As in, put the sources on the same disk as the binaries? =:^)
Exactly -- either that, or put the separate disks in the same package.
To the best of my knowledge, no, no "force" is necessary. However, the sources do need to be not just available at the same time, but with a reasonably prominent message saying they are. IOW, if the LiveCDs are out for the taking, there needs to be either another stack of source CDs, or at least a sign beside the LiveCDs saying ask for a source disk and we'll burn one. It can't be simply up to the passer by to ask, without some reasonably sized sign saying to ask if you want a sources disk too, or it falls back to the notice on the binaries disk (which you better be sure and have included), thus triggering the 3-year clock.
The thing is, I don't think the text of the license (either v2 or v3) supports this interpretation. It seems to me that even if the receiver explicitly refuses the source code at the time of receiving the binary, there's nothing in the GPL that stops him from being entitled to change his mind and ask for the source later. Moreover, if he passed the disk on to someone else, then that person would also have the right to request the source code from you, the person who made and initially distributed the copy. (The guy in the middle doesn't get that obligation because he didn't actually make a copy, which means copyright law and hence the GPL never applied to him.)
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe even including separate disks in the same package wouldn't work: what if the guy in the middle opened the package and only passed along the disk containing the binaries? It doesn't seem like that would be enough to invoke copyright law, which means the middle man wouldn't be responsible for providing the source, but the original distributor shouldn't be responsible for it either because he already made a good-faith attempt to fulfill the requirements of the GPL (under clause a). So who, then, becomes responsible for providing the source if the ultimate recipient wants it? Somebody has to be!
And [cops taking their guns home] is relevant to a discussion about the second amendment how?
He was making an argument by analogy that since cops are (theoretically) always safe with their guns due to their training, that non-cops with the same training would be safe too.
Hold on for a minute - I was talking about gun safety and marksmanship training specifically. Cops (hopefully) receive training in more areas than these two, and are subject to a little more scrutiny than the average gun owner, especially with regards to staying calm under stress and pressure.
I apologize: when I mentioned gun safety and marksmanship I intended them to be merely examples, not an exhaustive list. I would want citizen gun owners to complete all the relevant gun-related training that police receive, including (but not limited to!) remaining calm under pressure and defending their weapon from an attacker trying to take it away. Making the average gun owner subject to "a little more scrutiny" is exactly what I propose.
Besides, a broad definition of "gun safety" includes that stuff anyway!
Have you ever heard of China town? Or little Italy?
Have you ever heard of Ellis Island? The Italian and other European immigrants* all passed through there because they immigrated legally!
Now, I completely agree that levels of legal immigration are way too restricted these days. But if people want to move here then they need to have respect for our laws. Illegal immigrants lack that respect by definition, and should be deported for it! (Heck, doing so makes more room for the legal immigrants -- it's a win-win situation if you think about it...)
(*Not so much the Chinese, of course, since they arrived on the west coast... but still legally, unlike many (most?) Mexicans.)
The concern is that a law-abiding citizen may, in the heat of passion, pull a gun and murder a person.
This is where the "well-regulated" part of the 2nd Amendment should come in: gun ownership should come with an obligation of training and practice (including both gun safety and marksmanship) on a regular, ongoing basis.
Recently there has been a big debate over the push to allow guns in bars. This means, bar patrons would be allowed to bring guns into a bar and then drink.
No it doesn't. It means that people would be allowed to bring guns into the building. Whether or not they're also allowed to subsequently get drunk is a separate question, one which your statement does not address. Now, I'm not saying you're wrong; it's just that your chain of logic is missing a link.
Personally, I think it's entirely reasonable for people to bring guns to bars (along with everywhere else -- after all, if you've got it with you and have to go somewhere it's not allowed, where are you supposed to put it?!), but that it should be very illegal to actually get intoxicated while they have them. It's analogous to how driving to a bar is fine, but DUI is not. Of course, the ideal solution would be for bars to go back to checking guns at the door, like they used to do a hundred years ago.
if you haven't changed it, then linking the person to provider of the original source would be fine.
Well, if you're passing along copies somebody else made (the situation I was referring to before), then that's true (because copyright law, and therefore the GPL, never get invoked in the first place). But if you made the copies (which requires that you accept the GPL), then that's allowed only under certain circumstances:
6. Conveying Non-Source Forms.
You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:
...
c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b.
Btw I forgot to thank you for pointing out the fact that NDS has thought about the GPL and for confirming the box indeed carries GPL'ed software.
But it's not very useful coming from an Anonymous Coward, unless you intend to subpoena Slashdot...
By the way, I'd like to humbly suggest as a general bit of informal advice: Please proceed as politely, obligingly, and scrupulously methodically as possible, so that your case is as strong as possible. For example, even though you may be quite justified in expecting a response to a letter in 13 days, give them 30 days (or more!) to respond anyway so they have no excuse to even try to complain about it in court. As another example (the one which prompted this post), taunting an (alleged) representative of the defendant on Slashdot could give them an opportunity to argue that you're acting maliciously rather than in good-faith, and thus be counterproductive.
Basically, it is sharing with all people regardless of who they are. Some companies do not have a problem with this because of your second point. To keep from having to maintain an internal fork Netgear would also be contributing back to the project. They would effectively be cross-sharing via the project.
What you've really done is turned the situation to a Prisoner's Dilemma for no good reason. And that means the game-theoretic equilibrium result is both Linksys and Netgear forking, not sharing.
I've been able to determine that a few flat-screen TVs I've looked at run Linux by navigating through the on-screen menu system until I found the screen displaying the text of the GPL. Of course, that only works for things that are in compliance...
Similarly if you distribute disks at a FLOSS convention or the like. Have a stack of disks with the binaries and another with the sources (or a computer with a burner setup to burn a disk of the sources on demand, assuming there'll be less demand for that than the binaries).
I'm not sure this is correct: I think you might have to force everyone who takes binaries to takes sources as well, or else you still risk being on the hook for 3 years if somebody who took only the binary (or someone downstream from him) decides they want the source later.
Don't even think _hidden_, don't fool yourself or others. It's right there in the language of the GPL plain as day. Just like it's supposed to be. And thats the good thing that separates it from the BSD license which has no cost at all. That is the _whole_ reason to pick one over another as a licensor.
The BSD license has a cost as well; it's just even more abstract than the GPL's cost. With the BSD license, the costs are in terms of:
either the risk of competitors appropriating your improvements to gain an advantage if you distribute your changes or the loss of community help if you don't, and
the less extensive and suitable selection of BSD-licensed code available in the first place because of people who chose the latter option in point 1 before you.
So therefore, application code that is not a part of the kernal, is not subject to GPL? eg. If I write a game that uses an unmodified linux kernal, the game is not part of GPL.
As a rule of thumb, that's correct (as long as they don't use some other GPL'd bit, like a library or something, either).
However, the true answer to that question is that the game is not subject to the GPL if and only if it is not a "derivative work," which is a legal concept that depends not only on the technical circumstances (e.g., whether the GPL'd and [possibly-]non-GPL'd parts interact via static linking, dynamic linking, or a well-defined and standardized API) but also the historical circumstances (e.g. even if version 6.0 shares zero lines of code with 1.0, but 1.0 was GPL'd and 6.0 mutated from it rather than being a completely new program, then 6.0 has to be GPL'd too) and even the cognitive circumstances (e.g., if the author intended the new part to be combined with the GPL part as a single functional unit, or if the author substantially used GPL'd source code as a reference (i.e., plagiarized it)) as well. Only a court ruling can give a definitive answer, and in borderline cases a lawyer would be required to get even a reasonably likely-correct one.
But don't let that put you off too much; all this is a consequence of copyright law itself, not something uniquely difficult about the GPL. As long as you're only interacting with GPL'd code in reasonably normal ways (e.g. merely using the public API) and/or uses the GPL'd code incidentally rather than leveraging it as part of your code's primary purpose (e.g., your program is not itself an operating system kernel, that encapsulates Linux to do the heavy lifting), then you're fine.
It's not entirely up to Linus; there are hundreds of other people (i.e., every other contributor) who own at least some part of the copyright, and any one of them has standing to sue nVidia. The reason it hasn't happened yet is that nobody thinks the case is strong enough to be winnable, "spirit violations" notwithstanding.
(FWIW, I don't like what nVidia is doing either. Also, IANAL.)
You're right, but your compliant in still stupid. You need to look at the paragraph in the license just before the one you quoted:
a) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by the Corresponding Source fixed on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange.
In other words, include the damn source code with the product in the first place and you're already done! What's so fucking hard?!
Anyways, what it came down to is our legal department recommended against using linux because of having to provide source code, their slant on it was that if we didn't offer the latest linux on cd for reinstallation purposes, we'd have to keep the source code around somewhere for offering to distribute it because it matched whatever out of date version we had in our kit. In the case if we then actually DID distribute it and even the smallest piece subsequently failed to build, we would then have to help the customer fix the smallest piece that would fail to duplicate his slightly out of date binary debian installation and thus have to possibly duplicate THE ENTIRE DEBIAN PROJECT.
Your lawyers were wrong; GPL compliance is not even slightly that hard.
You don't have to ship the "latest" anything; just take a snapshot of the source code at the time you compiled the version running on the box, burn it on a CD, and shove it in the damn package. You're done! You don't even have to maintain an FTP server or mailing address at that point; you've already fulfilled all your obligations from the get-go. It's not fucking rocket science...
The "we'll have to help the customer fix it if it fails to build" argument is so completely wrong that I don't understand how the idiots could even manage to come up with it. Back in reality, the GPL says exactly the opposite: that it disclaims any warranty, merchantability, fitness of purpose, etc.
The thing is, if you just order a bunch of Ubuntu CDs from Canonical and then pass them along, you don't have to offer source code because the GPL never kicked in in the first place! It only applies when when you do something that would otherwise violate copyright law, which means you'd have to make the copies before distributing them.
I'd like to see Sony open up the PS3 just a little bit more, so that Linux can use the fancy graphics hardware. Even if it were via a library licensed in such a way that only Free Software could use it (so that commercial games would still be forced to kick money back to Sony), if such a thing is legally possible, that would be fine by me. That would be enough to make me quit boycotting Sony!
Road usage is the clear cut case, here you will loose in court if you close off a road that have been open to the public. Ownership or not, particularly if you bought the road as a part of a deal after public usage was an established tradition. Implicit contracts does need to be honored.
But if you close off the road and years and years go by with it like that before anyone notices, then you might have a legal claim to it. Or at least, you would if the road were previously owned by another private entity; it probably wouldn't work if the road were owned directly by the government.
Land ownership is not actually always ownership, there countries(UK and Sweden for instance) where you cannot actually own land, but only lease it on permanent contracts.
And the United States. What we have is called ownership, but it's really just a lease with no set termination date since property taxes and eminent domain exist. (See also fee simple ownership, as contrasted with allodial title.)
In America, the British (and other colonial powers) took the land from the indigenous people by force and claimed it in the name of the Crown. The Crown, in turn, granted/leased/sold (not sure of the terminology) it to the colonists (such that colonists had non-alloidal ownership, which they could sell amongst themselves but reverted to the Crown if they failed to pay taxes, died without heirs, etc.). Then the colonists became revolutionaries and took the land from the Crown by force, which works out the same as I just explained before except that the ownership ultimately reverts to either the Federal government or the government of each state (I'm not sure which, and it could vary between states) instead of the British Crown.
There is such a thing as "alloidal title," where property is owned absolutely (in that not even the government has legal authority to take it away, no matter what), but that's extremely rare (at least in the U.S. -- it's more common in "civil law" countries) and, of course, it could still be taken by force.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly -- either that, or put the separate disks in the same package.
The thing is, I don't think the text of the license (either v2 or v3) supports this interpretation. It seems to me that even if the receiver explicitly refuses the source code at the time of receiving the binary, there's nothing in the GPL that stops him from being entitled to change his mind and ask for the source later. Moreover, if he passed the disk on to someone else, then that person would also have the right to request the source code from you, the person who made and initially distributed the copy. (The guy in the middle doesn't get that obligation because he didn't actually make a copy, which means copyright law and hence the GPL never applied to him.)
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe even including separate disks in the same package wouldn't work: what if the guy in the middle opened the package and only passed along the disk containing the binaries? It doesn't seem like that would be enough to invoke copyright law, which means the middle man wouldn't be responsible for providing the source, but the original distributor shouldn't be responsible for it either because he already made a good-faith attempt to fulfill the requirements of the GPL (under clause a). So who, then, becomes responsible for providing the source if the ultimate recipient wants it? Somebody has to be!
He was making an argument by analogy that since cops are (theoretically) always safe with their guns due to their training, that non-cops with the same training would be safe too.
I apologize: when I mentioned gun safety and marksmanship I intended them to be merely examples, not an exhaustive list. I would want citizen gun owners to complete all the relevant gun-related training that police receive, including (but not limited to!) remaining calm under pressure and defending their weapon from an attacker trying to take it away. Making the average gun owner subject to "a little more scrutiny" is exactly what I propose.
Besides, a broad definition of "gun safety" includes that stuff anyway!
Have you ever heard of Ellis Island? The Italian and other European immigrants* all passed through there because they immigrated legally!
Now, I completely agree that levels of legal immigration are way too restricted these days. But if people want to move here then they need to have respect for our laws. Illegal immigrants lack that respect by definition, and should be deported for it! (Heck, doing so makes more room for the legal immigrants -- it's a win-win situation if you think about it...)
(*Not so much the Chinese, of course, since they arrived on the west coast... but still legally, unlike many (most?) Mexicans.)
This is where the "well-regulated" part of the 2nd Amendment should come in: gun ownership should come with an obligation of training and practice (including both gun safety and marksmanship) on a regular, ongoing basis.
No it doesn't. It means that people would be allowed to bring guns into the building. Whether or not they're also allowed to subsequently get drunk is a separate question, one which your statement does not address. Now, I'm not saying you're wrong; it's just that your chain of logic is missing a link.
Personally, I think it's entirely reasonable for people to bring guns to bars (along with everywhere else -- after all, if you've got it with you and have to go somewhere it's not allowed, where are you supposed to put it?!), but that it should be very illegal to actually get intoxicated while they have them. It's analogous to how driving to a bar is fine, but DUI is not. Of course, the ideal solution would be for bars to go back to checking guns at the door, like they used to do a hundred years ago.
Well, if you're passing along copies somebody else made (the situation I was referring to before), then that's true (because copyright law, and therefore the GPL, never get invoked in the first place). But if you made the copies (which requires that you accept the GPL), then that's allowed only under certain circumstances:
But it's not very useful coming from an Anonymous Coward, unless you intend to subpoena Slashdot...
By the way, I'd like to humbly suggest as a general bit of informal advice: Please proceed as politely, obligingly, and scrupulously methodically as possible, so that your case is as strong as possible. For example, even though you may be quite justified in expecting a response to a letter in 13 days, give them 30 days (or more!) to respond anyway so they have no excuse to even try to complain about it in court. As another example (the one which prompted this post), taunting an (alleged) representative of the defendant on Slashdot could give them an opportunity to argue that you're acting maliciously rather than in good-faith, and thus be counterproductive.
What you've really done is turned the situation to a Prisoner's Dilemma for no good reason. And that means the game-theoretic equilibrium result is both Linksys and Netgear forking, not sharing.
I've been able to determine that a few flat-screen TVs I've looked at run Linux by navigating through the on-screen menu system until I found the screen displaying the text of the GPL. Of course, that only works for things that are in compliance...
I'm not sure this is correct: I think you might have to force everyone who takes binaries to takes sources as well, or else you still risk being on the hook for 3 years if somebody who took only the binary (or someone downstream from him) decides they want the source later.
What made you decide to do that anyway? It seems like it might have been simpler to just contribute it as MIT-licensed (or dual-licensed) to both...?
The BSD license has a cost as well; it's just even more abstract than the GPL's cost. With the BSD license, the costs are in terms of:
As a rule of thumb, that's correct (as long as they don't use some other GPL'd bit, like a library or something, either).
However, the true answer to that question is that the game is not subject to the GPL if and only if it is not a "derivative work," which is a legal concept that depends not only on the technical circumstances (e.g., whether the GPL'd and [possibly-]non-GPL'd parts interact via static linking, dynamic linking, or a well-defined and standardized API) but also the historical circumstances (e.g. even if version 6.0 shares zero lines of code with 1.0, but 1.0 was GPL'd and 6.0 mutated from it rather than being a completely new program, then 6.0 has to be GPL'd too) and even the cognitive circumstances (e.g., if the author intended the new part to be combined with the GPL part as a single functional unit, or if the author substantially used GPL'd source code as a reference (i.e., plagiarized it)) as well. Only a court ruling can give a definitive answer, and in borderline cases a lawyer would be required to get even a reasonably likely-correct one.
But don't let that put you off too much; all this is a consequence of copyright law itself, not something uniquely difficult about the GPL. As long as you're only interacting with GPL'd code in reasonably normal ways (e.g. merely using the public API) and/or uses the GPL'd code incidentally rather than leveraging it as part of your code's primary purpose (e.g., your program is not itself an operating system kernel, that encapsulates Linux to do the heavy lifting), then you're fine.
(IANAL.)
It's not entirely up to Linus; there are hundreds of other people (i.e., every other contributor) who own at least some part of the copyright, and any one of them has standing to sue nVidia. The reason it hasn't happened yet is that nobody thinks the case is strong enough to be winnable, "spirit violations" notwithstanding.
(FWIW, I don't like what nVidia is doing either. Also, IANAL.)
You're right, but your compliant in still stupid. You need to look at the paragraph in the license just before the one you quoted:
In other words, include the damn source code with the product in the first place and you're already done! What's so fucking hard?!
Your lawyers were wrong; GPL compliance is not even slightly that hard.
The thing is, if you just order a bunch of Ubuntu CDs from Canonical and then pass them along, you don't have to offer source code because the GPL never kicked in in the first place! It only applies when when you do something that would otherwise violate copyright law, which means you'd have to make the copies before distributing them.
It wasn't in my education either; I somehow found it on Wikipedia one day.
I'd like to see Sony open up the PS3 just a little bit more, so that Linux can use the fancy graphics hardware. Even if it were via a library licensed in such a way that only Free Software could use it (so that commercial games would still be forced to kick money back to Sony), if such a thing is legally possible, that would be fine by me. That would be enough to make me quit boycotting Sony!
Err, yeah. Oops!
But if you close off the road and years and years go by with it like that before anyone notices, then you might have a legal claim to it. Or at least, you would if the road were previously owned by another private entity; it probably wouldn't work if the road were owned directly by the government.
And the United States. What we have is called ownership, but it's really just a lease with no set termination date since property taxes and eminent domain exist. (See also fee simple ownership, as contrasted with allodial title.)
Damnit. It's "allodial" title, not "alloidal." Dunno why I spelled it wrong; I guess I'm too used to seeing the "-oid" suffix in scientific terms...
In America, the British (and other colonial powers) took the land from the indigenous people by force and claimed it in the name of the Crown. The Crown, in turn, granted/leased/sold (not sure of the terminology) it to the colonists (such that colonists had non-alloidal ownership, which they could sell amongst themselves but reverted to the Crown if they failed to pay taxes, died without heirs, etc.). Then the colonists became revolutionaries and took the land from the Crown by force, which works out the same as I just explained before except that the ownership ultimately reverts to either the Federal government or the government of each state (I'm not sure which, and it could vary between states) instead of the British Crown.
There is such a thing as "alloidal title," where property is owned absolutely (in that not even the government has legal authority to take it away, no matter what), but that's extremely rare (at least in the U.S. -- it's more common in "civil law" countries) and, of course, it could still be taken by force.
Are you sure you don't mean AARL instead of AARP? AARP is a senior citizens' group.
If you ended up with $50 in bogus fees, then the answer to "are the cell phone companies really that bad?" is yes!
Quite a few people still pay their bills (utility, credit card, auto loan, etc.) using checks.