Which comes back to the same point I was trying to make. If something is really complicated, use a library. But as the posted link has shown many of jQuery's functions can be replaced with one liners which are just as likely to be correct as the call to jQuery itself.
AJAX calls, especially on a browser that you can't really rely on (embedded into a TV), regrettably don't fall into that category. They're really easy to get mostly right for most cases, and quite tricky to get completely right for all cases.
American history is fairly unique in that a lot of the laws were written at a time when there were massive quantities of natural resources just lying around for anyone who "wasn't lazy" to grab. The idea that the nation's supplies of oil, gas, and water don't belong to the nation to be used by America for Americans, but instead belong to anyone who can fund the means to extract them (even out from under their neighbors) is relatively unusual. It also leads to an accelerated tragedy of the commons.
The particular depiction of Disney's trademark, while similar to Mickey the cartoon character, is not Mickey the cartoon character.
They could (and should) successfully argue against any use of the character that confuses people about their trademark. That shouldn't mean that nobody else can make cartoons about a mouse named Mickey.
And why shouldn't they? If there was no business case for the modifier to release their code as open then in the GPL case they wouldn't have made the modifications in the first place - again, we're right back to parity between the two systems.
Yes, I spoke poorly. I was poorly referring to the idea that an individual developer would be the primary user - which seems to be a lot of the theoretical impetus behind RMS's speeches. This had to do with discussions about the user of software re-linking it, swapping out libraries, etc. But my words were indeed incorrect.
Within an organization there are often different groups coding and using software. Its funny though - if a business is allowed to say that just because the developer and the user are working for the same company that source distribution doesn't apply, could you create a "trade organization" umbrella and break the GPL that way? Seems like you can't really have it both ways.
And if they hadn't been available, do you really think that Microsoft would have either GPL'd Active Directory or simply not built it? They retain tens of thousands of developers - they'd have just made something completely proprietary that would have been a whole ton harder for anyone to work with.
no one's saying you can't profit from free software, especially RMS. He would love it if everyone could profit from free software.
And I think it would be great if we all lived in a big park with free houses and had noodles to eat whenever we wanted to, because love. Hasn't happened yet, since people who build houses (or cook noodles for that matter) often want to be compensated for their time and materials too. One major issue with his work is that he has never come up with a rational roadmap for that profit to occur.
Right, for today. Tomorrow, a fork of LLVM can be sold as proprietary software with a license that curtails the freedoms of its users. If LLVM were released under a strong copyleft license, that risk would not exist.
What risk? If tomorrow a fork of LLVM was sold as proprietary software, LLVM would still exist in all of its glory.
The only "risk" is that a private company might choose to pay its employees to develop said proprietary software in new and interesting ways because they think they can make money from it - but if LLVM wasn't BSD license they wouldn't necessarily still do all that work and give it away for free until they went out of business, they'd do something else instead. That's the part of the equation that RMS doesn't seem to grasp.
If there would be plenty of people willing to work on LLVM without the backing of BigCO then those same people can do so even after the commercial release happens, so again, no harm done.
On the other hand, continuing your analogy, companies that build their medicine on LLVM are far more likely to do so, whereas companies with tons of money who don't use LLVM would instead rewrite just the portion of a compiler that they needed rather than be forced to give away hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work.
Your example only works when the value of the "stack" massively outweighs the value of the "new code" - and even then it only works if there's still a way to monetize that work (even developers need to eat sometimes). Sometimes it works that way, and sometimes it doesn't.
And yet for humanity as a whole, even in your cancer argument the BSD license wins out again.
Also remember that Apple basically built clang themselves. They could have kept it completely closed thanks to the BSD license and modular nature of LLVM, but instead they gave it back to the community. They didn't have to, but they did anyway - and they did so rather than license something like Intel's compiler that's comfortably closed-source and quite advanced. That's the spirit of BSD.
Thanks for sharing that story - one of the clearer non-software-company examples of GPL viral infection I've seen in a long time.
The theory is that you'll just share your proprietary advantage with the world so everyone gets more efficient. The reality, as you point out, is far from that simple, since if you had had that restriction from day one and there was no other way to write the software, you simply wouldn't have done it in the first place (tragedy of the commons in reverse - nobody's going to pay significant money to improve a common area where all benefit equally).
Of course, if this was a tiny portion of your business and there was a large market then you might decide to do so anyway, in the same way that businesses may sponsor a local park and keep it clean, but not when its a large amount of work and its success or failure has a material impact on your ability to stay afloat.
You ONLY need to accept and abide by the license if you are NOT simply a user, but if you are rather a DISTRIBUTOR.
Of course, the massively vast majority of all software development happens by distributors and not users, but please continue. Just don't pretend that that's some weird special case that doesn't really matter all that much.
The first part of this is reasonable. The second part, not so much in many ways. Of course, it depends a lot on what the library does and how deeply integrated into your code it is. But that's the problem - "it depends" is hard to deal with, especially if the answer may change years after the initial decision is made.
If you modify a LGPL library that you use in a distributed product, forcing you to make that code available to others - to me - completely satisfies the spirit of the LGPL or even the GPL. Forcing you to support relinking has nothing to do with you providing your enhancements back to the community, nothing whatsoever.
The natural outcome of the status-quo is that a person can, for example, purchase their own iOS phone and find out that even though they paid for the device, their right to install or remove functionality is subject to the ongoing business interests and taste prefrences of Apple inc.
You know, if people didn't have such a track record of rooting their phones, borking them, and then trying to get them "repaired" under warranty, this might not be the case. As it is, if one company is going to stand behind the device as a package (hardware/software/many-apps), there aren't many real-world-viable solutions that actually work other than locking it down.
To build on the "more free" fallacy, think of the BSD core of the Apple products. The iDevices are just about the most locked and restrictive hardware imagined after gaming consoles. The user has no idea what code is run and no right to find out. He needs to accept a TOS that basically says "we do what we want with your device including operating it remotely and compromising your privacy and we have no liability". And by contributing to Darwin's source, you enable that type of treacherous computing.
Of course, this would hold true even if they were running a GPL'd OS with LGPL'd libraries. The majority of the OS portion of iOS devices is open source. The majority of the apps that run on it are not - but they wouldn't have to be anyway.
But it isn't "better than GCC". It is targeted pretty much exclusively at x86...
Depends on how you measure it. Just as postfix is not better than sendmail in the general case (after all, sendmail can talk hundreds of protocols whereas postfix just talks SMTP), postfix is arguably better than sendmail in the very specific case of dealing with SMTP traffic... which happens to be the massively vast majority of email traffic these days.
Same with things like targeting non-X86 chips for most developers (although I'd bet that LLVM is pretty good at the A* series). It may not be as versatile, but if its better at doing the thing that 99% of the people want to do 99% of the time, that's not insignificant.
With GPLed code, nothing prevents a user from being able to maintain their system, except their own limitations (budget, tech knowledge, time, etc)
A little fanciful, but all well and good. Then you follow with:
With BSD-licensed code, the user may be able to maintain the system (if the developer opted to also BSD-license it to them)
That's the BS. With BSD licensed code, the user can also maintain the system. Who else is the "them" that the developer who BSD-licensed their code referring to, after all?
What you don't mention is non-free-licenced code. Sure, someone can go off and build a commercial product without using GPL code. That product may or may not contain BSD code. In either case the user, entirely due to their choice to use non-open-source code, will not be able to maintain their own system. In either case, no harm has been done to the original GPL or BSD codebase.
If a user has a system where all programs are licensed either through BSD or through GPL then there's nothing preventing them from maintaining their own system, except their own limitations. If they, as a user, use their own choices to stick to "free" software and ignore closed-source software then either of those licenses will work in exactly the same way, for them.
A 3rd party creating non-open-source software may incorporate BSD code. Or they may not. Either way, you can build a system without it if you wish - or use it if you wish. Its your choice as a user.
BSD, LGPL, and GPL are all free software licences. The user gets the same four freedoms in each case (use, study, modify, redistribute). But, using the BSD licence (or the LGPL) takes away an incentive to contribute to the free software project.
No - the incentives are still there. If they want to recontribute, they absolutely will - in fact, its a whole lot easier to contribute with less risk of license issues. It does however remove the legal requirement for them to do so by the addition of additional restrictions.
LLVM weakens GCC's ability to attract free software contributors. That's why Apple funds LLVM.
Why do you think that Apple dislikes the idea behind GCC (not the software itself, which had stagnated)? They could have based Xcode on a proprietary compiler like Visual Studio if that was their goal. In this case, Apple is in fact giving back to the community without being legally strong-armed into doing so.
Most of everything we consume is considered "crap" by someone. Do you cook gourmet meals? Watch only the best movies? Enjoy great music (opera! No, classical! No, whatever...). How about your car - is it a high-touch work of art or do you do just fine with a "transportation appliance" that you probably see for more hours per week than you watch movies? Are your clothes bespoke or off the rack?
Sure, in a very few areas of their lives most people have different (possibly better, but at least different) tastes. Deriding the mainstream in any one area only exposes the hypocrisy in all other areas.
When you do things in the real world with considerable consequences, make sure you are doing them properly. If this had been a rental agreement, or a purchase contract for a company, or whatever, the result would have been similar if the parties involved did things without the correct paperwork.
Except that in those cases - especially when both parties to the contract agree completely with the same interpretation of the contract - the courts will almost always allow that interpretation to stand. Its very rare indeed that the courts will reinterpret a signed contractual relationship contrary to the wishes of both parties.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the difference between being an owner and being an employee.
Yup, because heavy industry never uses two things in any given process.
Which comes back to the same point I was trying to make. If something is really complicated, use a library. But as the posted link has shown many of jQuery's functions can be replaced with one liners which are just as likely to be correct as the call to jQuery itself.
AJAX calls, especially on a browser that you can't really rely on (embedded into a TV), regrettably don't fall into that category. They're really easy to get mostly right for most cases, and quite tricky to get completely right for all cases.
American history is fairly unique in that a lot of the laws were written at a time when there were massive quantities of natural resources just lying around for anyone who "wasn't lazy" to grab. The idea that the nation's supplies of oil, gas, and water don't belong to the nation to be used by America for Americans, but instead belong to anyone who can fund the means to extract them (even out from under their neighbors) is relatively unusual. It also leads to an accelerated tragedy of the commons.
The particular depiction of Disney's trademark, while similar to Mickey the cartoon character, is not Mickey the cartoon character.
They could (and should) successfully argue against any use of the character that confuses people about their trademark. That shouldn't mean that nobody else can make cartoons about a mouse named Mickey.
And why shouldn't they? If there was no business case for the modifier to release their code as open then in the GPL case they wouldn't have made the modifications in the first place - again, we're right back to parity between the two systems.
Yes, I spoke poorly. I was poorly referring to the idea that an individual developer would be the primary user - which seems to be a lot of the theoretical impetus behind RMS's speeches. This had to do with discussions about the user of software re-linking it, swapping out libraries, etc. But my words were indeed incorrect.
Within an organization there are often different groups coding and using software. Its funny though - if a business is allowed to say that just because the developer and the user are working for the same company that source distribution doesn't apply, could you create a "trade organization" umbrella and break the GPL that way? Seems like you can't really have it both ways.
"Sure, we don't have all of Xcode for free" to me quite obviously refers to free-as-in-beer.
And if they hadn't been available, do you really think that Microsoft would have either GPL'd Active Directory or simply not built it? They retain tens of thousands of developers - they'd have just made something completely proprietary that would have been a whole ton harder for anyone to work with.
no one's saying you can't profit from free software, especially RMS. He would love it if everyone could profit from free software.
And I think it would be great if we all lived in a big park with free houses and had noodles to eat whenever we wanted to, because love. Hasn't happened yet, since people who build houses (or cook noodles for that matter) often want to be compensated for their time and materials too. One major issue with his work is that he has never come up with a rational roadmap for that profit to occur.
Well said. If there were more than a couple of significant organizations that had figured this out, that'd help his cause too.
Right, for today. Tomorrow, a fork of LLVM can be sold as proprietary software with a license that curtails the freedoms of its users. If LLVM were released under a strong copyleft license, that risk would not exist.
What risk? If tomorrow a fork of LLVM was sold as proprietary software, LLVM would still exist in all of its glory.
The only "risk" is that a private company might choose to pay its employees to develop said proprietary software in new and interesting ways because they think they can make money from it - but if LLVM wasn't BSD license they wouldn't necessarily still do all that work and give it away for free until they went out of business, they'd do something else instead. That's the part of the equation that RMS doesn't seem to grasp.
If there would be plenty of people willing to work on LLVM without the backing of BigCO then those same people can do so even after the commercial release happens, so again, no harm done.
On the other hand, continuing your analogy, companies that build their medicine on LLVM are far more likely to do so, whereas companies with tons of money who don't use LLVM would instead rewrite just the portion of a compiler that they needed rather than be forced to give away hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work.
Your example only works when the value of the "stack" massively outweighs the value of the "new code" - and even then it only works if there's still a way to monetize that work (even developers need to eat sometimes). Sometimes it works that way, and sometimes it doesn't.
And yet for humanity as a whole, even in your cancer argument the BSD license wins out again.
Also remember that Apple basically built clang themselves. They could have kept it completely closed thanks to the BSD license and modular nature of LLVM, but instead they gave it back to the community. They didn't have to, but they did anyway - and they did so rather than license something like Intel's compiler that's comfortably closed-source and quite advanced. That's the spirit of BSD.
Thanks for sharing that story - one of the clearer non-software-company examples of GPL viral infection I've seen in a long time.
The theory is that you'll just share your proprietary advantage with the world so everyone gets more efficient. The reality, as you point out, is far from that simple, since if you had had that restriction from day one and there was no other way to write the software, you simply wouldn't have done it in the first place (tragedy of the commons in reverse - nobody's going to pay significant money to improve a common area where all benefit equally).
Of course, if this was a tiny portion of your business and there was a large market then you might decide to do so anyway, in the same way that businesses may sponsor a local park and keep it clean, but not when its a large amount of work and its success or failure has a material impact on your ability to stay afloat.
You ONLY need to accept and abide by the license if you are NOT simply a user, but if you are rather a DISTRIBUTOR.
Of course, the massively vast majority of all software development happens by distributors and not users, but please continue. Just don't pretend that that's some weird special case that doesn't really matter all that much.
The first part of this is reasonable. The second part, not so much in many ways. Of course, it depends a lot on what the library does and how deeply integrated into your code it is. But that's the problem - "it depends" is hard to deal with, especially if the answer may change years after the initial decision is made.
If you modify a LGPL library that you use in a distributed product, forcing you to make that code available to others - to me - completely satisfies the spirit of the LGPL or even the GPL. Forcing you to support relinking has nothing to do with you providing your enhancements back to the community, nothing whatsoever.
The natural outcome of the status-quo is that a person can, for example, purchase their own iOS phone and find out that even though they paid for the device, their right to install or remove functionality is subject to the ongoing business interests and taste prefrences of Apple inc.
You know, if people didn't have such a track record of rooting their phones, borking them, and then trying to get them "repaired" under warranty, this might not be the case. As it is, if one company is going to stand behind the device as a package (hardware/software/many-apps), there aren't many real-world-viable solutions that actually work other than locking it down.
To build on the "more free" fallacy, think of the BSD core of the Apple products. The iDevices are just about the most locked and restrictive hardware imagined after gaming consoles. The user has no idea what code is run and no right to find out. He needs to accept a TOS that basically says "we do what we want with your device including operating it remotely and compromising your privacy and we have no liability". And by contributing to Darwin's source, you enable that type of treacherous computing.
Of course, this would hold true even if they were running a GPL'd OS with LGPL'd libraries. The majority of the OS portion of iOS devices is open source. The majority of the apps that run on it are not - but they wouldn't have to be anyway.
But it isn't "better than GCC". It is targeted pretty much exclusively at x86...
Depends on how you measure it. Just as postfix is not better than sendmail in the general case (after all, sendmail can talk hundreds of protocols whereas postfix just talks SMTP), postfix is arguably better than sendmail in the very specific case of dealing with SMTP traffic... which happens to be the massively vast majority of email traffic these days.
Same with things like targeting non-X86 chips for most developers (although I'd bet that LLVM is pretty good at the A* series). It may not be as versatile, but if its better at doing the thing that 99% of the people want to do 99% of the time, that's not insignificant.
Sure, we don't have all of Xcode for free
Actually, while it may be (afaik) closed-source, anyone can indeed go and download a copy of it and use it for whatever they feel like doing.
Bullshit. You say:
With GPLed code, nothing prevents a user from being able to maintain their system, except their own limitations (budget, tech knowledge, time, etc)
A little fanciful, but all well and good. Then you follow with:
With BSD-licensed code, the user may be able to maintain the system (if the developer opted to also BSD-license it to them)
That's the BS. With BSD licensed code, the user can also maintain the system. Who else is the "them" that the developer who BSD-licensed their code referring to, after all?
What you don't mention is non-free-licenced code. Sure, someone can go off and build a commercial product without using GPL code. That product may or may not contain BSD code. In either case the user, entirely due to their choice to use non-open-source code, will not be able to maintain their own system. In either case, no harm has been done to the original GPL or BSD codebase.
If a user has a system where all programs are licensed either through BSD or through GPL then there's nothing preventing them from maintaining their own system, except their own limitations. If they, as a user, use their own choices to stick to "free" software and ignore closed-source software then either of those licenses will work in exactly the same way, for them.
A 3rd party creating non-open-source software may incorporate BSD code. Or they may not. Either way, you can build a system without it if you wish - or use it if you wish. Its your choice as a user.
BSD, LGPL, and GPL are all free software licences. The user gets the same four freedoms in each case (use, study, modify, redistribute). But, using the BSD licence (or the LGPL) takes away an incentive to contribute to the free software project.
No - the incentives are still there. If they want to recontribute, they absolutely will - in fact, its a whole lot easier to contribute with less risk of license issues. It does however remove the legal requirement for them to do so by the addition of additional restrictions.
LLVM weakens GCC's ability to attract free software contributors. That's why Apple funds LLVM.
Why do you think that Apple dislikes the idea behind GCC (not the software itself, which had stagnated)? They could have based Xcode on a proprietary compiler like Visual Studio if that was their goal. In this case, Apple is in fact giving back to the community without being legally strong-armed into doing so.
Isn't that a good thing?
Most of everything we consume is considered "crap" by someone. Do you cook gourmet meals? Watch only the best movies? Enjoy great music (opera! No, classical! No, whatever...). How about your car - is it a high-touch work of art or do you do just fine with a "transportation appliance" that you probably see for more hours per week than you watch movies? Are your clothes bespoke or off the rack?
Sure, in a very few areas of their lives most people have different (possibly better, but at least different) tastes. Deriding the mainstream in any one area only exposes the hypocrisy in all other areas.
When you do things in the real world with considerable consequences, make sure you are doing them properly. If this had been a rental agreement, or a purchase contract for a company, or whatever, the result would have been similar if the parties involved did things without the correct paperwork.
Except that in those cases - especially when both parties to the contract agree completely with the same interpretation of the contract - the courts will almost always allow that interpretation to stand. Its very rare indeed that the courts will reinterpret a signed contractual relationship contrary to the wishes of both parties.