Well, I would argue that you can't steal GPL code, because it's free. The only way you could steal it was if you took that right away from others.
I still say, let them (M$, others) try! The only way it could detriment the computing world is if the companies say, "it's not our fault the code is buggy, we stole it from open source authors..." which only helps our cause by illuminating the proprietary firms failings.
Wouldn't you love lightweight IPC, universal interconnectivity, powerful scripting, and strong security on windows? I wouldn't mind if they pasted their GUI right on top of Linux 2.6! So long as they don't take away my freedoms to use GPL code.
Imitation is, after all, the highest form of praise.
Ok, assume a corporation CAN sucessfully steal GPL code, with or without watermark. Let's say M$ paints an IE browser look on top of the mozilla firebird codebase:
Is it a bad thing that their software just got better, faster, and more standards compliant?
Doesn't this even out the playing field, as far as proprietary technology goes? Everyone starts at 0.
The mozilla developers would have real speed/memory/feature competition from M$, as opposed to the "we'll never touch IE code again" stance of M$.
More company coders would be familiar with and able to develop on open source projects in their spare time (or convert even!).
GPL projects aren't really in competition with corporate firms. GPL software doesn't lose profit margins if there's better software out there.
So aside from ethical issues, why should the GPL community really care?
Some benchmarks were posted the other day comparing scaling of a few BSD kernels and two Linux kernels, which gives me an idea.
Do you think you could collect statistics from a running gpl'd program (exe1) and compare it to a "mystery" programs (exe2) statistics, given the same input, and if they match too closely, put (exe2) to the torch to find more similarities?
To minimize variables, you could run both on some
combination of hardware emulators (bochs), and system call/library emulators (wine/cygwin), and
have tables of OS overhead for common functions
to subtract off.
Granted it would be initially a lot of work, but
as programmers are lazy, we attempt to automate
as much as humanly possible.
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I still say, let them (M$, others) try! The only way it could detriment the computing world is if the companies say, "it's not our fault the code is buggy, we stole it from open source authors..." which only helps our cause by illuminating the proprietary firms failings.
Wouldn't you love lightweight IPC, universal interconnectivity, powerful scripting, and strong security on windows? I wouldn't mind if they pasted their GUI right on top of Linux 2.6! So long as they don't take away my freedoms to use GPL code.
Imitation is, after all, the highest form of praise.
Ok, assume a corporation CAN sucessfully steal GPL code, with or without watermark. Let's say M$ paints an IE browser look on top of the mozilla firebird codebase:
So aside from ethical issues, why should the GPL community really care?
Some benchmarks were posted the other day comparing scaling of a few BSD kernels and two Linux kernels, which gives me an idea.
Do you think you could collect statistics from a running gpl'd program (exe1) and compare it to a "mystery" programs (exe2) statistics, given the same input, and if they match too closely, put (exe2) to the torch to find more similarities?
To minimize variables, you could run both on some combination of hardware emulators (bochs), and system call/library emulators (wine/cygwin), and have tables of OS overhead for common functions to subtract off. Granted it would be initially a lot of work, but as programmers are lazy, we attempt to automate as much as humanly possible.