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Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

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Re: Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

#31

Post by dragonwriter »

jancsika wrote: post #29
mempko wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found his arguments either dishonest or ignorant. He basically said "Look, I don't have an ideology to push, I chose the license because it served MY needs, FSF is pushing an ideology is GPLv3 and I don't like that.". However, he certainly has an ideology which I call "The roman conception of freedom". It is favored by laze-faire free market types. This is not an "ideology-free" argument. He is pushing an ideology…

He's not arguing that the FSF shouldn't push an ideology. Nor is he arguing that he doesn't have an ideology-- he states it clearly in the video regarding his understanding of the GPLv2-- "I give you the source code, you give me back your changes, and we're even." He is making a claim that FSF tried to persuade him that the GPLv3 would satisfy Linus' ideology under the reasoning that it allows him to invalidate the t…

> That's rather hard to believe IMO, as I've never read or heard anything from the FSF that is purposely deceitful in this manner.

The FSF has claimed that several licenses that have requirements not present in GPLv2 are compatible with GPLv2; the FSF is very aggressive in pushing the use of their license and their bias for such use definitely colors their representation of facts.

Re: Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

#32

Post by belorn »

mikeash wrote: post #10
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #2

Ok, I understand that this is trying to be decent and reasonable people here, in cases where it's truly an accident of including some GPL code. Shit happens, clean it up. If I were to do this with commercial code or assets, would they be so flexible in working with me, or do they go straight to shakedown? I'll give ye all a hint: go look at the MPAA and RIAA's views on that. I remembered when friends were back in the…

Why do we open source software in the first place? For most of us, I think it's because we want people to use it. And, yes, we want people to use it under certain conditions, it's not a free-for-all, but using it is an important part. If it wasn't, we'd just keep it closed. Going straight to harsh enforcement for a violation isn't going to help with that. There are already a lot of people unwilling to consider open s…

When people work on a volunteer basis, I would actually guess that people get more emotional when the social contract is broken by a profit seeking company. Going straight to harsh enforcement in order to strengthen the social contracts might sound illogical, but I would bet that its common through out history. Just look at historical societies that operated on a honor bound system and see how harsh enforcement were, even when the punishment has a cost to that society.

There is multiple strategies to keep social contracts. Forgiveness is good, but so is enforcement. Site like HN do ban people, but also warn people. I am uncertain if any singular tactic is best.

Re: Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

#33

Post by belorn »

tzs wrote: post #15
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #2

Ok, I understand that this is trying to be decent and reasonable people here, in cases where it's truly an accident of including some GPL code. Shit happens, clean it up. If I were to do this with commercial code or assets, would they be so flexible in working with me, or do they go straight to shakedown? I'll give ye all a hint: go look at the MPAA and RIAA's views on that. I remembered when friends were back in the…

> I remembered when friends were back in the Napster times shook down for a few grand. RIAA asked infringers for about $2 per infringed song. That seems a pretty fair price--it's only about twice what it would have cost for the people to legitimately purchase copies of the music.

I am pretty sure RIAA do not ask for $2 per infringed song when a company is the one doing the infringement. Maybe per copy, but then that will likely count up to millions in the end, like with the pirate bay case in Sweden. The founders did get charge for infringement of specific films, games and music, and the cost where no where near $2 per work.

As far as I have heard several lawyers doing GPL enforcement, no person has ever been sued over GPL infringement. It has always been companies that sells millions of copies. The $2 figure has no relevance since it don't cover commercial infringement done for profit.

Re: Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

#34

Post by TrashMacNugget »

Phrodo_00 wrote: post #27
Analemma_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torvalds has always been very upfront that he doesn't care about software freedom. Note that choice of words very carefully: not "opposes" but "doesn't care about", one way or the other. He has said from the beginning that the choice of GPL for Linux was a technical one that he thinks produces the best code, and that the GPLv3 offered no technical gains and thus wasn't worth switching to. Presumably if he thought swi…

Also, Linux code is owned by whoever wrote it (or paid to have it written I guess), so it'd a major effort to try and change its license.

True, but Linux originally used the GPLv2, but IIRC never said anywhere whether it was GPLv2-only or GPLv2 or any later version, or just "GPL". According to the GPL, that means:

> If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.

So Linux could've theoretically upgraded to the GPLv3 (or GPLv2+). However, Linus didn't like that idea, and in 2006 edited the COPYING file to say that it was GPLv2-only. If you really wanted to, you could take the 2006 source code and make a GPLv3 fork of Linux.

Re: Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

#35

Post by asveikau »

mempko wrote: post #23
__s wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU Torvalds on GPLv2 vs GPLv3

I found his arguments either dishonest or ignorant. He basically said "Look, I don't have an ideology to push, I chose the license because it served MY needs, FSF is pushing an ideology is GPLv3 and I don't like that.". However, he certainly has an ideology which I call "The roman conception of freedom". It is favored by laze-faire free market types. This is not an "ideology-free" argument. He is pushing an ideology…

The copyright for Linux (the kernel) is not held by a small number of people or organizations. There are many contributors with copyright notices all over the tree. I don't think he could relicense if he wanted.

Re: Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

#36

Post by kelnos »

TrashMacNugget wrote: post #34
Phrodo_00 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Linux code is owned by whoever wrote it (or paid to have it written I guess), so it'd a major effort to try and change its license.

True, but Linux originally used the GPLv2, but IIRC never said anywhere whether it was GPLv2-only or GPLv2 or any later version, or just "GPL". According to the GPL, that means: > If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation. So Linux could've theoretically upgraded to the GPLv3 (or GPLv2+). However, Linus didn't like that…

> If you really wanted to, you could take the 2006 source code and make a GPLv3 fork of Linux.

You certainly theoretically could, but maintaining, updating, and modernizing such a beast would be out of the reach of most people and organizations. 11 years of progress can't be replicated so quickly, especially when you consider you'd need to do it in a clean-room sort of fashion to be entirely aboveboard, which means many people who are already well familiar with the Linux kernel couldn't even work on it.

At any rate, I think your estimate of the timing is off: I found references to the "GPLv2-only" language in the kernel's COPYING file as far back as linux-2.4.0-test8, which was released sometime in 2000, and I didn't really try to go farther back.

Re: Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

#37

Post by comatose »

Blazespinnaker wrote: post #28

The funny thing is that gpl is mostly used by per profit companies creating a two licensing system. Gpl is great to test drive before buying a commercial license, but other than it’s pretty much ignored except maybe in academia.

well, safari, chrome, osx, iphone, iPad, amazon, android, appletv, and a large number of routers and car systems all use gpl under that license singly. the fact that it's mostly due to linux and khtml seem unimportant when you say so much gpl is dual licensed ( all of those contain software that is gpl only) but, yes, dual licensing is popular too, ie the immense popularity of qt

Re: Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

#38

Post by racer-v »

The GPL ship has sailed. It used to be every free license could be converted to GPL, so it became the "universal recipient" license. Then Stallman forked it and created two incompatible GPL's, effectively killing his own dream of a copyleft ecosystem. So the only sane thing now is "universal donor" licenses like MIT - or straight public domain. I'm stealing all of this from Rob Landley.

https://ia601008.us.archive.org/7/items/OhioLinuxfest2013/24...

Re: Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

#39

Post by geokon »

Doesn't this clause seems not backwards compatible with GPLv2?

At face value GPLv3 seems more constrained - so it's easy to relicense an existing v2 project. You just tell everyone working on it, okay, now every addition we make has extra requirements (if you want the looser version, you can grab an older copy of our project from when we switched licenses)

Loosening the license on pre-existing code is sorta like if you wanted to make the project (like the Linux kernel) BSD. You'd have to have everyone who has already contributed to agree to loosen the license on their work. If one person thinks "Hell no! I want people to be severely punished" then you're in for a headache.

So then GPLv3 isn't a "superset" and compatible GPLv2? Or did am I misunderstanding something?

Re: Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

#40

Post by racer-v »

comatose wrote: post #37
Blazespinnaker wrote: post #28

The funny thing is that gpl is mostly used by per profit companies creating a two licensing system. Gpl is great to test drive before buying a commercial license, but other than it’s pretty much ignored except maybe in academia.

well, safari, chrome, osx, iphone, iPad, amazon, android, appletv, and a large number of routers and car systems all use gpl under that license singly. the fact that it's mostly due to linux and khtml seem unimportant when you say so much gpl is dual licensed ( all of those contain software that is gpl only) but, yes, dual licensing is popular too, ie the immense popularity of qt

Eh, what? Safari and Chrome are not GPL - they're Apple / Google freeware built on BSD and LGPL. OSX is proprietary based on BSD. Android is notable for refusing to include GPL components other than Linux. Not sure what you're trying to say here.
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