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My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

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Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#291

Post by ghaff »

icebraining wrote: post #282
cr0sh wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's to give user's freedom to inspect, modify and re-use the software. The GPL is this, but I believe it is something else, too. I believe that when you make your code GPL, you are saying to others who want to use your code, or especially to extend it and publish those changes, that you want to be paid. How? In code. You are basically saying "Yes, go ahead and have fun with this work, but - if you want to change i…

It should be noted that the GPL requires you to pay forward , not back. You are under no obligation to release the code publicly or contribute to the original project.

The parent comment as a whole made it pretty clear they were talking about modified code that is redistributed.

(I can, of course, take code and modify it for internal use and I don't have obligations under the GPL.)

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#292

Post by icebraining »

calcifer wrote: post #240
ran3824692 wrote: post #139

Nonfree software is often malware, https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html , and it's nowadays built on top of permissively licensed free software. Its not just a difference of opinion and its not about "selling" the software. Red hat happens to sell lots of free software.

Red Hat is an anomaly, not the norm. https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-wa...

There are many, many companies selling Free Software. I personally worked five years for one, getting paid for writing A/LGPL licensed code. It's just that they're small companies working as a network, not behemoths, since the economics of sharing code favour that. And to me, that's just an extra plus, not an issue. But I'm sure Peter Levine partner at a16z doesn't like it - VCs are generally unable to extract profit from these companies.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#293

Post by jbotz »

UglyToad wrote: post #191
jbotz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand copyright... you can't violate a license (that's based on copyright) by using ideas you saw in the source code. You really have to actually copy , verbatim, a significant chunk of code to be in violation of a software copyright. Sure, what constitutes a significant chunk is somewhat open to interpretation, but nobody who releases their software under the GPL is likely to ask a court for a ri…

I'm interested in this. From what I have read unless you do a 'clean room' rewrite, that is a team reads the code and describes the algorithm to another team with no view of the code, your work can be classified as a derivative work? Now there are grey areas for sure, but my problem with the GPL is knowledge should be a commons, not a field day for lawyers and a creator of 'thought crimes'. Maybe I have misunderstood…

This is really only an issue for project where you're trying re-implement a whole piece of software, and not when you pick up some "good ideas" looking at a piece of code. If you're creating a functional clone of some software and suspect that the owners of that software might take legal action against you, then you'll need to make extra sure that no part of your reimplementation resembles the original source code. Hence the whole "clean room" approach.

But if you're just looking at some code and get some ideas and use them in a totally different kind of program, you're definitely not violating the spirit of copyright, and as far as I know no court has ever decided that you're violating the letter of copyright in such a case either.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#294

Post by xenadu02 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #112
dbcurtis wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that substitution completely misses my point. One can have deep and well thought out principles and morals and apply that to the strategic selection of a license, and also in choosing which projects are worthy of contribution. Ideology-based decisions are in a different category. When I look at RMS, I see someone who has thought deeply about the implications of various licenses, and has decided firmly what kind o…

As an example to back up your point RMS has explicitly supported the use of non-GPL licenses for codecs as a strategic move to avoid being shut out of that market by network effects.

RMS has also endorsed selling exceptions to the GPL, see https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions

GPL/AGPL + fee for exceptions seems like a reasonable model to promote freedom and fairness.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#295

Post by cjbprime »

c22 wrote: post #260
cjbprime wrote: post #177

> [more free vs. less free] The intuition that helped me understand this was noticing that the GPL is trying to maximize societal freedom, and in contrast the BSD is trying to maximize individual freedom. So, is the GPL less free than BSD? Answer: For whom? Single individuals or everyone together? An analogy: a society would have more individual liberty if dogs were allowed to poop on the sidewalk, because fining dog…

What about a society where individuals are free to let their dogs poop all over but most choose not to since it's unattractive and they've been raised in a society where personal responsibility is of paramount value? This is the society I want to live in, and I think if you look at it pragmatically this is a society in which a lot of us already live (I have heard of very few cases where someone has actually been fine…

I guess I just don't believe cooperation problems scale.

e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#296

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

rmtech wrote: post #236
pessimizer wrote: post #118

This may go either way for you, but I feel like the GPL is the closest thing that programmers have to a union. It guarantees that our obligations to users and other programmers always supersede the obligations that we have to our employer. They are a law hack that encodes professionalism. edit: it seems obvious that a doctor's obligations should be to the patient, then to medicine, then to the particular institution…

> but I feel like the GPL is the closest thing that programmers have to a union But unions generally exist to make their members rich. GPL has the opposite effect, it means you can't sell your code so you become poor. It's like the opposite of a union; a collective agreement among a group of professionals whereby they mutually agree to prevent each other from making money.

The programmer doesn't sell code, the programmer sells time writing software. With proprietary software, the owner of that software has a monopoly on the work on that software, and as such can demand monopoly prices. With Free Software, that monopoly doesn't exist, you only have market competition.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#297

Post by antidesitter »

icebraining wrote: post #289
antidesitter wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the right to enjoy future improvements to the code Why is that a “right”?

Because the license gives you the legal entitlement to do so.

A permissive license doesn’t grant “the right to deny others” a so-called “right” it doesn’t define or even refer to.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#298

Post by gridlockd »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #281
gridlockd wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know? It could be exactly what I need for some esoteric reason! No true scotsman wants to read that garbage. > Within the past year, I've found several useful projects on Github that their authors who appeared to consider them worthless. If the authors truly believed it was worthless, they wouldn't have expended the energy to publish it. But that's not the point anyway. If you drown out your good work wi…

Take a look at the example I edited in above (it looks like our posts crossed). I really do think that app's author considered it fairly worthless, it barely has a readme and it was explicitly given a WTFPL license. I would have thought my barely-tweaked fork was worthless to, and almost didn't share it, but I'm glad I did.

Just because that one thing happens to not be entirely worthless, doesn't mean that anything has value.

Also, since you're not even a professional developer, I'm not directing that advice at you.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#299

Post by jbotz »

UglyToad wrote: post #191
jbotz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand copyright... you can't violate a license (that's based on copyright) by using ideas you saw in the source code. You really have to actually copy , verbatim, a significant chunk of code to be in violation of a software copyright. Sure, what constitutes a significant chunk is somewhat open to interpretation, but nobody who releases their software under the GPL is likely to ask a court for a ri…

I'm interested in this. From what I have read unless you do a 'clean room' rewrite, that is a team reads the code and describes the algorithm to another team with no view of the code, your work can be classified as a derivative work? Now there are grey areas for sure, but my problem with the GPL is knowledge should be a commons, not a field day for lawyers and a creator of 'thought crimes'. Maybe I have misunderstood…

You mention "algorithm"... algorithms can't be copyrighted, and although it can be argued that they shouldn't even be patentable (as mathematical equations aren't), in the 1990s courts in the US effectively allowed algorithms to be patented "when part of an implementation". Also in some other countries algorithms were always patentable.

But that's patents, we're talking about copyright here. You absolutely can't copyright an algorithm. And "not looking" doesn't protect you from a patent anyway, so go ahead and look at the code unless you want to write a functional clone and claim that it's in no way a derivative work.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#300

Post by UglyToad »

jbotz wrote: post #293
UglyToad wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in this. From what I have read unless you do a 'clean room' rewrite, that is a team reads the code and describes the algorithm to another team with no view of the code, your work can be classified as a derivative work? Now there are grey areas for sure, but my problem with the GPL is knowledge should be a commons, not a field day for lawyers and a creator of 'thought crimes'. Maybe I have misunderstood…

This is really only an issue for project where you're trying re-implement a whole piece of software, and not when you pick up some "good ideas" looking at a piece of code. If you're creating a functional clone of some software and suspect that the owners of that software might take legal action against you, then you'll need to make extra sure that no part of your reimplementation resembles the original source code. H…

Ah thanks for clarifying, I guess there's a sort of size cutoff where stuff goes from fair use to a derivative work.
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