If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by cwyers » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 4:57 PM UTC

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #82

cwyers wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reac…

> LP's testimony starkly contrasts with Kay and SJR.

No it doesn't. There is no reason that "conceptually, it was the wrong design" has to contradict with "they had different ideas to me, and couldn't contribute them because of the CLA" and "it could have quite easily evolved into what systemd looks like today, with an active community working on it." It is quite easy to read those statements as being in agreement -- Lennart decided that Upstart wasn't conceptually correct, SJR is amenable to discussing merging changes that would bring Upstart in line with Lennart's ideas, but the CLA is a roadblock so Lennart goes off to form his own project. Why not adopt the principle of charity and take everyone at their word?

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

#92

Post by Mikeb85 » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

lambda wrote: post #84

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 t…

You can distribute unmodified versions of Ubuntu or the binaries, you just can't call Ubuntu + your binaries "Ubuntu", or call your distribution + Ubuntu binaries "Ubuntu".

It's basically just clarification concerning the GPL and trademark law. Software licenses are legal documents, they're binding as far as the interpretation of the laws of the jurisdiction.

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

#93

Post by vezzy-fnord » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 5:03 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #91

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reac…

> LP's testimony starkly contrasts with Kay and SJR. No it doesn't. There is no reason that "conceptually, it was the wrong design" has to contradict with "they had different ideas to me, and couldn't contribute them because of the CLA" and "it could have quite easily evolved into what systemd looks like today, with an active community working on it." It is quite easy to read those statements as being in agreement --…

Except for the whole part about Lennart's project already having a prior non-public existence.

Discussing historical counterfactuals like this based on limited public testimony is a difficult matter, but my input here is that the ultimate breadth of changes envisioned by the systemd developers would have triggered a split anyway.

SJR's comments concern systemd-the-PID1.

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

#94

Post by Mikeb85 » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

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.

There is no legal ambiguity. The license is a legal document. You comply with the terms of the license and trademark law.

> What do they consider trademarks, what do you need to remove?

They don't define trademarks, because it's a legal term that depends on the laws in your country, and not up to them to define.

Canonical's Q&A is merely clarification. At the end of the day, you're subject to whatever licenses you implicitly agree to, as interpreted by the laws in your jurisdiction (and maybe some international laws that your country recognizes).

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

#95

Post by eptcyka » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #49

pnt12 wrote: post #2

I agree: Canonical should make it easier for developers to strip the company's trademarks when forking their applications. Canonical's relationship with the rest of the FOSS community always seemed a bit screwed up to me. They try to make Ubuntu the best Linux distro while ignoring what all the other ones are doing. All other distros seem much more friendly towards integration between projects, to benefit from the sh…

I'm not sure why you think this is a bad thing. Canonical is a corollary to Apple in the Linux world. They set their own agenda with limited cooperation. The FOSS obsession with "community" and "integration" is myopic and abhorrent. As if everyone must converge on one approach, one vanguard. There are scantly any problem domains where only one solution applies. Now, Canonical keeping to themselves has a very crucial…

>I'm not sure why you think this is a bad thing. Canonical is a corollary to Apple in the Linux world. They set their own agenda with limited cooperation.

I'm not sure why would anyone think this is a good thing

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

#96

Post by swills » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 5:13 PM UTC

bkor wrote: post #45

swills wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RHEL 6 (and CentOS 6 by extension) use Upstart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart#Adoption Not that I disagree with your comments on Red Hat, but let's get our facts right.

RHEL6 starts upstarts, but doesn't make use of any of the functionality. Everything is sysvinit scripts and zero (upstart) jobs. I was administrating a few RHEL6 machines and had to read elsewhere about the change to even notice it. The person you responded to is correct though; a large factor in starting systemd was the CLA of Upstart. Above even highlights this; you cannot really say that RHEL6 used upstart in any…

I guess it depends on how you look at it. It uses upstart to start all the sysvinit scripts, no? I know you can create upstart jobs and they'll get started, I've done that. But you're right, it doesn't make "real" use of upstart, in a sense.

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

#97

Post by jack9 » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 5:20 PM UTC

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.

This is the process used to generate new version of CentOS from RHEL.

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

#98

Post by Mikeb85 » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 5:28 PM UTC

mjg59 wrote: post #81

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-f…

> 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.

Your responsibility is to abide by the terms of the license, and trademark law. It's not about what Canonical considers an infringement, but what the law considers infringement based on the interpretation of the license you implicitly agreed to and trademark law.

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

#99

Post by Mikeb85 » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

greyman wrote: post #29

delonia wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's repeated all too often and it gets stuck into the mind of people. But is it actually true? Ubuntu is still heavily based on Debian and still reuses most of the packages. There has been a gradual move towards systemd and systemd is default in Ubuntu 15.10. To me, mjg59 comes out as a bitter person. He used to work for Canonical in the early days of Ubuntu. He shared the vision for a usable open-source desktop.…

I don't see it as a rant. He criticized Ubuntu for unwillingness to clarify the trademark issue. Correct me if I am wrong, but how I understood the article, what Canonical did was to take Debian sources licensed under GPL, created a product based on it, but now if anyone wants to do binary redistribution of their product [the right GPL license assures], they could be sued for trademark infringement. So in practice th…

> So in practice they made it non-free software [free as in Stallman definition of free].

Not at all. RMS isn't philosophically pro-trademark, but he has said that trademark and free software are separate issues (meaning that 'free software' doesn't confer on the user the ability to rip off a trademark).

> but now if anyone wants to do binary redistribution of their product

You CAN redistribute Ubuntu, but only in its whole form. You just can't rip out/add pieces to it and still call it Ubuntu, because then it infringes trademark. If you want to change it, you can, but then it can't be "Ubuntu".

> He criticized Ubuntu for unwillingness to clarify the trademark issue.

Which is stupid, because trademark is a legal term, defined by the laws of the land. Canonical can't change the way a country interprets 'trademark'.

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

#100

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

Mikeb85 wrote: post #94

jordigh wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no legal ambiguity. The license is a legal document. You comply with the terms of the license and trademark law. > What do they consider trademarks, what do you need to remove? They don't define trademarks, because it's a legal term that depends on the laws in your country, and not up to them to define. Canonical's Q&A is merely clarification. At the end of the day, you're subject to whatever licenses you im…

[deleted]