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If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

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Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#81

Post by mjg59 »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #71

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others.…

Canonical have the right to protect their brand. But what Canonical are doing is being so unclear about your obligations around their brand that it's impossible to know whether they'd consider a derivative an infringement of their rights.

If I release software under a BSD-style license with an additional proviso that you must demonstrate p=np before being able to redistribute it, we'd probably agree that it was non-free. If I release software under a BSD-style license with an additional proviso that you must replace a single file containing my trademark, we'd agree that it was free. Canonical's requirements are somewhere between these two things, but they won't tell us where. If it's impossible to determine whether a requirement is feasible, it's difficult to figure out what your practical ability to make use of those freedoms is.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#82

Post by vezzy-fnord »

cwyers wrote: post #79
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your story is factually off, I'm afraid. Canonical comes up with a replacement for sysvinit called Upstart. Actually a replacement for both sysvinit and sysv-rc, along with some overlap for hotplug and other demand-based/lazy operations. Everyone agrees sysvinit is a dumpster fire on wheels careening around at high speed, so a new init system is welcomed as a Good Thing. Hah. I wish. In fact, the painful truth of the…

Most of your corrections to my story aren't really germane to the point, and mostly involve your constant flogging of a bunch of sysvinit replacements that never caught on, but there's one where I think you move from mere pedantry to being wrong: > In fact, "some people from Red Hat" already had deeper architectural failings with Upstart (which I agree with, but absolutely not with how they decided to "solve" them) a…

Kay Sievers was actually a SUSE employee at the time, IIRC.

Now, there's a case to be made that the public statements of intent did not necessarily correspond to the actual function, or strategy that made systemd emerge.

Quoting from Lennart Poettering's Linux Voice interview [1]:

> We, at that time, thought: OK, Upstart is the future! Scott understood how init systems work – it needs to be dynamic, it needs to react to events, and it’s not the static thing that Sysvinit was. So we thought that was the way of the future, but as it progressed, we realised it probably wasn’t the future, because we realised that conceptually, it was the wrong design.

Now, furthermore, the goal of systemd became "universal GNU/Linux middleware," a massively increased scope relative to what Upstart was intended to be. Though it may have been the case that Upstart could have evolved into something similar to systemd-the-PID1, it appears to me that systemd's emergence would nevertheless have been determined by the desire for a homogeneous catch-all userland suite. The Upstart architecture, relying on so-called "bridges" at the time to marshall external events to and from the internal format, would likely not have been as desirable.

LP's testimony starkly contrasts with Kay and SJR.

[1] http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#83

Post by jordigh »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #71

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others.…

The problem is that Canonical is (intentionally?) vague about what you need to do with their software to redistribute it. They have not answered requests for clarification. What do they consider trademarks, what do you need to remove?

This kind of (intentional?) legal ambiguity ends up having a chilling effect.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#84

Post by lambda »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #71

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others.…

How is it protecting their brand to say that I am not allowed to redistribute the libpcap0.8 binary package that they built, written by other developers, licensed under the 3-clause BSD license, packaged by Debian developers, and the only reference to Ubuntu is the substitution of "Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers , Original-Maintainer: Romain Francoise " in the binary package details, that they automatically add when they rebuild the package on their infrastructure?

That sounds more like "taking the work of others and trying to pass it off as their own" rather than "protecting their brand."

No one involved has a problem with branding guidelines that require replacing graphics, strings, and other branding information that shows up in user-visible locations. The problem is the weird and vague rules that Canonical imply to mean that anyone who redistributes packages from Ubuntu have to rebuild all binary packages (with an exception for GPL'd packages if that requirement would conflict with the GPL licensing which doesn't allow adding extra restrictions).

Because of restrictions like this, third parties who create forks of Ubuntu are left in a weird legal limbo. It can be solved by doing a full rebuild of all packages, but it is a lot of work and very error prone to set up a build system and rebuild every package. Rebuilding only the ones necessary for removing user-visible branding and whatever local changes are necessary is much simpler.

The other problem is that this policy was imposed relatively recently (in 2013). The previous trademark policy did not mention needing to rebuild all binary packages. So people who were relying on the earlier trademark policy are left in the lurch.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#85

Post by pxc »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #71

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others.…

No. Free software is software that confers, as practical capabilities, the four fundamental software freedoms to its users.

If what you said were true, whence the GPLv3? Tivoization, impossible build systems, etc., absolutely can defeat the purpose and spirit of free software. When they do, we are right to call projects hobbled by such practices 'virtually unfree' or 'practically proprietary' or whatever.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#86

Post by cabalamat »

jordigh wrote: post #83
Mikeb85 wrote: post #71

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others.…

The problem is that Canonical is (intentionally?) vague about what you need to do with their software to redistribute it. They have not answered requests for clarification. What do they consider trademarks, what do you need to remove? This kind of (intentional?) legal ambiguity ends up having a chilling effect.

> The problem is that Canonical is (intentionally?) vague about what you need to do with their software to redistribute it.

What does trademark law say on the issue? I assume there are some differences between using a trademark and merely mentioning it, because if not then this post would be illegal due to having the words "Canonical" and "Ubuntu" in it.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#87

Post by iamsohungry »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #71

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others.…

> This doesn't change the fact that you can use their code as you wish.

But I can't use the code as I wish. If I want to make a modification to it and then redistribute it, I then have to go through the entire codebase and remove trademarks. I wish to do the first step without doing the second step, and I can't.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#88

Post by Mikeb85 »

pxc wrote: post #85
Mikeb85 wrote: post #71

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others.…

No. Free software is software that confers, as practical capabilities, the four fundamental software freedoms to its users. If what you said were true, whence the GPLv3? Tivoization, impossible build systems, etc., absolutely can defeat the purpose and spirit of free software. When they do, we are right to call projects hobbled by such practices 'virtually unfree' or 'practically proprietary' or whatever.

Those fundamental freedoms are what determine whether a license is free or not, according to the FSF.

Compliance with free licenses makes the software free (legally). And of course, licenses are legal documents, subject to the laws in the jurisdiction that applies.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#89

Post by Mikeb85 »

iamsohungry wrote: post #87
Mikeb85 wrote: post #71

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others.…

> This doesn't change the fact that you can use their code as you wish. But I can't use the code as I wish. If I want to make a modification to it and then redistribute it, I then have to go through the entire codebase and remove trademarks. I wish to do the first step without doing the second step, and I can't.

Even the GPL says you can't misrepresent the origin of the software. Besides changing attribution clauses, all you'd need to remove is artwork.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#90

Post by mdeslaur »

thiagoharry wrote: post #13
netheril96 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I am wrong, but to my understanding, both Unity and Mir are open source, and nothing stops other distros from adopting it.

Unity for example, needs a forked glib to be compiled and work. And only Ubuntu uses this forked glib. I don't know about Mir.

I don't see any Unity-specific patches in the glib package in Ubuntu. What are you referring to?
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