The problem isn't the GPL, it's Oracle's patent portfolio, their claims to API copyrights, and their success at killing alternative implementations. And you can't live with that in the long run, because if you're a Java developer, Oracle has you by your balls.
And why would you want to live with that anyway? Java is a shitty language with a shitty runtime and shitty libraries. The only reason it's still in use is because there is so much legacy crap in it and because so many people learned it in college in their intro CS class.
Until then, anything not under Apache 2 is suspect.
You mean like Java?
So why don't they just relicense the.NET CLR and the rest of the packages under the Apache 2 license?
Better question: why do people keep using and defending Java despite Sun's historical legal shenanigans and Oracle's litigiousness?
I mean, I can see rejecting both Java and C# (I use neither anymore), but to argue that Java is somehow OK and C# isn't strikes me as completely backwards. C# might be legally OK and Microsoft might be benign, but Java is clearly legally not OK, and Oracle clearly is anything but benign.
Apparently "we" don't have a long memory of Sun/Oracle's past behavior: Sun's repeated lies about making Java an open standard, their legal threats and lawsuits, the way they killed off independent implementations, and most recently, Oracle suing the pants of Google again. Microsoft played hardball on the business side, but Sun and Oracle have been dishonest, deceptive, and litigious. In the end, Java is both technically inferior and legally more risky than C#.
Yes, it's nice that Apache is open source, and it would be a disaster if the situation were reversed wrt. IIS.
But what I'd really like to see is a lot more diversity in web servers. Apache is a reliable, robust, efficient server, but it is only one, very specific way of serving web data and it has tons of quirks as well (starting with its configuration files).
Having Apache open makes it easier to innovate based on it. But I think it would be even better if more people did something altogether different rather than just plugging into Apache.
The basic problem with steganography is that it hides content in noise but compression reduces noise.
Many high-quality audio, video, and image files use such low compression that they preserve much of the noise.
Instead You have to write an specific steganografic algorithm for each lossfull compression format You want to hide content in! It has to respect the 'format noise character'. That's what Niels Provos did for pnm and jpeg with outguess.
Or, you just stick to files that are losslessly compressed and add noise to them. There are plenty of those around (FLAC, raw digital camera data, raw physics measurements, etc.), and they all have legitimate uses.
The reason is that normal compressed images don't have redundancy
Sure they do: professional photographers either use very high quality compression or store raw images. There is enormous amounts of redundancy in that.
And even consumer images have plenty of noise, both when they are scanned from film and when they are taken with CCD or CMOS chips. In fact, digital camera tests and scanner tests regularly test this amount of noise.
with turning lead into gold. No, I take that back: we can turn lead into gold in principle with particle accelerators. Steganography, however, is provably undetectable when it is done correctly.
But our new overlords, the US military, won't be stopped by such little details from wasting their money, like the lords and monarchs before them wasted money on alchemy.
Yes, I agree: the XServe G5 is a pretty nice machine. And it is very attractive to current OS X users, who really have had little choice when it comes to servers.
But I think it would be unwise for anybody to change platforms because of the XServe G5. That kind of expense and commitment would only be justified if the XServe G5 offered a substantially better (2x or more) price/performance ratio than the Opteron, and I think it's pretty clear it doesn't do that. Among other things, there is a huge risk that Apple will fall far behind again, and OS X simply doesn't have anywhere near the scientific, engineering, or web software as Linux available for it.
Unlimited does not mean 'Unlimited Bandwidth', it means your account is not metered by time.
Any reasonable interpretation of "unlimited" means that they impose no limits on your usage, in terms of time, bandwidth, or volume: you get what the wire offers. That means it should be acceptable for you to download at the maximum speed 24/7. Complaining that you download too much is a violation of their promise of "unlimited" service.
ISPs are concerned with good response times during peak usage and otherwise have excess capacity.
The solution? Introduce peak/off-peak plans. You get 5Gbytes of peak-time usage per month included in your basic fees, you pay $0.50 for each additional Gbyte during peak time (or whatever it takes to get the traffic down to where everybody is happy), and you get unlimited (or much cheaper) off-peak usage.
That way, people who have a choice will do their Windows/Debian/OSX/RedHat updates late at night, download and exchange video and images at that time, and people can browse the web responsively when they are awake.
Just about any industry other than ISPs has figured this out. Maybe ISPs should move into the 21st century and start using some modern business practices?
Now...about your bill. That 768/128 line is going to cost, oh...$300/month.
That remark is just inane. Companies could easily avoid oversubscribing by having a good rate structure.
For example, 1Gbyte of data transferred during peak hours might cost you $0.50 (or whatever it takes to avoid having oversubscription during peak hours), while 1Gbyte of data transferred at 4am might cost you nothing at all.
All of a sudden, all those "apt-get updates" and "bittorrent" sessions would move to 4am where they don't bother anybody and everybody could be happy.
Instead, the ISPs oversubscribe and then send out meaningless and annoying letters.
The XServe G5 will allow to build supercomputers using far more space
The XServe costs about as much as a comparably configured dual Opteron rack-mount but it gives you far less choice in terms of software.
and will be obviously one of the best solutions around for webservers.
Why waste money on a dual G5 running at 2GHz? For a web server, 1U rack mount mid-range Pentium running Linux and Apache is cheaper, is the de-facto industry standard, and is trivial to set up and administer.
2004 will definitely be Apple's year and I think that's good news because it will bring some change in the IT world.
Apple will probably do pretty well in 2004, but in the IT world, they will remain no more than a blip.
If the court realises that there is a valid case that the copies are legal, then the copies are legal.
If the company violates the terms of the GPL, then they don't have a license to distribute the code, hence the copies were illegally made. End users, who haven't violated KISS's terms, can acquire a copy of the original mplayer code, that's all.
KISS still has a licence to distribute the code. They simply need to acquire another copy of media player, and agree to the terms.
"Media player"? Get out of your Microsoft mindset. We are talking about "mplayer", and, no, they can't "just acquire another copy". The GPL isn't a per copy license, it's a contract between authors and distributors. And that contract explicitly says that it becomes void if you violate its terms.
The GPL grants rights to anyone who accepts the terms, regardless of whether they chose to accept them in the past.
If you have lost your rights granted to you by the author of a GPL'ed piece of software, you can't just fix that by getting another copy. The GPL is not a shrink-wrap, per-copy license, it's an agreement between authors and distributors.
They may be copying portions of MPlayer. This is different.
No, it's not. Any significant portion of mplayer put into a commercial product would fall under copyright law.
No they don't. Neither the GPL or copyright law makes this rquirement. A court may choose to insist that they do this.
The law doesn't need to "require" that--it's not a penalty. The copies are unauthorized and illegal and remain so no matter what the court does.
Once again, neither copyright law or the GPL states this. As long as they make a good faith attempt to fulfil obligations, then they can do so after the fact. Strange as it may seem, there is a certain amount of common sense in the law.
From the GPL 2:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program
except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
What I can't figure out about people like you is whether you just make things up as you go along or whether you really just can't read.
No, they simply need to make the source code available to these people.
KISS can't make the source code available to those people because KISS doesn't have a license to distribute the code anymore; they lost that license when they violated the terms of the GPL. Furthermore, KISS customers are not covered under the "However..." clause above because they never received their mplayer binaries under the GPL (this may or may not be the intent of the GPL, but it is pretty clearly a logical consequence). KISS customers can, however, obtain and use the original mplayer code under the GPL.
Now take them to court because they are redistributing the content without a license. Easy case to prove, but the penalty is based on damages
Hello? My point was that even without any penalty, the court would have to order them to stop distributing the software and recall the illegally copied products. That alone would kill a company like KISS. If they continue despite the court order, well, let's just say it wouldn't be very smart.
Are you sure that it's necessarily wise for the OS community to really go out of their way to punish and ruin companies that misuse the code?
No, it isn't "necessarily" wise, but it may be a good idea in specific cases, like when a company refuses to come into compliance voluntarily and committed a calculated and willful theft of GPL code.
Can you imagine how this could easily be spinned to middle management by people like Microsoft?
You think there is every a way of making Microsoft stop spinning?
"Linux is dangerous to use; one honest mistake with the code, and those hippies can ruin your business entirely. You'd be much safer with this licensed, professionally developed solution."
Microsoft then continues: "We, in contrast, will raid your business and sue you professionally with our large, professional legal staff when you accidentally use our code without a license. Our code is not only copyrighted, it is also trade secret, so, unlike GPL'ed code, if you even look at our code, we own you."
I'm just saying it's not a "gpl violation".. there is no such thing. IT's copyright violation, plain and simple.
The GPL has specific terms. When people talk about "GPL violations", they mean non-compliance with those terms. Would you now like to go on to define the meaning of "is"?
Even if the GPL were unenforceable, you could still be violating its terms. I mean, you can violate the ten commandments even though many of them aren't laws.
No, but it matters whether they are copying mplayer, and they clearly are: onto every machine that they ship and into every ROM update that they ship. That's what violates copyright law and that's what they need to stop doing; they also need to destroy the illegally made copies--i.e., copies on machines they already have shipped.
Furthermore, there have no way of coming into compliance: once you violate the GPL, you lose all your rights under it. You can't turn around later and say "oh, sorry, here is the source after all".
And end users probably don't even have the right to keep the binaries because they never received those binaries under the GPL. Which, again, means that KISS needs to erase mplayer from those already shipped products and compensate their customers.
The GPL is not a contract you agree to before using or obtaining source... it is a license that permits you to do things other than those allowed by copryight law alone.
A license is a contract.
If they are using MPlayer's code without license, that's copyright violation, and all that entails.
Yes, and that entails that they have to stop shipping it and recall the machines with which they already shipped it.
They can either come to an agreement with the copyright holders,
That's very difficult for GPL'ed projects because they usually have so many contributors.
or cite the GPL as their permission, if they had followed it.
Well, they haven't complied with it, so they have lost any rights the GPL granted them.
It's the mplayer developers' choice whether they want to enforce their license against KISS. If they don't, after a while they may not be able to.
But their actions have no bearing on whether you or I can legally enforce the GPL against software we have created and released under the GPL. The GPL is just contractual language. Just because you may fail to enforce your contracts doesn't affect my ability to enforce my contracts even if the contracts we use use the same language.
If your line of reasoning applied, most of the real estate contracts people use (which are mostly standardized) would be unenforceable because many people fail to enforce their contractual rights under them.
The DMCA prohibits reverse engineering for the purpose of circumventing copy protection devices. Analyzing binaries for detecting copyright infringement is not something prohibited by the DMCA.
The problem is that while you can't lose your copyright because of distibution under an invalid license, it's hard to prove damages if you were distributing something essentially for free and someone else comes and packages it and makes money with it.
I don't see that as a problem. People who use the GPL want compliance, not vast amounts of money. The requirement to comply with the license doesn't go away even if there are no monetary damages.
The GPL already has big hammer: if you violate it, you lose all rights to the software. So, at this point, KISS faces the prospect of having to rip mplayer out of all their players, shipped, shipping, and on the drawing board, and looking for a substitute. That would amount to an enormous penalty and drive them out of business.
If the open source community feels an example needs to be set, that's what the authors of mplayer should demand.
Of course, in the past, GPL authors have often been nice and simply permitted companies like KISS to come into compliance by posting the source code after the fact. But that's a friendly gesture from the open source community; the GPL license carries a bigger stick.
So, you are saying we should tolerate GPL copyright violations so that you can get updates to your ROMs from sleazy companies? I don't think so. As long as software copyrights are the law of the land, GNU has the same rights to enforce them as everybody else.
If KISS doesn't want to deal with the GPL, they can always license Windows XP/Embedded for their players and you can pay for it. And you can bet that Microsoft will enforce their licenses.
If nobody ever gets in any trouble for using GPL code in a closed project, then isn't it reasonable to assume that it'll happen more often?
Companies do get in trouble for violating the GPL all the time. They seem to realize so quickly that their legal position is untenable that cases have never had to go to court. That's a good thing: it shows you how strong the GPL actually is.
As opposed to verifying the proof verifier with another proof verifier.
You are making a type error here. A proof verifier does not "check other proof verifiers", as you state, a proof verifier verifies manually constructed proofs.
What if the proof verifier is faulty? If it finds bugs, they may not be bugs at all and vice versa.
Then you do what you always do when a proof verifier finds bugs in your manual proof: you fix your manual proof. That's the whole purpose of having a proof verifier: they help you find conceptual bugs in your manually constructed proofs. You still have to fully understand your manually constructed proofs. It's roughly like "lint" or compile-time type checking. And like a good compiler, a proof verifier doesn't just say "yay or nay", it gives you specific error messages with line numbers. You don't just say "oh, it says there's a bug, darn, I guess I'll just move on to collecting butterflies", you fix the bug and try again.
And if you come to the conclusion that there is no bug in your manual proof, then there obviously has to be a bug in your proof verifier and you fix that. Either way, you win.
I think Godel would have something to say about your "suggestion"
He probably would, but it would have nothing to do with his incompleteness theorem.
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The problem isn't the GPL, it's Oracle's patent portfolio, their claims to API copyrights, and their success at killing alternative implementations. And you can't live with that in the long run, because if you're a Java developer, Oracle has you by your balls.
And why would you want to live with that anyway? Java is a shitty language with a shitty runtime and shitty libraries. The only reason it's still in use is because there is so much legacy crap in it and because so many people learned it in college in their intro CS class.
You mean like Java?
Better question: why do people keep using and defending Java despite Sun's historical legal shenanigans and Oracle's litigiousness?
I mean, I can see rejecting both Java and C# (I use neither anymore), but to argue that Java is somehow OK and C# isn't strikes me as completely backwards. C# might be legally OK and Microsoft might be benign, but Java is clearly legally not OK, and Oracle clearly is anything but benign.
Apparently "we" don't have a long memory of Sun/Oracle's past behavior: Sun's repeated lies about making Java an open standard, their legal threats and lawsuits, the way they killed off independent implementations, and most recently, Oracle suing the pants of Google again. Microsoft played hardball on the business side, but Sun and Oracle have been dishonest, deceptive, and litigious. In the end, Java is both technically inferior and legally more risky than C#.
Yes, it's nice that Apache is open source, and it would be a disaster if the situation were reversed wrt. IIS.
But what I'd really like to see is a lot more diversity in web servers. Apache is a reliable, robust, efficient server, but it is only one, very specific way of serving web data and it has tons of quirks as well (starting with its configuration files).
Having Apache open makes it easier to innovate based on it. But I think it would be even better if more people did something altogether different rather than just plugging into Apache.
The basic problem with steganography is that it hides content in noise but compression reduces noise.
Many high-quality audio, video, and image files use such low compression that they preserve much of the noise.
Instead You have to write an specific steganografic algorithm for each lossfull compression format You want to hide content in! It has to respect the 'format noise character'. That's what Niels Provos did for pnm and jpeg with outguess.
Or, you just stick to files that are losslessly compressed and add noise to them. There are plenty of those around (FLAC, raw digital camera data, raw physics measurements, etc.), and they all have legitimate uses.
The reason is that normal compressed images don't have redundancy
Sure they do: professional photographers either use very high quality compression or store raw images. There is enormous amounts of redundancy in that.
And even consumer images have plenty of noise, both when they are scanned from film and when they are taken with CCD or CMOS chips. In fact, digital camera tests and scanner tests regularly test this amount of noise.
with turning lead into gold. No, I take that back: we can turn lead into gold in principle with particle accelerators. Steganography, however, is provably undetectable when it is done correctly.
But our new overlords, the US military, won't be stopped by such little details from wasting their money, like the lords and monarchs before them wasted money on alchemy.
Yes, I agree: the XServe G5 is a pretty nice machine. And it is very attractive to current OS X users, who really have had little choice when it comes to servers.
But I think it would be unwise for anybody to change platforms because of the XServe G5. That kind of expense and commitment would only be justified if the XServe G5 offered a substantially better (2x or more) price/performance ratio than the Opteron, and I think it's pretty clear it doesn't do that. Among other things, there is a huge risk that Apple will fall far behind again, and OS X simply doesn't have anywhere near the scientific, engineering, or web software as Linux available for it.
Unlimited does not mean 'Unlimited Bandwidth', it means your account is not metered by time.
Any reasonable interpretation of "unlimited" means that they impose no limits on your usage, in terms of time, bandwidth, or volume: you get what the wire offers. That means it should be acceptable for you to download at the maximum speed 24/7. Complaining that you download too much is a violation of their promise of "unlimited" service.
ISPs are concerned with good response times during peak usage and otherwise have excess capacity.
The solution? Introduce peak/off-peak plans. You get 5Gbytes of peak-time usage per month included in your basic fees, you pay $0.50 for each additional Gbyte during peak time (or whatever it takes to get the traffic down to where everybody is happy), and you get unlimited (or much cheaper) off-peak usage.
That way, people who have a choice will do their Windows/Debian/OSX/RedHat updates late at night, download and exchange video and images at that time, and people can browse the web responsively when they are awake.
Just about any industry other than ISPs has figured this out. Maybe ISPs should move into the 21st century and start using some modern business practices?
Now...about your bill. That 768/128 line is going to cost, oh...$300/month.
That remark is just inane. Companies could easily avoid oversubscribing by having a good rate structure.
For example, 1Gbyte of data transferred during peak hours might cost you $0.50 (or whatever it takes to avoid having oversubscription during peak hours), while 1Gbyte of data transferred at 4am might cost you nothing at all.
All of a sudden, all those "apt-get updates" and "bittorrent" sessions would move to 4am where they don't bother anybody and everybody could be happy.
Instead, the ISPs oversubscribe and then send out meaningless and annoying letters.
The XServe G5 will allow to build supercomputers using far more space
The XServe costs about as much as a comparably configured dual Opteron rack-mount but it gives you far less choice in terms of software.
and will be obviously one of the best solutions around for webservers.
Why waste money on a dual G5 running at 2GHz? For a web server, 1U rack mount mid-range Pentium running Linux and Apache is cheaper, is the de-facto industry standard, and is trivial to set up and administer.
2004 will definitely be Apple's year and I think that's good news because it will bring some change in the IT world.
Apple will probably do pretty well in 2004, but in the IT world, they will remain no more than a blip.
If the court realises that there is a valid case that the copies are legal, then the copies are legal.
If the company violates the terms of the GPL, then they don't have a license to distribute the code, hence the copies were illegally made. End users, who haven't violated KISS's terms, can acquire a copy of the original mplayer code, that's all.
KISS still has a licence to distribute the code. They simply need to acquire another copy of media player, and agree to the terms.
"Media player"? Get out of your Microsoft mindset. We are talking about "mplayer", and, no, they can't "just acquire another copy". The GPL isn't a per copy license, it's a contract between authors and distributors. And that contract explicitly says that it becomes void if you violate its terms.
The GPL grants rights to anyone who accepts the terms, regardless of whether they chose to accept them in the past.
If you have lost your rights granted to you by the author of a GPL'ed piece of software, you can't just fix that by getting another copy. The GPL is not a shrink-wrap, per-copy license, it's an agreement between authors and distributors.
No, it's not. Any significant portion of mplayer put into a commercial product would fall under copyright law.
No they don't. Neither the GPL or copyright law makes this rquirement. A court may choose to insist that they do this.
The law doesn't need to "require" that--it's not a penalty. The copies are unauthorized and illegal and remain so no matter what the court does.
Once again, neither copyright law or the GPL states this. As long as they make a good faith attempt to fulfil obligations, then they can do so after the fact. Strange as it may seem, there is a certain amount of common sense in the law.
From the GPL 2:What I can't figure out about people like you is whether you just make things up as you go along or whether you really just can't read.
No, they simply need to make the source code available to these people.
KISS can't make the source code available to those people because KISS doesn't have a license to distribute the code anymore; they lost that license when they violated the terms of the GPL. Furthermore, KISS customers are not covered under the "However..." clause above because they never received their mplayer binaries under the GPL (this may or may not be the intent of the GPL, but it is pretty clearly a logical consequence). KISS customers can, however, obtain and use the original mplayer code under the GPL.
Now take them to court because they are redistributing the content without a license. Easy case to prove, but the penalty is based on damages
Hello? My point was that even without any penalty, the court would have to order them to stop distributing the software and recall the illegally copied products. That alone would kill a company like KISS. If they continue despite the court order, well, let's just say it wouldn't be very smart.
Are you sure that it's necessarily wise for the OS community to really go out of their way to punish and ruin companies that misuse the code?
No, it isn't "necessarily" wise, but it may be a good idea in specific cases, like when a company refuses to come into compliance voluntarily and committed a calculated and willful theft of GPL code.
Can you imagine how this could easily be spinned to middle management by people like Microsoft?
You think there is every a way of making Microsoft stop spinning?
"Linux is dangerous to use; one honest mistake with the code, and those hippies can ruin your business entirely. You'd be much safer with this licensed, professionally developed solution."
Microsoft then continues: "We, in contrast, will raid your business and sue you professionally with our large, professional legal staff when you accidentally use our code without a license. Our code is not only copyrighted, it is also trade secret, so, unlike GPL'ed code, if you even look at our code, we own you."
I'm just saying it's not a "gpl violation".. there is no such thing. IT's copyright violation, plain and simple.
The GPL has specific terms. When people talk about "GPL violations", they mean non-compliance with those terms. Would you now like to go on to define the meaning of "is"?
Even if the GPL were unenforceable, you could still be violating its terms. I mean, you can violate the ten commandments even though many of them aren't laws.
It doesn't matter whether their using it.
No, but it matters whether they are copying mplayer, and they clearly are: onto every machine that they ship and into every ROM update that they ship. That's what violates copyright law and that's what they need to stop doing; they also need to destroy the illegally made copies--i.e., copies on machines they already have shipped.
Furthermore, there have no way of coming into compliance: once you violate the GPL, you lose all your rights under it. You can't turn around later and say "oh, sorry, here is the source after all".
And end users probably don't even have the right to keep the binaries because they never received those binaries under the GPL. Which, again, means that KISS needs to erase mplayer from those already shipped products and compensate their customers.
The GPL is not a contract you agree to before using or obtaining source... it is a license that permits you to do things other than those allowed by copryight law alone.
A license is a contract.
If they are using MPlayer's code without license, that's copyright violation, and all that entails.
Yes, and that entails that they have to stop shipping it and recall the machines with which they already shipped it.
They can either come to an agreement with the copyright holders,
That's very difficult for GPL'ed projects because they usually have so many contributors.
or cite the GPL as their permission, if they had followed it.
Well, they haven't complied with it, so they have lost any rights the GPL granted them.
It's the mplayer developers' choice whether they want to enforce their license against KISS. If they don't, after a while they may not be able to.
But their actions have no bearing on whether you or I can legally enforce the GPL against software we have created and released under the GPL. The GPL is just contractual language. Just because you may fail to enforce your contracts doesn't affect my ability to enforce my contracts even if the contracts we use use the same language.
If your line of reasoning applied, most of the real estate contracts people use (which are mostly standardized) would be unenforceable because many people fail to enforce their contractual rights under them.
The DMCA prohibits reverse engineering for the purpose of circumventing copy protection devices. Analyzing binaries for detecting copyright infringement is not something prohibited by the DMCA.
The problem is that while you can't lose your copyright because of distibution under an invalid license, it's hard to prove damages if you were distributing something essentially for free and someone else comes and packages it and makes money with it.
I don't see that as a problem. People who use the GPL want compliance, not vast amounts of money. The requirement to comply with the license doesn't go away even if there are no monetary damages.
The GPL already has big hammer: if you violate it, you lose all rights to the software. So, at this point, KISS faces the prospect of having to rip mplayer out of all their players, shipped, shipping, and on the drawing board, and looking for a substitute. That would amount to an enormous penalty and drive them out of business.
If the open source community feels an example needs to be set, that's what the authors of mplayer should demand.
Of course, in the past, GPL authors have often been nice and simply permitted companies like KISS to come into compliance by posting the source code after the fact. But that's a friendly gesture from the open source community; the GPL license carries a bigger stick.
So, you are saying we should tolerate GPL copyright violations so that you can get updates to your ROMs from sleazy companies? I don't think so. As long as software copyrights are the law of the land, GNU has the same rights to enforce them as everybody else.
If KISS doesn't want to deal with the GPL, they can always license Windows XP/Embedded for their players and you can pay for it. And you can bet that Microsoft will enforce their licenses.
If nobody ever gets in any trouble for using GPL code in a closed project, then isn't it reasonable to assume that it'll happen more often?
Companies do get in trouble for violating the GPL all the time. They seem to realize so quickly that their legal position is untenable that cases have never had to go to court. That's a good thing: it shows you how strong the GPL actually is.
As opposed to verifying the proof verifier with another proof verifier.
You are making a type error here. A proof verifier does not "check other proof verifiers", as you state, a proof verifier verifies manually constructed proofs.
What if the proof verifier is faulty? If it finds bugs, they may not be bugs at all and vice versa.
Then you do what you always do when a proof verifier finds bugs in your manual proof: you fix your manual proof. That's the whole purpose of having a proof verifier: they help you find conceptual bugs in your manually constructed proofs. You still have to fully understand your manually constructed proofs. It's roughly like "lint" or compile-time type checking. And like a good compiler, a proof verifier doesn't just say "yay or nay", it gives you specific error messages with line numbers. You don't just say "oh, it says there's a bug, darn, I guess I'll just move on to collecting butterflies", you fix the bug and try again.
And if you come to the conclusion that there is no bug in your manual proof, then there obviously has to be a bug in your proof verifier and you fix that. Either way, you win.
I think Godel would have something to say about your "suggestion"
He probably would, but it would have nothing to do with his incompleteness theorem.