When I get a company PC, and it has software loaded on it, that software is being *distributed* to me.
Distribution is only taking place if the company says "you are now the owner of this PC, and you are the owner of this software copy". By own, I mean that if you quit the job you could take the PC and the software copy with you.
If it's not distribution (and if it doesn't trigger GPL provisions, it cannot be distribution), then copyright law cannot apply, and while a software EULA may (questionably) apply, software or music with no EULA should be just as freely "distributable" as GPL software.
The company is the owner of the original copy, and if it makes a second copy it also owns that second copy. Yes, this activity is regulated by copyright law, and the company only gets to do this because the license allows them to. The second act of them providing an employee with the computer (while maintaining ownership of this computer), does not involve copyright law.
When the company makes a copy of music by streaming it, copyright law regulates the activity.
This is incorrect. B is an employee or other person within an organization. If your employer uses GPL-based software, and it is provided to you, you have the right to get the source for it, and you have the right to re-distribute it outside the organization.
No. The entity owning the copy is the employer, the employee is just a person being paid to push buttons for the company, they do not own company assets. Only the owner of the copy gets the freedoms connected to the license, and the company is the entity that owns the copy.
If an employer explicitly gave an employee a copy and said "you are the owner of this copy, not us", then you are right, A and B are now separate entities and A must pass on freedoms to B. In this case it is no longer relevant that B works for A, the exchange is no longer intra-organizational. That would be unusual, normally employers say "we own this assets, your job is to operate it for us".
Let us entertain the absurd siltation where corporation A (the only owner of a copy) gives employee B access to its copy so B can get some work done. B could try complaining to the copyright holder, C, "A won't give me access to the source", and C will tell B to "shut the fuck up and go back to work".
If every person within an organization was considered the same legal entity, then corporations would only need to purchase 1 license for every piece of software they used,
A corporation can buy one license if they want, copyright law would just restrict use of it to one machine at a time. Unfortunately proprietary software companies add additional restrictions via their licenses, and they can pressure their users to accept terms concerning the # of employees, # of computers, or # of cpus.
one copy of every book they need,
A corporation can buy one copy of a book, leave it on a bookshelf and allow multiple employees to access it. Absolutely legal.
and it would be legal to set up music servers that streamed music off corporate-purchased CDs to everyone in the company without paying any further fees.
The prohibition of this under copyright law has nothing to do with entity/employer/employee distinctions. Streaming the music involves making a copy, copyright law regulates the making of copies, and fair use/fair dealing does not provide an exception allowing copying in that case.
Qt started out with a commercial license for all platforms and a GPL license for Linux. Criticism of the use of Qt for the KDE project is what started the GNOME project and their use of GTK. Many loud and annoying voices claimed that it was wrong to rely on Trolltech to develop Qt and that if Trolltech was sold or if their business failed, then the GPL version of Qt could no longer be available.
The original Qt was not under the GPL, it was under a license that was not free software and was not
open source. Thus to use KDE, a user had to give up their freedom and use Qt. GNOME was started for this reason. If Qt had been available under a free software license on free platforms at that time, GNOME would not have been started.
As a self confessed "free software zealot", you sure as hell won't catch me saying “hey that's bad, you can't write proprietary software with it!” Whoever says such a thing is obviously not a true believer.
Ooops, sorry for the formating, forgot to switch back to plain ol text
> distribution within an organization is absolutely considerd "distribution" under copyright > law and should invoke the GPL, and I'm not sure why they think it shouldn't.
Okay, what if distribution within an organization is "distribution"? One entity (A) distributes a copy of the software to another entity (B). A must pass on its freedom to B as required by the license. I hope you don't think A is now also required to post the code publicly, (such as on sourceforge) that is a myth about copyleft. A is only required to pass on the same freedoms to B. It turns out that A and B are the same organization. As A=B, this whole exercise was a bit useless. A/B in fact has no possible way to deprive itself of freedom. A/B has no way to violate the license when distributing to itself.
> distribution within an organization is absolutely considerd "distribution" under copyright
> law and should invoke the GPL, and I'm not sure why they think it shouldn't.
Okay, what if distribution within an organization is "distribution"? One entity (A) distributes a copy of the software to another entity (B). A must pass on its freedom to B as required by the license. I hope you don't think A is now also required to post the code publicly, (such as on sourceforge) that is a myth about copyleft. A is only required to pass on the same freedoms to B.
It turns out that A and B are the same organization. As A=B, this whole exercise was a bit useless. A/B in fact has no possible way to deprive itself of freedom. A/B has no way to violate the license when distributing to itself.
You would be surprised by the number of developers that I know that developed their apps using MySQL and then had to pay for the comercial license many months later because they didn't read the fine print. Lets just say that if they had known beforehand they would have charged a little more for their applications;-)
They should of considered another option, they could of respected thier customer's freedom by compling with the license and they would not have had a need to give MySQL AB anything.
If copyright law were changed to allow verbatim, non-commercial distribution of any work, would you still financially support your favorite bands as you do now?
The same old questions are obviously going to prompt the same old answers. List the questions in this interview that haven't been asked of RMS elsewhere.
I believe there has to be a better way to try and stop all the file sharing other then charging someone a couple thousand and giving them jail time.
How can this possibly be done without implementing a digital police state? Keep in mind that the next generation of file sharing programs will provide near anonymity.
The GPL has yet to be tested in court and it is my opinion that a court would not validate the license method.
Find me a credible copyright law expert who shares this opinion, or give me a law based argument for it. Do you hold this view just because you don't like concept of copyleft?
The lawyers of several companies who were at one point not in compliance do not agree with you. Some of them could of afforded a court battle if they felt they were right and I'm willing to guess that in some cases such a battle would of been worth the effort. One company in Germany made the mistake of thinking this way; they lost. The FSF has dealt privately with a very large number of such companies, they have never failed to convince them how foolish a court challenge would be.
The law is very clear. Copying software without permission is copyright infringement. A copyright holder is allowed to grant other people the right to do things they wouldn't normally be allowed to do under copyright law, and the copyright holder can limit the scope of this grant. The mechanism for doing this is called a license. Licenses to do things not normally allowed under copyright law, but with some limitations are common under all kinds of works. They idea that a license can set limits instead only allowing unconditional copying is well tested.
It becomes a way in which OSS will fail because it defeats the original purpose of the GPL license which was to be different from BSD and other types of open source licenses in that this was supposed to be the one that does NOT get taken advantage of. By simply lying and decieving however, it is quite possible to take advantage of GPL software.
I will concede that if there was an extremely large amount of infringement taking place it would be somewhat of a defeat. This could only happen if your GPL death scenario plays out. If the GPL continues to be regarded as legally sound, a large amount of infringement can't take place. The more popular something becomes, the chance that somebody notices the infringement increases.
Who said the GPL is about not being taken advantage of? It's about ensuring that everyone who receives a copy gets freedom! If I write a piece of software, license it under the GPL, and some company uses it and successfully hides their infringement, how have I been "taken advantage of"? The outcome of them turning my GPL program into a proprietary program and successfully hiding it is no different in it's effect on me than them using their own proprietary program. The people who lose something are the recipients of this product, as they could of had freedom, but a lier and deceiver took it away from them.
"But what about dual licensing!" some will reply. Let's look at that scenario. I write a program, make it available under the GPL and also sell a version to those willing to pay that has no copyleft restrictions. Some company obtains the GPL copy, uses it in a product and hides their infringement. What if I had not made available a GPL version, only the for sale non-copyleft one. The same company that could successfully hide their failure to comply with the GPL could also obtain a copy of the sale only one and successfully hide their infringement again, it would just be harder to get that first copy.
I admit, the last two paragraphs are only valid arguments if we assume that copyleft is safe as a legal concept. I encourage you to elaborate on your view that it isn't.
Even if copyleft is defeated as a legal concept, it will not lead to the failure of the free software movement. Yes, the death of copyleft means there will be more people offering proprietary software derived from free software, but this doesn't take away the choice of using free software, and it certainly won't stop the millions of people who will continue to choose to do so.
None of the above use the GNU C Library and GNU coreutils, which along with Linux and Bash are the most fundamental operating system pieces that combined make GNU/Linux a free clone of Unix.
People who try to work towards a perfect world will fail to do so, but while trying will contribute more than those resigned to selfishness and pessimism.
Socialists always advocate for such things yet never learn from the lessons of the past.
What lessons of the past should I learn from? Show me another example of a worldwide social movement that worked on voluntary co-operation, and had the tremendous level of success we currently enjoy.
There are two ways in which OSS will ultimately fail.
1. Sufficient numbers of SKILLED programmers will fail to see the wisdom of giving away their valuable labor just for some nebulous "social good".
Nebulous "social good"? No. We see the results of our work and the good it does. We see the wisdom in our valuable labour, there is a large amount of pride in our community because of it.
Making Linux freely available is the single best decision I've ever made.
Linus Torvalds
Inform me on the day when there is a decrease in overall participation in the free software movement from people deciding that their participation isn't in the best interest of themselves and their communities.
We really don't know and can never know how many hardware products are sold today or will be sold in the future using free software at their core. Since not that many people will have access to the proprietary source it is very possible and convienent for a company to build a business off the backs of open source developers while simultaneously disrespecting the license of the software.
Any business that does this is taking a big risk. Penalties for copyright infringement are severe, and hiding such a secret is not easy. Let's examine your scenario though. Some business uses GPLed software in their product and manages to hide this. How does this become part of "ways in which OSS will ultimately fail."? If the business had not used the GPLed software, they would of either wrote their own, or legally or illegally used someone else's. How does this lead to a failure for the free software movement? None of these four outcomes are desirable, but none of them take anything away from the free software movement.
You can hire someone to program a utility that augments the original programs function
This is not always an option, but even when it is, such solutions can be uglier, and costlier.
you could hire someone to code up an alternative program from the ground up to get around whatever problem you were having in the original program.
Also for any large software category there's usually more than one choice. You could just pick an existing program to switch to.
How nice. A system where the solution to a problem is starting fresh, instead of allowing people to improve what they already have. The costs to do so are of course quite high, so people often will not do so, even when it's in their long term best interest.
This is how proprietary software breeds a negative spirit of helplessness. No wonder so many people hate computers.
It is also not impossible for problems to be fixed. If you have a bad enough problem you can hire someone to fix it. If you won't hire them, then it must not have been a big enough problem to begin with.
How can you hire someone to fix a problem if there is no source code for that person to work with? Should they hack on the assembly or virtual machine code?
Your reply focuses mostly on cost, which is something we in the Free Software Movement are not focused on. Cost is a shallow reason to switch to free software.
Try thinking about the ethics of refusing to share something that is useful and easy to copy. Would you say to your friends, "sorry I won't give you a copy." ?
Think about the ethics of denying someone access to software source code. You are denying them control over their own devices and communications, you are taking away any possibility of customizations being created for their specific needs, you are making it impossible for problems to be fixed, and you are preventing them from co-operating with other people to make it better. To do so is wrong.
So you can live in a world where everyone is free to share and modify software. A world were we are nice to each other instead of hoarding useful information from each other.
I've never purchased a Mac because they simply don't have the software titles I'm interested in and Windows does. I mean sure, they've got great stuff, but they lack in GAMES, yes games
How would making Mac OS X available for all x86 machines improve this situation that keeps you from buying a Mac? Just because you have the same hardware arch as windows doesn't mean you can run windows apps.
Yes, there are software solutions to this problem, but they will work just as well on an Apple x86 as on a whitebox x86.
Slashdot Mirror
> to a loss of support from major companies for newer versions of the GPL.
Popularity is not the goal of the free software movment.
Distribution is only taking place if the company says "you are now the owner of this PC, and you are the owner of this software copy". By own, I mean that if you quit the job you could take the PC and the software copy with you.
The company is the owner of the original copy, and if it makes a second copy it also owns that second copy. Yes, this activity is regulated by copyright law, and the company only gets to do this because the license allows them to. The second act of them providing an employee with the computer (while maintaining ownership of this computer), does not involve copyright law.
When the company makes a copy of music by streaming it, copyright law regulates the activity.
No. The entity owning the copy is the employer, the employee is just a person being paid to push buttons for the company, they do not own company assets. Only the owner of the copy gets the freedoms connected to the license, and the company is the entity that owns the copy.
If an employer explicitly gave an employee a copy and said "you are the owner of this copy, not us", then you are right, A and B are now separate entities and A must pass on freedoms to B. In this case it is no longer relevant that B works for A, the exchange is no longer intra-organizational. That would be unusual, normally employers say "we own this assets, your job is to operate it for us".
Let us entertain the absurd siltation where corporation A (the only owner of a copy) gives employee B access to its copy so B can get some work done. B could try complaining to the copyright holder, C, "A won't give me access to the source", and C will tell B to "shut the fuck up and go back to work".
A corporation can buy one license if they want, copyright law would just restrict use of it to one machine at a time. Unfortunately proprietary software companies add additional restrictions via their licenses, and they can pressure their users to accept terms concerning the # of employees, # of computers, or # of cpus.
A corporation can buy one copy of a book, leave it on a bookshelf and allow multiple employees to access it. Absolutely legal.
The prohibition of this under copyright law has nothing to do with entity/employer/employee distinctions. Streaming the music involves making a copy, copyright law regulates the making of copies, and fair use/fair dealing does not provide an exception allowing copying in that case.
You can use the version of Qt under the GPL for commercial work too.
You missed a vital part of the history.
The original Qt was not under the GPL, it was under a license that was not free software and was not open source. Thus to use KDE, a user had to give up their freedom and use Qt. GNOME was started for this reason. If Qt had been available under a free software license on free platforms at that time, GNOME would not have been started.
As a self confessed "free software zealot", you sure as hell won't catch me saying “hey that's bad, you can't write proprietary software with it!” Whoever says such a thing is obviously not a true believer.
Ooops, sorry for the formating, forgot to switch back to plain ol text
> distribution within an organization is absolutely considerd "distribution" under copyright
> law and should invoke the GPL, and I'm not sure why they think it shouldn't.
Okay, what if distribution within an organization is "distribution"? One entity (A) distributes a copy of the software to another entity (B). A must pass on its freedom to B as required by the license. I hope you don't think A is now also required to post the code publicly, (such as on sourceforge) that is a myth about copyleft. A is only required to pass on the same freedoms to B. It turns out that A and B are the same organization. As A=B, this whole exercise was a bit useless. A/B in fact has no possible way to deprive itself of freedom. A/B has no way to violate the license when distributing to itself.
> distribution within an organization is absolutely considerd "distribution" under copyright > law and should invoke the GPL, and I'm not sure why they think it shouldn't. Okay, what if distribution within an organization is "distribution"? One entity (A) distributes a copy of the software to another entity (B). A must pass on its freedom to B as required by the license. I hope you don't think A is now also required to post the code publicly, (such as on sourceforge) that is a myth about copyleft. A is only required to pass on the same freedoms to B. It turns out that A and B are the same organization. As A=B, this whole exercise was a bit useless. A/B in fact has no possible way to deprive itself of freedom. A/B has no way to violate the license when distributing to itself.
They should of considered another option, they could of respected thier customer's freedom by compling with the license and they would not have had a need to give MySQL AB anything.
If copyright law were changed to allow verbatim, non-commercial distribution of any work, would you still financially support your favorite bands as you do now?
All of us.
The same old questions are obviously going to prompt the same old answers. List the questions in this interview that haven't been asked of RMS elsewhere.
They have a feedback page. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/feedback/ Be sure to mention the T word.
How can this possibly be done without implementing a digital police state? Keep in mind that the next generation of file sharing programs will provide near anonymity.
Find me a credible copyright law expert who shares this opinion, or give me a law based argument for it. Do you hold this view just because you don't like concept of copyleft?
The lawyers of several companies who were at one point not in compliance do not agree with you. Some of them could of afforded a court battle if they felt they were right and I'm willing to guess that in some cases such a battle would of been worth the effort. One company in Germany made the mistake of thinking this way; they lost. The FSF has dealt privately with a very large number of such companies, they have never failed to convince them how foolish a court challenge would be.
The law is very clear. Copying software without permission is copyright infringement. A copyright holder is allowed to grant other people the right to do things they wouldn't normally be allowed to do under copyright law, and the copyright holder can limit the scope of this grant. The mechanism for doing this is called a license. Licenses to do things not normally allowed under copyright law, but with some limitations are common under all kinds of works. They idea that a license can set limits instead only allowing unconditional copying is well tested.
I will concede that if there was an extremely large amount of infringement taking place it would be somewhat of a defeat. This could only happen if your GPL death scenario plays out. If the GPL continues to be regarded as legally sound, a large amount of infringement can't take place. The more popular something becomes, the chance that somebody notices the infringement increases.
Who said the GPL is about not being taken advantage of? It's about ensuring that everyone who receives a copy gets freedom! If I write a piece of software, license it under the GPL, and some company uses it and successfully hides their infringement, how have I been "taken advantage of"? The outcome of them turning my GPL program into a proprietary program and successfully hiding it is no different in it's effect on me than them using their own proprietary program. The people who lose something are the recipients of this product, as they could of had freedom, but a lier and deceiver took it away from them.
"But what about dual licensing!" some will reply. Let's look at that scenario. I write a program, make it available under the GPL and also sell a version to those willing to pay that has no copyleft restrictions. Some company obtains the GPL copy, uses it in a product and hides their infringement. What if I had not made available a GPL version, only the for sale non-copyleft one. The same company that could successfully hide their failure to comply with the GPL could also obtain a copy of the sale only one and successfully hide their infringement again, it would just be harder to get that first copy.
I admit, the last two paragraphs are only valid arguments if we assume that copyleft is safe as a legal concept. I encourage you to elaborate on your view that it isn't.
Even if copyleft is defeated as a legal concept, it will not lead to the failure of the free software movement. Yes, the death of copyleft means there will be more people offering proprietary software derived from free software, but this doesn't take away the choice of using free software, and it certainly won't stop the millions of people who will continue to choose to do so.
I dare you to compare:
- 2.6.12.5.tar.gz
t ar.gz. tar.gzr .bz2. gzt ar.gz
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux
(keep in mind that most of this is driver code)
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/glibc/glibc-2.3.4.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.0.
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-3.0.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.1.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar/tar-1.15.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/gzip-1.2.4.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-4.1.4.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/findutils/findutils-4.2.23
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-4.0.1/gcc-4.0.1.ta
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.16.tar
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/make/make-3.80.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/patch/patch-2.5.4.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/diffutils/diffutils-2.8.1.
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk/gawk-3.1.5.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bc/bc-1.06.tar.gz
None of the above use the GNU C Library and GNU coreutils, which along with Linux and Bash are the most fundamental operating system pieces that combined make GNU/Linux a free clone of Unix.
People who try to work towards a perfect world will fail to do so, but while trying will contribute more than those resigned to selfishness and pessimism.
What lessons of the past should I learn from? Show me another example of a worldwide social movement that worked on voluntary co-operation, and had the tremendous level of success we currently enjoy.
Nebulous "social good"? No. We see the results of our work and the good it does. We see the wisdom in our valuable labour, there is a large amount of pride in our community because of it.
Inform me on the day when there is a decrease in overall participation in the free software movement from people deciding that their participation isn't in the best interest of themselves and their communities.
Any business that does this is taking a big risk. Penalties for copyright infringement are severe, and hiding such a secret is not easy. Let's examine your scenario though. Some business uses GPLed software in their product and manages to hide this. How does this become part of "ways in which OSS will ultimately fail."? If the business had not used the GPLed software, they would of either wrote their own, or legally or illegally used someone else's. How does this lead to a failure for the free software movement? None of these four outcomes are desirable, but none of them take anything away from the free software movement.
This is not always an option, but even when it is, such solutions can be uglier, and costlier.
How nice. A system where the solution to a problem is starting fresh, instead of allowing people to improve what they already have. The costs to do so are of course quite high, so people often will not do so, even when it's in their long term best interest.
This is how proprietary software breeds a negative spirit of helplessness. No wonder so many people hate computers.
How can you hire someone to fix a problem if there is no source code for that person to work with? Should they hack on the assembly or virtual machine code?
Your reply focuses mostly on cost, which is something we in the Free Software Movement are not focused on. Cost is a shallow reason to switch to free software.
Try thinking about the ethics of refusing to share something that is useful and easy to copy. Would you say to your friends, "sorry I won't give you a copy." ?
Think about the ethics of denying someone access to software source code. You are denying them control over their own devices and communications, you are taking away any possibility of customizations being created for their specific needs, you are making it impossible for problems to be fixed, and you are preventing them from co-operating with other people to make it better. To do so is wrong.
Read the link I provided, and some other articles from the Philosophy of the GNU Project page.
Free software is a matter of liberty not price.
So you can live in a world where everyone is free to share and modify software. A world were we are nice to each other instead of hoarding useful information from each other.
Why Software Should Be FreeI don't give a shit about TOC. You can't put a price on freedom.
Something that is a problem for such companies is a problem for all of us. The contributions from businesses to free software have been substantial.
How would making Mac OS X available for all x86 machines improve this situation that keeps you from buying a Mac? Just because you have the same hardware arch as windows doesn't mean you can run windows apps.
Yes, there are software solutions to this problem, but they will work just as well on an Apple x86 as on a whitebox x86.