about programming, anyway.
What's that? Did we have piss-poor sales performance? I know how to fix that: drive away the rest of our customers.
Any major OS may have an occasional problem. There is a difference between occasional problems and epidemic problems, though. Just about every piece of self-replicating malware created for Unix-like systems in the last twentyish years has required user intervention to allow it to execute (and thus replicate), in fact -- maybe all of them (I'm sure there are some I haven't read about, but all of them that I have read about require user intervention somehow). One of the big differences is Microsoft's reticence to admit to a vulnerability -- a problem Apple shares -- which tends to incent the vendor to hide or deny vulnerabilities rather than fix them a rather unacceptable percentage of the time. Another is the relatively small pool of people who know the system well enough to develop specific solutions (last I checked, a few years ago, Microsoft's fastest-ever turn-around time on a vulnerability from report to fix was longer than the average for core open source OS projects like OpenBSD and the Linux kernel).
Probably the biggest for Microsoft, though, is its refusal to consider many types of vulnerabilities as system issues at all. Instead, they are regarded as though they are unavoidable forces of nature, offloading the task of securing the system against these problems to detection and removal systems (e.g. antivirus software) rather than dealing with it at the source (addressing the system's flaws). As a result, there are always legions of viruses and other pieces of malware floating around out there that are largely identical to older viruses and other malware previously detected and protected against by those detection and removal systems. The new malware continues to work because it has been altered enough to escape immediate detection, even though it is basically v3.3 of a virus that has been through half a dozen other major and minor versions that attracted the attention of antivirus vendors in the past. New signatures and heuristic detection routines then need to be developed -- and, adding insult to injury, the new heuristic detection routines end up generating false positives a dismaying percentage of the time, resulting in occasional news items on Slashdot about some antivirus software flagging legitimate software as a "virus". All of this could be avoided by simply addressing the vulnerabilities at the source. Too bad some of those vulnerabilities are "features" that people who are aware of the dangers often try to turn off or otherwise render inoperable, an effort that is generally only partially effective (breaking the feature not not preventing all exploits of the underlying system behavior).
Examples of certain classes of software (notably including web servers) that are dominated by non-Microsoft (and especially open source) alternatives, where the Microsoft offerings still tend to be the most-compromised examples, point to a much more endemic problem with Microsoft's software development and maintenance policies than can be simply explained away by popularity making MS Windows a bigger target. An understanding of the architectural designs of various systems also lends itself to recognition of the fact that the kinds of problems "enjoyed" by Microsoft's software offerings seem pretty much inevitable at a technical level. Consider the fact that for almost thirty years Microsoft has failed to ever implement any kind of architectural privilege separation in an OS, merely laying a thin veil of permission-checking over a system without concern for privilege separation as a fundamental design principle, to the point where Microsoft's phone-home license verification has been found to literally turn off privilege checking so it can run. Even if it was merely a matter of popularity, though, that wouldn't change the fact that for security purposes you'd be much better served using something other than MS Windows, anyway.
Of course, some of this is changing for some Linux distributions, and the GNU project is a complicit contributor to the problem. Consider the case of Ubuntu's ro
I think you're confusing statutory damages with the kinds of penalties applied to criminal cases. If there are penalties, apart from those that must be specifically shown to have occurred by way of evidence in court, that is because they were specified by statute (thus the term "statutory damages"). This is not always the way it works, though; it depends on the specific violation committed. Sometimes (often, in fact) there simply are not any statutory damages for a particular violation -- and statutory damages are often less costly than buying a commercial license, so it's often a win just to have gotten statutory damages assessed rather than playing by the rules all along. Of course, that mostly only applies in cases where the license violation is not itself shown to be measurably damaging, because otherwise damages can be assessed above statutory damages. This is why the GPL (along with other restrictive "free" licenses) is kinda special when it comes to enforcement -- because it can be violated by the licensee, but does not have an easily applied standard for determining damages due to the fact there is no cost for the license, which is offered freely to the public.
Meanwhile, theft lands you in jail. It's a different ball of wax entirely. Ultimately, the difference is that civil cases are about damages -- a fact that leads to the possibility of someone being acquitted of a murder charge in a criminal court case, then found guilty of wrongful death in a civil court case, where the penalty assessed is . . . wait for it . . . damages.
At least, that's the case in the US, as far as I'm aware. Where are you located?
When fredprado said "the money the original owner can make diminished" he was talking about enforceability of a license in court, because pretty much all the courts can do in a civil case (like a license enforcement case) is either award damages or issue an injunction.
So . . . the reason I thought that is that it was true.
Fallacy.
I'm not sure you understand that word.
If that were true, there would be no merit to copyrighting source code that a person decides to make freely available, whether under the GPL or BSD licenses.
If the only value from copyright came from monetary inducement, then for material that is supposed to be free, there is no advantage to it over public domain. Yet the majority of freely released works are not issued under public domain. They are copyrighted.
The fact you do not understand how copyright law works internationally, or how people benefit from various licensing models, is a failure in your argument, and not in mine. Some businesses use copyleft licenses to establish anticompetitive advantages over their competitors, to say nothing of the fact that there are many people who simply don't understand what the hell they're doing with licensing and as such end up using restrictive "free" licensing to serve ends that are actually undercut by their own license choices. Then, of course, there's the fact that something released into the public domain in the US (which hasn't really been comprehensively tested in court, as far as I'm aware, and the laws on the books that I've seen are hopelessly vague about that, but let's just assume it works) is not considered public domain in France, where the law does not recognize the power of individual people to release a copyrighted work into the public domain before the expiration of its copyright -- which is why SQLite, a supposedly public domain piece of software, still gets $1000 licensing deals in some countries for people who don't want to be sued when they use it.
That's pretty much the whole reason that copyfree licenses (including the Unlicense and CC0 License) exist.
You have been deluded into thinking that money is the only measure of worth or value. It is not. It is merely a very objective one.
Uh, no, I haven't. I fully recognize that there are things of worth other than money. In fact, I probably know better than you that the crap people tend to call "money" isn't even worth the ink in the bills. This does not change the fact that the courts measure the worth of something in a civil suit by its measurable dollar "value", which means that if you cannot attach a dollar value to something you aren't going to get anything in a lawsuit beyond statutory damages, which usually costs less than buying a license anyway -- and that assumes there are even any statutory damages for the case in question.
I'm really not sure why, but you've responded for some reason as though my commentary about artificial scarcity was a statement that the only way to measure the value of something is with dollars. That's absurd and, frankly, kinda irrelevant to my point. Perhaps you'd like to try again.
I didn't say reverse engineering was the same as getting the source code. I pointed out that you were ignoring what others had said about reverse engineering.
Eliminating copyright wouldn't eliminate the "need" for the GPL -- it would just eliminate the ability to place many systematic restrictions on what people can do with things they possess (including the restrictions in the GPL).
By the way, saying that eliminating copyright would make the GPL impossible in the tone of a doomsayer is kind of silly, considering I would rather the GPL (and all other copyleft licenses) just went away. The last thing we need is more restriction in the name of "freedom".
Technically, I think it would make it a license violation to combine the "or any later version" files with the project as a whole, and not just make the project license invalid.
The guy in the example was reverse engineering a physical device, not a piece of software. The point was that "IP" was not respected much in China, and potential patent violations with regard to machinery fits that just as well as potential GPL violations with regard to software.
Copyright license cases (as with GPL violations) are not about theft. They're about damages. This is why an apple theft would be a criminal case, but a GPL violation would be a civil case.
It's worth highlighting this as the best argument I've heard for GPL violation being translatable into monetary damages so far. I have a vague recollection of some kind of precedent that established the GPL as being enforceable in civil court through damages, but don't recall the specifics. Regardless of those specifics, though, your explanation is pretty damned cogent, I think.
I thought we were talking about the enforceability of the license in court, not whether you wanted your children to die.
The point made wasn't about whether you could make money on the software -- it was about whether violating the license causes any quantifiable damages according to the law. While there may be a reasonable argument that the $0 statement is wrong, your argument wasn't it. I don't even think it was relevant.
I think the point the previous coward meant to make (though made the effort in terms of "freedom" rather than actual economic effects of commercial activity using the GPL as leverage, which is understandably confusing) is that copyleft licenses create anticompetitive benefits for the copyright holder in that various business models built on holding copyright on copyleft licensed software creates asymmetries with recipients of the software in question. A common case is maintaining a public open source project with copyright assignment for all contributions, offering the software under a copyleft license, then producing commercial closed source "value added products" of some kind, as MySQL AB did with MySQL's multi-licensing scheme before Sun bought the company and all its assets. This sets any would-be competitors using the copyleft codebase of the software at a disadvantage, because their modifications have to be made public and, to take advantage of continuing development of the original codebase, they then have to either expend significant resources on continuous re-merging of custom modifications (which can be specifically targeted for manufactured incompatibility by the copyright holder of the original codebase, making that re-merging more expensive, because of the necessarily public nature of the competitor's modifications) or contribute their improvements to the project maintained for the original codebase by the copyright holder, complete with copyright assignment, so that the copyright holder can then incorporate those improvements into its own closed source "value added product". The upshot, then, is that I do not believe the lost value to which the previous coward meant to refer was limited to a feeling of warmth and fuzziness for altruistic sharing, even if altruism is part of his product's marketing.
Many opportunities for using copyleft licenses as leverage in anticompetitive business practices exist, and any violation of the copyleft license in those business models may then have a negative effect on the profitability of the copyright holder's business model, which could then be argued in court to constitute damages.
(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, et cetera, et cetera, et alii, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, insert further disclaimers here.)
Copying something that is copyrighted without permission *does* deprive the copyright holder of some of the value behind their copyright.
It only reduces artificial value, because copyright is a mechanism for manufacturing artificial scarcity in support of rent-seeking behavior.
And after all... if the mere right to copy wasn't really of any value to creators, then why would people who bother to make freely distributable works bother to copyright it at all? Why not just put the work into public domain?
Interestingly, that is increasingly becoming the case, as it becomes decreasingly possible to enforce copyright in a cost effective manner. That's a good turn of events, too, because (among other reasons) copyright stifles a lot of creative work that might otherwise flourish.
By the way, it's not "the mere right to copy" that is of value to copyright holders (who are usually not the creators themselves in the case of commercially profitable works) -- it's the enforced prohibition on copying imposed on the rest of the world that is of value to them.
Just because what is lost to the copyright holder is of no value to the person who takes it, doesn't mean that it isn't stolen.
You do not seem to understand the meaning of the term "stolen". Stealing is appropriating something for oneself by removing it from someone else, an act that has meaning only for rivalrous goods. When you talk about "stealing" in this context, you basically have three options for what you are saying is stolen. One is a physical representation or medium for a work, in which case what is stolen has nothing to do with copyright itself (as in the case of a meatspace dead-tree book, or of a physical optical medium like a CD regardless of what is stored on it). Another is the work itself, in the abstract, in which case it is non-rivalrous and can only be copied, not "stolen", thus increasing the wealth of the world through essentially cost-free replication. The third is the "value" of the work under circumstances of artificial scarcity, where some enforcement of circumstances of scarcity is imposed on a market where scarcity effectively has no natural meaning, but as you pointed out the value itself is not transferred in this act you describe as "stealing"; the recipient may not have the same value in the work that the copyright holder previously had. The closest you could reasonably get (at least if you try to be rational, honest, and consistent about it) to theft in the case of a wholly subjective sense of value is vandalism -- not stealing.
probably BSD refugees
I doubt that. In my experience, many more users of Linux as a "desktop" OS started using MacOS than users of BSD Unix for the same purpose. Large numbers of members (as a percentage) of several LUGs with which I've been involved have started using Macs in addition to Linux-based systems, and none of the BSD Unix users I know have made the same migration. In the cases where people who used BSD Unix heavily started using MacOS laptops and desktops, they were people who used BSD Unix heavily for servers, but used Linux-based systems for desktops and laptops, only replacing the Linux in their lives with MacOS, which to me looks like a case of people who used Linux-based systems moving to MacOS, rather than people who used BSD Unix doing so.
I have, however, seen a few people go from Linux-based systems (only) to MacOS+Linux, and from there to MacOS+Linux+BSD, to MacOS+BSD, and finally to BSD Unix (only). Those people have also, I've noticed, generally tended to become more active contributors to open source projects, which I find interesting as a phenomenon. I suspect the only connection MacOS had to the ultimate path of migration was filling a third OS slot, because from what I've seen people who just move from MS Windows to Linux-based systems tend to be very limited in their thinking about operating system options (not as much as those who've always used MS Windows, period, but pretty limited nonetheless), while those who've moved through at least three OS families (pretty much regardless of what families they are) tend to be much more open to regarding the world as something other than a battleground between One True OS and a major competitor or two.
Unlike the legions of copyleftists who tend to describe Apple as some evil entity that can do no right, and never gives anything to open source software communities, many of the people who actually use Macs along with some open source OS realize that Apple not only regularly releases sources for software that uses copyfree or otherwise permissive licenses (e.g. the Darwin OS basis of MacOS), but also takes on maintenance of existing open source projects (e.g. CUPS) and creates new open source software it shares with the world (e.g. LLVM+Clang).
All of this is, of course, not a defense of all the evil Apple does. Malevolence in patent enforcement and suing customers for doing unauthorized things with hardware they bought with their own money is only the tip of the iceberg of stuff that Apple does wrong. It's just silly to make hand-wavy accusations that haven't much basis in truth the way a lot of copyleftists do when there are so many legitimate gripes to have with Apple. It similarly doesn't make any sense for copyleftists to pretend that BSD Unix users choose to defend Apple as a class, or to pretend they use descriptively accurate terms for a license longer than some Microsoft EULAs only as a means of defending Apple.
You go ahead and pretend that the only way anyone could ever disagree with you is by being consciously and irredeemably evil, though. See how far that gets your advocacy efforts.
I know people have not been extremely explicit about it, but I still managed to figure out there was some reference to reverse engineering and/or decompiling in preceding comments -- something generally disallowed by commercial, closed source copyright licenses.
That's because the GPL is essentially the antithesis of copyright, hence that whole "copyleft" thing.
That's only as true as the statement that Democrats are the antithesis of Republicans in the US.
It's essentially a way to fight copyright within the confines of copyright itself.
No -- it's a way to fight certain uses of copyright with other uses of copyright, like a nation of state socialists using nuclear weapons to fight against the use of nuclear weapons by a nation of fascists. A much less paradoxical way to fight copyright would be to choose neither copyright nor copyleft, but copyfree instead.
When your license imposes the overhead costs of a bunch of source archive management, bookkeeping, and so on, it creates incentives to plagiarize for people working on projects that do not turn a profit or for startups.
Once again, we might note that this isn't a property of the GPL; it's just as true for proprietary code. The only real difference is that GPL'd code is usually published openly and comes with a license that lets anyone use the code for free, while you typically have to pay for a license to use proprietary code -- if you can even get a license to use the code.
It is a property of copyright restrictions in general, yes. This is, in fact, sorta my point. The GPL does not provide nearly the level of greater ease of code reuse that many people seem to think.
. . . and you completely bypassed my point, which was the fact that plagiarism is incentivized for GPLed (and, yes, proprietary) code in ways that do not apply to copyfree and public domain code. In short, any copyright restrictions that impose any overhead on the reuser of your code serves as a trade-off between chances of plagiarism and chances of someone using your code without giving you anything (other than attribution).
Note that this also applies to supposedly "permissive" licenses that come with nontrivial restrictions, like the Apache License 2.0.
There is no difference in the legally required accountability when you use someone else's code. If you do this at all, you need to keep good records, or you are opening yourself and your products to serious legal problems. The GPL may "invite" this by making the code easily available, but GPL'd code is copyrighted, and is legally no different from proprietary code in regards to ownership.
Criticising someone because they make their code easy to copy, use, and build on is a rather bizarre sort of negativism. Do you really think it's better that you not be allowed access to the code at all, or that you be charged for non-commercial, personal use?
Your straw men are burning.
An honest person would consider it normal to keep track of what usage they make of other people's work, and would give proper credit to their sources. They would consider keeping proper records of such usage just a normal part of creating something new, not an unnecessary burden. Complaining about the need for something that's ethically required is a fairly clear statement of one's character. ;-)
I wasn't talking about what honest people would or would not do. I agree that an honest person would make some effort to properly credit people on whose work he or she builds, but that does not in any way change the applicability of anything I said.
I hope you're not trying to insinuate that I personally object to giving proper attribution for others' work when I build on it. In fact, my approach is to just not use copyleft licensed code in my work so I never have to worry about its restrictions. Sometimes this makes things a little harder, but usually there's no extra difficulty at all, and I'm happy to give attribution for the copyfree licensed projects whose work I do use, and release my code under the terms of copyfree licenses any time I have a choice in the matter. So . . . no, I don't object to giving proper attribution. I just think people should stop equating copyright enforcement with attribution enforcement, and recognize that the two are actually opposed to some nontrivial degree.
Living in a fantasy land where as long as you talk about your intentions you don't have to worry about unintended consequences is kinda counterproductive, after all.
(Yes, I do normally work from copies of all software that I "borrow" from someone else, and archive the originals. There are good technical reasons for doing this, in addition to the ethical obligation. I don't consider it a burden at all. And I've ofte
It's also worth noting that the GPL actually encourages plagiarism in some cases. Consider someone wanting to use freely available code as the basis for a closed source offering (or maybe even open source, but doesn't want to deal with the hassle of the GPL's draconian source archive management requirements). If the code the person finds that best suits his or her needs is distributed under the MIT/X11 License (for instance), that person might proudly refer to the open source roots of the software. If it is distributed under the terms of the GPL, on the other hand, that person might instead decide to conceal the source of the code, thinking it won't be discovered so that all that source archive management overhead can be avoided (and even if it is discovered the worst result will probably then be having to start sharing the sources in accordance with the requirements of the license, still having given the person a grace period with no costs incurred by that overhead).
When your license imposes the overhead costs of a bunch of source archive management, bookkeeping, and so on, it creates incentives to plagiarize for people working on projects that do not turn a profit or for startups. This is just one of the many unintended consequences that can arise from the use of highly complex, restrictive licenses that try to micromanage how people modify and distribute derivative works.
What I quoted implies everything you just restated, and it still doesn't dispute the fact that "BSD Unix ran into major legal hurdles in the early days of its migration to the x86-based commodity software sphere, thus helping Linux gain an early lead." You seem to have no (willingness to acknowledge, or conception of) the importance of timing. I suppose you've never heard the phrase "fist to market", either.
This is not a substantive contribution to the discussion. It's quibbling over definitions. It has been about twenty years since BSD Unix and Linux kernels arrived on x86 architecture systems. It (and, explicitly so you don't just complain about selective quoting: including the stuff immediately following what I quoted) also doesn't substantively address what I said about the nature of those companies with regard to the "marketing" effects on growing popularity; it just confirms some of what I said about them.
Is that your substitution of snark for meaningful discussion?
No, it's not a euphemism for "wrong". It's a reference to the fact that his statement was incautiously phrased and overlooked key cases. Yes, what he said was factually incorrect, or "wrong" if you like, but what I said addressed more of the character of how he was "wrong". Unlike you, I don't have a vested interest in ridiculing anyone in this discussion.
True (and noted). People make incautious statements like that quite regularly. There is, sometimes, quite a lot of truth in the thrust of the statement even when its literal meaning is false in some particulars due to overly absolutist use of language, though, and this is relevant here.
If your only goal is to "win" by showing that someone is "wrong" a lot, I guess that's the most important thing about what he said. If it's to actually engage in some kind of exchange of information and possibly have a meaningful discussion, however, it pays to think not in terms like "your blanket statement is technically wrong", but rather in terms like "as a blanket statement, that is incorrect, but it is worth considering whether a strong trend exists before dismissing the ideas you raise".
Of course, I've seen libman around in other contexts before, and he has not only a tendency toward blanket statements where they are not strictly accurate, and toward imposing interpretations of non-blanket statements as though they were blanket statements on others' arguments (highly fucking aggravating when he does that) and using that to "prove" that person was "wrong" somehow. I doubt you know this from past experience with him like I do, though, and your response is counterproductive toward convincing anyone of anything, I think. In fact, in this case you seem to come off less reasonably than he does, by blowing past the meat of every point he makes to attack something peripheral, tied solely to phrasing, or otherwise well off the mark. You've done the same in response to my previous comment, too (see above, re: "early", for instance). Perhaps you could try looking for the meat of a statement rather than just looking for excuses to disagree in vague disagreements about use of nonspecific terms.