I'd be eager to read about court decisions in which these matters have been decided.
We all would, if for no other reason than to end the endless flame-wars (like this one) over this issue. Then/. could go back to really important discussions, like deciding whether emacs or vi is the better editor, or whether emacs should even be allowed in the running for "best" editor, since its also an operating system.
Unfortunately, despite 20 years of GPL history (v1 was released in January 1989), no one has actually challenged the FSF's idea of "derivative work" in a court of law. I wonder why....
The "linking rule" is a rule-of-thumb that doesn't always apply, despite what the FSF would have you believe.
We don't know whether it applies or not, since no one has actually tested the FSF's idea of "derivative work" in a legal case yet.
So until they've been *proven* wrong, you had better pay attention to what they "believe", since a judge just might agree with them and rule against you.:)
As always, however, consult a quality lawyer first.
Assuming that people have been doing this up till now, perhaps the reason why no one has tried to challenge the FSF's interpretation is because the lawyers have been telling their clients that the FSF might win? Hmmm...
Thus, if I write my program to use one of two backend libraries - one of which is GPL, and the other which is not, I only have to distribute my code under the terms of GPL when it has been compiled to use the GPL backend, but not when it has been compiled to use the proprietary backend library.
The terms are only applicable at distribution time based on the use of other code at compile/linking time.
no?
Correct, but the question I now have is what are trying to avoid here? Why bother making 2 separate distributions of your app for this case, why not just release a single version of your app that is dual-licensed under both the BSD and GPL, and supports all the backends (including the GPLed one) that you wish in a modular fashion?
If your app's "frontend" is going to be identical in both cases, I don't see the point. Just dual-license it (if you are the sole author of the app), as thats what you'll effectively be doing anyway, just without the trouble of trying to maintain two different physical "versions" with two different codebases.
Anyone who is using "an elaborate hack", to use the GP's phrase, just to "get around" the limitations of the GPL, *does* have bad intentions, since they're obviously trying to avoid having to honor the desire of the author(s) of the code in question. Actions do show intent.
and just admit that there are flaws in your licensing scheme
Your opinion, and for that matter, *my* opinion, just don't matter. It'll take a court ruling to decide for sure if there are any flaws, and that hasn't happened yet.
when they hang 'v2' at the end of something, you know there are improvements still to be made.
improvements != flaws
Does adding a feature to an app mean the previous version was "flawed"? By that strange definition, damn near everything under the sun is flawed, and we wouldn't even have the word "improvement" in our vocabulary.
a developer has distributed a closed-source application that links to GPL licensed libraries on the end-user's computer. The developer does not distribute the libraries themselves. The end-user runs the program, but does not do anything else with it.
Ask yourself the question "How does my system's linker know what libraries that app needs?".
Answer: The app's binary has embedded in it an *explicit* list of the libs it needs, along with other information like the names of functions and shared data structures that are used by the app and lib to pass data between them.
At that point the FSF could prove the "intent", in a hypothetical court case, of the app's developer to use their lib in violation of the lib's license. The end-user's role becomes irrelevant at this point.
Now whether this embedded information is *actually* a "derivative work" of the lib, or merely an "aggregate work", I don't know, those are legal terms that come from copyright law, and IANAL, but the FSF *does* think so, and so far, no court has said that they're wrong.
No one has yet decided to test the FSF's idea of "derivative work" in a court because, I suspect, they know a court will not just look at the "letter of the license" and the "letter of the law", but also at what the *intentions* were of the plaintiff (FSF) and the defendant, and the FSF has made it clear over the years what they intend their license to mean and accomplish.
Larry Niven talks about this in relation to Man-Kzin wars quite a bit
Haven't all the Man-Kzin war novels been released with Larry's blessing, if not actual co-authorship? I know a couple of recent ones were written entirely by someone else, but has there been one released that didn't have Larry's, or his publisher's, explicit approval? Just curious.
otherwise we'd be arguing for the "Year of FreeBSD on the Desktop" instead of Linux.
That's just because we've already seen the "Year of FreeBSD on the Desktop." It's called Mac OS X.
Except as Daengbo points out above us, OSX doesn't use the BSD license for the kernel part, it uses the APSL, which more resembles the GPL than the BSD, e.g. its a stronger "Copyleft" style of license thats more "restrictive" than the BSD. The rest of Mac OS X, the part that really counts!, of course, is proprietary, so the GP's point remains: "Year of *BSD on the Desktop" hasn't happened yet.
The only major GPL projects with corporate contributions that come to my mind immediately are Linux
In the context of the GP's "Year of XXX on the Desktop" reference, this is exactly the point: BSD-licensed OS kernels (*BSDs) vs. Copyleft-licensed OS kernels (Linux). The latter is seeing more corporate interest/support than the former, so far.
On the other hand, many, many non-GPL projects with corporate contributions immediately come to mind. All Apache projects, postgresql, ffmpeg, BSD, memcached, OpenOffice.org, QT, postfix, bind, all Mozilla software, webkit,
Yes, the GP did use the word "projects", thus opening up the whole "open" or "free" software world for inclusion as well, besides OS kernels, and that obviously means there are plenty of examples of BSD-licensed software out there. No one disputes that.
On the other hand, your use of phrase "non-GPL" here plus your particular list of examples is misleading:
ffmpeg = LGPL OO.org = LGPL QT = GPL/LGPL (dual-licensed) Postfix = IPL Mozilla = MPL/GPL/LGPL (triple-licensed) Webkit = part BSD, part LGPL
where IPL = IBM Public License, and MPL = Mozilla Public License.
If you're trying to argue *for* the BSD license, then you haven't actually helped your case since just over half of your examples are using some form of a "strong" (or at least "stronger") Copyleft license. LGPL, IPL, & MPL are all Copyleft licenses that are more "restrictive" than the BSD.
If you're trying to argue *against* the GPL license, then first, most people don't think of the LGPL as being "non-GPL", but merely "not quite as strong as", and second, 2 of your examples are actually dual-licensed under the GPL, and third, anyone who wanted to go to the trouble could come up with a list of projects that *are* GPLed.
So your list doesn't really *prove* anything, and as far as the larger context of this debate is concerned, I think you're confusing/conflating two different issues: strong Copyleft (GPL) vs. weaker Copyleft (LGPL/MPL/IPL/APSL), and any kind of Copyleft vs. *non*-Copyleft (BSD). At a minimum, your mistaken assumption that Max OS X is an example of a BSD-licensed project at the outset damages the rest of your response.
The sad truth is, the actual value of the GPL is a lot less than everybody thinks.
If an astute reader interprets your reference to the GPL as "strong Copyleft" and to the BSD as "non-Copyleft", then the real sad truth is that judging by the licenses used by more than half of your own example projects, a lot of people seem to disagree with you!
The GPL and LGPL contain terms which are only really well-defined in the C/C++ paradigm.
Which ones?
Rather than make people who want to use your project wrap their brains about how the provisions on header files or linking apply to Java or Perl
"header files" isn't used in the GPL3 license at all. "link" only shows up twice, one of those usages is the generic meaning of the word, where they say "link or combine", the other usage is in defining the term "corresponding source", referring to code of any libraries or "dynamically linked subprograms" that explicitly make up the whole work, e.g. not system libraries, but a work that has been split up into separate components.
Note that "libraries", "subprograms", and "components" are terms that are just as applicable to Java or Perl as they are to C/C++ (or any other language), so I don't see any C/C++ specific verbiage involved in the license.
Note: I'm just trying to understand how you think the license is language-specific, or perhaps more importantly, why you think a "language-specific license" would be a good thing. After all, we've already got more software licenses than anyone can keep track of, having a license for each programming language out there too would only make a bad situation worse.
"linking" (in the general sense) is an issue for all programming languages that allow for separate "modules" to ultimately be used together in some way, whether the language is statically compiled & linked, or dynamically executed in a runtime environment (where the runtime engine effectively takes care of the "linking" for you), so this problem will exist no matter what.
In fact, the *real* problem here is not the programming language or the software license or what "linking" means, but the inherent vagueness of copyright *law*, specifically what is meant by the phrase "derivative work". That term comes from copyright law itself, not the GPL or any other software license, and any "copyright license" ultimately depends on the underlying "copyright law" for meaning and clarity. Unfortunately, copyright law doesn't actually give us either, never mind the problem of copyright law itself being different depending on where you are.
So who has been saying all along that GPU compute on ATI cards just isn't up to snuff?
Mainly people who haven't been paying attention to what ATI has been doing since AMD bought it and began merging tech ~3 years ago, along with the usual business/management changes that go with that kind of consolidation. Basically today's ATI isn't the ATI of just a few years ago.
To be fair to those folks, the Radeon HD 4800 series is, roughly speaking, less than 2 years old, with the 4850 X2 being only ~1 year old. Before the HD 4800 series came out (based on the RV770), which was the *second* generation of ATI's tech to come out since the AMD takeover, ATI was in fact trailing NVIDIA in raw performance.
So unless you've been shopping recently for a new graphics card, and thus doing a little research before buying, you may not know whats been going on in the graphics world, heck, there's probably many folks who still don't know that ATI is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of AMD, referred to as the "Graphics Product Group" within AMD, and that "ATI" is now just a brand name AMD kept for marketing purposes.
FWIW, Ted T'so, the maintainer of ext3/ext4, himself said somewhere he expected, or could envision, btrfs replacing ext4 when the time came.
Only question is timing, btrfs isn't at v1.0, and isn't stable, but it seems to have a lot momentum behind it, compared to all the other advanced Linux file systems out there.
Oh no! People are being CRITICIZED! ... That doesn't change the fact that their choice in this case is foolish
Responses of the form: "Duh, your stuuupid!" might technically be "criticism", but that doesn't go very far here, at least not for readers for which content actually matters.
Hint: You've yet to make any rational argument for why they're being "foolish", especially since you already admit:
software authors DO have the LEGAL right to decide what license to release their code under
This is especially weird here, as the software is an implementation of (AFAIK) an open specification, and can be reimplemented by anyone else if they want it under a different license. Can't stand GCC because of its license? No problem, use another C compiler.
So, don't like the license? Fine, then attack that, but just calling its users "foolish" only makes you sound like a troll. Or was that what you intended all along?
Its also a little amusing, given that the people you are calling "foolish" are actually employees of Oracle, IBM, Hitachi, and the usual Linux suspects, e.g. RedHat, SUSE, et. al. Best of all, the originators of BTRFS are the people that now significantly control ZFS's destiny, e.g. Oracle, and they were the ones who gave it the GPL license. Do you really want to continue calling the new masters of ZFS/Solaris/OpenSolaris "foolish"?
Maybe whats really got you irked is that the audience for BTRFS (the Linux ecosystem) will be more than large enough to ensure its long term success, whereas ZFS's future depends a lot on whether Oracle chooses to continue it into the long term. Its not clear yet what they're going to do with ZFS, but the Oracle dev who created BTRFS, Chris Mason (who BTW, was one of the ZFS devs too), and who is still leading its development (along with the others mentioned above) told its dev ml recently that everything was still a go with BTRFS as far as Oracle was concerned. So do you *still* want to continue calling Oracle "foolish"?:)
They would have gone the Microsoft route and created software that is completely proprietary
Instead, they just stole what they wanted from *BSD and created a system that is partially proprietary. That you think that is somehow better than "completely proprietary" is where the disagreement is. Three points still remain:
a) Apple took from the *BSD world, made a profit, and never returned in kind, and
b) Apple's OS is still proprietary: you can't write an "Apple OS application" using just the underlying BSD plumbing, and thus
c) The GP's points still stand, in particular: the *BSD's can't garner any momentum in the corporate space because most companies will never consider contributing back for fear of their competitors using their code against them. Since it isn't a level playing field, most commercial entities are only ever going to *take* from the *BSD world, not give back.
Little thing called the network stack that I'm sure we're all happy was BSD licensed?
Well, at least MS was happy they could snag that for free (then turn around and get others to pay *them* for it).
But, hey, if you think thats a great "arrangement", no problem, you're free to choose that path, just don't be too surprised that, having watched all this *taking* over the years, others have decided to go in a different direction...
Why are developers who don't want their code to be ripped off (used without payment in a closed product) by companies and incorporated into a product are labeled zealots?
Perhaps because they are writing software which is by FAR most useful when it is used as far and wide as possible, while using a license which makes that goal extremely difficult to achieve, unnecessarily.
Um, "most useful" to *who*, exactly? Why is your, or anyone else's, convenience/preference more important than that of the software authors? By this logic, *all* software should be released into the public domain.
I know its an old-fashioned idea and all, but geez, whatever happened to letting software *authors* decide how their software may be used?
For drivers that are built *into* the kernel at compile time, they must be GPL-compatible.
For a non-GPL driver built as a kernel module, however, the issue is more complicated/controversial. For example, the proprietary graphics drivers from NVIDIA/AMD do something like having 2 parts: the part which links with the kernel, and a second non-GPL part, a binary blob, that is loaded at runtime by the first part. Non-GPL drivers are therefore always built as external kernel modules and use this kind of "technique", to avoid using any linkage mechanism between the kernel itself and the binary blob. There are, ah, "purists", though, who consider even this to be a GPL violation, hence the controversy (and the reason for kernel modules having a "Tainted" flag).
Open Source is essentially an open and cooperative development model with an open license.
... except that the Linux kernel uses the GPL license which is Free Software's license, so at this point I think you're confused as to what the real differences between "Open Source" and "Free Software" really are.
but is a political dogma centered around Richard Stallman as supreme leader
... and this is just trolling.
Some people are more interested in being "top revolutionary" than writing good code.
... and this is just more trolling.
That's why Linux succeeded where HURD failed.
... well, its kinda hard for software to succeed if its not ever released.
Worse, HURD's failure had nothing whatsoever to do with FS politics and everything to do with technical/design issues, as in what HURD was trying to accomplish in a single leap, with the answer to that being, arguably, "too much".
Lesse, micro-kernel architecture with a number of new, unconventional, and therefore untested, OS features. Yea, thats got "politics" written all over it.
Sheesh.
That's why FSF projects are consistently forking into projects run in the bazaar model. See GCC/LLVM for a more recent example of this.
... and this is just flat wrong. LLVM is not a fork of GCC.
If you're thinking of 'llvm-gcc', thats just a temporary hack of GCC to use LLVM as its backend code generator, until 'clang' (which will soon be included with the LLVM codebase) can fully replace it (C++ support is what is missing, C support is basically there except for corner-cases).
LLVM itself is a separate, independently-developed code base, with much broader and *far* more ambitious goals than GCC.
However, the FSF guys, because they are into politics, love to generate lots of noise.
In any case, you've failed to point out an instance where Fox News has actually purposefully lied to the public,
Try actually reading the link the GP provided:
The court did not dispute the heart of Akre's claim, that Fox pressured her to broadcast a false story to protect the broadcaster from having to defend the truth in court, as well as suffer the ire of irate advertisers. Fox argued from the first, and failed on three separate occasions, in front of three different judges, to have the case tossed out on the grounds there is no hard, fast, and written rule against deliberate distortion of the news.
God, I'm getting so tired of these knee-jerk "prove it" responses, and the latest sad variation: prove it with out using a wikipedia link, as if no wikipage provides external links to support itself - Sheesh.
If you were really interested in the truth, a simple google search would have led you to multiple instances of Fox News shenanigans, and reading the archives at mediamatters.org (and other places) is a hoot as well, hell this stuff is what Fox is *famous* for. You know, like why "Fair and Balanced" causes so many people to either start laughing hysterically or ranting angrily, or both simultaneously (which is really impressive), etc, etc...
Heck, without Fox News, Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" comedy show would have been canceled long ago due to lack of material...
Absolutely agreed. As good as/. is, it would be even better if it relied much more on up-moderation rather than down-moderation.
So I'd go as far as to suggest that the "Troll" and "Flamebait" mods be merged into one, as they just have too much overlap, and at the very *least*, that the "Offtopic" moderation should be taken out back and shot, or terminated with extreme prejudice if the former language sounds too harsh to you. I see the OT mod as the single most frequently and consistently "misabused" moderation of them all, with this "Even the Germans" subthread being just the latest example (and proof) of its pointless, counter-productive uselessness.
Can you tell that I'm a little annoyed?:)
It made better sense back when/. had a much smaller, non-international population, but not any more: virtually every discussion now at some point, or at *multiple* points, and sometimes for the *entire* remainder of the discussion!, goes OT, with so many posters its just impossible for that not to happen, what with human nature being what it is, never mind the *delicious* number of possibilities for an international audience to misunderstand one another (as appears to have played a role here). Besides, going OT is not *always* a bad outcome anyway, many off-topic subthreads (like this one!) I read here are just as Interesting/Informative/Insightful as on-topic subthreads are.
Worse, once an OT subthread starts, we'd have to waste a huge number of mod points to down-mod the whole thing. Down-modding just part of an OT subthread accomplishes absolutely *nothing*, we're forcing those who want to *understand* the rest of the subthread to drop their threshold to -1 to see the first part of it - which just defeats the purpose of having a threshold to begin with! Thats the case with this subthread, sadly.
And as final food-for-thought: if we don't want OT posts, why do we give posters the ability to change the Subject line? Indeed, why is there a Subject line for each post at all? Just askin'...
[dons blindfold and lights last cigarette and waits for the inevitable moderator who disagrees to mod *this* post OT... Come on, this is/., you *know* its gonna happen...]
I don't see the choice of GPL as being a major driver in the proliferation of the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel just happened to come along at the right time when there were few if any viable open-source alternatives,
The *BSDs had ~10 year head start on Linux, yet Linux, though starting much later, is now the one with all the apparent momentum and popularity.
I think you've missed what the GPL meant to the *commercial* contributors to the Linux kernel: they could contribute without fear of their competitors "stealing" their code and using it against them. IBM, for example, doesn't have to worry about someone taking their JFS file system implementation from Linux and incorporating it into a proprietary product that IBM ends up having to compete with.
This is why so many hardware manufacturers and computer vendors have, so far, been more willing to support Linux compared to a BSD licensed OS, and as we all know, an OS, no matter how many features it may provide or how brilliantly its designed, is still useless if it can't support the hardware.
The choice of license was largely irrelevant for the early developers - they just wanted to hack a unix kernel.
The success of Linux has little to do with Unix kernel hackers, and much more to do with having broader hardware support.
Had Linus chosen the BSD license for Linux I don't see things having turned out much different.
Fortunately for (some of) us, Linus himself saw the difference the license would make. After all, he was well aware of the *BSDs that already existed at the time...
in relatively static segments. Anything that's fast moving...
The Linux kernel is static? Its not "fast-moving"? There may always be segments or "niche markets" that are too small for a FOSS interest to develop within them, but it won't be because they are "fast-moving" or that FOSS is only *possible* in "static segments".
because commercial developers are, you know, paid?
What, did you think Linus has been working out of his mom's basement for the last decade? He's getting a paycheck from the Linux Foundation to work on the Linux kernel full-time, and he's not the only dev being paid to work full-time on FOSS...
The only *real* difference right now is the relative size/usage/acceptance of Commercial vs. FOSS software. As the FOSS ecosystem grows, then paid-for development of it will too.
We shouldn't assume that the current lack of large numbers of paid, full-time developers working on FOSS software is because of the peculiarities of FOSS software itself, it may just be due to the current difference in size/usage/acceptance between Commercial & FOSS, i.e., its hard to accurately compare these two "markets" to one another right now because they aren't in any way *equal* to one another right now.
I take this for the list to be quite longer than just the four
Well, until we see the size, and content, of this list, we really have no way of knowing which of us is "right".:)
"updating all the time to stay up to the list", not to talk about the constant flux of bugs due to integration problems that such a practice would arise.
Integration problems exist for binary-based distros as well. I was responding to the implication that this would somehow be impossible with a source-based distro because the "building" part would allegedly consume "all the time". That is false.
Living on the bleeding edge creates exactly the same problems for both binary and source-based distros. If this list really does force you far out onto the bleeding edge, then it won't matter what kind of distro you use as a solution, there will be difficulties in any case, but a source-based distro won't make it any *harder*.
However, if your need is to adapt to this "list" for a large number of targets, then using a source-based "meta-distro" might make the *administration* of your whole system easier, where the customized building and integration is done once on a fast machine then distributed out to all the targets. As always, it depends on the specifics.
What people said was that "no one is going to make money developing FLOSS software"
They said that too, in addition to a lot of other (usually derogatory) things. They also said what I claimed they did.
that >98% of the software included with "Redhat Linux" have been developed and paid for by companies
[citation needed]
Look, Redhat's success doesn't deny your point, true, however, that was never the point I was making in the first place. You're basically just trying to change the subject from "selling" to "developing". Once the former is proven possible, then we'll find out if the latter is possible as well, but that won't happen until FLOSS is far more accepted/used than it is now (as a "market entity" its still small).
The GPL isn't getting tested because nobody's dumb enough to do so.
Paging Daniel Wallace. Daniel Wallace to the courtroom please.
#1 The basis of his lawsuits was about *price-fixing*, i.e. an anti-trust violation, not the GPL license per se.
#2 DW was a nutcase.
Basically, the GPL was not, in fact, "tested" in this case, since DW was not accused of a GPL violation, nor was he accusing anyone else of a GPL violation. No violation of anyone's copyright was alleged or involved.
The only result of this lunatic's lawsuits is that the courts agree that the GPL doesn't violate the Sherman Act, however, what some people are interested in is how it stands up to scrutiny in relation to the Copyright Act.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be eager to read about court decisions in which these matters have been decided.
We all would, if for no other reason than to end the endless flame-wars (like this one) over this issue. Then /. could go back to really important discussions, like deciding whether emacs or vi is the better editor, or whether emacs should even be allowed in the running for "best" editor, since its also an operating system.
Unfortunately, despite 20 years of GPL history (v1 was released in January 1989), no one has actually challenged the FSF's idea of "derivative work" in a court of law. I wonder why....
The "linking rule" is a rule-of-thumb that doesn't always apply, despite what the FSF would have you believe.
We don't know whether it applies or not, since no one has actually tested the FSF's idea of "derivative work" in a legal case yet.
So until they've been *proven* wrong, you had better pay attention to what they "believe", since a judge just might agree with them and rule against you. :)
As always, however, consult a quality lawyer first.
Assuming that people have been doing this up till now, perhaps the reason why no one has tried to challenge the FSF's interpretation is because the lawyers have been telling their clients that the FSF might win? Hmmm...
Thus, if I write my program to use one of two backend libraries - one of which is GPL, and the other which is not, I only have to distribute my code under the terms of GPL when it has been compiled to use the GPL backend, but not when it has been compiled to use the proprietary backend library.
The terms are only applicable at distribution time based on the use of other code at compile/linking time.
no?
Correct, but the question I now have is what are trying to avoid here? Why bother making 2 separate distributions of your app for this case, why not just release a single version of your app that is dual-licensed under both the BSD and GPL, and supports all the backends (including the GPLed one) that you wish in a modular fashion?
If your app's "frontend" is going to be identical in both cases, I don't see the point. Just dual-license it (if you are the sole author of the app), as thats what you'll effectively be doing anyway, just without the trouble of trying to maintain two different physical "versions" with two different codebases.
Stop casting aspersions of bad intentions
Anyone who is using "an elaborate hack", to use the GP's phrase, just to "get around" the limitations of the GPL, *does* have bad intentions, since they're obviously trying to avoid having to honor the desire of the author(s) of the code in question. Actions do show intent.
and just admit that there are flaws in your licensing scheme
Your opinion, and for that matter, *my* opinion, just don't matter. It'll take a court ruling to decide for sure if there are any flaws, and that hasn't happened yet.
when they hang 'v2' at the end of something, you know there are improvements still to be made.
improvements != flaws
Does adding a feature to an app mean the previous version was "flawed"? By that strange definition, damn near everything under the sun is flawed, and we wouldn't even have the word "improvement" in our vocabulary.
a developer has distributed a closed-source application that links to GPL licensed libraries on the end-user's computer. The developer does not distribute the libraries themselves. The end-user runs the program, but does not do anything else with it.
Ask yourself the question "How does my system's linker know what libraries that app needs?".
Answer: The app's binary has embedded in it an *explicit* list of the libs it needs, along with other information like the names of functions and shared data structures that are used by the app and lib to pass data between them.
At that point the FSF could prove the "intent", in a hypothetical court case, of the app's developer to use their lib in violation of the lib's license. The end-user's role becomes irrelevant at this point.
Now whether this embedded information is *actually* a "derivative work" of the lib, or merely an "aggregate work", I don't know, those are legal terms that come from copyright law, and IANAL, but the FSF *does* think so, and so far, no court has said that they're wrong.
No one has yet decided to test the FSF's idea of "derivative work" in a court because, I suspect, they know a court will not just look at the "letter of the license" and the "letter of the law", but also at what the *intentions* were of the plaintiff (FSF) and the defendant, and the FSF has made it clear over the years what they intend their license to mean and accomplish.
Yes, the GPL applies in that case because your code is a derivative work, regardless of what goes on in memory,
Umm, no. The FSF's own interpretation says if the GPLed code and non-GPLed code "make function calls to each other and share data structures" then the GPL applies, otherwise not.
So, "what goes on in memory" is in fact *crucial* to their definition of "derivative work".
Larry Niven talks about this in relation to Man-Kzin wars quite a bit
Haven't all the Man-Kzin war novels been released with Larry's blessing, if not actual co-authorship? I know a couple of recent ones were written entirely by someone else, but has there been one released that didn't have Larry's, or his publisher's, explicit approval? Just curious.
otherwise we'd be arguing for the "Year of FreeBSD on the Desktop" instead of Linux.
That's just because we've already seen the "Year of FreeBSD on the Desktop." It's called Mac OS X.
Except as Daengbo points out above us, OSX doesn't use the BSD license for the kernel part, it uses the APSL, which more resembles the GPL than the BSD, e.g. its a stronger "Copyleft" style of license thats more "restrictive" than the BSD. The rest of Mac OS X, the part that really counts!, of course, is proprietary, so the GP's point remains: "Year of *BSD on the Desktop" hasn't happened yet.
The only major GPL projects with corporate contributions that come to my mind immediately are Linux
In the context of the GP's "Year of XXX on the Desktop" reference, this is exactly the point: BSD-licensed OS kernels (*BSDs) vs. Copyleft-licensed OS kernels (Linux). The latter is seeing more corporate interest/support than the former, so far.
On the other hand, many, many non-GPL projects with corporate contributions immediately come to mind. All Apache projects, postgresql, ffmpeg, BSD, memcached, OpenOffice.org, QT, postfix, bind, all Mozilla software, webkit,
Yes, the GP did use the word "projects", thus opening up the whole "open" or "free" software world for inclusion as well, besides OS kernels, and that obviously means there are plenty of examples of BSD-licensed software out there. No one disputes that.
On the other hand, your use of phrase "non-GPL" here plus your particular list of examples is misleading:
ffmpeg = LGPL
OO.org = LGPL
QT = GPL/LGPL (dual-licensed)
Postfix = IPL
Mozilla = MPL/GPL/LGPL (triple-licensed)
Webkit = part BSD, part LGPL
where IPL = IBM Public License, and MPL = Mozilla Public License.
If you're trying to argue *for* the BSD license, then you haven't actually helped your case since just over half of your examples are using some form of a "strong" (or at least "stronger") Copyleft license. LGPL, IPL, & MPL are all Copyleft licenses that are more "restrictive" than the BSD.
If you're trying to argue *against* the GPL license, then first, most people don't think of the LGPL as being "non-GPL", but merely "not quite as strong as", and second, 2 of your examples are actually dual-licensed under the GPL, and third, anyone who wanted to go to the trouble could come up with a list of projects that *are* GPLed.
So your list doesn't really *prove* anything, and as far as the larger context of this debate is concerned, I think you're confusing/conflating two different issues: strong Copyleft (GPL) vs. weaker Copyleft (LGPL/MPL/IPL/APSL), and any kind of Copyleft vs. *non*-Copyleft (BSD). At a minimum, your mistaken assumption that Max OS X is an example of a BSD-licensed project at the outset damages the rest of your response.
The sad truth is, the actual value of the GPL is a lot less than everybody thinks.
If an astute reader interprets your reference to the GPL as "strong Copyleft" and to the BSD as "non-Copyleft", then the real sad truth is that judging by the licenses used by more than half of your own example projects, a lot of people seem to disagree with you!
The GPL and LGPL contain terms which are only really well-defined in the C/C++ paradigm.
Which ones?
Rather than make people who want to use your project wrap their brains about how the provisions on header files or linking apply to Java or Perl
"header files" isn't used in the GPL3 license at all. "link" only shows up twice, one of those usages is the generic meaning of the word, where they say "link or combine", the other usage is in defining the term "corresponding source", referring to code of any libraries or "dynamically linked subprograms" that explicitly make up the whole work, e.g. not system libraries, but a work that has been split up into separate components.
Note that "libraries", "subprograms", and "components" are terms that are just as applicable to Java or Perl as they are to C/C++ (or any other language), so I don't see any C/C++ specific verbiage involved in the license.
Note: I'm just trying to understand how you think the license is language-specific, or perhaps more importantly, why you think a "language-specific license" would be a good thing. After all, we've already got more software licenses than anyone can keep track of, having a license for each programming language out there too would only make a bad situation worse.
"linking" (in the general sense) is an issue for all programming languages that allow for separate "modules" to ultimately be used together in some way, whether the language is statically compiled & linked, or dynamically executed in a runtime environment (where the runtime engine effectively takes care of the "linking" for you), so this problem will exist no matter what.
In fact, the *real* problem here is not the programming language or the software license or what "linking" means, but the inherent vagueness of copyright *law*, specifically what is meant by the phrase "derivative work". That term comes from copyright law itself, not the GPL or any other software license, and any "copyright license" ultimately depends on the underlying "copyright law" for meaning and clarity. Unfortunately, copyright law doesn't actually give us either, never mind the problem of copyright law itself being different depending on where you are.
Record labels support the artists.
You must not be a "Southern Rock" music fan, otherwise you'd have heard the song "Working For MCA" by Lynyrd Skynyrd...
So who has been saying all along that GPU compute on ATI cards just isn't up to snuff?
Mainly people who haven't been paying attention to what ATI has been doing since AMD bought it and began merging tech ~3 years ago, along with the usual business/management changes that go with that kind of consolidation. Basically today's ATI isn't the ATI of just a few years ago.
To be fair to those folks, the Radeon HD 4800 series is, roughly speaking, less than 2 years old, with the 4850 X2 being only ~1 year old. Before the HD 4800 series came out (based on the RV770), which was the *second* generation of ATI's tech to come out since the AMD takeover, ATI was in fact trailing NVIDIA in raw performance.
So unless you've been shopping recently for a new graphics card, and thus doing a little research before buying, you may not know whats been going on in the graphics world, heck, there's probably many folks who still don't know that ATI is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of AMD, referred to as the "Graphics Product Group" within AMD, and that "ATI" is now just a brand name AMD kept for marketing purposes.
Is this ever going to replace ext4?
FWIW, Ted T'so, the maintainer of ext3/ext4, himself said somewhere he expected, or could envision, btrfs replacing ext4 when the time came.
Only question is timing, btrfs isn't at v1.0, and isn't stable, but it seems to have a lot momentum behind it, compared to all the other advanced Linux file systems out there.
Oh no! People are being CRITICIZED!
...
That doesn't change the fact that their choice in this case is foolish
Responses of the form: "Duh, your stuuupid!" might technically be "criticism", but that doesn't go very far here, at least not for readers for which content actually matters.
Hint: You've yet to make any rational argument for why they're being "foolish", especially since you already admit:
software authors DO have the LEGAL right to decide what license to release their code under
This is especially weird here, as the software is an implementation of (AFAIK) an open specification, and can be reimplemented by anyone else if they want it under a different license. Can't stand GCC because of its license? No problem, use another C compiler.
So, don't like the license? Fine, then attack that, but just calling its users "foolish" only makes you sound like a troll. Or was that what you intended all along?
Its also a little amusing, given that the people you are calling "foolish" are actually employees of Oracle, IBM, Hitachi, and the usual Linux suspects, e.g. RedHat, SUSE, et. al. Best of all, the originators of BTRFS are the people that now significantly control ZFS's destiny, e.g. Oracle, and they were the ones who gave it the GPL license. Do you really want to continue calling the new masters of ZFS/Solaris/OpenSolaris "foolish"?
Maybe whats really got you irked is that the audience for BTRFS (the Linux ecosystem) will be more than large enough to ensure its long term success, whereas ZFS's future depends a lot on whether Oracle chooses to continue it into the long term. Its not clear yet what they're going to do with ZFS, but the Oracle dev who created BTRFS, Chris Mason (who BTW, was one of the ZFS devs too), and who is still leading its development (along with the others mentioned above) told its dev ml recently that everything was still a go with BTRFS as far as Oracle was concerned. So do you *still* want to continue calling Oracle "foolish"? :)
They would have gone the Microsoft route and created software that is completely proprietary
Instead, they just stole what they wanted from *BSD and created a system that is partially proprietary. That you think that is somehow better than "completely proprietary" is where the disagreement is. Three points still remain:
a) Apple took from the *BSD world, made a profit, and never returned in kind, and
b) Apple's OS is still proprietary: you can't write an "Apple OS application" using just the underlying BSD plumbing, and thus
c) The GP's points still stand, in particular: the *BSD's can't garner any momentum in the corporate space because most companies will never consider contributing back for fear of their competitors using their code against them. Since it isn't a level playing field, most commercial entities are only ever going to *take* from the *BSD world, not give back.
Little thing called the network stack that I'm sure we're all happy was BSD licensed?
Well, at least MS was happy they could snag that for free (then turn around and get others to pay *them* for it).
But, hey, if you think thats a great "arrangement", no problem, you're free to choose that path, just don't be too surprised that, having watched all this *taking* over the years, others have decided to go in a different direction...
Why are developers who don't want their code to be ripped off (used without payment in a closed product) by companies and incorporated into a product are labeled zealots?
Perhaps because they are writing software which is by FAR most useful when it is used as far and wide as possible, while using a license which makes that goal extremely difficult to achieve, unnecessarily.
Um, "most useful" to *who*, exactly? Why is your, or anyone else's, convenience/preference more important than that of the software authors? By this logic, *all* software should be released into the public domain.
I know its an old-fashioned idea and all, but geez, whatever happened to letting software *authors* decide how their software may be used?
how can Linux link non-GPL drivers
*Legally*, it can't.
For drivers that are built *into* the kernel at compile time, they must be GPL-compatible.
For a non-GPL driver built as a kernel module, however, the issue is more complicated/controversial. For example, the proprietary graphics drivers from NVIDIA/AMD do something like having 2 parts: the part which links with the kernel, and a second non-GPL part, a binary blob, that is loaded at runtime by the first part. Non-GPL drivers are therefore always built as external kernel modules and use this kind of "technique", to avoid using any linkage mechanism between the kernel itself and the binary blob. There are, ah, "purists", though, who consider even this to be a GPL violation, hence the controversy (and the reason for kernel modules having a "Tainted" flag).
3) why isn't Reiser 4 in the damn kernel already?
ditto ZFS.
For ZFS, its easy: its current license isn't compatible with the GPLv2 that the Linux kernel uses.
As for R4, well, thats a little more... complicated. :)
Open Source is essentially an open and cooperative development model with an open license.
... except that the Linux kernel uses the GPL license which is Free Software's license, so at this point I think you're confused as to what the real differences between "Open Source" and "Free Software" really are.
but is a political dogma centered around Richard Stallman as supreme leader
... and this is just trolling.
Some people are more interested in being "top revolutionary" than writing good code.
... and this is just more trolling.
That's why Linux succeeded where HURD failed.
... well, its kinda hard for software to succeed if its not ever released.
Worse, HURD's failure had nothing whatsoever to do with FS politics and everything to do with technical/design issues, as in what HURD was trying to accomplish in a single leap, with the answer to that being, arguably, "too much".
Lesse, micro-kernel architecture with a number of new, unconventional, and therefore untested, OS features. Yea, thats got "politics" written all over it.
Sheesh.
That's why FSF projects are consistently forking into projects run in the bazaar model. See GCC/LLVM for a more recent example of this.
... and this is just flat wrong. LLVM is not a fork of GCC.
If you're thinking of 'llvm-gcc', thats just a temporary hack of GCC to use LLVM as its backend code generator, until 'clang' (which will soon be included with the LLVM codebase) can fully replace it (C++ support is what is missing, C support is basically there except for corner-cases).
LLVM itself is a separate, independently-developed code base, with much broader and *far* more ambitious goals than GCC.
However, the FSF guys, because they are into politics, love to generate lots of noise.
Speaking of noise...
In any case, you've failed to point out an instance where Fox News has actually purposefully lied to the public,
Try actually reading the link the GP provided:
The court did not dispute the heart of Akre's claim, that Fox pressured her to broadcast a false story to protect the broadcaster from having to defend the truth in court, as well as suffer the ire of irate advertisers. Fox argued from the first, and failed on three separate occasions, in front of three different judges, to have the case tossed out on the grounds there is no hard, fast, and written rule against deliberate distortion of the news.
God, I'm getting so tired of these knee-jerk "prove it" responses, and the latest sad variation: prove it with out using a wikipedia link, as if no wikipage provides external links to support itself - Sheesh.
If you were really interested in the truth, a simple google search would have led you to multiple instances of Fox News shenanigans, and reading the archives at mediamatters.org (and other places) is a hoot as well, hell this stuff is what Fox is *famous* for. You know, like why "Fair and Balanced" causes so many people to either start laughing hysterically or ranting angrily, or both simultaneously (which is really impressive), etc, etc...
Heck, without Fox News, Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" comedy show would have been canceled long ago due to lack of material...
Absolutely agreed. As good as /. is, it would be even better if it relied much more on up-moderation rather than down-moderation.
So I'd go as far as to suggest that the "Troll" and "Flamebait" mods be merged into one, as they just have too much overlap, and at the very *least*, that the "Offtopic" moderation should be taken out back and shot, or terminated with extreme prejudice if the former language sounds too harsh to you. I see the OT mod as the single most frequently and consistently "misabused" moderation of them all, with this "Even the Germans" subthread being just the latest example (and proof) of its pointless, counter-productive uselessness.
Can you tell that I'm a little annoyed? :)
It made better sense back when /. had a much smaller, non-international population, but not any more: virtually every discussion now at some point, or at *multiple* points, and sometimes for the *entire* remainder of the discussion!, goes OT, with so many posters its just impossible for that not to happen, what with human nature being what it is, never mind the *delicious* number of possibilities for an international audience to misunderstand one another (as appears to have played a role here). Besides, going OT is not *always* a bad outcome anyway, many off-topic subthreads (like this one!) I read here are just as Interesting/Informative/Insightful as on-topic subthreads are.
Worse, once an OT subthread starts, we'd have to waste a huge number of mod points to down-mod the whole thing. Down-modding just part of an OT subthread accomplishes absolutely *nothing*, we're forcing those who want to *understand* the rest of the subthread to drop their threshold to -1 to see the first part of it - which just defeats the purpose of having a threshold to begin with! Thats the case with this subthread, sadly.
And as final food-for-thought: if we don't want OT posts, why do we give posters the ability to change the Subject line? Indeed, why is there a Subject line for each post at all? Just askin'...
[dons blindfold and lights last cigarette and waits for the inevitable moderator who disagrees to mod *this* post OT... Come on, this is /., you *know* its gonna happen...]
I don't see the choice of GPL as being a major driver in the proliferation of the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel just happened to come along at the right time when there were few if any viable open-source alternatives,
The *BSDs had ~10 year head start on Linux, yet Linux, though starting much later, is now the one with all the apparent momentum and popularity.
I think you've missed what the GPL meant to the *commercial* contributors to the Linux kernel: they could contribute without fear of their competitors "stealing" their code and using it against them. IBM, for example, doesn't have to worry about someone taking their JFS file system implementation from Linux and incorporating it into a proprietary product that IBM ends up having to compete with.
This is why so many hardware manufacturers and computer vendors have, so far, been more willing to support Linux compared to a BSD licensed OS, and as we all know, an OS, no matter how many features it may provide or how brilliantly its designed, is still useless if it can't support the hardware.
The choice of license was largely irrelevant for the early developers - they just wanted to hack a unix kernel.
The success of Linux has little to do with Unix kernel hackers, and much more to do with having broader hardware support.
Had Linus chosen the BSD license for Linux I don't see things having turned out much different.
Fortunately for (some of) us, Linus himself saw the difference the license would make. After all, he was well aware of the *BSDs that already existed at the time...
in relatively static segments. Anything that's fast moving ...
The Linux kernel is static? Its not "fast-moving"? There may always be segments or "niche markets" that are too small for a FOSS interest to develop within them, but it won't be because they are "fast-moving" or that FOSS is only *possible* in "static segments".
because commercial developers are, you know, paid?
What, did you think Linus has been working out of his mom's basement for the last decade? He's getting a paycheck from the Linux Foundation to work on the Linux kernel full-time, and he's not the only dev being paid to work full-time on FOSS...
The only *real* difference right now is the relative size/usage/acceptance of Commercial vs. FOSS software. As the FOSS ecosystem grows, then paid-for development of it will too.
We shouldn't assume that the current lack of large numbers of paid, full-time developers working on FOSS software is because of the peculiarities of FOSS software itself, it may just be due to the current difference in size/usage/acceptance between Commercial & FOSS, i.e., its hard to accurately compare these two "markets" to one another right now because they aren't in any way *equal* to one another right now.
I take this for the list to be quite longer than just the four
Well, until we see the size, and content, of this list, we really have no way of knowing which of us is "right". :)
"updating all the time to stay up to the list", not to talk about the constant flux of bugs due to integration problems that such a practice would arise.
Integration problems exist for binary-based distros as well. I was responding to the implication that this would somehow be impossible with a source-based distro because the "building" part would allegedly consume "all the time". That is false.
Living on the bleeding edge creates exactly the same problems for both binary and source-based distros. If this list really does force you far out onto the bleeding edge, then it won't matter what kind of distro you use as a solution, there will be difficulties in any case, but a source-based distro won't make it any *harder*.
However, if your need is to adapt to this "list" for a large number of targets, then using a source-based "meta-distro" might make the *administration* of your whole system easier, where the customized building and integration is done once on a fast machine then distributed out to all the targets. As always, it depends on the specifics.
What people said was that "no one is going to make money developing FLOSS software"
They said that too, in addition to a lot of other (usually derogatory) things. They also said what I claimed they did.
that >98% of the software included with "Redhat Linux" have been developed and paid for by companies
[citation needed]
Look, Redhat's success doesn't deny your point, true, however, that was never the point I was making in the first place. You're basically just trying to change the subject from "selling" to "developing". Once the former is proven possible, then we'll find out if the latter is possible as well, but that won't happen until FLOSS is far more accepted/used than it is now (as a "market entity" its still small).
The GPL isn't getting tested because nobody's dumb enough to do so.
Paging Daniel Wallace. Daniel Wallace to the courtroom please.
#1 The basis of his lawsuits was about *price-fixing*, i.e. an anti-trust violation, not the GPL license per se.
#2 DW was a nutcase.
Basically, the GPL was not, in fact, "tested" in this case, since DW was not accused of a GPL violation, nor was he accusing anyone else of a GPL violation. No violation of anyone's copyright was alleged or involved.
The only result of this lunatic's lawsuits is that the courts agree that the GPL doesn't violate the Sherman Act, however, what some people are interested in is how it stands up to scrutiny in relation to the Copyright Act. :)