There's nothing legally wrong with slapping a GPL on modified BSD code, but doing so, you consciously deny any direct use of your modifications by the BSD originators.
Read my lips: you wanted it that way. The BSD license allows for this and you knew it (I know you knew it because the commercial world has been taking BSD code and not giving back for years). You knew it and did nothing about it. What's more, you boasted about how great the license is. And now, somehow, you don't like BSD code being GPL'd. Although you knew it is possible and you knew everybody was doing whatever they wanted with BSD code and you wanted it that way.
Let me give you more links to support that GPL is a license, not a contract: [1], [2], [3]. And a quote from one of the links:
Neither the GPL nor any other piece of paper constitutes a contract without more. A "contract" is the total legal obligations of the parties arising out of their agreement as enforced in law. Papers or digital records are neither agreements, nor obligations. [..] How the license is used in the context of a particular transaction controls whether it creates or becomes part of a contract.
You are arguing that GPL as part of particular circumstances, together with something else, can become part of a contract. It's possible and is most likely what the ruling you refer to was about.
But GPL by itself is not a contract and it will never be. Thus, your original statement, that the GPL "is both a contract and a license" is simply false.
Usually there's this download source code link and it don't ask for no permissions. After that, I can copy that sucker all day long without any permissions at all. YMMV.
When you download stuff it's not your responsability, according to copyright law, it's the responsability of whoever made that thing available. You are safe, as far as copyright law is concerned, downloading anything that was made publicly available, and keeping it for personal use only. You're only liable once you do stuff that the copyright law forbids, without having a license from the copyright holder that allows you to do that stuff. For things like re-distribution or creation of derivative works you need permission. Just to download something that was published in the open you do not.
To be fair, I've seen a lot of packages that don't respect this rule. They just say "this is covered by GPL" and never bother to actually include the damn thing in the package.
It is both a contract and a license. You see, in order to get the license concerning the copyright, you have to abide by a contract that requires certain things to be done.
Dude, if you don't know what you're talking about then STFU. GPL is not a bloody contract by any means. It only has to do with copyright law and that's ALL. You don't have to abide by anything before you get to read the GPL license in a package. That's because personal use is specifically allowed both by copyright law and the GPL. Neither cares what you do with GPL-covered stuff. The GPL restrictions start applying only when you re-distribute the stuff or create derivative works off it. In which case any sane individual would first look around for a license, because otherwise by default the copyright law does not allow him to do that.
What I am asking is this: let's assume that Microsoft spends major bucks to get their OOXML stuff accepted in a few different countries through a standards committee, but then the standard is proven to NOT be open -- as is being shown by work already in progress -- but that the lack of openness and the bad press generated by their blatant vote buys in the mean time pretty much corrupts the market value of their standard anyway.
You're puzzled because you assume that Microsoft gives a shit about standards. They don't. They just want to compromise the value of ISO standards forever and make a joke out of the ISO approval process. When it becomes apparent how easy is to play the ISO vote the whole thing will fall apart. Once the standards institution becomes the kind of joke the US software patent system is, who do you think will thrive? You guessed it: Microsoft and its closed, proprietary stuff.
I'm hoping it won't get that far. Fucking up a good thing for the entire planet just so they can have their monopoly is simply too much, even for Microsoft.
With the majority of music in existence now belonging to the RIAA in some way, I'd be easy for them to argue you violated their "copyright".
There's something to your worry, but I say let's cross that bridge when we come to it. Solving the problem of present day copyrighted material comes first. When and if they decide to grab at straws it will be another issue.
Good God. Thank you for that. I did try D2 and hoped something like this was in there, but for my life I couldn't figure what it was. Never in a million years would I have guessed to click on the post title. In D1 the titles are not links so it never occured to me. Judging by the fact I got moderated 5+, it's not obvious for many people.
I'm gonna write to a developer and suggest they add a [-][+] sign, or a triangle like on the sidebar, anything that will hint you can click titles to expand/collapse.
If you'll RTFA you'll notice they pretty much don't give a rat's ass about his personal situation. He's unemployed and unemployable and they're making him buy a Windows copy. It's like a fine thrown on top of the jail and home confinement. If he didn't have the hardware it would just be the same. He can sell a kidney and pay for Windows or he can stop using the Internet for all they care.
I mean, real collapsable threads. Because one asshole says "gentoo" in a FP and 99% of what was supposed to be about a Linus interview goes to Hell in a handbasket. So I wish it was possible to click on a "[-]" button the second I saw "gentoo" and be spared of all this.
Nothing against Gentoo, but this was a horrible example when this would've been a really useful Slashdot feature.
Oh come on, you can't tell me you've moved from CVS to SVN and haven't felt a damn thing. It is bloody better. It doesn't feature distributed repositories, which is Linus' pet peeve, and probably some subtler stuff, but you can't honestly compare it to CVS and say it's "totally unremarkable".
Mod parent down, he has altered the article to include things like "What do you think of penis?"
No, no, this is Slashdot, he's just following proper procedure. Good God, I'd feel very awkward if there wasn't a penis snuck in there somewhere. Whenever I see some karma whore who reposts a/.ed article and forgets to put their penis in the text I chuckle to myself and think "what a total n00b!" Then I mod their ass down.
I predict that if the MS-PL license is accepted and MS becomes part of the OS community, from that day forward the general understanding in the press/media will be that there are two different camps of open source.
If only we should be so lucky! But no, I'm afraid that the media and general public will keep doing what they have always done: bundle everything under one big "open source" hat. The distinction eludes them and Microsoft is all too happy to seed further confusion. Because MS wants to blur the lines, when lines are blurred FUD seeps through much better.
Not for transfers, only for tracker connections. And I wouldn't have to do this if the ISP's wouldn't force me too. They don't seem to care what I download via BT, only that I'm using it.
And even then it wouldn't be perfect, because it's plausible they could start limiting traffic on listening ports that get a lot of traffic.
Isn't that overkill? They'd be much better off just capping the overall speed/amount downloaded whenever a certain speed or amount are exceeded.
The way I see it, they're not sure how far to push this themselves. Right now ISP's rely on identifying BT and limit BT alone claiming "it's illegal". It's stupid, for a lot of reasons. To name just 2, there's perfectly legal BT usage and it's being used more and more for all kinds of downloads. And second, you can do a lot of download in lots of ways, BT is just one way.
So what they do seems half-thought out and hypocritical. They'll need to update their policies anyway as soon as RC4 is not detectable anymore.
It might also be construed as profiting from illegal behavior.
What "illegal behavior"? The transfers are encrypted, how do they know what's transferred?
Come to think about it, how do they even know it's BT traffic if you use full mandatory encryption? The only way I can think of is to spy on the tracker connections. Which can be also encrypted if the tracker supports HTTPS (why don't they, usually?) or via the Tor network.
Now, if MS seriously falls down and ignores thier product, yes, a competitor will take over.
I'm guessing they're not that stupid. The Office-related line of products is their single point of strength and major revenue source. On the Windows side things are getting wobbly. The Xbox is a money eater and it's all they can do to keep it in the market against fierce competition. They let Internet Explorer fester and when they finally came up with 7 it didn't impress anybody. I do believe that they learned something from all this.
In order to challenge MS Office you don't need to make a good product. There are plenty of good office products out there that can give it a run for its money in many respects. The problem is that people are addicted to MS Office. They won't stop using it out of fear that they won't be able to fully use the.doc's and.xls's and whatnot.
And they won't, because MS plays on that strength. Why do you think they oppose a truly open document standard with everything they've got? It's their bread and butter, that's why. As long as people can't let go MS will have plenty of suckers to bleed. Give them an open format and let them take their pick of office suites and the whole thing goes to pieces. Nuh-huh, they're not that dumb.
Speaking of "cancer"... why is it that these days, the thing I associate with cancer is not GPL, but Microsoft? Why do I get this sense of utter dread whenever I hear they touch anything? Why is my first instinct "what kind of shit are they up to NOW"?
In classic USENET lore, the alt.os.*.advocacy newsgroups were a dumping ground to push the tards onto so everyone else could hold grown up discussions.
Umm... you didn't just describe Slashdot, did you?
You're taking this into a *very* wrong direction. It's not about butting into Linus's personal development tree, nor what particular versioning system he uses or anything like that. It's about the fact he thinks he can work in a crystal tower, away from all the worries and politics. And he can't, nobody can, this isn't a fairytale, it's the real world and bad guys come at you.
If he can't or won't deal with the real world then he should delegate to someone who's able, willing and ready. The FSF seem to fit that description pretty damn well. Linux going GPLv3 is the mandate they need in order to be able to go on fighting so that Linus can still have a crystal tower tomorrow.
That's a fairly typical engineer's attitude, and ignores the enormous damage Microsoft is doing to the computing community while "inertia" is taking its course.
That IMHO has always been Linus Torvald's biggest weak spot, blind spot even. And if I may expand upon it, it also affects people who keep to the BSD license over GPL. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, these people keep thinking that if everybody was nice to each other everything will be alright. I'm sorry, but "turn the other cheek" or "can't we all just get along" don't work in the real world. You have to stand up and fight back.
Speaking of that, English is not my first language. So "motherfucker" doesn't carry weight with me, it's just funny. It reminds me of black thugs in bad Hollywood movies saying "I otta bust a cap in yo ass, motherfucker." Hilarious. I could use it all day around my friends and nobody would mind other than if I got carried away and the joke got stale.
Then they could put pressure on the ISPs to block the old protocol using traffic-shaping.
AFAIK, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you can't shape BT as long as the peers use full encryption. What ISP's do is sniff the tracker connections and pick peer IP's from that, then blindly shape connections between you and those IP's, presuming (rightly) they will be used for BT transfers. This is easily solved with HTTPS tracker connections, or by passing tracker connections through Tor or a HTTPS proxy, SSH tunnel and so on.
With all this encryption in place, all the ISP sees is a bunch of encrypted connections that make up [a lot of] traffic. There's no particular port to pick on (unless you want to pick on 80 or 443, which is idiotic). There's no way to determine what the connections are used for. At most they can presume there's P2P going on, but you can't filter or shape a particular connection on presumptions alone.
So it's back to overall shaping and/or monthly bandwidth cap and that's about it. They only thing they accomplished by shaping is forcing P2P participants to use encryption and thus increase the traffic with the added overhead.
Slashdot Mirror
You are arguing that GPL as part of particular circumstances, together with something else, can become part of a contract. It's possible and is most likely what the ruling you refer to was about.
But GPL by itself is not a contract and it will never be. Thus, your original statement, that the GPL "is both a contract and a license" is simply false.
You're full of shit and a simple search on Google would have saved you the embarassment: The GPL is a license, not a contract.
Dude, if you don't know what you're talking about then STFU. GPL is not a bloody contract by any means. It only has to do with copyright law and that's ALL. You don't have to abide by anything before you get to read the GPL license in a package. That's because personal use is specifically allowed both by copyright law and the GPL. Neither cares what you do with GPL-covered stuff. The GPL restrictions start applying only when you re-distribute the stuff or create derivative works off it. In which case any sane individual would first look around for a license, because otherwise by default the copyright law does not allow him to do that.
You're puzzled because you assume that Microsoft gives a shit about standards. They don't. They just want to compromise the value of ISO standards forever and make a joke out of the ISO approval process. When it becomes apparent how easy is to play the ISO vote the whole thing will fall apart. Once the standards institution becomes the kind of joke the US software patent system is, who do you think will thrive? You guessed it: Microsoft and its closed, proprietary stuff.
I'm hoping it won't get that far. Fucking up a good thing for the entire planet just so they can have their monopoly is simply too much, even for Microsoft.
Good God. Thank you for that. I did try D2 and hoped something like this was in there, but for my life I couldn't figure what it was. Never in a million years would I have guessed to click on the post title. In D1 the titles are not links so it never occured to me. Judging by the fact I got moderated 5+, it's not obvious for many people.
I'm gonna write to a developer and suggest they add a [-][+] sign, or a triangle like on the sidebar, anything that will hint you can click titles to expand/collapse.
If you'll RTFA you'll notice they pretty much don't give a rat's ass about his personal situation. He's unemployed and unemployable and they're making him buy a Windows copy. It's like a fine thrown on top of the jail and home confinement. If he didn't have the hardware it would just be the same. He can sell a kidney and pay for Windows or he can stop using the Internet for all they care.
I mean, real collapsable threads. Because one asshole says "gentoo" in a FP and 99% of what was supposed to be about a Linus interview goes to Hell in a handbasket. So I wish it was possible to click on a "[-]" button the second I saw "gentoo" and be spared of all this.
Nothing against Gentoo, but this was a horrible example when this would've been a really useful Slashdot feature.
Especially since their Office line of products is their one cash cow. Their other stuff... not so great (the Web, Windows, Xbox).
Oh come on, you can't tell me you've moved from CVS to SVN and haven't felt a damn thing. It is bloody better. It doesn't feature distributed repositories, which is Linus' pet peeve, and probably some subtler stuff, but you can't honestly compare it to CVS and say it's "totally unremarkable".
If only we should be so lucky! But no, I'm afraid that the media and general public will keep doing what they have always done: bundle everything under one big "open source" hat. The distinction eludes them and Microsoft is all too happy to seed further confusion. Because MS wants to blur the lines, when lines are blurred FUD seeps through much better.
Not for transfers, only for tracker connections. And I wouldn't have to do this if the ISP's wouldn't force me too. They don't seem to care what I download via BT, only that I'm using it.
Isn't that overkill? They'd be much better off just capping the overall speed/amount downloaded whenever a certain speed or amount are exceeded.
The way I see it, they're not sure how far to push this themselves. Right now ISP's rely on identifying BT and limit BT alone claiming "it's illegal". It's stupid, for a lot of reasons. To name just 2, there's perfectly legal BT usage and it's being used more and more for all kinds of downloads. And second, you can do a lot of download in lots of ways, BT is just one way.
So what they do seems half-thought out and hypocritical. They'll need to update their policies anyway as soon as RC4 is not detectable anymore.
What "illegal behavior"? The transfers are encrypted, how do they know what's transferred?
Come to think about it, how do they even know it's BT traffic if you use full mandatory encryption? The only way I can think of is to spy on the tracker connections. Which can be also encrypted if the tracker supports HTTPS (why don't they, usually?) or via the Tor network.
I'm guessing they're not that stupid. The Office-related line of products is their single point of strength and major revenue source. On the Windows side things are getting wobbly. The Xbox is a money eater and it's all they can do to keep it in the market against fierce competition. They let Internet Explorer fester and when they finally came up with 7 it didn't impress anybody. I do believe that they learned something from all this.
In order to challenge MS Office you don't need to make a good product. There are plenty of good office products out there that can give it a run for its money in many respects. The problem is that people are addicted to MS Office. They won't stop using it out of fear that they won't be able to fully use the
And they won't, because MS plays on that strength. Why do you think they oppose a truly open document standard with everything they've got? It's their bread and butter, that's why. As long as people can't let go MS will have plenty of suckers to bleed. Give them an open format and let them take their pick of office suites and the whole thing goes to pieces. Nuh-huh, they're not that dumb.
Speaking of "cancer"... why is it that these days, the thing I associate with cancer is not GPL, but Microsoft? Why do I get this sense of utter dread whenever I hear they touch anything? Why is my first instinct "what kind of shit are they up to NOW"?
You're taking this into a *very* wrong direction. It's not about butting into Linus's personal development tree, nor what particular versioning system he uses or anything like that. It's about the fact he thinks he can work in a crystal tower, away from all the worries and politics. And he can't, nobody can, this isn't a fairytale, it's the real world and bad guys come at you.
If he can't or won't deal with the real world then he should delegate to someone who's able, willing and ready. The FSF seem to fit that description pretty damn well. Linux going GPLv3 is the mandate they need in order to be able to go on fighting so that Linus can still have a crystal tower tomorrow.
Speaking of that, English is not my first language. So "motherfucker" doesn't carry weight with me, it's just funny. It reminds me of black thugs in bad Hollywood movies saying "I otta bust a cap in yo ass, motherfucker." Hilarious. I could use it all day around my friends and nobody would mind other than if I got carried away and the joke got stale.
AFAIK, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you can't shape BT as long as the peers use full encryption. What ISP's do is sniff the tracker connections and pick peer IP's from that, then blindly shape connections between you and those IP's, presuming (rightly) they will be used for BT transfers. This is easily solved with HTTPS tracker connections, or by passing tracker connections through Tor or a HTTPS proxy, SSH tunnel and so on.
With all this encryption in place, all the ISP sees is a bunch of encrypted connections that make up [a lot of] traffic. There's no particular port to pick on (unless you want to pick on 80 or 443, which is idiotic). There's no way to determine what the connections are used for. At most they can presume there's P2P going on, but you can't filter or shape a particular connection on presumptions alone.
So it's back to overall shaping and/or monthly bandwidth cap and that's about it. They only thing they accomplished by shaping is forcing P2P participants to use encryption and thus increase the traffic with the added overhead.