60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

Post by nonbirithm » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

adsche wrote: post #65

nonbirithm wrote: post #62

It is a tough feeling to see someone else's design for a library that would be literally perfect for my needs, but I'm unable to use it because of the license, so I have to spend weeks implementing my own inferior version while carefully avoiding making the code too similar to what I happen to remember. I'm past believing that I'm smart enough to always be able to come up with/reimplement a competent enough solution…

Curious, what license(s) prevented you from using a library? Or maybe rather, what does "use" mean here?

Post by troutwine » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #69

nonbirithm wrote: post #62

It is a tough feeling to see someone else's design for a library that would be literally perfect for my needs, but I'm unable to use it because of the license, so I have to spend weeks implementing my own inferior version while carefully avoiding making the code too similar to what I happen to remember. I'm past believing that I'm smart enough to always be able to come up with/reimplement a competent enough solution…

> carefully avoiding making the code too similar to what I happen to remember Is this really necessary? The GPL allows you to read and study the software. Is it really copyright infringement if you take your understanding and make your own program? Are people really forced to come up with convoluted new ways to solve the same problem just to avoid any similarity to existing work?

Post by csdreamer7 » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

nonbirithm wrote: post #62

It is a tough feeling to see someone else's design for a library that would be literally perfect for my needs, but I'm unable to use it because of the license, so I have to spend weeks implementing my own inferior version while carefully avoiding making the code too similar to what I happen to remember. I'm past believing that I'm smart enough to always be able to come up with/reimplement a competent enough solution…

Post by drran » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

anticristi wrote: post #74

faho wrote: post #3

> Michał Sidor suggests building against libbfd, something that the Debian maintainers don’t want to do. "don't want to" isn't quite correct - they can't . Perf is licensed under the GPLv2, libbfd under the GPLv3. The licenses are incompatible, which makes the combination unredistributable - which is what Debian would be doing with it. Debian is legally not allowed to do this.

Kind of ironic that RMS campained against proprietary software to allow reuse of code. Now we have two islands of open source code ... .

Post by nightpool » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #75

lathiat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of the crux of a long history of these licensing arguments. That dynamic linking is problematic because it potentially creates a derived work. And then you might distribute that derived work. But shelling out to something or in some cases having an automated script create or download the derived work automatically is sometimes acceptable. It’s a bit of a silly line in some ways. But it’s a long story.

I'm skeptical that there's a coherent legal distinction to be drawn between using a dynamic library with dlopen etc and running a similar executable with arguments. It's functionally identical usage of some public interface.