I have never seen or read anywhere, in the license or on the FSF website, that the intention of the GPL was to explicitly destroy the software business, nor have I seen anything of RMS saying that OS/GPL companies were parasites that he tolerated. However, if these statements are true, could you perhaps provide links to back them up?
See the quotes from RMS in some of my earlier messages in this discussion; they have pointers to documents where he has stated his intention to reduce all programmers to the level of starving graduate students.
RMS explicitly called Tim O'Reilly (who publishes books about open source products) and John Ousterhout "parasites" in public forums last summer (see http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199809/ms g00159.html for one account of this).
As for your idea of selling content: this is problematic because it only works in a few specialized cases (e.g. games and books). Some content (e.g. "levels" for games) is so easy to pirate -- especially if the program that uses it is open source -- that it might well be hard to make money from it. And books can be undercut by free documentation, which Stallman advocates publishing under the GPL. (In fact, he already does publish some manuals under the GPL.) So, I doubt that these are viable options either.
Before I read your post I was merrily proceeding trying to license my Smalltalk packages under the GPL..
Now I guess I am looking for an alternative.
There are a lot of reasons -- I think -- why most of the alternatives are better. I'd be glad to point you to some that might be suitable for your project.
I wish that you would in detail outline your reasoning with links to your resources.
Several people have now asked me to do so, and I am now editing together a series of Web pages which do this. The issue is big and complex, and some people try to turn any discussion of the GPL into a political fight or a flame war. So, I'm having the material reviewed by people who are especially sensitive to these things to be sure that they're as objective and fair as they can be.
Also, it seems like to me that there may be a few ways to skin a cat that you are not recognising?/aware of?
Maybe, though I have done my best to consider things as thoroughly as I can.
Is it not the case that one can divide one's commercial app based on GPL code into two sections? One that is open source and one that is closed source. The code that calls or activates the GPL lib stuff must be made available to your customers. or is it that you do not need to open source the code that calls the GPL lib but you must distribute any changes you make to the lib?
If a library is licensed under the GPL (rather than the LGPL), code that links to it is "infected" by the GPL and cannot be made closed source. Some people say that this applies to dynamic linking, too; others say it doesn't. But there is general agreement that it does apply to static linking.
As in directly modifying GPL subroutines? But subroutines that you add to the lib don't need to have source distributed?
If you modify the GPLed code and then distribute the modified version, you must distribute the source.
Anyway, assuming that you must distribute source on anything that calls or activates GPL code, you can still hide your proprietary stuff by making a seperate program B that works closely together with the GPL dependent program A. These programs can communicate via files at the very least. And because of Disk caches this shouldn't be too slow. Perhaps pipes and such could also be used just so long as program B does not call A and tell it to activate GPL code. I do this kind of thing in my own code using the Clipboard as the user simple means of communications between some methods where the user can jump in there if desired. The user can cobble functions together in different ways because they communicate via the Clipboard.
This is a workaround that has been used before. BeOS has used this technique so that it can make use of Linux device drivers. It makes the device drivers into "daemons" which communicate with the OS via inter-process communications. Many of the more radical supporters of the GPL believe this is a loophole that should be closed by modifying the GPL.
If I am not wrong the GPL doesn't bar this?
It is generally agreed that this is a workable loophole for some people today. But it may not be in the future!
My idea was that companies who want to make commercial programs using my lib would have to ( under the GPL provide source code( or even better a special Smalltalk image ) to any methods that they make that call my GPLed code either directly or indirectly.
But code that doesn't call my lib methods can remain closed and be hidden in the image. Thus a user might be able to get the required copy of Dolphin Smalltalk load up the special image, and see and modify the code that calls my code. Thus they could add their own user interface to it and add their own custom addons. And since they would also know hopefully the data being set up for the hidden Program B part to consume they would also be able to customize it's functioning too.
If this is what the GPL provides then I guess I will go with the GPL( but I will try to read the others too. Maybe I like them better. ).
The GPL, unfortunately, runs into really serious problems as far as OOP goes, because in OOP you are in effect modifying someone else's code when you subclass, override, etc. In effect, using something like the GPL would prevent the use of your Smalltalk to create anything commercial! I don't think that this is a good policy.
Once license that you might want to consider instead is the eCOS License -- the license used by Cygnus, Inc. for its embedded real time operating system. Under this sort of license, licensees are required to provide you with source for fixes or improvements to your code -- in the case of OOP, this would mean your base set of objects and methods. But if they create their own custom subclasses, they are not required to give them away. This helps you improve your product but does not burden the developer to the point where he or she will say, "Sorry, I just can't use your Smalltalk; the license forces me to give away all of my work." The developer can keep his or her own original work, which is fair.
Even if the code is licensed more liberally (e.g. under the BSD license) the developer would be smart to tell you what changes he made to your base objects and methods, because they would then enter the code base that you were maintaining and he or she wouldn't have to patch each new version. So, we tend to see the same behavior that's explicitly required by the eCOS license under the BSD or MIT X licenses too. And these latter licenses have the advantage of simplicity and clarity; they're much shorter than the eCOS license. So, chances are that they'd work too.
Also-: Just because you are required to distribute your source code doesn't mean that you have to distribute usable source code. You can put a scrambler on it that adds misleading variable names and comments that are wrong. In effect, if the code is big enough, it becomes completely unmaintainable. There were some Smalltalk open source progams like that. Why bother trying to modify them. You might as well start from scratch.
ALSO-: There is a completely open source( but restricted distribution ) futures trading program written in Quick Basic that I know of that uses nothing but two letter variable names. And not that many comments either. It is about 400 to 800 lines long. Totally useless. Don't even try it. Many have tried and failed. Hackers and "Software Engineering" types have looked at it to no avail. We all threw up our hands and said that we might as well make a new one from scratch. If only we knew how. Now, it could be that we are not true hackers who can unsnarl raw Assembler in their sleep that was written by 1000 gibbering apes, who were also in their sleep when they wrote it, at the time, but I sir, am not one of those. And I have never actually met any who were neither. Although I did hear of one. Who took an assembler code where every third line was a jump so when you mapped out all the jumps graphically, every inch of code looked like a really snarly hair do. But I am not one of those. And as far as I can tell, most coders are not one of those neither, fer nothin. And he only succeeded because he was an expert at what that driver thing was trying to do.
The GPL doesn't permit this. It demands that the source code be readable and usable and not "shrouded."
In any event, I would say that for your application there are several licenses to choose from that might be better than the GPL. eCOS is one; the Artistic License is another; the MIT X license (the most liberal of all) is the third. As I've mentioned above, even under the MIT X license it is in developers' interest to send you information on improvements they have made to the classes and methods you supply, so you will probably be just fine with this very simple and least problematic license.
PS-: ( I thought that a few of the responses to your posts down below were a bit shrill and vitriolic. Like screaming stuck liberals or something. Ahh youth. When you are young if you are not liberal: You have got no heart. When you are older if you are not conservative: You have got no brain. )
Well, it seems in your case if the situation is not one of politics but rather of pragmatism. You want people to help you improve your product, which is a fair and reasonable thing to ask. But because you are not trying to engage in a political vendetta, using the GPL would be going too far. I think that one of the three licenses mentioned above would be about right. Myself, I'd just use the MIT X license because it is simplest and seems to produce the behavior you want via enlightened self interest.
I would guess that the ratio of hoarded code by private corporations to the FSF stach has got to be HUGE.
The ratio between the amount of code owned ("hoarded" is Stallman's pejorative term) by other people and that owned by Microsoft is likely quite small too. Yet Microsoft is malevolent and dangerous. The same is true of the FSF.
As for malice well I don't see where FSF can be compared to Microsoft.
It's actually much worse than Microsoft. Not all of Microsoft's products were created with the express intent of destroying others' livelihoods or driving honest people out of business. But the FSF's entire mission is to do this.
The FSF makes their code freely "usable" by anybody although they limit redistribution MS does not do this.
Actually, that's exactly what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer. And it achieved similar effects.
The FSF has broken no laws.
I believe that the FSF has defrauded the IRS by claiming to be a charitable non-profit organization. In fact, it accumulates capital (in the form of valuable code), competes directly with private enterprise, fails to means-test its benefits, and engages in other activities which disqualify it as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. Right now, the FSF is getting money from United Way -- money which was donated by people who wanted to contribute to charitable organizations -- when its real intent is to destroy proviate businesses. I believe that this is fraudulent.
The RMS has not commited perjury unlike Bill G. I don't see how you can say the FSF is as evil as MS when even a cursory glance at the dealings of MS will show them to be ruthless cut-throat businessmen who don't let little things like morals and ethics get in the way of them making money.
Microsoft is ruthless and cut-throat some of the time. The FSF is all the time.
what [Stallman] did not forsee however was the abuse of the patent system. If he had just patented all of his code in the beggining he would rule the world.
Ah.... Now we're getting down to brass tacks. If Stallman doesn't want money, what does he want? The answer: power and control -- in essence, to "rule the world."
Just as the pigs in the book "Animal Farm" eventually become as greedy as the farmer they displaced, we see that the FSF -- while it condemns the "hoarding" of software -- does so itself.
The FSF demands that all contributors to "GNU" projects sign over the rights to their work to the FSF. The FSF thus accumulates the rights to code in a way which it would deride if any other organization were to do so.
The FSF has accumulated control of millions of dollars' worth of software, and makes it non-free by denying its use to commercial programmers. This is the greatest hypocrisy of all. GPLed software is not "free" software at all. It's part of an empire which is now being built and which is no less malevolent than that of Microsoft.
Be was doomed from the start. What were they thinking?
They were thinking that they could create a better OS. And they did. They deserve credit.
If Linux didn't exist, they'd be just as dead (or you'd be saying that *BSD is wiping them out, except that you seem to like those guys).
Not so. BSD is not predatory; Be can (and does!) use BSD-licensed code to improve their own work. But Be is being crushed between a rock and a hard place -- between Microsoft and Linux, both of which are anti-competitive. It's sad to see.
Quite a few people (thousands) are making a reasonable living building on GPLed software.
Some of those people (hundreds, not thousands) are taking home decent paychecks -- for now. Some have stock which, if they cash out absolutely as soon as possible, might get them some money. But their companies are not making money, and the business model under which they're working is unproven and unsustainable. See the quotations I posted, earlier in this discussion, from Red Hat's own Form 10-Q.
What you are seeing is a transfer of money from speculative investors (who, in the long run, are likely to lose their shirts) to those who are willing to fool them.
The above is so loaded with ad hominem attacks and misinformation that it would be a considerable waste of time and effort to reply.
If you'd bothered to check, you'd know that I oppose UCITA -- for pro-consumer reasons, not for the petty reasons for which Stallman opposes it. (Stallman routinely opposes anything which he perceives as helping commercial software developers in any way.) I will continue to oppose not only UCITA but also the GPL, since both are unethical, unfair, and hostile to the interests of consumers and small businesses.
It is scary that the person who wrote this nonsense makes part of his living as a journalist,
Please do not argue ad hominem. It diminishes your credibility and adds nothing to the discussion.
as it is wrong in so many ways.
Not so. Every point I made was carefully thought out and researched, and is supported by ample evidence.
Stallman acted according to deeply held principles, not a "tantrum".
Stallman may have some very deeply held and "religious" beliefs; however, his reactions to such things as basic security measures for MIT's machines can only be classified as tantrums. Did you know that Stallman -- who served as a system administrator and system programmer -- even refused to let users put passwords on their accounts?
Yes, 'tis true, and it's documented. People who were at MIT at the time report that Stallman decrypted password files and sent messages to users saying, "I see your password is X. I suggest that you switch to the password [carriage return]. It's much easier to type, and also stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords."
He also modified the system code so that it would echo users' passwords to a public system console and system log as they logged in -- perhaps the first documented case of "password sniffing." He did this despite users' reasonable desire to keep their e-mail and other personal information private.
Steven Levy's book "Hackers" describes other ways in which Stallman fought security measures. Levy writes:
Stallman kept fighting, trying, he said, "to delay the fascist advances with every method I could." Though his official systems programming duties were equally divided between the computer science department and the AI Lab, he went "on strike" against the Lab for Computer Science because of their security policy. When he came out with a new version of his EMACS editor, he refused to let the computer science lab use it. He realizes that, in a sense, he was punishing users of that machine rather than the people who made policy. "But what could I do?" he later said. "People who used that machine went along with the policy. They weren't fighting. A lot of people were angry with me, saying I was trying to hold them hostage or blackmail them, which in a sense I was. I was engaging in violence against them because I thought that they were engaging in violence to [sic] everyone at large."
Sorry, Joe, but anyone who considers password-protecting one's private e-mail to be committing "violence" -- and justification for retaliatory acts of "violence" -- isn't acting from any "higher" principle any more than a religious fanatic who blows up a school believing that it will get him into heaven. Rather, he's a dangerous loony.
He fought against Symbolics in much the same manner that FreeBSD is currently fighting against Sun: putting out non-copylefted free software.
FreeBSD is not, in any way, "fighting against" Sun. In fact, Sun is free and welcome to use any portion of FreeBSD in its own products if it sees fit to do so. As Jordan Hubbard writes in the FreeBSD Handbook:
The goals of the FreeBSD Project are to provide software that may be used for any purpose and without strings attached. Many of us have a significant investment in the code (and project) and would certainly not mind a little financial compensation now and then, but we are definitely not prepared to insist on it. We believe that our first and foremost ``mission'' is to provide code to any and all comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets the widest possible use and provides the widest possible benefit. This is, I believe, one of the most fundamental goals of Free Software and one that we enthusiastically support.
FreeBSD likewise has a complementary and symbiotic relationship with BSDI. FreeBSD is improving on the code which was released to the public for all to use -- including businesses -- by the University of California at Berkeley and continuing to license it in a way which is friendly to businesses and software developers. Others should follow its example.
Symbolics could, and did, use RMS's work.
I do not believe that Symbolics used much of Stallman's work, if for no other reason than that he was using MIT's money and equipment in an attempt to sabotage their business. However, if the code was being given away for all to use, there would have been nothing wrong with their doing so.
If RMS's effort to compete against Symbolics was wrong, then you should, for consistency, attack the FreeBSD people for competing against Sun.
Not so. The key difference is that the GPL is designed to sabotage businesses by denying them access to the code, whereas the BSD license allows them to build upon it. The GPL turns open source -- otherwise a good thing -- into a weapon aimed at those against whom Richard Stallman bears a personal grudge.
RMS did not "lose the use of his hands" in this effort; he's had some RSI problems, but your claim that he lost the use of his hands in the early 80s is ridiculous.
It was in the mid- to late 80's that RMS began to complain that he could no longer code more than an hour or two a day because he had given himself a terrible case of RSI.
Symbolics was never in a position to provide a significant source of income to MIT, and in no alternative universe could they be.
Symbolics gave MIT the use of their code and machines, as well as some of the capital they'd raised. Had they been successful, they might well have done more.
RMS developed the GPL because he found that non-copylefted freeware was not effective in competing against Symbolics and others
In short, his first attempt to destroy businesses via predatory practices was not working, so he tried nastier tactics.
who could take the free base software and add a few proprietary enhancements.
The notion that one can add only "a few" enhancements to an open source program and make large amounts of money is a myth. Remember, when you release code to the world for free, the market value of that code and that functionality becomes zero. (After all, an informed consumer will not pay money for something that's available for free!) So, any money that the company does make is the result of value it adds. That's fair. And it has to add substantial value before customers will buy it rather than just using the free version. Microsoft demonstrated this repeatedly as it drove other companies out of business with free, inferior products.
It is true that academic research labs require support from the outside world. But that's no reason why research institutions shouldn't use licenses like the GPL;
Yes, there is. Research institutions should not embark upon a political agenda, nor should they engage themselves in a campaign whose purpose is to destroy livelihoods, businesses, and markets. This is what the GPL is for and what it does. The fruits of basic research have traditionally been available for all to use -- especially businesses which can develop them into useful products. This tradition should continue. To prevent commercial programmers from using the code is not only spiteful -- it ultimately hurts consumers by preventing the research from spawning products which will benefit them.
after all, the GPL is much more generous than the other popular model, which permits non-commercial or research use only and demands licensing for other use, even in cases where the taxpayers footed the bill for the original research (e.g. NCSA's handing of the original Mosaic).
Not so. The GPL is nastier. If one pays a price to license the technnology, at least one has it. GPLed code is generally not available for commercial licensing at any price; at the same time, it sabotages commercial endeavors. So it's worse in every way.
Finally, you misuse the term "commercial developer". All companies and individuals who develop software for profit are commercial developers, no matter what licensing terms they choose to use for their software.
Not so. GPLed software cannot be "commercial" according to the normal usage of the word -- or its dictionary definition. The word "commercial" means "used in commerce." But GPLed software cannot be licensed for money, and therefore cannot be commercial.
It is true that companies such as Red Hat can sell discs with the software on it. But it's the MEDIA that's commercial -- not the software on it. The distinction is important. Since it does not own the rights to the software itself, Red Hat cannot sell a license for it.
What about the original author of a piece of GPLed software? Alas, once the software has been released under the GPL, his chances of being able to license it for money are virtually nil. And once he's accepted a single GPLed contribution to the software, he can't license it for money at all.
Thus, GPLed software is not and cannot be commercial.
People who put out GPLed software are competing in the free market.
No, they're not. They're attempting to destroy markets. Stallman says so himself in his GNU Manifesto.
There are some whiners who don't like this competition;
The GPL is not competitive; it is anti-competitive. Just as Microsoft attempted to "cut off [Netscape's] air supply," Stallman has duped gullible programmers into doing the same to other software companies, and thus destroying the market for their own work!
I get paid from writing proprietary software.
In that case, Stallman would say that what you are doing is evil and wrong, and will do what he can to deprive you of that work.
I don't cry and wail because I can't grab other people's software and then sell it.
Well, good for you. Guess what: I don't either. However, I also do not attempt to destroy livelihoods or businesses out of spite. If I give code away, I give it away. I don't say, "I'll give it to everyone but you, so that no one will want what you sell and you won't be able to benefit from it." That's spiteful and malevolent. And it is, alas, exactly what the GPL is about.
--Brett Glass
The GPL *is* an attempt to use force.
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You may be right that RMS never comes out and promotes an elimination of proprietary software through the means of force and legislation.
Actually, this is exatly what the GPL does. By using existing legislation (the copyright laws), and force (the force of courts and police, which enforce them), the GPL seeks to sabotage commercial software vendors. This process is explicitly explained on the FSF's Web pages.
--Brett Glass
Re:Why are you people so dense?
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Where and when did RMS say he wanted to "ban proprietary software"?
For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers worked at the Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than they could have had anywhere else. They got many kinds of non-monetary rewards: fame and appreciation, for example. And creativity is also fun, a reward in itself.
Then most of them left when offered a chance to do the same interesting work for a lot of money.
What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned.
Which is what Stallman advocates: banning commercial software and commercial software companies. The stated purpose of the GPL is to destroy all programming jobs which pay better than what is earned by a starving graduate student.
The Free Software Foundation follows the rule that we cannot install any proprietary program on our computers except temporarily for the specific purpose of writing a free replacement for that very program. Aside from that, we feel there is no possible excuse for installing a proprietary program.
These, and other documents, reaffirm Stallman's goal of driving all commercial software (which he calls "proprietary" software even though that word has a different meaning in normal usage) out of the marketplace.
I love how people say the GPL 'infects any code that comes near it',
I did not make that assertion. It is, however, true that GPLed code infects any work in which it is included or to which it is linked. This is true regardless of the quantity of GPLed code that is used. This represents an "unconscionable" provision which I believe renders the GPL unenforceable.
for values of 'come near it' that equal 'take GPLed code, read it, copy big chunks of it and use it as the basis of your own thing'.
A loaded and prejudicial interpretation which doesn't square with the arguments that others are making. See above.
Clearly the only ethical choice is to allow people to take everything you do and _not_ ask anything of them in return! furrfu.
In fact, this is the best way to publish open source because it does the maximum amount of good. Since one is forfeiting any opportunity to make money from the code when one publishes it as open source, it is unethical to arbitrarily deny to anyone else the chance to benefit from it. Especially when the intent is to do harm.
How quaint! And to think that I believed the GPL was for taking coding ideas and forcibly preventing them from being filched and made proprietary by people like you. Shocked, I am, to learn that 'Saint Ignatius's only real interest is in destroying jobs! Could you have misheard him? Maybe he wants to destroy Wozniak instead;)
Apparently, you're not aware of the GPL's history or motivations. The stated purpose of the GPL is to destroy opportunities for programmers to make salaries better than they could make in academia. In The GNU Manifesto, Richard Stallman writes:
For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers worked at the Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than they could have had anywhere else. They got many kinds of non-monetary rewards: fame and appreciation, for example. And creativity is also fun, a reward in itself.
Then most of them left when offered a chance to do the same interesting work for a lot of money.
What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned.
It may have escaped your attention, but at the time, the AI lab did not USE passwords.
I know. I visited at the time. However, MIT was putting more and more machines on the ARPANet, and passwords were becoming essential. To deny the need for them was, and is, sheer folly.
At the time, people were evolving ways of functioning in 'electronic society' without locks and passwords and barriers, and it actually worked, because people felt the obligation to behave civilly, given the freedom to do harm.
Unfortunately, as recent developments have shown, that perspective was naive. Allowing strangers even limited access to computers on the network paves the way for denial of service attacks -- such as the ones we've seen in recent weeks -- and worse. And now that important and sensitive communications are routinely sent by e-mail, I doubt that you'd be willing to allow all and sundry to have access to your mailbox.
The use of passwords you cite was not business as usual, but the imposition of a new set of regulations which assumed anyone with the freedom to do harm would obviously do it, and arranged matters so nobody had that freedom.
I see. By analogy, I suppose we should insist that no one should have a lock on his or her door either. Do you lock the door to your house? Do you take the keys out of your car when you park it? Do you lock your bicycle if you ride one? If you truly believe what you say above, you would be hypocritical if you did.
I realise that you think this is the only way the world can work. We'll never know now, will we?
I believe that last week's attacks, plus the recent rash of Web site defacements and credit card number thefts, have settled that question once and for all -- if it was ever a serious question to begin with.
Because RMS failed in his attempt to force the issue,
As he should have. By attempting to force the issue, he was guilty of gross insubordination. Had I been his supervisor, I would have fired him on the spot for endangering MIT's resources and the personal information of its staff, faculty, and students. He was, and is, a dangerous loony.
and did not convince the world that establishing social expectations was the way to handle 'security'.
Of course he didn't; it's a fool's errand. The notion is as absurd as expecting "social expectations" to prevent burglary and other crimes.
(Also, it's interesting to note how you fulminate against anyone interfering with a business-employed coder's right to withhold their code from others if they wish,
Again, an ad hominem attack. The fact is that if a coder is employed by a business, what he creates on the job is the property of that business. And, yes, the business has the right to release that code to the world or not. It's not the programmer's individual decision. By becoming an employee and doing the work on the job in return for a salary, the programmer has agreed willingly to this.
but won't accept RMS's academia-funded right to withhold EMACS from others as he wished. So if you are a business, you get to do whatever you want, but if you are academic or an OSS type you are obliged to be exploited and trod upon?)
RMS was an employee of MIT, and as such the code he created on the school's time and with its equipment was its property. When he agreed to be employed by the University, he agreed willingly to this. He did not have the right to withhold the code from his employer or from parts of the University whose policies he did not like.
The _order_ you put that in is interesting, but the claim makes no sense whatsoever. Surely a young company with programmers and promising ideas is free to do whatever it wants, within reason? Do you think a good idea cannot compete against a GPLed implementation of 'cheap imitation' quality?
Even if the free product is far inferior, it is difficult and sometimes impossible. Microsoft has demonstrated this with EMM386, DoubleSpace, and Internet Explorer.
Do you have that little faith in the marketplace that the mere existence of free things terrifies you so?
Again, an ad hominem attack. The truth has nothing to do with "faith" or with being "terrified." Nor is the existence of things which are available at no cost necessarily destructive. However, the GPL is intended to make it destructive.
Do you think little elves will sneak into the fine young company under cover of darkness and, cackling malignantly, GPL everything while nobody is looking?
Elves are not required. Those who follow the industry may recall that Be, Inc. had problems with GPL infection of its OS kernel not long ago. Richard Stallman in fact advocates the introduction of GPLed code into companies' programs as a way of coercing them to forfeit their intellectual property. (See his essay, Why Software Should Not Have Owners.)
You've got some very strange ideas about what the GPL _means_ to a company that wants no part of it.
Not so. Every assertion I've made is provable via empirical evidence. Even if a software company wants no part of the GPL, it is injured by the destruction of its markets.
Why in God's name do you think commercial developers _should_ get to make use of open source?
Because denying to them -- and them alone -- the use of open source code is an explicit attempt to hurt them. That's why the BSD license is ethical and the GPL is not.
Being a commercial developer usually means proprietary code. Use that.
This argument ignores the obvious: the GPL damages programmers and their livelihoods whether or not they use GPLed code themselves.
If you must compete and not interact cooperatively with others, come up with your own damn ideas.
You appear not to understand intellectual property law. Ideas are protected by patent, not copyright.
For _years_ there wasn't a major, public open source movement, and no commercial developers complained about this at all.
Not true. It was well known that open source code such as BIND, Sendmail, and the BSD TCP/IP stack were available for free to everyone -- including developers. It is the release of GPLed code -- which, actually, is not open source because the GPL discriminates against a field of endeavor -- which hurts developers.
Nobody objected in the slightest to having to reinvent the wheel behind closed doors, it was a way of life to come up with your own code.
Not true. Code reuse has always been an important concept.
Now all of a sudden, OSS is trendy, and suddenly access to other people's code is a _right_?
Stallman, and many of his more fanatic followers, would assert that anyone should have the right to access anyone's code. However, when programs are published as freely redistributable open source, it is unethical to deny the use of the code to developers.
[Several ad hominem attacks deleted here]
Commercial developers are paid to develop. They have resources which part-time people couldn't begin to dream of.
Not true. Many are individual programmers who hope to make a reasonable living -- despite efforts by large corporations such as Microsoft or the FSF to put them out of business via predatory practices. (And, yes, the FSF is a large corporation. It holds the exclusive rights to large amounts of extremely valuable intellectual property and engages in predatory practices routinely; in fact, that's its purpose.)
"This isn't ethical; it's a game of "keep-away.""
This is different from proprietary code exactly how?
You are being disingenuous here. In a game of "keep away," everyone can have access to an object except one person who needs and desires it. The object of the game is to gang up on, and hurt, that person.
Having private property is, of course, very different from engaging in that destructive and cruel game.
My. Words fail me. Aside from the fact that this is nonsense, why do you feel that you have any business saying this on Slashdot?
Perhaps it's because I believe that this view should be heard. Or that Slashdot isn't, and shouldn't be, a place where only views that conform to the FSF's "party line" may be expressed.
I'll give you credit for not preaching to the choir here, but on the other hand you've got to be fscking crazy if you think this argument carries weight here.
Again, an ad hominem attack. The analogy to religion is, however, apt.
OSS is a flood. If you don't want to be part of it, then rise above it. If you won't bother to rise above it, then shut up and drown!
In the above, you attempt to characterize me as being opposed to open source, which is not the case. I am opposed to the GPL, which attempts to turn open source into a weapon against commercial software developers and programmers in general. By voicing this opposition, I am indeed attempting to "rise above the flood" and prevent open source from being turned from a useful tool into a weapon of spite. Only those who are malicious would oppose this.
Your perceptions of Stallman, the GPL and history are warped. Symbolics and other companies didn't beging pulling out of academia because of anything Stallman did. They did it because they were greedy and thought they could get away with using the research without paying.
Not true. They paid MIT and give it free use of their software and equipment. However, by rights, the research should have been available to the world for free since it was largely government-funded.
The GPL does not deny corporations access to the software it covers,
Wrong. The GPL denies not only corporations but all developers access to the software for the purpose of building on it and making a reasonable living. The people most hurt by the GPL are not large corporations but smaller companies that might challenge them. I'm sure that Microsoft loves the GPL, because it is about to wipe out Be.
The MIT AI Lab was _DARPA_ funded. The existence of the academic sandbox Stallman loved was due to government funding.
Only partially. There was private funding as well. And that private funding increased when LMI and Symbolics were formed.
Government funding of research that can be commercially exploited is a good thing as well. The public has benefited greatly from spinoffs of NASA technology, for example.
The far worse situation occurs when companies do not form to bring the fruits of research to the rest of the world. Who is going to build the machines that the academics have been funded to conceive of? Not the schools, but private enterprise. It's an important part of the picture.
As soon as for-profit companies stepped in, the thriving community of hackers that existed in the MIT AI Lab was fragmented and eventually destroyed by the IP requirements of the for-profit companies, notably Symbolics which hired away most of the hackers and silenced them with NDAs.
And would you have had the hackers permanently indentured at the AI Lab? Stallman would have. In fact, the stated intent of the GPL was to destroy jobs that paid better than the slave wages earned by grad students in the MIT AI Lab.
When it came time for commercial development of the ideas which had been developed there, it was only natural that many of them would want to take part in that. Academics frequently hold jobs both in academia and in private companies, and/or go back and forth between the two. However, by attempting to sabotage the commercial endeavors, Stallman alienated the companies that might otherwise have supported continued research at the Lab. No wonder they weren't cooperative! Stallman was using MIT's money and facilities in an attempt to destroy their businesses.
Only after the MIT AI Lab was already destroyed did Stallman try to revenge himself on Symbolics.
According to the account he told to Steven Levy, who was researching the book "Hackers," he started exacting "revenge" on people who disagreed with him far earlier than that. Levy relates that Stallman refused to provide EMACS software -- which he was being paid by MIT to write! -- to users on the Computer Science department's systems. Why? Because they used passwords to keep their machines from being broken into from across the ARPANet. Yes, that's right; Stallman was so radically opposed to the notion of computer security that he committed "violence" (his own word!) against people who wanted to secure their systems against attacks from the outside.
He did this through a burst of reverse engineering and singlehandedly kept pace with an entire team of the world's best hackers (at Symbolics), impressing the hell out of them. He succeeded in keeping up while reengineering everything Symbolics did, he didn't just 'try'.
It's not clear that he actually succeeded, since of course it was not in the interest of the Symbolics employees to correct his mistakes or omissions.
What success Stallman did enjoy was likely due to the fact that reverse engineering is much easier than engineering a feature from scratch. Copying is always an order of magnitude easier than producing the original work. Being a crazed, totally obsessed individual with no life, it's no wonder that Stallman could reimplement much of that they'd done.
The GPL prevents any such situation from recurring-
Not so. It is very easy to do clean room reverse engineering on GPLed code. What the GPL does do, however, is sabotage young companies and programmers with promising ideas.
it bars nobody from participating
Not true. It prohibits commercial developers from making use of open source without giving away the farm.
(despite many attempts to add 'except Microsoft can't use my code!' clauses) and the single condition it imposes is that the code licensed under the GPL remains forever open for discussion and exchange. It does nothing else,
Bull. It ensures that programmers cannot make a living by licensing their work. Stallman says explicitly, in The GNU Manifesto, that this is what the GPL does and is designed to do.
and can only be considered a weapon if you expect commercial developers to be allowed to take OTHER PEOPLE'S work away from them,
Not so. It is a weapon because it undermines commercial developers' work. Anyone can use GPLed code in the way which most benefits him or her -- except commercial developers. Even though the author of GPLed code has forfeited any prospect of ever making a single penny from the code, and has in effect given the code away to everyone else in the world except those developers. This isn't ethical; it's a game of "keep-away."
There is no symbiosis between academia and the commercial world.
It's a good thing that universities and companies disagree with this stance. If they embraced it, a lot would be lost on both sides. Just as a treasure is lost whenever another a line of code falls under the vicious, viral, unethical GPL.
While companies such as IBM and DEC have shown that servicing "big iron" is an extremely profitable business, the same case has never been made for software -- especially microcomputer software. Why? First, there is abundant free help available -- especially on the Internet. (Advocates of GPLed software are also pushing for the creation of free documentation, which will eliminate much support revenue. This movement, spearheaded by Richard Stallman, is intended to cut companies such as Red Hat -- which hope to make money via support -- off at the knees. Stallman considers these companies to be parasites, and tolerates them on a temporary basis because they further the spread of the GPL and the damage it does.)
Second, support is expensive. Minimum wage laws, overhead, mandatory benefits, training costs, and high turnover make it difficult to do technical support at a price consumers are willing to pay.
Third, remote support is difficult and time-consuming. As anyone who has done tech support knows, most computer users do not know the names of the items they see on their screens -- or even that they have names. Absent a remote control system (which may not work if the machine is disabled), even an expert technical support staffer can take hours to diagnose a simple problem on the phone with a customer.
Red Hat, the "poster child" for distributors of GPLed software, has lost millions of dollars per employee over its lifetime.
OUR BUSINESS MAY NOT SUCCEED BECAUSE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE BUSINESS MODELS ARE UNPROVEN
We have not demonstrated the success of our open source business model, which gives our customers the right freely to copy and distribute our software. No other company has built a successful open source business. Few open source software products have gained widespread commercial acceptance partly due to the lack of viable open source industry participants to offer adequate service and support on a long term basis. In addition, open source vendors are not able to provide industry standard warranties and indemnities for their products, since these products have been developed largely by independent parties over whom open source vendors exercise no control or supervision. If open source software should fail to gain widespread commercial acceptance, we would not be able to sustain our revenue growth and our business could fail.
This is not surprising. What's more, due to the GPL, Red Hat does not even own its own products free and clear! In fact, it has virtually no assets. No assets? No profits? This doesn't paint a very promising picture.
And what about the future? Again, let's hear the story straight from the horse's mouth. Red Hat says that it's not sure it will ever make money:
WE EXPECT TO INCUR SUBSTANTIAL LOSSES FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE
We have incurred operating losses in four of our previous five fiscal years, including our most recent fiscal year ended February 28, 1999, as well as in the nine months ended November 30, 1999. We expect to incur significant losses for the foreseeable future, as we substantially increase our sales and marketing, research and development and administrative expenses. In addition, we are investing considerable resources in our web initiatives and to expand our professional services offerings. As a result, we cannot be certain when or if we will achieve sustained profitability. Failure to become and remain profitable may adversely affect the market price of our common stock and our ability to raise capital and continue operations. See "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations--Overview", "--Results of Operations" and "--Liquidity and Capital Resources".
None of this should be surprising. The purpose of the GPL is not to enable software businesses but to destroy them. This was its explicit intent, and this is what it's doing. If you hope to make any money, better make it by buying and selling stock and taking advantage of gullible investors. You won't make it on GPLed software.
If you do, your colleagues in the commercial world -- where you may be one day yourself -- won't be able to make use of your code.
As mentioned in my message titled "Symbiosis" elsewhere in this discussion, denying the fruits of academic work to companies -- which is what the GPL does -- will discourage them from sponsoring that work. This, in turn, will hurt education and research. I don't think any of us want that. Instead, use the time-tested BSD or MIT X license. Both of these originated in academia and proved their worth long before the GPL (in fact, the BSD license can justifiably be said to have brought about the Internet as we know it today). The GPL is the product of Richard Stallman's personal spite against commercial software developers and upsets the symbiotic relationship between academia and the commercial world. (Its intent, according to Stallman, was to prevent programmers from making a higher salary at corporations than they did as starving graduate students.)
A fragile symbiosis exists between academia and the corporate world.
Corporations spend millions to fund research programs which make scientific discoveries and develop new areas of knowledge. Why? Because, eventually, that knowledge will allow them to engineer products which make them money and benefit all of us.
To insist that corporations not use the fruits of that research is to destroy this carefully crafted win/win relationship. If this happens, corporations will form their own private research laboratories and pull their money out of academia. Education as well as research will suffer as a result.
Richard Stallman was ignorant of this delicate balance when he bridled against commercial spinoffs of the MIT AI Lab, such as Symbolics. (His two-year tantrum, in which he desperately tried to put Symbolics out of business by writing free equivalents of its software products, cost him the use of his hands; he developed RSI trying to keep up. The GPL, which Stallman designed to accomplish similar goals, is likewise ill-advised because it turns open source software into a weapon against commercial developers.)
Stallman's spite was, of course, misplaced. The very existence of the academic "sandbox" he enjoyed was due to funding from for-profit companies, and the AI Lab suffered and eventually died when its sponsors perceived that the relationship was no longer symbiotic.
Academic research labs are an artificial environment which is not self-sustaining. They are created explicitly to develop ideas, which means that rewards come from sharing information (publishing) rather than withholding it and from developing and proving the feasibility of new concepts. But they can't exist without support from the "real world" outside, in which intellectual property matters.
Instead of attempting to impose the values of one world upon the other (which hurts both), we must recognize the differences in the "rules" and the symbiosis that exists between the two. Open source is, in essence, an extension of the academic world. To begrudge the output of open source projects to commercial developers -- which is what the GPL does -- is ill advised and ultimately hurts both. The hostility expressed in the above article is destructive and stems from a narrow view which does not account for the existence of these two worlds.
...or even a million fingers, won't keep water from evaporating from the reservoir.
As with the Processor Serial Number, Intel seems to mistakenly believe -- or perhaps their marketroids have been trying to fool media companies into believing -- that you can control access to information once you've put it into the user's hands. Of course, that's silly. It's too easy to jigger the hardware, crack the encryption, reverse-engineer the software. It will be no problem to crack open a "copy protected" monitor and extract a decrypted video signal in short order.
The article says, " A violated key could be tracked down and revoked over a satellite broadcast network, for example." Of course, this is silly. It'll only take a few hours to crack the next one! And will consumers tolerate the notion of large corporations reaching into their homes to disable their equipment? Sure.... In the same way they turned out in droves to buy DivX players and movies.
I feel like asking Intel and the media moguls: "Ed Gruberman, have you learned nothing from the lesson of DeCSS? Of DivX? Of the Processor Serial Number? Boot to the head!"
Perhaps, in time, Intel will becoome enightened about this. But I'm not counting on it.
--Brett Glass
There is a threatening little GNOME in the room.
on
New Desktop for Linux
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· Score: 2
He throws a gnife. It misses. -> Throw axe "Join me now and share the.... AAAACK!" [THUD] You've killed a little GNOME. The body disappears in a puff of greasy black smoke.
WHEREAS, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws has promulgated the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), and it is now available for consideration for adoption by the several states; and
WHEREAS, the UCITA is major legislation that would govern transactions of computer information, thereby significantly impacting all Virginians who use computers; and
WHEREAS, the UCITA presents a significant policy decision to be made by the General Assembly; and
WHEREAS, the voluminous pages of the UCITA contain highly technical language and a legal scheme which even legal professionals may have trouble understanding; and
WHEREAS, the Commonwealth may be one of the first states to consider this major legislation and other states may be looking to the Commonwealth for guidance in considering the UCITA; and
WHEREAS, the Commonwealth is the leader in technology and relevant laws and it must be responsible in leading other states; now, therefore, be it
RESOLVED by the House of Delegates, the Senate concurring, That a joint subcommittee be established to study the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act. The joint subcommittee shall be composed of twelve members, which shall include seven legislative members and five nonlegislative citizen members as follows: four members of the House of Delegates, to be appointed by the Speaker, one of whom shall be a member of the Joint Commission on Technology and Science, one of whom shall be a member of the House Committee on Science and Technology, one of whom shall be a member of the House Committee on Courts of Justice, and one of whom shall be a member of the House Committee on Corporations, Insurance and Banking; three members of the Senate, to be appointed by the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections, one of whom shall be a member of the Joint Commission on Technology and Science, one of whom shall be a member of the Senate Committee on Courts of Justice, and one of whom shall be a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce and Labor; one representative of those who would be considered licensors under the UCITA and one representative who would be considered a licensee under the UCITA to be appointed by the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections; and one representative of consumer interests, one member with an expertise in intellectual properties, and one member from the academic legal community who is knowledgeable in the UCITA and the Uniform Commercial Code, to be appointed by the Speaker.
In conducting its study, the joint subcommittee shall review the UCITA and make a recommendation regarding the appropriateness of using the UCITA as the proper model to govern computer information transactions and shall make suggestions regarding alternatives or amendments to the UCITA that will assure that interests of both the licensors and licensees are adequately protected.
The direct costs of this study shall not exceed $13,500.
The Division of Legislative Services shall provide staff support for the study. All agencies of the Commonwealth shall provide assistance to the joint subcommittee, upon request.
The joint subcommittee shall complete its work in time to submit its findings and recommendations to the Governor and the 2001 Session of the General Assembly as provided in the procedures of the Division of Legislative Automated Systems for the processing of legislative documents.
Implementation of this resolution is subject to subsequent approval and certification by the Joint Rules Committee. The Committee may withhold expenditures or delay the period for the conduct of the study.
Gross errors such as the one InfoWorld made in its UCITA coverage were frequently introduced into my column during editing and then printed; I rarely had a chance to review the column and catch those mistakes. The editor I worked with there actually resented it when I complained about such errors being introduced. It is thus no surprise that InfoWorld got it wrong.
IP exists as either copyrights or patents. The GPL does nothing to appropriate someone's copyrights or patents.
Stallman advocates its use for precisely that purpose. In his essay, "What is Copyoleft?" Stallman advocated the surreptitious use of GPLed code by programmers who wish to create GPLed software on their employers' time and then force the employers to give away the result:
Copyleft provides another benefit as well. People who write improvements in free software often work for companies or universities that would do almost anything to get money. A programmer may want to contribute her changes to the community, but her employer may ``see green'' and insist on turning the changes into a commercial product.
When we explain to the employer that it is illegal to distribute the improved version except as free software, the employer usually decides to release it as free software rather than throw it away.
It's the programmers who are not allowed to "confiscate" the IP of the GPLd work when a copyrighted work is covered under the GPL.
Not so. GPLed software has zero market value, since it is available for free to all users. Therefore, programmers should be able to use it completely freely in their own work, whatever that work may be, at no charge and with no obligation. Why does the GPL begrudge them this? Because by doing so it undermines their livelihoods.
Every single line of code that has been licensed under the GPL has been licensed as such because the AUTHOR OF THE CODE WANTED IT THAT WAY.
Not true. Stallman himself says that the goal of the GPL is to force programmers and their employers to give away their work. The GPL is intended as a lever with which to pry it away from them, no matter how much they are entitled to it.
However if I wanted to use a line or module from a GPL'd app and distribute it under something else, I'm fully free to CONTACT the author and ASK his permission; and if what I'm doing doesn't violate what HE SPECIFICALLY AS A HUMAN INDIVIDUAL wants, then he'll allow me to do it.
Actually, the GPL is designed to prevent this. Because it aggregates the works of many authors, and any can veto the commercial use of the code, it is generally impossible to locate all of the authors. And the odds of securing an agreement from every one of them are vanishingly small, because authors of GPLed code often subscribe to the GPL's malicious agenda.
Brett, your points simply have no merit,
Proof by assertion: you say it, therefore it must be so. Sure.
and stem from a need to hate things which are successful. Hatred is just too easy; try something else.
An unwarranted ad hominem attack. The GPL is motivated by spite and anger (and this is well-documented; read Stallman's own words or any of several published accounts of how it came to be. My postings are motivated by concern for programmers, the future of the industry, and ethics. It is unethical and wrong to attack and hurt people out of spite, and that is what the GPL does.
And if you believe the conspiracy theories above, I have some GPLed code for you. Go ahead, use it in your programs. It won't do you any harm. All you must do is give up all the income you would have made as a programmer -- forever.
It just so happens that I support open source vigorously. However, the GPL is not open source, because it is not open to all. Anyone can use GPLed software in the way which benefits him or her the most -- except commercial software developers. This discrimination was explicitly intended, by Richard Stallman, to reduce programmers' economic prospects to those of starving graduate students. He says so in his "GNU Manifesto."
The GPL is not a valid open source license, even according to the "official" Open Source Definition posted at http://www.opensource.org. Why? Because it violates a key principle listed there: an open source license must not discriminate against a field of endeavor. The GPL discriminates against the well-established field of commercial software development and is thus not a legitimate open source license. It is unethical to use the GPL for this reason.
The MIT X License and the BSD license, by contrast, do qualify because they do not discriminate.
Yet you advocate the MIT X and BSD licenses as being "true" sharing licenses. These licenses allow you to take and take and take from the work of others and "not share proportionately or fairly" or at all with the original authors.
Yes. That's what sharing is about. If you insist on something back, it's not sharing. What's more, what the GPL demands is not that the developer give code to the author of the original work, but rather that he or she give it to the whole wide world, for free, forever. And, by doing so, forfeit his or her chance to make any money from the work he or she invested in it. It's like saying, "Here, have a breath mint. But in return, I expect you to give me your house, your car, and the contents of your bank accounts."
People do give back under the MIT X and BSD licenses, but in reasonable amounts. They don't give away the farm, and are not required to. That's fair.
So, it could be said that these other "Open" licenses discriminate against programmers who wish their works to be extended only by those who are willing to share those extensions back to the original author.
Again, the extensions are not merely shared with the original author. The programmer must give up his or her livelihood. A Faustian bargain.
Of course, that's the way it's designed. The entire purpose of the GPL is to destroy programmers' prospects of making money.
It can, in a sense. When a new version comes out, it can license it only under the latest version of the GPL and not any older one(s). Who would want to run an older one with known bugs? The FSF can thus tighten or otherwise change the licensing essentially at will.
Wage data probably wasn't on the MIT computer in those days.
No, but private e-mail certainly was. Should my private conversations with my wife, girlfriend, doctor, broker, lawyer, etc. be accessible by my co-workers? The public? Should anyone be able to use my account and impersonate me on Usenet, the Internet, or elsewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
See the quotes from RMS in some of my earlier messages in this discussion; they have pointers to documents where he has stated his intention to reduce all programmers to the level of starving graduate students.
RMS explicitly called Tim O'Reilly (who publishes books about open source products) and John Ousterhout "parasites" in public forums last summer (see http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199809/ms g00159.html for one account of this).
As for your idea of selling content: this is problematic because it only works in a few specialized cases (e.g. games and books). Some content (e.g. "levels" for games) is so easy to pirate -- especially if the program that uses it is open source -- that it might well be hard to make money from it. And books can be undercut by free documentation, which Stallman advocates publishing under the GPL. (In fact, he already does publish some manuals under the GPL.) So, I doubt that these are viable options either.
--Brett Glass
Now I guess I am looking for an alternative.
There are a lot of reasons -- I think -- why most of the alternatives are better. I'd be glad to point you to some that might be suitable for your project.
I wish that you would in detail outline your reasoning with links to your resources.
Several people have now asked me to do so, and I am now editing together a series of Web pages which do this. The issue is big and complex, and some people try to turn any discussion of the GPL into a political fight or a flame war. So, I'm having the material reviewed by people who are especially sensitive to these things to be sure that they're as objective and fair as they can be.
Also, it seems like to me that there may be a few ways to skin a cat that you are not recognising?/aware of?
Maybe, though I have done my best to consider things as thoroughly as I can.
Is it not the case that one can divide one's commercial app based on GPL code into two sections? One that is open source and one that is closed source. The code that calls or activates the GPL lib stuff must be made available to your customers. or is it that you do not need to open source the code that calls the GPL lib but you must distribute any changes you make to the lib?
If a library is licensed under the GPL (rather than the LGPL), code that links to it is "infected" by the GPL and cannot be made closed source. Some people say that this applies to dynamic linking, too; others say it doesn't. But there is general agreement that it does apply to static linking.
As in directly modifying GPL subroutines? But subroutines that you add to the lib don't need to have source distributed?
If you modify the GPLed code and then distribute the modified version, you must distribute the source.
Anyway, assuming that you must distribute source on anything that calls or activates GPL code, you can still hide your proprietary stuff by making a seperate program B that works closely together with the GPL dependent program A. These programs can communicate via files at the very least. And because of Disk caches this shouldn't be too slow. Perhaps pipes and such could also be used just so long as program B does not call A and tell it to activate GPL code. I do this kind of thing in my own code using the Clipboard as the user simple means of communications between some methods where the user can jump in there if desired. The user can cobble functions together in different ways because they communicate via the Clipboard.
This is a workaround that has been used before. BeOS has used this technique so that it can make use of Linux device drivers. It makes the device drivers into "daemons" which communicate with the OS via inter-process communications. Many of the more radical supporters of the GPL believe this is a loophole that should be closed by modifying the GPL.
If I am not wrong the GPL doesn't bar this?
It is generally agreed that this is a workable loophole for some people today. But it may not be in the future!
My idea was that companies who want to make commercial programs using my lib would have to ( under the GPL provide source code( or even better a special Smalltalk image ) to any methods that they make that call my GPLed code either directly or indirectly.
But code that doesn't call my lib methods can remain closed and be hidden in the image. Thus a user might be able to get the required copy of Dolphin Smalltalk load up the special image, and see and modify the code that calls my code. Thus they could add their own user interface to it and add their own custom addons. And since they would also know hopefully the data being set up for the hidden Program B part to consume they would also be able to customize it's functioning too.
If this is what the GPL provides then I guess I will go with the GPL( but I will try to read the others too. Maybe I like them better. ).
The GPL, unfortunately, runs into really serious problems as far as OOP goes, because in OOP you are in effect modifying someone else's code when you subclass, override, etc. In effect, using something like the GPL would prevent the use of your Smalltalk to create anything commercial! I don't think that this is a good policy.
Once license that you might want to consider instead is the eCOS License -- the license used by Cygnus, Inc. for its embedded real time operating system. Under this sort of license, licensees are required to provide you with source for fixes or improvements to your code -- in the case of OOP, this would mean your base set of objects and methods. But if they create their own custom subclasses, they are not required to give them away. This helps you improve your product but does not burden the developer to the point where he or she will say, "Sorry, I just can't use your Smalltalk; the license forces me to give away all of my work." The developer can keep his or her own original work, which is fair.
Even if the code is licensed more liberally (e.g. under the BSD license) the developer would be smart to tell you what changes he made to your base objects and methods, because they would then enter the code base that you were maintaining and he or she wouldn't have to patch each new version. So, we tend to see the same behavior that's explicitly required by the eCOS license under the BSD or MIT X licenses too. And these latter licenses have the advantage of simplicity and clarity; they're much shorter than the eCOS license. So, chances are that they'd work too.
Also-: Just because you are required to distribute your source code doesn't mean that you have to distribute usable source code. You can put a scrambler on it that adds misleading variable names and comments that are wrong. In effect, if the code is big enough, it becomes completely unmaintainable. There were some Smalltalk open source progams like that. Why bother trying to modify them. You might as well start from scratch.
ALSO-: There is a completely open source( but restricted distribution ) futures trading program written in Quick Basic that I know of that uses nothing but two letter variable names. And not that many comments either. It is about 400 to 800 lines long. Totally useless. Don't even try it. Many have tried and failed. Hackers and "Software Engineering" types have looked at it to no avail. We all threw up our hands and said that we might as well make a new one from scratch. If only we knew how. Now, it could be that we are not true hackers who can unsnarl raw Assembler in their sleep that was written by 1000 gibbering apes, who were also in their sleep when they wrote it, at the time, but I sir, am not one of those. And I have never actually met any who were neither. Although I did hear of one. Who took an assembler code where every third line was a jump so when you mapped out all the jumps graphically, every inch of code looked like a really snarly hair do. But I am not one of those. And as far as I can tell, most coders are not one of those neither, fer nothin. And he only succeeded because he was an expert at what that driver thing was trying to do.
The GPL doesn't permit this. It demands that the source code be readable and usable and not "shrouded."
In any event, I would say that for your application there are several licenses to choose from that might be better than the GPL. eCOS is one; the Artistic License is another; the MIT X license (the most liberal of all) is the third. As I've mentioned above, even under the MIT X license it is in developers' interest to send you information on improvements they have made to the classes and methods you supply, so you will probably be just fine with this very simple and least problematic license.
PS-: ( I thought that a few of the responses to your posts down below were a bit shrill and vitriolic. Like screaming stuck liberals or something. Ahh youth. When you are young if you are not liberal: You have got no heart. When you are older if you are not conservative: You have got no brain. )
Well, it seems in your case if the situation is not one of politics but rather of pragmatism. You want people to help you improve your product, which is a fair and reasonable thing to ask. But because you are not trying to engage in a political vendetta, using the GPL would be going too far. I think that one of the three licenses mentioned above would be about right. Myself, I'd just use the MIT X license because it is simplest and seems to produce the behavior you want via enlightened self interest.
--Brett Glass
The ratio between the amount of code owned ("hoarded" is Stallman's pejorative term) by other people and that owned by Microsoft is likely quite small too. Yet Microsoft is malevolent and dangerous. The same is true of the FSF.
As for malice well I don't see where FSF can be compared to Microsoft.
It's actually much worse than Microsoft. Not all of Microsoft's products were created with the express intent of destroying others' livelihoods or driving honest people out of business. But the FSF's entire mission is to do this.
The FSF makes their code freely "usable" by anybody although they limit redistribution MS does not do this.
Actually, that's exactly what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer. And it achieved similar effects.
The FSF has broken no laws.
I believe that the FSF has defrauded the IRS by claiming to be a charitable non-profit organization. In fact, it accumulates capital (in the form of valuable code), competes directly with private enterprise, fails to means-test its benefits, and engages in other activities which disqualify it as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. Right now, the FSF is getting money from United Way -- money which was donated by people who wanted to contribute to charitable organizations -- when its real intent is to destroy proviate businesses. I believe that this is fraudulent.
The RMS has not commited perjury unlike Bill G. I don't see how you can say the FSF is as evil as MS when even a cursory glance at the dealings of MS will show them to be ruthless cut-throat businessmen who don't let little things like morals and ethics get in the way of them making money.
Microsoft is ruthless and cut-throat some of the time. The FSF is all the time.
--Bret Glass
Ah.... Now we're getting down to brass tacks. If Stallman doesn't want money, what does he want? The answer: power and control -- in essence, to "rule the world."
Just as the pigs in the book "Animal Farm" eventually become as greedy as the farmer they displaced, we see that the FSF -- while it condemns the "hoarding" of software -- does so itself.
The FSF demands that all contributors to "GNU" projects sign over the rights to their work to the FSF. The FSF thus accumulates the rights to code in a way which it would deride if any other organization were to do so.
The FSF has accumulated control of millions of dollars' worth of software, and makes it non-free by denying its use to commercial programmers. This is the greatest hypocrisy of all. GPLed software is not "free" software at all. It's part of an empire which is now being built and which is no less malevolent than that of Microsoft.
--Brett Glass
They were thinking that they could create a better OS. And they did. They deserve credit.
If Linux didn't exist, they'd be just as dead (or you'd be saying that *BSD is wiping them out, except that you seem to like those guys).
Not so. BSD is not predatory; Be can (and does!) use BSD-licensed code to improve their own work. But Be is being crushed between a rock and a hard place -- between Microsoft and Linux, both of which are anti-competitive. It's sad to see.
Quite a few people (thousands) are making a reasonable living building on GPLed software.
Some of those people (hundreds, not thousands) are taking home decent paychecks -- for now. Some have stock which, if they cash out absolutely as soon as possible, might get them some money. But their companies are not making money, and the business model under which they're working is unproven and unsustainable. See the quotations I posted, earlier in this discussion, from Red Hat's own Form 10-Q.
What you are seeing is a transfer of money from speculative investors (who, in the long run, are likely to lose their shirts) to those who are willing to fool them.
--Brett Glass
If you'd bothered to check, you'd know that I oppose UCITA -- for pro-consumer reasons, not for the petty reasons for which Stallman opposes it. (Stallman routinely opposes anything which he perceives as helping commercial software developers in any way.) I will continue to oppose not only UCITA but also the GPL, since both are unethical, unfair, and hostile to the interests of consumers and small businesses.
--Brett Glass
Please do not argue ad hominem. It diminishes your credibility and adds nothing to the discussion.
as it is wrong in so many ways.
Not so. Every point I made was carefully thought out and researched, and is supported by ample evidence.
Stallman acted according to deeply held principles, not a "tantrum".
Stallman may have some very deeply held and "religious" beliefs; however, his reactions to such things as basic security measures for MIT's machines can only be classified as tantrums. Did you know that Stallman -- who served as a system administrator and system programmer -- even refused to let users put passwords on their accounts?
Yes, 'tis true, and it's documented. People who were at MIT at the time report that Stallman decrypted password files and sent messages to users saying, "I see your password is X. I suggest that you switch to the password [carriage return]. It's much easier to type, and also stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords."
He also modified the system code so that it would echo users' passwords to a public system console and system log as they logged in -- perhaps the first documented case of "password sniffing." He did this despite users' reasonable desire to keep their e-mail and other personal information private.
Steven Levy's book "Hackers" describes other ways in which Stallman fought security measures. Levy writes:
Sorry, Joe, but anyone who considers password-protecting one's private e-mail to be committing "violence" -- and justification for retaliatory acts of "violence" -- isn't acting from any "higher" principle any more than a religious fanatic who blows up a school believing that it will get him into heaven. Rather, he's a dangerous loony.
He fought against Symbolics in much the same manner that FreeBSD is currently fighting against Sun: putting out non-copylefted free software.
FreeBSD is not, in any way, "fighting against" Sun. In fact, Sun is free and welcome to use any portion of FreeBSD in its own products if it sees fit to do so. As Jordan Hubbard writes in the FreeBSD Handbook:
FreeBSD likewise has a complementary and symbiotic relationship with BSDI. FreeBSD is improving on the code which was released to the public for all to use -- including businesses -- by the University of California at Berkeley and continuing to license it in a way which is friendly to businesses and software developers. Others should follow its example.
Symbolics could, and did, use RMS's work.
I do not believe that Symbolics used much of Stallman's work, if for no other reason than that he was using MIT's money and equipment in an attempt to sabotage their business. However, if the code was being given away for all to use, there would have been nothing wrong with their doing so.
If RMS's effort to compete against Symbolics was wrong, then you should, for consistency, attack the FreeBSD people for competing against Sun.
Not so. The key difference is that the GPL is designed to sabotage businesses by denying them access to the code, whereas the BSD license allows them to build upon it. The GPL turns open source -- otherwise a good thing -- into a weapon aimed at those against whom Richard Stallman bears a personal grudge.
RMS did not "lose the use of his hands" in this effort; he's had some RSI problems, but your claim that he lost the use of his hands in the early 80s is ridiculous.
It was in the mid- to late 80's that RMS began to complain that he could no longer code more than an hour or two a day because he had given himself a terrible case of RSI.
Symbolics was never in a position to provide a significant source of income to MIT, and in no alternative universe could they be.
Symbolics gave MIT the use of their code and machines, as well as some of the capital they'd raised. Had they been successful, they might well have done more.
RMS developed the GPL because he found that non-copylefted freeware was not effective in competing against Symbolics and others
In short, his first attempt to destroy businesses via predatory practices was not working, so he tried nastier tactics.
who could take the free base software and add a few proprietary enhancements.
The notion that one can add only "a few" enhancements to an open source program and make large amounts of money is a myth. Remember, when you release code to the world for free, the market value of that code and that functionality becomes zero. (After all, an informed consumer will not pay money for something that's available for free!) So, any money that the company does make is the result of value it adds. That's fair. And it has to add substantial value before customers will buy it rather than just using the free version. Microsoft demonstrated this repeatedly as it drove other companies out of business with free, inferior products.
It is true that academic research labs require support from the outside world. But that's no reason why research institutions shouldn't use licenses like the GPL;
Yes, there is. Research institutions should not embark upon a political agenda, nor should they engage themselves in a campaign whose purpose is to destroy livelihoods, businesses, and markets. This is what the GPL is for and what it does. The fruits of basic research have traditionally been available for all to use -- especially businesses which can develop them into useful products. This tradition should continue. To prevent commercial programmers from using the code is not only spiteful -- it ultimately hurts consumers by preventing the research from spawning products which will benefit them.
after all, the GPL is much more generous than the other popular model, which permits non-commercial or research use only and demands licensing for other use, even in cases where the taxpayers footed the bill for the original research (e.g. NCSA's handing of the original Mosaic).
Not so. The GPL is nastier. If one pays a price to license the technnology, at least one has it. GPLed code is generally not available for commercial licensing at any price; at the same time, it sabotages commercial endeavors. So it's worse in every way.
Finally, you misuse the term "commercial developer". All companies and individuals who develop software for profit are commercial developers, no matter what licensing terms they choose to use for their software.
Not so. GPLed software cannot be "commercial" according to the normal usage of the word -- or its dictionary definition. The word "commercial" means "used in commerce." But GPLed software cannot be licensed for money, and therefore cannot be commercial.
It is true that companies such as Red Hat can sell discs with the software on it. But it's the MEDIA that's commercial -- not the software on it. The distinction is important. Since it does not own the rights to the software itself, Red Hat cannot sell a license for it.
What about the original author of a piece of GPLed software? Alas, once the software has been released under the GPL, his chances of being able to license it for money are virtually nil. And once he's accepted a single GPLed contribution to the software, he can't license it for money at all.
Thus, GPLed software is not and cannot be commercial.
People who put out GPLed software are competing in the free market.
No, they're not. They're attempting to destroy markets. Stallman says so himself in his GNU Manifesto.
There are some whiners who don't like this competition;
The GPL is not competitive; it is anti-competitive. Just as Microsoft attempted to "cut off [Netscape's] air supply," Stallman has duped gullible programmers into doing the same to other software companies, and thus destroying the market for their own work!
I get paid from writing proprietary software.
In that case, Stallman would say that what you are doing is evil and wrong, and will do what he can to deprive you of that work.
I don't cry and wail because I can't grab other people's software and then sell it.
Well, good for you. Guess what: I don't either. However, I also do not attempt to destroy livelihoods or businesses out of spite. If I give code away, I give it away. I don't say, "I'll give it to everyone but you, so that no one will want what you sell and you won't be able to benefit from it." That's spiteful and malevolent. And it is, alas, exactly what the GPL is about.
--Brett Glass
Actually, this is exatly what the GPL does. By using existing legislation (the copyright laws), and force (the force of courts and police, which enforce them), the GPL seeks to sabotage commercial software vendors. This process is explicitly explained on the FSF's Web pages.
--Brett Glass
At http://www.fsf.org/gnu/manifesto.html, where Stallman says:
Which is what Stallman advocates: banning commercial software and commercial software companies. The stated purpose of the GPL is to destroy all programming jobs which pay better than what is earned by a starving graduate student.
At http://www.fsf.org/phi losophy/free-software-for-freedom.html,Richard says:
And at http://www.fsf.or g/philosophy/categories.html#ProprietarySoftware, Stallman writes:
These, and other documents, reaffirm Stallman's goal of driving all commercial software (which he calls "proprietary" software even though that word has a different meaning in normal usage) out of the marketplace.
--Brett Glass
Ad hominem attacks weaken your argument.
I love how people say the GPL 'infects any code that comes near it',
I did not make that assertion. It is, however, true that GPLed code infects any work in which it is included or to which it is linked. This is true regardless of the quantity of GPLed code that is used. This represents an "unconscionable" provision which I believe renders the GPL unenforceable.
for values of 'come near it' that equal 'take GPLed code, read it, copy big chunks of it and use it as the basis of your own thing'.
A loaded and prejudicial interpretation which doesn't square with the arguments that others are making. See above.
Clearly the only ethical choice is to allow people to take everything you do and _not_ ask anything of them in return! furrfu.
In fact, this is the best way to publish open source because it does the maximum amount of good. Since one is forfeiting any opportunity to make money from the code when one publishes it as open source, it is unethical to arbitrarily deny to anyone else the chance to benefit from it. Especially when the intent is to do harm.
How quaint! And to think that I believed the GPL was for taking coding ideas and forcibly preventing them from being filched and made proprietary by people like you. Shocked, I am, to learn that 'Saint Ignatius's only real interest is in destroying jobs! Could you have misheard him? Maybe he wants to destroy Wozniak instead ;)
Apparently, you're not aware of the GPL's history or motivations. The stated purpose of the GPL is to destroy opportunities for programmers to make salaries better than they could make in academia. In The GNU Manifesto, Richard Stallman writes:
It may have escaped your attention, but at the time, the AI lab did not USE passwords.
I know. I visited at the time. However, MIT was putting more and more machines on the ARPANet, and passwords were becoming essential. To deny the need for them was, and is, sheer folly.
At the time, people were evolving ways of functioning in 'electronic society' without locks and passwords and barriers, and it actually worked, because people felt the obligation to behave civilly, given the freedom to do harm.
Unfortunately, as recent developments have shown, that perspective was naive. Allowing strangers even limited access to computers on the network paves the way for denial of service attacks -- such as the ones we've seen in recent weeks -- and worse. And now that important and sensitive communications are routinely sent by e-mail, I doubt that you'd be willing to allow all and sundry to have access to your mailbox.
The use of passwords you cite was not business as usual, but the imposition of a new set of regulations which assumed anyone with the freedom to do harm would obviously do it, and arranged matters so nobody had that freedom.
I see. By analogy, I suppose we should insist that no one should have a lock on his or her door either. Do you lock the door to your house? Do you take the keys out of your car when you park it? Do you lock your bicycle if you ride one? If you truly believe what you say above, you would be hypocritical if you did.
I realise that you think this is the only way the world can work. We'll never know now, will we?
I believe that last week's attacks, plus the recent rash of Web site defacements and credit card number thefts, have settled that question once and for all -- if it was ever a serious question to begin with.
Because RMS failed in his attempt to force the issue,
As he should have. By attempting to force the issue, he was guilty of gross insubordination. Had I been his supervisor, I would have fired him on the spot for endangering MIT's resources and the personal information of its staff, faculty, and students. He was, and is, a dangerous loony.
and did not convince the world that establishing social expectations was the way to handle 'security'.
Of course he didn't; it's a fool's errand. The notion is as absurd as expecting "social expectations" to prevent burglary and other crimes.
(Also, it's interesting to note how you fulminate against anyone interfering with a business-employed coder's right to withhold their code from others if they wish,
Again, an ad hominem attack. The fact is that if a coder is employed by a business, what he creates on the job is the property of that business. And, yes, the business has the right to release that code to the world or not. It's not the programmer's individual decision. By becoming an employee and doing the work on the job in return for a salary, the programmer has agreed willingly to this.
but won't accept RMS's academia-funded right to withhold EMACS from others as he wished. So if you are a business, you get to do whatever you want, but if you are academic or an OSS type you are obliged to be exploited and trod upon?)
RMS was an employee of MIT, and as such the code he created on the school's time and with its equipment was its property. When he agreed to be employed by the University, he agreed willingly to this. He did not have the right to withhold the code from his employer or from parts of the University whose policies he did not like.
The _order_ you put that in is interesting, but the claim makes no sense whatsoever. Surely a young company with programmers and promising ideas is free to do whatever it wants, within reason? Do you think a good idea cannot compete against a GPLed implementation of 'cheap imitation' quality?
Even if the free product is far inferior, it is difficult and sometimes impossible. Microsoft has demonstrated this with EMM386, DoubleSpace, and Internet Explorer.
Do you have that little faith in the marketplace that the mere existence of free things terrifies you so?
Again, an ad hominem attack. The truth has nothing to do with "faith" or with being "terrified." Nor is the existence of things which are available at no cost necessarily destructive. However, the GPL is intended to make it destructive.
Do you think little elves will sneak into the fine young company under cover of darkness and, cackling malignantly, GPL everything while nobody is looking?
Elves are not required. Those who follow the industry may recall that Be, Inc. had problems with GPL infection of its OS kernel not long ago. Richard Stallman in fact advocates the introduction of GPLed code into companies' programs as a way of coercing them to forfeit their intellectual property. (See his essay, Why Software Should Not Have Owners.)
You've got some very strange ideas about what the GPL _means_ to a company that wants no part of it.
Not so. Every assertion I've made is provable via empirical evidence. Even if a software company wants no part of the GPL, it is injured by the destruction of its markets.
Why in God's name do you think commercial developers _should_ get to make use of open source?
Because denying to them -- and them alone -- the use of open source code is an explicit attempt to hurt them. That's why the BSD license is ethical and the GPL is not.
Being a commercial developer usually means proprietary code. Use that.
This argument ignores the obvious: the GPL damages programmers and their livelihoods whether or not they use GPLed code themselves.
If you must compete and not interact cooperatively with others, come up with your own damn ideas.
You appear not to understand intellectual property law. Ideas are protected by patent, not copyright.
For _years_ there wasn't a major, public open source movement, and no commercial developers complained about this at all.
Not true. It was well known that open source code such as BIND, Sendmail, and the BSD TCP/IP stack were available for free to everyone -- including developers. It is the release of GPLed code -- which, actually, is not open source because the GPL discriminates against a field of endeavor -- which hurts developers.
Nobody objected in the slightest to having to reinvent the wheel behind closed doors, it was a way of life to come up with your own code.
Not true. Code reuse has always been an important concept.
Now all of a sudden, OSS is trendy, and suddenly access to other people's code is a _right_?
Stallman, and many of his more fanatic followers, would assert that anyone should have the right to access anyone's code. However, when programs are published as freely redistributable open source, it is unethical to deny the use of the code to developers.
[Several ad hominem attacks deleted here]
Commercial developers are paid to develop. They have resources which part-time people couldn't begin to dream of.
Not true. Many are individual programmers who hope to make a reasonable living -- despite efforts by large corporations such as Microsoft or the FSF to put them out of business via predatory practices. (And, yes, the FSF is a large corporation. It holds the exclusive rights to large amounts of extremely valuable intellectual property and engages in predatory practices routinely; in fact, that's its purpose.)
This is different from proprietary code exactly how?
You are being disingenuous here. In a game of "keep away," everyone can have access to an object except one person who needs and desires it. The object of the game is to gang up on, and hurt, that person.
Having private property is, of course, very different from engaging in that destructive and cruel game.
My. Words fail me. Aside from the fact that this is nonsense, why do you feel that you have any business saying this on Slashdot?
Perhaps it's because I believe that this view should be heard. Or that Slashdot isn't, and shouldn't be, a place where only views that conform to the FSF's "party line" may be expressed.
I'll give you credit for not preaching to the choir here, but on the other hand you've got to be fscking crazy if you think this argument carries weight here.
Again, an ad hominem attack. The analogy to religion is, however, apt.
OSS is a flood. If you don't want to be part of it, then rise above it. If you won't bother to rise above it, then shut up and drown!
In the above, you attempt to characterize me as being opposed to open source, which is not the case. I am opposed to the GPL, which attempts to turn open source into a weapon against commercial software developers and programmers in general. By voicing this opposition, I am indeed attempting to "rise above the flood" and prevent open source from being turned from a useful tool into a weapon of spite. Only those who are malicious would oppose this.
--Brett Glass
Not true. They paid MIT and give it free use of their software and equipment. However, by rights, the research should have been available to the world for free since it was largely government-funded.
The GPL does not deny corporations access to the software it covers,
Wrong. The GPL denies not only corporations but all developers access to the software for the purpose of building on it and making a reasonable living. The people most hurt by the GPL are not large corporations but smaller companies that might challenge them. I'm sure that Microsoft loves the GPL, because it is about to wipe out Be.
--Brett Glass
Only partially. There was private funding as well. And that private funding increased when LMI and Symbolics were formed.
Government funding of research that can be commercially exploited is a good thing as well. The public has benefited greatly from spinoffs of NASA technology, for example.
The far worse situation occurs when companies do not form to bring the fruits of research to the rest of the world. Who is going to build the machines that the academics have been funded to conceive of? Not the schools, but private enterprise. It's an important part of the picture.
As soon as for-profit companies stepped in, the thriving community of hackers that existed in the MIT AI Lab was fragmented and eventually destroyed by the IP requirements of the for-profit companies, notably Symbolics which hired away most of the hackers and silenced them with NDAs.
And would you have had the hackers permanently indentured at the AI Lab? Stallman would have. In fact, the stated intent of the GPL was to destroy jobs that paid better than the slave wages earned by grad students in the MIT AI Lab.
When it came time for commercial development of the ideas which had been developed there, it was only natural that many of them would want to take part in that. Academics frequently hold jobs both in academia and in private companies, and/or go back and forth between the two. However, by attempting to sabotage the commercial endeavors, Stallman alienated the companies that might otherwise have supported continued research at the Lab. No wonder they weren't cooperative! Stallman was using MIT's money and facilities in an attempt to destroy their businesses.
Only after the MIT AI Lab was already destroyed did Stallman try to revenge himself on Symbolics.
According to the account he told to Steven Levy, who was researching the book "Hackers," he started exacting "revenge" on people who disagreed with him far earlier than that. Levy relates that Stallman refused to provide EMACS software -- which he was being paid by MIT to write! -- to users on the Computer Science department's systems. Why? Because they used passwords to keep their machines from being broken into from across the ARPANet. Yes, that's right; Stallman was so radically opposed to the notion of computer security that he committed "violence" (his own word!) against people who wanted to secure their systems against attacks from the outside.
He did this through a burst of reverse engineering and singlehandedly kept pace with an entire team of the world's best hackers (at Symbolics), impressing the hell out of them. He succeeded in keeping up while reengineering everything Symbolics did, he didn't just 'try'.
It's not clear that he actually succeeded, since of course it was not in the interest of the Symbolics employees to correct his mistakes or omissions.
What success Stallman did enjoy was likely due to the fact that reverse engineering is much easier than engineering a feature from scratch. Copying is always an order of magnitude easier than producing the original work. Being a crazed, totally obsessed individual with no life, it's no wonder that Stallman could reimplement much of that they'd done.
The GPL prevents any such situation from recurring-
Not so. It is very easy to do clean room reverse engineering on GPLed code. What the GPL does do, however, is sabotage young companies and programmers with promising ideas.
it bars nobody from participating
Not true. It prohibits commercial developers from making use of open source without giving away the farm.
(despite many attempts to add 'except Microsoft can't use my code!' clauses) and the single condition it imposes is that the code licensed under the GPL remains forever open for discussion and exchange. It does nothing else,
Bull. It ensures that programmers cannot make a living by licensing their work. Stallman says explicitly, in The GNU Manifesto, that this is what the GPL does and is designed to do.
and can only be considered a weapon if you expect commercial developers to be allowed to take OTHER PEOPLE'S work away from them,
Not so. It is a weapon because it undermines commercial developers' work. Anyone can use GPLed code in the way which most benefits him or her -- except commercial developers. Even though the author of GPLed code has forfeited any prospect of ever making a single penny from the code, and has in effect given the code away to everyone else in the world except those developers. This isn't ethical; it's a game of "keep-away."
There is no symbiosis between academia and the commercial world.
It's a good thing that universities and companies disagree with this stance. If they embraced it, a lot would be lost on both sides. Just as a treasure is lost whenever another a line of code falls under the vicious, viral, unethical GPL.
--Brett
Second, support is expensive. Minimum wage laws, overhead, mandatory benefits, training costs, and high turnover make it difficult to do technical support at a price consumers are willing to pay.
Third, remote support is difficult and time-consuming. As anyone who has done tech support knows, most computer users do not know the names of the items they see on their screens -- or even that they have names. Absent a remote control system (which may not work if the machine is disabled), even an expert technical support staffer can take hours to diagnose a simple problem on the phone with a customer.
Red Hat, the "poster child" for distributors of GPLed software, has lost millions of dollars per employee over its lifetime.
This is why Red Hat wrote, in its most recent Form 10-Q:
OUR BUSINESS MAY NOT SUCCEED BECAUSE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE BUSINESS MODELS ARE UNPROVEN
We have not demonstrated the success of our open source business model, which gives our customers the right freely to copy and distribute our software. No other company has built a successful open source business. Few open source software products have gained widespread commercial acceptance partly due to the lack of viable open source industry participants to offer adequate service and support on a long term basis. In addition, open source vendors are not able to provide industry standard warranties and indemnities for their products, since these products have been developed largely by independent parties over whom open source vendors exercise no control or supervision. If open source software should fail to gain widespread commercial acceptance, we would not be able to sustain our revenue growth and our business could fail.
This is not surprising. What's more, due to the GPL, Red Hat does not even own its own products free and clear! In fact, it has virtually no assets. No assets? No profits? This doesn't paint a very promising picture.
And what about the future? Again, let's hear the story straight from the horse's mouth. Red Hat says that it's not sure it will ever make money:
WE EXPECT TO INCUR SUBSTANTIAL LOSSES FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE
We have incurred operating losses in four of our previous five fiscal years, including our most recent fiscal year ended February 28, 1999, as well as in the nine months ended November 30, 1999. We expect to incur significant losses for the foreseeable future, as we substantially increase our sales and marketing, research and development and administrative expenses. In addition, we are investing considerable resources in our web initiatives and to expand our professional services offerings. As a result, we cannot be certain when or if we will achieve sustained profitability. Failure to become and remain profitable may adversely affect the market price of our common stock and our ability to raise capital and continue operations. See "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations--Overview", "--Results of Operations" and "--Liquidity and Capital Resources".
None of this should be surprising. The purpose of the GPL is not to enable software businesses but to destroy them. This was its explicit intent, and this is what it's doing. If you hope to make any money, better make it by buying and selling stock and taking advantage of gullible investors. You won't make it on GPLed software.
--Brett Glass
As mentioned in my message titled "Symbiosis" elsewhere in this discussion, denying the fruits of academic work to companies -- which is what the GPL does -- will discourage them from sponsoring that work. This, in turn, will hurt education and research. I don't think any of us want that. Instead, use the time-tested BSD or MIT X license. Both of these originated in academia and proved their worth long before the GPL (in fact, the BSD license can justifiably be said to have brought about the Internet as we know it today). The GPL is the product of Richard Stallman's personal spite against commercial software developers and upsets the symbiotic relationship between academia and the commercial world. (Its intent, according to Stallman, was to prevent programmers from making a higher salary at corporations than they did as starving graduate students.)
--Brett Glass
Corporations spend millions to fund research programs which make scientific discoveries and develop new areas of knowledge. Why? Because, eventually, that knowledge will allow them to engineer products which make them money and benefit all of us.
To insist that corporations not use the fruits of that research is to destroy this carefully crafted win/win relationship. If this happens, corporations will form their own private research laboratories and pull their money out of academia. Education as well as research will suffer as a result.
Richard Stallman was ignorant of this delicate balance when he bridled against commercial spinoffs of the MIT AI Lab, such as Symbolics. (His two-year tantrum, in which he desperately tried to put Symbolics out of business by writing free equivalents of its software products, cost him the use of his hands; he developed RSI trying to keep up. The GPL, which Stallman designed to accomplish similar goals, is likewise ill-advised because it turns open source software into a weapon against commercial developers.)
Stallman's spite was, of course, misplaced. The very existence of the academic "sandbox" he enjoyed was due to funding from for-profit companies, and the AI Lab suffered and eventually died when its sponsors perceived that the relationship was no longer symbiotic.
Academic research labs are an artificial environment which is not self-sustaining. They are created explicitly to develop ideas, which means that rewards come from sharing information (publishing) rather than withholding it and from developing and proving the feasibility of new concepts. But they can't exist without support from the "real world" outside, in which intellectual property matters.
Instead of attempting to impose the values of one world upon the other (which hurts both), we must recognize the differences in the "rules" and the symbiosis that exists between the two. Open source is, in essence, an extension of the academic world. To begrudge the output of open source projects to commercial developers -- which is what the GPL does -- is ill advised and ultimately hurts both. The hostility expressed in the above article is destructive and stems from a narrow view which does not account for the existence of these two worlds.
--Brett Glass
As with the Processor Serial Number, Intel seems to mistakenly believe -- or perhaps their marketroids have been trying to fool media companies into believing -- that you can control access to information once you've put it into the user's hands. Of course, that's silly. It's too easy to jigger the hardware, crack the encryption, reverse-engineer the software. It will be no problem to crack open a "copy protected" monitor and extract a decrypted video signal in short order.
The article says, " A violated key could be tracked down and revoked over a satellite broadcast network, for example." Of course, this is silly. It'll only take a few hours to crack the next one! And will consumers tolerate the notion of large corporations reaching into their homes to disable their equipment? Sure.... In the same way they turned out in droves to buy DivX players and movies.
I feel like asking Intel and the media moguls: "Ed Gruberman, have you learned nothing from the lesson of DeCSS? Of DivX? Of the Processor Serial Number? Boot to the head!"
Perhaps, in time, Intel will becoome enightened about this. But I'm not counting on it.
--Brett Glass
He throws a gnife.
It misses.
-> Throw axe
"Join me now and share the.... AAAACK!" [THUD]
You've killed a little GNOME.
The body disappears in a puff of greasy black smoke.
HB 561 is UCITA. It was passed by the House but then appears to have been dropped in favor of this resolution to study the issue.
--Brett Glass
Offered January 24, 2000
Establishing a joint subcommittee to study the
Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act.
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Patrons-- Baskerville, Christian, Crittenden, Harris, Kilgore, Melvin and Rhodes; Senator: Miller, Y.B.
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Referred to Committee on Rules
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WHEREAS, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws has promulgated the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), and it is now available for consideration for adoption by the several states; and
WHEREAS, the UCITA is major legislation that would govern transactions of computer information, thereby significantly impacting all Virginians who use computers; and
WHEREAS, the UCITA presents a significant policy decision to be made by the General Assembly; and
WHEREAS, the voluminous pages of the UCITA contain highly technical language and a legal scheme which even legal professionals may have trouble understanding; and
WHEREAS, the Commonwealth may be one of the first states to consider this major legislation and other states may be looking to the Commonwealth for guidance in considering the UCITA; and
WHEREAS, the Commonwealth is the leader in technology and relevant laws and it must be responsible in leading other states; now, therefore, be it
RESOLVED by the House of Delegates, the Senate concurring, That a joint subcommittee be established to study the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act. The joint subcommittee shall be composed of twelve members, which shall include seven legislative members and five nonlegislative citizen members as follows: four members of the House of Delegates, to be appointed by the Speaker, one of whom shall be a member of the Joint Commission on Technology and Science, one of whom shall be a member of the House Committee on Science and Technology, one of whom shall be a member of the House Committee on Courts of Justice, and one of whom shall be a member of the House Committee on Corporations, Insurance and Banking; three members of the Senate, to be appointed by the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections, one of whom shall be a member of the Joint Commission on Technology and Science, one of whom shall be a member of the Senate Committee on Courts of Justice, and one of whom shall be a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce and Labor; one representative of those who would be considered licensors under the UCITA and one representative who would be considered a licensee under the UCITA to be appointed by the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections; and one representative of consumer interests, one member with an expertise in intellectual properties, and one member from the academic legal community who is knowledgeable in the UCITA and the Uniform Commercial Code, to be appointed by the Speaker.
In conducting its study, the joint subcommittee shall review the UCITA and make a recommendation regarding the appropriateness of using the UCITA as the proper model to govern computer information transactions and shall make suggestions regarding alternatives or amendments to the UCITA that will assure that interests of both the licensors and licensees are adequately protected.
The direct costs of this study shall not exceed $13,500.
The Division of Legislative Services shall provide staff support for the study. All agencies of the Commonwealth shall provide assistance to the joint subcommittee, upon request.
The joint subcommittee shall complete its work in time to submit its findings and recommendations to the Governor and the 2001 Session of the General Assembly as provided in the procedures of the Division of Legislative Automated Systems for the processing of legislative documents.
Implementation of this resolution is subject to subsequent approval and certification by the Joint Rules Committee. The Committee may withhold expenditures or delay the period for the conduct of the study.
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See http://leg1.state.va.us/c gi-bin/legp504.exe?001+ful+HJ277.
Gross errors such as the one InfoWorld made in its UCITA coverage were frequently introduced into my column during editing and then printed; I rarely had a chance to review the column and catch those mistakes. The editor I worked with there actually resented it when I complained about such errors being introduced. It is thus no surprise that InfoWorld got it wrong.
--Brett Glass
Stallman advocates its use for precisely that purpose. In his essay, "What is Copyoleft?" Stallman advocated the surreptitious use of GPLed code by programmers who wish to create GPLed software on their employers' time and then force the employers to give away the result:
It's the programmers who are not allowed to "confiscate" the IP of the GPLd work when a copyrighted work is covered under the GPL.
Not so. GPLed software has zero market value, since it is available for free to all users. Therefore, programmers should be able to use it completely freely in their own work, whatever that work may be, at no charge and with no obligation. Why does the GPL begrudge them this? Because by doing so it undermines their livelihoods.
--Brett Glass
Not true. Stallman himself says that the goal of the GPL is to force programmers and their employers to give away their work. The GPL is intended as a lever with which to pry it away from them, no matter how much they are entitled to it.
However if I wanted to use a line or module from a GPL'd app and distribute it under something else, I'm fully free to CONTACT the author and ASK his permission; and if what I'm doing doesn't violate what HE SPECIFICALLY AS A HUMAN INDIVIDUAL wants, then he'll allow me to do it.
Actually, the GPL is designed to prevent this. Because it aggregates the works of many authors, and any can veto the commercial use of the code, it is generally impossible to locate all of the authors. And the odds of securing an agreement from every one of them are vanishingly small, because authors of GPLed code often subscribe to the GPL's malicious agenda.
Brett, your points simply have no merit,
Proof by assertion: you say it, therefore it must be so. Sure.
and stem from a need to hate things which are successful. Hatred is just too easy; try something else.
An unwarranted ad hominem attack. The GPL is motivated by spite and anger (and this is well-documented; read Stallman's own words or any of several published accounts of how it came to be. My postings are motivated by concern for programmers, the future of the industry, and ethics. It is unethical and wrong to attack and hurt people out of spite, and that is what the GPL does.
--Brett Glass
It just so happens that I support open source vigorously. However, the GPL is not open source, because it is not open to all. Anyone can use GPLed software in the way which benefits him or her the most -- except commercial software developers. This discrimination was explicitly intended, by Richard Stallman, to reduce programmers' economic prospects to those of starving graduate students. He says so in his "GNU Manifesto."
The GPL is not a valid open source license, even according to the "official" Open Source Definition posted at http://www.opensource.org. Why? Because it violates a key principle listed there: an open source license must not discriminate against a field of endeavor. The GPL discriminates against the well-established field of commercial software development and is thus not a legitimate open source license. It is unethical to use the GPL for this reason.
The MIT X License and the BSD license, by contrast, do qualify because they do not discriminate.
Yes. That's what sharing is about. If you insist on something back, it's not sharing. What's more, what the GPL demands is not that the developer give code to the author of the original work, but rather that he or she give it to the whole wide world, for free, forever. And, by doing so, forfeit his or her chance to make any money from the work he or she invested in it. It's like saying, "Here, have a breath mint. But in return, I expect you to give me your house, your car, and the contents of your bank accounts."
People do give back under the MIT X and BSD licenses, but in reasonable amounts. They don't give away the farm, and are not required to. That's fair.
So, it could be said that these other "Open" licenses discriminate against programmers who wish their works to be extended only by those who are willing to share those extensions back to the original author.
Again, the extensions are not merely shared with the original author. The programmer must give up his or her livelihood. A Faustian bargain.
Of course, that's the way it's designed. The entire purpose of the GPL is to destroy programmers' prospects of making money.
--Brett Glass
It can, in a sense. When a new version comes out, it can license it only under the latest version of the GPL and not any older one(s). Who would want to run an older one with known bugs? The FSF can thus tighten or otherwise change the licensing essentially at will.
--Brett Glass
No, but private e-mail certainly was. Should my private conversations with my wife, girlfriend, doctor, broker, lawyer, etc. be accessible by my co-workers? The public? Should anyone be able to use my account and impersonate me on Usenet, the Internet, or elsewhere?
--Brett Glass