Copyright doesn't allow your git or text editor examples, but I would agree that those two situations would be wrong. Tools shouldn't be able to tell users what they can do. It'd be like pencil's coming with terms and conditions.
But it's also not true that GPL'ing a library would cause its terms to apply to code you had nothing to do with. The third-party coder has a choice: write his own library, or use yours and share-alike. That's just fair. Nobody's forced.
If proprietary developers can ask for payment in the same conditions, why is it wrong for freedom coders to ask for a code contribution that's going to be shared with everyone? It's not even selfish.
LGPL isn't about being fair, it's about doing less for freedom in certain circumstances when we're in a weak bargaining position.
> As opposed to using the free libc that's part of clang/LLVM?
Apple and other proprietary software companies would love everyone to move to LLVM. That's why Apple's funding it: LLVM's success benefits Apple (and other companies that don't want to compete against free software).
Funding LLVM is a tactical compromise that Apple was forced into. FSF's use of the LGPL succeeded in making it too hard to get everyone to move away from free software, so Apple has to settle for undermining the copyleft system that encourages people to contribute to free software.
Apple's doing an embrace, extend, extinguish. 1. We love this free software compiler. We fund it. It's free. We're friends. 2. We've developed an amazing extension module. It's proprietary but it's sooo slick. 3. Sure, everyone has the choice of using the free code. It makes slower binaries and doesn't support modern debugging and won't work on our latest hardware, but it's still there.
If we want free software to exist in ten or twenty years time, we have to support copyleft today.
Anon wrote: >...when I'm writing a library, what I want most of all is...
The LGPL is a tactical compromise. The aim is to get as many people using that library, but still encourage those software developers to contribute to free software projects.
It's an admission that a firmer stance is likely to backfire.
Conversely, when a firmer stance won't backfire, when it will instead lead to more people contributing to free software, then compromising is needless and self-defeating.
For example, Glibc is LGPL'd because FSF knows that if it was GPL'd, then some Unix vendor would push projects to ignore Glibc and use their proprietary libc instead. That would be a loss, so FSF compromised and used the LGPL so that Glibc will still be used, even by companies that don't want to contribute to free software.
Releasing software as free software is always good, but noting a file's copyright status in that file is simple and it's much easier for the author to do.
The author can write "Copyright, 2013, me, released under GPLv3 or any later version". It's much harder for someone else to confidently write that, and it's hard to be confident of a file's copyright if the author of the copyright notice is some unrelated third-party.
Then there's the problem of mistakes. If the author makes a mistake in his copyright notice, she says oops, silly me, I've fixed it now. If someone else makes that mistake you get a flame war about hostile takeovers and passing of MY software as being licence X when it's really licence Y.
I mean, were talking about twenty seconds of effort here per file that you'll spend hours writing. It's not worth creating legal problems for other people.
The lack of mention of GPLv3's patent-fighting provisions is the major bungle.
It's hard to find a good name for non-copyleft licences since there are various versions of "the BSD" licence, and some are non-free. "MIT" is also ambiguous since that university surely has written various licences. "The licence of X Windows" is non-ambiguous, but not very recognisable.
LGPLv3 is the only other licence I'd considering adding to that mix, with a link to FSF's own Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library. It would be good to encourage the AGPLv3 too, but that could be an opt-in checkbox in a later screen.
For software, they don't help innovation, and promoting innovation can't be the only goal. Lots of non-innovative software development is really useful.
And it's really crucial that patents be analysed per-domain. The don't affect pharma and the auto industry the same, and they don't affect software the same either. The distribution models are different, as is the profile of who mass produces each thing, as is the complexity (number of ideas) that get added to a product within one lifecycle, and the length of product lifecycles...
But I get the feeling that if Stallman hadn't kicked up such a stink about this, other organisations wouldn't be jumping in to help now.
If EFF's objection is successful, some people will look back afterward and say that RMS's petition and public denouncements achieved nothing and only the later campaigns by others were useful, but they'll be missing the point that RMS is the one that whips those other groups out of inaction. He knows he usually can't win battles on his own, and he knows how to highlight a cause and set an example so that he isn't left on his own.
A solution: The LibreJS plugin for IceCat, Firefox etc. disables javascript if it is non-trivial and doesn't have a notice about using a free software licence: https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/
Someone will probably reply with a link to a story about someone patenting the wheel in Australia. But it's not true.
Or, it wasn't a "patent". It was an "innovation patent", which is something completely different and doesn't get any substantial examination by any examiner. They just check the formalities and rubber stamp it (and the examination happens if, and only if, there is litigation, which never happened with the wheel innovation patent).
The USPTO is holding roundtables with software developers to ask for suggestions. If anyone can add to what's there already, I've some suggestions on this wiki:
(But remember, the patent office has only a small role in patent policy. Most substantial changes will have to come from Congress or the Supreme Court.)
I'm sad to hear that this wiki (that I didn't even know existed) is shutting down.
I've never even heard of WikiEmacs, but I wish I had. A MediaWiki site about Emacs sounds like a perfect match. Maybe lots of other Emacs users would become contributors if they knew it existed. Of all wiki systems, I've found MediaWiki sites to be much more likely to become well maintained and navigable.
I hope WikiEmacs doesn't shut down. I'll probably become a regular contributor.
Nonsense. Patents might have funded R&D in one building, but those patents blocked R&D in every other building.
In the 90s, everyone was after image and video compression, there were piles of people working on it, or wanting to work on it. Studies show that software patents caused money to be diverted *away* from R&D (toward patent defence, defensive acquisition etc.).
And if you want to fund researchers, just abolish software patents and suddenly you free up a few billion in application fees, maintenance fees, freedom to operate search fees, defence costs, out of court settlements, licensing fees...
Why does EFF never oppose software patents as a concept?
They always want to eliminate the 10 worst software patents, but they have enough educated/informed people to know that the world isn't plagued by 10 lousy software patents. It's thickets like the 346 US patents exploited by MPEG LA.
Or the thousands of patents held by Intellectual Ventures, Apple, and Microsoft.
C'mon EFF. You have the cash and the lawyers. Give us a hand fixing the problem (legislation, court briefs) and stop trying to wipe out malaria by swatting mosquitoes! You know that doesn't work.
MPEG LA claims to manage 346 patents (in the USA alone) which are necessary for anyone who wants to write a video player that can play this very widely used format.
Eliminating 5%, or even 95% of these patents will change nothing. Software developers will still have to ask MPEG LA for permission, and MPEG LA will continue to prohibit free software implementations.
Why bother with these complicated, time-consuming ideas? The way to fix the problem (and unblock the patent office), is to make software simply non-eligible.
If you don't know how to search for cached copies of web pages
Us nerds being able to circumvent these measures isn't the point.
Most people (non-techs - think of your family and friends) *don't* know about cached copies, and we don't know when courts will get smarter and propose dynamic lists for "equivalent" pages/urls that also have to be blocked to comply with whatever law or court decision.
There will always be ways for the nerdiest 1% to access these pages, but that doesn't change that for most people in Belgium, this blog entry doesn't exist.
Didn't work for me. I get redirected to the blocked page (thepiratebay.se/blog/204).
BTW, if there's a working IP address, is there an easy way to configure my GNU/Linux box to automatically go to that IP address when an application makes a request to "thepiratebay.se"? (I did this before but don't remember the file)
I've never been affected first-hand by government censorship of websites, but when I clicked on the piratebay.se link to read his blog entry, I just got:
The access to this website is blocked in conformity with a decision of the Antwerp Court of Appeal dated 26 September 2011.
For any additional information, you can contact the Belgian Anti-piracy Federation (BAF), at Almaplein 3 P.O. Box 10, 1200 Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe - http://www.anti-piracy.be/en/.
The development cost might justify the patent system for pharma in rich countries, but there are countries that have big AIDS problems and which are too poor for their populations to fund pharma development in any significant way. There the patent system for pharma isn't justified and is leading to millions of deaths. And that's what Gates pushed for via TRIPS.
And charity like this (in this case: a tiny portion of someone's ill-gotten gains) isn't making up the difference. Last I heard, the AIDS problems of poor countries isn't going away.
Let's not forget that the reason developing countries can't cheaply manufacture their own AIDS medication is that the TRIPS agreement, which Gates was a major back of, requires them to respect the patents of the richest countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright doesn't allow your git or text editor examples, but I would agree that those two situations would be wrong. Tools shouldn't be able to tell users what they can do. It'd be like pencil's coming with terms and conditions.
But it's also not true that GPL'ing a library would cause its terms to apply to code you had nothing to do with. The third-party coder has a choice: write his own library, or use yours and share-alike. That's just fair. Nobody's forced.
If proprietary developers can ask for payment in the same conditions, why is it wrong for freedom coders to ask for a code contribution that's going to be shared with everyone? It's not even selfish.
LGPL isn't about being fair, it's about doing less for freedom in certain circumstances when we're in a weak bargaining position.
> As opposed to using the free libc that's part of clang/LLVM?
Apple and other proprietary software companies would love everyone to move to LLVM. That's why Apple's funding it: LLVM's success benefits Apple (and other companies that don't want to compete against free software).
Funding LLVM is a tactical compromise that Apple was forced into. FSF's use of the LGPL succeeded in making it too hard to get everyone to move away from free software, so Apple has to settle for undermining the copyleft system that encourages people to contribute to free software.
Apple's doing an embrace, extend, extinguish.
1. We love this free software compiler. We fund it. It's free. We're friends.
2. We've developed an amazing extension module. It's proprietary but it's sooo slick.
3. Sure, everyone has the choice of using the free code. It makes slower binaries and doesn't support modern debugging and won't work on our latest hardware, but it's still there.
If we want free software to exist in ten or twenty years time, we have to support copyleft today.
Anon wrote: ...when I'm writing a library, what I want most of all is...
>
The LGPL is a tactical compromise. The aim is to get as many people using that library, but still encourage those software developers to contribute to free software projects.
It's an admission that a firmer stance is likely to backfire.
Conversely, when a firmer stance won't backfire, when it will instead lead to more people contributing to free software, then compromising is needless and self-defeating.
For example, Glibc is LGPL'd because FSF knows that if it was GPL'd, then some Unix vendor would push projects to ignore Glibc and use their proprietary libc instead. That would be a loss, so FSF compromised and used the LGPL so that Glibc will still be used, even by companies that don't want to contribute to free software.
It's a good essay, worth a read: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.en.html
Releasing software as free software is always good, but noting a file's copyright status in that file is simple and it's much easier for the author to do.
The author can write "Copyright, 2013, me, released under GPLv3 or any later version". It's much harder for someone else to confidently write that, and it's hard to be confident of a file's copyright if the author of the copyright notice is some unrelated third-party.
Then there's the problem of mistakes. If the author makes a mistake in his copyright notice, she says oops, silly me, I've fixed it now. If someone else makes that mistake you get a flame war about hostile takeovers and passing of MY software as being licence X when it's really licence Y.
I mean, were talking about twenty seconds of effort here per file that you'll spend hours writing. It's not worth creating legal problems for other people.
The lack of mention of GPLv3's patent-fighting provisions is the major bungle.
It's hard to find a good name for non-copyleft licences since there are various versions of "the BSD" licence, and some are non-free. "MIT" is also ambiguous since that university surely has written various licences. "The licence of X Windows" is non-ambiguous, but not very recognisable.
LGPLv3 is the only other licence I'd considering adding to that mix, with a link to FSF's own Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library. It would be good to encourage the AGPLv3 too, but that could be an opt-in checkbox in a later screen.
For software, they don't help innovation, and promoting innovation can't be the only goal. Lots of non-innovative software development is really useful.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Studies_on_economics_and_innovation
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/More_than_innovation
And it's really crucial that patents be analysed per-domain. The don't affect pharma and the auto industry the same, and they don't affect software the same either. The distribution models are different, as is the profile of who mass produces each thing, as is the complexity (number of ideas) that get added to a product within one lifecycle, and the length of product lifecycles...
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Why_software_is_different
I've been documenting this and have all the background here:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/German_parliament_petition_against_software_patents
This is great work by EFF.
But I get the feeling that if Stallman hadn't kicked up such a stink about this, other organisations wouldn't be jumping in to help now.
If EFF's objection is successful, some people will look back afterward and say that RMS's petition and public denouncements achieved nothing and only the later campaigns by others were useful, but they'll be missing the point that RMS is the one that whips those other groups out of inaction. He knows he usually can't win battles on his own, and he knows how to highlight a cause and set an example so that he isn't left on his own.
So thanks, EFF, and thanks, Richard.
The distinction between installed-software and software that's being run from your browser cache is becoming subtle.
RMS's views on the problem: The JavaScript Trap
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html
A solution: The LibreJS plugin for IceCat, Firefox etc. disables javascript if it is non-trivial and doesn't have a notice about using a free software licence:
https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/
("trivial" is defined as "defines functions")
Someone will probably reply with a link to a story about someone patenting the wheel in Australia. But it's not true.
Or, it wasn't a "patent". It was an "innovation patent", which is something completely different and doesn't get any substantial examination by any examiner. They just check the formalities and rubber stamp it (and the examination happens if, and only if, there is litigation, which never happened with the wheel innovation patent).
But there are many silly patents in the world:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Silly_patents
The USPTO is holding roundtables with software developers to ask for suggestions. If anyone can add to what's there already, I've some suggestions on this wiki:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Suggestions_for_the_USPTO_in_2013
(But remember, the patent office has only a small role in patent policy. Most substantial changes will have to come from Congress or the Supreme Court.)
Maybe the pages could be moved to the libreplanet.org wiki that FSF hosts.
It's a Mediawiki site, and there's already a community of contributors and a big portion are surely Emacs users. How about it?
I'm sad to hear that this wiki (that I didn't even know existed) is shutting down.
I've never even heard of WikiEmacs, but I wish I had. A MediaWiki site about Emacs sounds like a perfect match. Maybe lots of other Emacs users would become contributors if they knew it existed. Of all wiki systems, I've found MediaWiki sites to be much more likely to become well maintained and navigable.
I hope WikiEmacs doesn't shut down. I'll probably become a regular contributor.
That would be around 1992, right?
So EFF was good for two years and then sold out? If that's correct, how have they managed to maintain a high profile and good reputation?
There patent work always disappoints me, but I assumed they were valuable in some other area, but I know very little about their work.
> Jpeg and mpeg
Nonsense. Patents might have funded R&D in one building, but those patents blocked R&D in every other building.
In the 90s, everyone was after image and video compression, there were piles of people working on it, or wanting to work on it. Studies show that software patents caused money to be diverted *away* from R&D (toward patent defence, defensive acquisition etc.).
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Studies_on_economics_and_innovation
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/An_Empirical_Look_at_Software_Patents
And if you want to fund researchers, just abolish software patents and suddenly you free up a few billion in application fees, maintenance fees, freedom to operate search fees, defence costs, out of court settlements, licensing fees...
Why does EFF never oppose software patents as a concept?
They always want to eliminate the 10 worst software patents, but they have enough educated/informed people to know that the world isn't plagued by 10 lousy software patents. It's thickets like the 346 US patents exploited by MPEG LA.
Or the thousands of patents held by Intellectual Ventures, Apple, and Microsoft.
C'mon EFF. You have the cash and the lawyers. Give us a hand fixing the problem (legislation, court briefs) and stop trying to wipe out malaria by swatting mosquitoes! You know that doesn't work.
He also wrote a good piece back in July:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/why-there-are-too-many-patents-in-america/259725/ ...where he repeats most of the arguments that people use to ask for abolishing software patents, but he stops short and instead muses on a few reforms (that probably wouldn't have much of an effect).
Here's my views on his July piece:
http://news.swpat.org/2012/07/posners-problem/
And there're a few more links about his positions here:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Richard_Posner_on_software_patents
Abolition seems like the logical conclusion of his musings. I can't see why he doesn't discuss it.
MPEG LA claims to manage 346 patents (in the USA alone) which are necessary for anyone who wants to write a video player that can play this very widely used format.
Eliminating 5%, or even 95% of these patents will change nothing. Software developers will still have to ask MPEG LA for permission, and MPEG LA will continue to prohibit free software implementations.
Why bother with these complicated, time-consuming ideas? The way to fix the problem (and unblock the patent office), is to make software simply non-eligible.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Raising_examination_standards_wouldn't_fix_much
That's called "open core".
Pity.
This doesn't work for me. I get redirected to the blocked page (and get the blocked page message).
If you don't know how to search for cached copies of web pages
Us nerds being able to circumvent these measures isn't the point.
Most people (non-techs - think of your family and friends) *don't* know about cached copies, and we don't know when courts will get smarter and propose dynamic lists for "equivalent" pages/urls that also have to be blocked to comply with whatever law or court decision.
There will always be ways for the nerdiest 1% to access these pages, but that doesn't change that for most people in Belgium, this blog entry doesn't exist.
Didn't work for me. I get redirected to the blocked page (thepiratebay.se/blog/204).
BTW, if there's a working IP address, is there an easy way to configure my GNU/Linux box to automatically go to that IP address when an application makes a request to "thepiratebay.se"? (I did this before but don't remember the file)
I've never been affected first-hand by government censorship of websites, but when I clicked on the piratebay.se link to read his blog entry, I just got:
I'm currently in Belgium.
The development cost might justify the patent system for pharma in rich countries, but there are countries that have big AIDS problems and which are too poor for their populations to fund pharma development in any significant way. There the patent system for pharma isn't justified and is leading to millions of deaths. And that's what Gates pushed for via TRIPS.
And charity like this (in this case: a tiny portion of someone's ill-gotten gains) isn't making up the difference. Last I heard, the AIDS problems of poor countries isn't going away.
Let's not forget that the reason developing countries can't cheaply manufacture their own AIDS medication is that the TRIPS agreement, which Gates was a major back of, requires them to respect the patents of the richest countries.