I apologise in advance for the bad language but in the interests of having a complete public record on Slashdot, here's a list of the words and phrases that Apple censors from their iPhone dictionaries: --- Reality Distortion Field egomaniac vendor lockin exploding iPod making unfreedom hip iCon backdated stock options Lisa fanboyism --- There you go. I feel dirty now, and shall wash my keyboard out with soap.
"Who said that IFPI.com was ever owned by the IFPI?" Archive.org says so.
"Who said that they still own it, provided they ever did?" Nobody says that ifpi still owns it, least of all Slashdot or TFA. Piratebay owns it, legitimately. Looks like the IFPI let their domain name expire, it was taken over early this year by sharp-eyed music sharers, then donated to piratebay.
... would be for a large number of males to pick a female character, when they demand the webcam identification, the victims flash their throbbing male members and/or distended anus at the camera, and logoff.
Lets face it, this policy is only there to pink-triangle all the women on the game so that they can be marked for online stalking by whatever horny male geeks thought this policy up. But after being made to stare deeply and thoughtfully into the depths of a couple of hundred hairy male goatses, the gender nazis behind the cameras would probably decide that this rule would be more trouble than it's worth.
I know about the copyright misuse doctrine. I know about the theories regarding copyright misuse and GPLed software.
You're very wrong here though, as regards Lexmark. SCC and the EFF did argue a copyright misuse theory, but that theory related to antitrust issues (the theory that the GPL violated antitrust laws has already been soundly clobbered by the sixth circuit in Wallace vs IBM et al) and it wasn't addressed by the appellate court. Lexmark didn't 'permanently lose their copyright for copyright abuse', either - it's just that copyright protection isn't given to devices in software that need to be mimicked for interoperability purposes, much the same as in the Lotus/Borland case. The effect is superficially similar, but there are differences. With copyright misuse, the misuser doesn't 'permanently lose their copyright', they just temporarily lose the right to enforce it, until the misuse is rectified.
In any case, it doesn't get anywhere near the busybox/Monsoon case.How in the name of Great Emacs Almighty can busybox be 'misusing' copyright by asking someone else to stop distributing their copyrighted code, only their code, and only the code that the two busybox developers own? That's a monopoly explicitly granted by the copyright laws, and there's no way that copyright misuse can possibly apply there...
"There's a remote possibility that a judge could rule that the use of GPL on BusyBox is "copyright abuse" and the developers could lose their copyright."
Lose their rights to enforce the copyright until the misuse is resolved, you mean. In any case, it doesn't apply here. The copyright misuse defence theory of GPL infringement is that it relies on the copyright holder overstretching the definition of 'derivative work' beyond what copyright law allows. MyHava were being growled at over unmodified copies of busybox, so there's no stretch at all here, let alone overstretch.
"Or the judge might rule that certain actions that were thought to be insufficient to be in compliance with the GPL are actually sufficient. For example, the judge could rule that "the source code being available" is sufficient and it doesn't matter where the source code is available. Or that only a "majority" of the source code need to be available, etc."
Doesn't that require completely ignoring the clear and unambiguous language of section 3 of the GPL? Won't section 7 kick in so that everyone in that jurisdiction loses their GPL right? What basis in law would the judge have for cherrypicking the parts of the GPL that license the code to Monsoon, but not the parts that say what conditions Monsoon have to obey?
You're referring to only one court case, Jacobsen vs Katzer, Kamind and Russell
That related to the Artistic License, NOT the GPL. There are a number of relevant differences though, including the fact that the GPL has an explicit termination condition, whereas the Artistic License doesn't. Certainly though, the ruling you refer to is very disconcerting.
Except that the point of the unbundling thing is so that it would be reasonable for OEM's (or even Microsoft, if it felt like it) to bundle windows with netscape or opera or Mosaic or whatever instead, back before Microsoft destroyed the commercial browser market. The whole purpose of Microsoft bundling IE for free with every Windows computer (and making it impossible to uninstall) was to destroy Netscape by forcing everyone to have an equivalent product to Netscape's already installed on their desktop, whether they liked it or not.
The fact that IE was free came as a big shock to everyone, even to the guys who made it and sold it to Microsoft; Microsoft fucked those guys over by offering them a royalty on sales of the browser, which was $0.
That's not the problem. The idea is that it's easier for MediaDefender to disrupt bittorrent when the other users are using utorrent.
I don't know exactly what interdiction involves (it's a military term so I can make a guess) , but it seems to be an exploit in utorrent that they use to disrupt downloading of utorrent users. The less people use utorrent, the harder it is for MediaDefender to practice this 'interdiction'. MediaDefender seems to be quite worried every time a new version comes out, and they do try to get their customers to use utorrent when checking torrent sites to see that their files are being spoofed properly.
Some of this stuff could conceivably be used by MD's customers to sue MediaDefender for deliberately misleading them as to the effectiveness of their spoofing, like this one, when Amy Winehouse' record company wants to come and see how well they're doing:
From: Ben Ebert To: Randy Saaf; Tabish Hasan; Ben Grodsky; Jay Mairs Cc: qateam Sent: Wed Jun 27 09:23:42 2007 Subject: Re: umgi
Neil is asking for this now, let's give him amy winehouse on the sites I listed below. We need to make +sure they are usiny utorrent since our decoys are not as strong as they could be. If you can influence +the methodology have them download the top 15 with a short time frame like 2 hours.
Oh, and their emails do show them avidly reading slasdot and Digg and the like whenever a scandal affects them. So hello and welcome, to all you grifters taking the piss out of corporate record executives in ineffective-but-lucrative-peer-to-peer-spoofing land!
If you read the emails, apparently utorrent is their favourite torrent client, since it allows them to 'interdict' torrents, whatever that means. Whatever they're up to, that surely warrants a campaign to boycott the client in favour of free software torrent clients where these sorts of deficiencies can at least be fixed by anyone who cares.
Oh, and the rumors of them being behind the spyware-encrusted ziptorrent were false; that one seems to have been MediaSentry's doing.
No. Going back over the postings shows you refusing to address MY argument that you can't call something a different name. Your whole argument throughout has been to doggedly call a charge for source code something else and expecting me to fall for that, even when examining the actual transactions involved totally put the lie to it. You continually claim the transactions are voluntary, which, in a way they are, but they're the same sort of 'voluntary' transaction as a mutual agreement to impose a Microsoft-style EULA on the software. I mentioned that, but you denied it without any clear attempt at refutation.
Nowhere do you ever address my point that the GPL prevents even 'voluntary' restrictions and obligations, if they are incompatible with the GPL. Nowhere do you ever state any legal principle that gives the distributor the right to refuse source code merely because of non-payment your supposed 'full' price of the binary. You just bang on the same old tune, interspersing it with more ad hominems as you go along, trolling harder and harder.
"They weren't attack,"
"Your so blinded by zeal" "you won't take the blinders off." "You have a hard time wrapping your head around the fact" "I think your just upset" "You need to wake up."
It's only AFTER taking this shit for three or four posts that I eventually bit and called you an ignoramus, with very good reason. Then the ad hominems got worse.
Two things: "OK your right and everyone else is wrong."
No. You're wrong, and everyone else is right.
"...your resort to name calling..."
Hey, YOU were the one who started the ad hominems first, and you've been insulting me throughout this discussion, culminating in this latest depressingly infantile epistle of yours. I actually ignored your insults for the first couple of posts, before pointing out you were an ignoramus, when it was blatantly obvious you didn't have a clue about what you were talking about.
"No you ignoramus, "at cost" is the cost if the product."
No it isn't. I used the phrase, and I know damn well what it meant when I said it. The very first definition of 'at cost' that google gives me concurs with me. As will almost any other definition you care to look up. Consider the fact that you're trivially proven wrong here a small cluestick that you're almost certainly wrong elsewhere.
None of the rest of your pointless shit is anything more than the same tired old semantic drivel that doesn't address anything I said, just reiterates your moronic position that you think you can impose new conditions and charges as long as you merely SAY that they're old ones. That easily fails the duck test.
"The two aren't even comparable. You are not imposing anything, you are offering and someone else is agreeing. If you don't voluntarily wish to agree, you pay the regular costs."
Okay, I paid the regular costs. Now I want my source, at cost. What gives you the right to deny me the source code, at cost price? That's right, some sort of 'obligation', that I agreed to. YOU used the word 'obligation', not me. But the GPL doesn't actually allow you to impose such obligations on the downstream user. It says those sorts of restrictions are forbidden, and it makes no exceptions for when the downstream user 'consents' to them.
"at costs huh, What the hell do you think X dollars is? It is the costs. The discounted cost, which isn't the cost, it is the discounted costs is the cost minus a sum for an agreement outside the scope of the license but pertaining to the product in question."
No, you ignoramus. "at cost" is the cost, to the distributor, of distributing and copying the product, which is pretty clear in context. Cost, in general, is not necessarily equal to the price - there are terms like 'markup' and 'profit' to describe that sort of stuff. However, here, the GPL stipulates that the source must be distributed, at no more than the cost of shipping the source, to any third party who asks. That's the 'cost' I'm talking about.
"They wouldn't? Sane judges look at deals and contracts all the time. They would look at the deal you made to get the discount, see that you didn't follow through with your obligations and then make you pay the difference because you didn't uphold the value of your part of the agreement."
You can't impose any GPL-incompatible obligations without breaching copyright law. The GPL forbids you from making any agreements that impose such obligations on third parties. It doesn't excuse the deals if those obligations being 'by mutual agreement'. ALL licensing agreements are mutual agreements. The clue here is that even you have to use the word 'obligation', which you can't characterise as being for the binary, and no matter how many ad hominem insults you throw at me, you'll still never get that word in. The customer was under NO GPL-incompatible obligations, until he or she asked for the source. The obligation here is the obligation to pay more than cost price if the customer asks for the source code. Calling it a 'discount' or 'the full price of the binary' fools nobody.
As for 'the deal you made to get the discount', that's irrelevant. Because the likely court case here is between the GPL copyright holder and the distributor. The customer is only here as a witness. The distributor made two deals here, one with the customer, which the customer may or may not have broken, and one with the copyright holder (the GPL), which he broke by attempting to make a GPL incompatible deal with the customer. The language of the GPL and the language of your deal are clearly incompatible, and in that case, regardless of the status of the deal between the customer and distributor, the distributor loses in a copyright case.
"And outside you crying about the "GPL says this",which doesn't even come into play, you cannot show that it can't be done."
Yes it does. Your trolling arse can't seem to get over the fact that the law makes it's own mind up over what stuff is. No matter what names you give something, if the judge has half a brain, he'll give it the proper name and deal with it accordingly. Law is all about giving the correct names to things in order that the law can deal with them, so there's absolutely NO lawyer out there that's going to be fooled by your nonsensical sophist shit. They've been playing this game for hundreds of years. An amateur like you would be toast.
"I don't think you are willing to look at this objectively. It is in no way shape or form, someone imposing restrictions. It is someone offering a discount and someone else agreeing to take it. There is no imposing going on at all."
Only in the same way that there's no 'imposing' going on with the Microsoft EULA. That is, technically, a voluntary agreement too, in that nobody's forced to take it. However, offering someone gcc only on the conditions that they abide by Microsoft EULA terms, and attempting to enforce such terms, would still be a heinous beach of the GPL and copyright law. You can ask someone nicely not to take their full GPL rights, but any attempt to enforce that legally would land you in legal hot water.
"It is simple. The GPL effects the people distributing the license. It doesn't kick in with possession."
So it does. And when someone distributes a GPLed binary on it's own, for commercial gain, they do so on the condition that they are offering the source code to the person receiving the code, and any third party that asks, for a period of three years, at cost price. If they refuse to offer that source code, they are violating the GPL. It doesn't matter if the person receiving the binary paid them $20 or $400. That 'any third party' totally spoils your fun too, by the way. Even in the unlikely event you didn't pull this bullshit sophistry right out of your rectum, the simple workaround is just say to my friend Bob 'Ask him for the source code'. Bob didn't pay for the binary in the first place, so there's no way you can charge him anything above cost.
"WTF are you talking about. I can charge anything I want for a GPLed work."
You can charge it for the services of distributing or copying or writing it. You CANNOT charge a license fee (i.e. permission to run the code), as per section 2b. And it's possible that what you're demanding this $380 for would look like a license fee, which is why I brought it up.
How would this work in practice? I pay $20 for the binary, then demand source code for next to nothing. I then contact the copyright holder and he takes you to court. I show the invoice for $380 and ask what the price is for. Is it the price for shipping the binaries? Nope, you already shipped them for $20. Is it for shipping the source? Nope, section 3b of the GPL says it isn't. Is it the price I have to pay to be allowed to run the binaries in my possession? Can you take me to court to stop me running the code I supposedly, in bizarro-world, haven't paid for? Nope, because that's a license fee, and the GPL states that the code must be licensed 'at no charge' to any third party.
And before you say it yet again, NO. No way would any sane judge look at that $380 and say it was for the binaries that you'd already shipped to me, that you weren't asking more money for.
"You and I can come to a seperate agreement over any transaction we make between us. The GPL does nothing to stop this."
It stops you attempting to enforce your half of the bargain, if the conditions therein are GPL incompatible. See my first point.
"You have a hard time wrapping your head around the fact that some people don't want the source or any of the freedoms the GPL imposes."
Not at all. YOUR problem is that you think you can give a duck a different name and you expect others to think it's not a duck any more. Walks waddles, quacks.
Think of the scholastic discounts a lot of vendors give because it is being used by students and teachers, not corporate big wigs and such. It says right in the license that your not supposed to use it outside the scholar environment.
And why does your argument fail when talking about the GPL? That's right, because the GPL is explicitly opposed to these sorts of practices. If anyone was ever to attempt to impose any condition like the ones in your second paragraph on the user of GPLed software, they would be in flagrant breach of section 6 of the GPL, and by extension, copyright law.
"If they go back later and want the source, they pay the difference in price."
And how on earth do you reconcile that with section 3b of the GPL? (version 2 - version 3 gives some scope for a markup in the price of source)
Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code"
If you've given out the cheap binary of GPLed code, and you're trying to charge $400 a pop for it, then you MUST offer source according to this section of the GPL. What gives you the right to impose a fee more than the cost of shipping the source?
You simply can't turn round and impose a retroactive fee for the binary, since no matter what words you use for it, to characterise it in law, it's got to be either some sort of retroactive license fee on use of the binary(no way can you claim this is the fee for shipping the already-shipped binary), an unreasonably large charge for the source code (not allowed) or some sort of condition imposed on the user of the binary before he's allowed to get his GPL-mandated source code (not allowed).
No matter how hard you obfuscate this, it's still a GPL violation.
This is just the same sort of semantic gamesplaying as the original poster.
What we have here is two products:
GPLed product without source for $20 and the same GPLed product with source for $2000
And the $1980 price tag for source code is couched in euphemistic language as a 'voluntary discount' for those that go without. And by the same logic Ferraris are free, but you just get a $300,000 discount on your Ferrari tax if you do without. Nobody's likely to be fooled by such blatant sophistry, least of all judges.
Judges aren't automatons, and they are able to use their common sense when interpreting laws and documents (the GPL cases in Germany are prime examples of this). Your arrangement is certainly well outwith the spirit of the GPL, which makes it abundantly clear that anyone who gets the GPLed version should be offered the source at cost price. Judges almost certainly will take that, and the ideological waffle in the GPL preamble into account, when looking at a case of this nature, as proof of intentions of one of the parties in the agreement.
As for the customer 'lying about his intentions', that's of little concern to the court, since the customer isn't suing the distributor, the GPL copyright holder is. The customer's only role here is 'I got my GPLed binary, but they wouldn't give me source at a reasonable price' at a witness stand.
"No, you would only have to offer the source code to those who you have distributed to. The downstream users wouldn't have any rights to an upstream providers source outside them letting it go. If they refused to allow downstream customers access, the GPL is fine with it."
I dunno about you, but I have multiple copies of the GPL on my hard drive, and it's all over the net. Maybe you should read it before opening your mouth. I'd make a sarcastic comment on how I actually cited the actual passage, but I cited the wrong section, sorry about at. Here it is, though, section, (ahem) 3b, of the GPL.
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,
See that? Any third party? That you that is. Maybe even me! In't the GPL just dandy?
There are alternatives to the 'any third party' distribution, but they're not applicable in this instance; there's 3a (giving the source code with the binary, but they didn't do that) and 3c (passing on someone else's 3b offer, but that's for noncommercial users).
I suggest lowering the ignorance quotient before contradicting people in future...
Wrong. Reread section 2b of version 2 of the GPL. Section 2c doesn't apply because this is a commercial enterprise, and section 2b obliges you to offer source code to 'any third party' for up to three years.
And how does that not conflict with section 6 of the GPL?
The section that says: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
Demanding a 'voluntary' waiver of the source code right prior to distributing code to someone is almost certainly going to be considered a legal restriction on that code, semantic differences aside (unless your judge happens to have shoved a hatpin through his frontal lobes that day).
In any case, a commercial enterprise would have to rely on section 2b of the GPL as far as the distribution is concerned, which forces them to offer source code for at least three years to "any third party". So even if a lobotomised judge does let this pass and your intended victim has 'voluntarily' waived his right to source code, you still have to offer source to downstream users.
Slashdot Mirror
I apologise in advance for the bad language but in the interests of having a complete public record on Slashdot, here's a list of the words and phrases that Apple censors from their iPhone dictionaries:
---
Reality Distortion Field
egomaniac
vendor lockin
exploding iPod
making unfreedom hip
iCon
backdated stock options
Lisa
fanboyism
---
There you go. I feel dirty now, and shall wash my keyboard out with soap.
From the percentages you post, I deduce there had been exactly 6 votes posted, so we now know there are at least 3 assholes on the internet.
Why would it invalidate them? The results will be slower for everyone, since the LiveCD would standardise the software environment.
Anyways, it only matters if the suite reads from the disk during a test for some boneheaded reason.
"Who said that IFPI.com was ever owned by the IFPI?"
Archive.org says so.
"Who said that they still own it, provided they ever did?"
Nobody says that ifpi still owns it, least of all Slashdot or TFA. Piratebay owns it, legitimately. Looks like the IFPI let their domain name expire, it was taken over early this year by sharp-eyed music sharers, then donated to piratebay.
... would be for a large number of males to pick a female character, when they demand the webcam identification, the victims flash their throbbing male members and/or distended anus at the camera, and logoff.
Lets face it, this policy is only there to pink-triangle all the women on the game so that they can be marked for online stalking by whatever horny male geeks thought this policy up. But after being made to stare deeply and thoughtfully into the depths of a couple of hundred hairy male goatses, the gender nazis behind the cameras would probably decide that this rule would be more trouble than it's worth.
I know about the copyright misuse doctrine. I know about the theories regarding copyright misuse and GPLed software.
You're very wrong here though, as regards Lexmark. SCC and the EFF did argue a copyright misuse theory, but that theory related to antitrust issues (the theory that the GPL violated antitrust laws has already been soundly clobbered by the sixth circuit in Wallace vs IBM et al) and it wasn't addressed by the appellate court. Lexmark didn't 'permanently lose their copyright for copyright abuse', either - it's just that copyright protection isn't given to devices in software that need to be mimicked for interoperability purposes, much the same as in the Lotus/Borland case. The effect is superficially similar, but there are differences. With copyright misuse, the misuser doesn't 'permanently lose their copyright', they just temporarily lose the right to enforce it, until the misuse is rectified.
In any case, it doesn't get anywhere near the busybox/Monsoon case.How in the name of Great Emacs Almighty can busybox be 'misusing' copyright by asking someone else to stop distributing their copyrighted code, only their code, and only the code that the two busybox developers own? That's a monopoly explicitly granted by the copyright laws, and there's no way that copyright misuse can possibly apply there...
"There's a remote possibility that a judge could rule that the use of GPL on BusyBox is "copyright abuse" and the developers could lose their copyright."
Lose their rights to enforce the copyright until the misuse is resolved, you mean. In any case, it doesn't apply here. The copyright misuse defence theory of GPL infringement is that it relies on the copyright holder overstretching the definition of 'derivative work' beyond what copyright law allows. MyHava were being growled at over unmodified copies of busybox, so there's no stretch at all here, let alone overstretch.
"Or the judge might rule that certain actions that were thought to be insufficient to be in compliance with the GPL are actually sufficient. For example, the judge could rule that "the source code being available" is sufficient and it doesn't matter where the source code is available. Or that only a "majority" of the source code need to be available, etc."
Doesn't that require completely ignoring the clear and unambiguous language of section 3 of the GPL? Won't section 7 kick in so that everyone in that jurisdiction loses their GPL right? What basis in law would the judge have for cherrypicking the parts of the GPL that license the code to Monsoon, but not the parts that say what conditions Monsoon have to obey?
You're referring to only one court case, Jacobsen vs Katzer, Kamind and Russell
That related to the Artistic License, NOT the GPL. There are a number of relevant differences though, including the fact that the GPL has an explicit termination condition, whereas the Artistic License doesn't. Certainly though, the ruling you refer to is very disconcerting.
Actually the relevant Ayn Rand sections are contained in a tedious 60-page monologue near the end of her magnum opus "Asstunnel Shrugged"
Except that the point of the unbundling thing is so that it would be reasonable for OEM's (or even Microsoft, if it felt like it) to bundle windows with netscape or opera or Mosaic or whatever instead, back before Microsoft destroyed the commercial browser market. The whole purpose of Microsoft bundling IE for free with every Windows computer (and making it impossible to uninstall) was to destroy Netscape by forcing everyone to have an equivalent product to Netscape's already installed on their desktop, whether they liked it or not.
The fact that IE was free came as a big shock to everyone, even to the guys who made it and sold it to Microsoft; Microsoft fucked those guys over by offering them a royalty on sales of the browser, which was $0.
"Every MS machine I've used quickly had firefox installed."
How many had IE uninstalled?
I don't know exactly what interdiction involves (it's a military term so I can make a guess) , but it seems to be an exploit in utorrent that they use to disrupt downloading of utorrent users. The less people use utorrent, the harder it is for MediaDefender to practice this 'interdiction'. MediaDefender seems to be quite worried every time a new version comes out, and they do try to get their customers to use utorrent when checking torrent sites to see that their files are being spoofed properly.
Some of this stuff could conceivably be used by MD's customers to sue MediaDefender for deliberately misleading them as to the effectiveness of their spoofing, like this one, when Amy Winehouse' record company wants to come and see how well they're doing:
Oh, and their emails do show them avidly reading slasdot and Digg and the like whenever a scandal affects them. So hello and welcome, to all you grifters taking the piss out of corporate record executives in ineffective-but-lucrative-peer-to-peer-spoofing land!
If you read the emails, apparently utorrent is their favourite torrent client, since it allows them to 'interdict' torrents, whatever that means. Whatever they're up to, that surely warrants a campaign to boycott the client in favour of free software torrent clients where these sorts of deficiencies can at least be fixed by anyone who cares.
Oh, and the rumors of them being behind the spyware-encrusted ziptorrent were false; that one seems to have been MediaSentry's doing.
No. Going back over the postings shows you refusing to address MY argument that you can't call something a different name. Your whole argument throughout has been to doggedly call a charge for source code something else and expecting me to fall for that, even when examining the actual transactions involved totally put the lie to it. You continually claim the transactions are voluntary, which, in a way they are, but they're the same sort of 'voluntary' transaction as a mutual agreement to impose a Microsoft-style EULA on the software. I mentioned that, but you denied it without any clear attempt at refutation.
Nowhere do you ever address my point that the GPL prevents even 'voluntary' restrictions and obligations, if they are incompatible with the GPL. Nowhere do you ever state any legal principle that gives the distributor the right to refuse source code merely because of non-payment your supposed 'full' price of the binary. You just bang on the same old tune, interspersing it with more ad hominems as you go along, trolling harder and harder.
"They weren't attack,"
"Your so blinded by zeal"
"you won't take the blinders off."
"You have a hard time wrapping your head around the fact"
"I think your just upset"
"You need to wake up."
It's only AFTER taking this shit for three or four posts that I eventually bit and called you an ignoramus, with very good reason. Then the ad hominems got worse.
Okay, one last bite. Then I'm off.
Two things:
"OK your right and everyone else is wrong."
No. You're wrong, and everyone else is right.
"...your resort to name calling..."
Hey, YOU were the one who started the ad hominems first, and you've been insulting me throughout this discussion, culminating in this latest depressingly infantile epistle of yours. I actually ignored your insults for the first couple of posts, before pointing out you were an ignoramus, when it was blatantly obvious you didn't have a clue about what you were talking about.
"No you ignoramus, "at cost" is the cost if the product."
No it isn't. I used the phrase, and I know damn well what it meant when I said it. The very first definition of 'at cost' that google gives me concurs with me. As will almost any other definition you care to look up. Consider the fact that you're trivially proven wrong here a small cluestick that you're almost certainly wrong elsewhere.
None of the rest of your pointless shit is anything more than the same tired old semantic drivel that doesn't address anything I said, just reiterates your moronic position that you think you can impose new conditions and charges as long as you merely SAY that they're old ones. That easily fails the duck test.
As do you. I'm bored with your trolling.
"The two aren't even comparable. You are not imposing anything, you are offering and someone else is agreeing. If you don't voluntarily wish to agree, you pay the regular costs."
Okay, I paid the regular costs. Now I want my source, at cost. What gives you the right to deny me the source code, at cost price? That's right, some sort of 'obligation', that I agreed to. YOU used the word 'obligation', not me. But the GPL doesn't actually allow you to impose such obligations on the downstream user. It says those sorts of restrictions are forbidden, and it makes no exceptions for when the downstream user 'consents' to them.
"at costs huh, What the hell do you think X dollars is? It is the costs. The discounted cost, which isn't the cost, it is the discounted costs is the cost minus a sum for an agreement outside the scope of the license but pertaining to the product in question."
No, you ignoramus. "at cost" is the cost, to the distributor, of distributing and copying the product, which is pretty clear in context. Cost, in general, is not necessarily equal to the price - there are terms like 'markup' and 'profit' to describe that sort of stuff. However, here, the GPL stipulates that the source must be distributed, at no more than the cost of shipping the source, to any third party who asks. That's the 'cost' I'm talking about.
"They wouldn't? Sane judges look at deals and contracts all the time. They would look at the deal you made to get the discount, see that you didn't follow through with your obligations and then make you pay the difference because you didn't uphold the value of your part of the agreement."
You can't impose any GPL-incompatible obligations without breaching copyright law. The GPL forbids you from making any agreements that impose such obligations on third parties. It doesn't excuse the deals if those obligations being 'by mutual agreement'. ALL licensing agreements are mutual agreements. The clue here is that even you have to use the word 'obligation', which you can't characterise as being for the binary, and no matter how many ad hominem insults you throw at me, you'll still never get that word in. The customer was under NO GPL-incompatible obligations, until he or she asked for the source. The obligation here is the obligation to pay more than cost price if the customer asks for the source code. Calling it a 'discount' or 'the full price of the binary' fools nobody.
As for 'the deal you made to get the discount', that's irrelevant. Because the likely court case here is between the GPL copyright holder and the distributor. The customer is only here as a witness. The distributor made two deals here, one with the customer, which the customer may or may not have broken, and one with the copyright holder (the GPL), which he broke by attempting to make a GPL incompatible deal with the customer. The language of the GPL and the language of your deal are clearly incompatible, and in that case, regardless of the status of the deal between the customer and distributor, the distributor loses in a copyright case.
"And outside you crying about the "GPL says this",which doesn't even come into play, you cannot show that it can't be done."
Yes it does. Your trolling arse can't seem to get over the fact that the law makes it's own mind up over what stuff is. No matter what names you give something, if the judge has half a brain, he'll give it the proper name and deal with it accordingly. Law is all about giving the correct names to things in order that the law can deal with them, so there's absolutely NO lawyer out there that's going to be fooled by your nonsensical sophist shit. They've been playing this game for hundreds of years. An amateur like you would be toast.
"I don't think you are willing to look at this objectively. It is in no way shape or form, someone imposing restrictions. It is someone offering a discount and someone else agreeing to take it. There is no imposing going on at all."
Only in the same way that there's no 'imposing' going on with the Microsoft EULA. That is, technically, a voluntary agreement too, in that nobody's forced to take it. However, offering someone gcc only on the conditions that they abide by Microsoft EULA terms, and attempting to enforce such terms, would still be a heinous beach of the GPL and copyright law. You can ask someone nicely not to take their full GPL rights, but any attempt to enforce that legally would land you in legal hot water.
"It is simple. The GPL effects the people distributing the license. It doesn't kick in with possession."
So it does. And when someone distributes a GPLed binary on it's own, for commercial gain, they do so on the condition that they are offering the source code to the person receiving the code, and any third party that asks, for a period of three years, at cost price. If they refuse to offer that source code, they are violating the GPL. It doesn't matter if the person receiving the binary paid them $20 or $400. That 'any third party' totally spoils your fun too, by the way. Even in the unlikely event you didn't pull this bullshit sophistry right out of your rectum, the simple workaround is just say to my friend Bob 'Ask him for the source code'. Bob didn't pay for the binary in the first place, so there's no way you can charge him anything above cost.
"WTF are you talking about. I can charge anything I want for a GPLed work."
You can charge it for the services of distributing or copying or writing it. You CANNOT charge a license fee (i.e. permission to run the code), as per section 2b. And it's possible that what you're demanding this $380 for would look like a license fee, which is why I brought it up.
How would this work in practice? I pay $20 for the binary, then demand source code for next to nothing. I then contact the copyright holder and he takes you to court. I show the invoice for $380 and ask what the price is for. Is it the price for shipping the binaries? Nope, you already shipped them for $20. Is it for shipping the source? Nope, section 3b of the GPL says it isn't. Is it the price I have to pay to be allowed to run the binaries in my possession? Can you take me to court to stop me running the code I supposedly, in bizarro-world, haven't paid for? Nope, because that's a license fee, and the GPL states that the code must be licensed 'at no charge' to any third party.
And before you say it yet again, NO. No way would any sane judge look at that $380 and say it was for the binaries that you'd already shipped to me, that you weren't asking more money for.
"You and I can come to a seperate agreement over any transaction we make between us. The GPL does nothing to stop this."
It stops you attempting to enforce your half of the bargain, if the conditions therein are GPL incompatible. See my first point.
"You have a hard time wrapping your head around the fact that some people don't want the source or any of the freedoms the GPL imposes."
Not at all. YOUR problem is that you think you can give a duck a different name and you expect others to think it's not a duck any more. Walks waddles, quacks.
And why does your argument fail when talking about the GPL? That's right, because the GPL is explicitly opposed to these sorts of practices. If anyone was ever to attempt to impose any condition like the ones in your second paragraph on the user of GPLed software, they would be in flagrant breach of section 6 of the GPL, and by extension, copyright law.
And how on earth do you reconcile that with section 3b of the GPL? (version 2 - version 3 gives some scope for a markup in the price of source)
If you've given out the cheap binary of GPLed code, and you're trying to charge $400 a pop for it, then you MUST offer source according to this section of the GPL. What gives you the right to impose a fee more than the cost of shipping the source?
You simply can't turn round and impose a retroactive fee for the binary, since no matter what words you use for it, to characterise it in law, it's got to be either some sort of retroactive license fee on use of the binary(no way can you claim this is the fee for shipping the already-shipped binary), an unreasonably large charge for the source code (not allowed) or some sort of condition imposed on the user of the binary before he's allowed to get his GPL-mandated source code (not allowed).
No matter how hard you obfuscate this, it's still a GPL violation.
This is just the same sort of semantic gamesplaying as the original poster.
What we have here is two products:
GPLed product without source for $20
and the same GPLed product with source for $2000
And the $1980 price tag for source code is couched in euphemistic language as a 'voluntary discount' for those that go without. And by the same logic Ferraris are free, but you just get a $300,000 discount on your Ferrari tax if you do without. Nobody's likely to be fooled by such blatant sophistry, least of all judges.
Judges aren't automatons, and they are able to use their common sense when interpreting laws and documents (the GPL cases in Germany are prime examples of this). Your arrangement is certainly well outwith the spirit of the GPL, which makes it abundantly clear that anyone who gets the GPLed version should be offered the source at cost price. Judges almost certainly will take that, and the ideological waffle in the GPL preamble into account, when looking at a case of this nature, as proof of intentions of one of the parties in the agreement.
As for the customer 'lying about his intentions', that's of little concern to the court, since the customer isn't suing the distributor, the GPL copyright holder is. The customer's only role here is 'I got my GPLed binary, but they wouldn't give me source at a reasonable price' at a witness stand.
My bad. I certainly was thinking about section 3.
There are alternatives to the 'any third party' distribution, but they're not applicable in this instance; there's 3a (giving the source code with the binary, but they didn't do that) and 3c (passing on someone else's 3b offer, but that's for noncommercial users). I suggest lowering the ignorance quotient before contradicting people in future...
Wrong. Reread section 2b of version 2 of the GPL. Section 2c doesn't apply because this is a commercial enterprise, and section 2b obliges you to offer source code to 'any third party' for up to three years.
And how does that not conflict with section 6 of the GPL?
The section that says:
"You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
Demanding a 'voluntary' waiver of the source code right prior to distributing code to someone is almost certainly going to be considered a legal restriction on that code, semantic differences aside (unless your judge happens to have shoved a hatpin through his frontal lobes that day).
In any case, a commercial enterprise would have to rely on section 2b of the GPL as far as the distribution is concerned, which forces them to offer source code for at least three years to "any third party". So even if a lobotomised judge does let this pass and your intended victim has 'voluntarily' waived his right to source code, you still have to offer source to downstream users.