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Imagine people start "stealing" TikTok code, TikToc sues, and now the defendant has their day in court to defend the GPL, at TikToks expense.
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Why are people downvoting you? You are 100% correct about NSLs and gag orders. This is one of the biggest issues the EFF focuses on: https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters/faq
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That would be moving the goalposts. We're concerned whether companies are de facto influenced by governments, not whether those companies produce PR material about said influences.
Moving goal posts would be more like claiming that, because we have evidence Google cooperates with the US Government for some investigations, the US Government has similar influence and control over Google as China does over ByteDance, without any scrutiny or review of the severity of China's influence on ByteDance. Also, to the very point you bring up... recipients of an NSL can file a legal challenge to an NSL whi…
Any attempts to muddy the waters for ideological point-scoring are beside the point. If you want to dig deeper, please bring evidence instead of speculation.
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This is a horrible take. A Chinese company stealing IP is very different from China stealing IP. Google was caught using IP from Sogou for its pinyin IME, but we don't say America stealing IP.
ByteDance is partially controlled by the government so I don't think your Google analogy is a good one. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/beijing-t... https://qz.com/1788836/targeting-tiktoks-privacy-alone-misse...
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OBS is willing to work with TikTok to get them into compliance. That would either mean open-sourcing the software or paying for a license.
> That would either mean open-sourcing the software or paying for a license no, in general it means TikTok rewriting those portions of the software themselves
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That’s not the only repercussion. They can sue for copyright infringement and there can be large fines.
Not a lawyer but seems like source projects would have a hard time showing damages since they don’t charge for the software.
How can you be so inept that you're literally stealing software, but are too incompetent to properly obfuscate it?
People are misunderstanding this and claiming it's not problematic. Ben Torrell (an OBS developer) notes later in the thread that there is indeed GPL code compiled into TikTok's executables; since source is not available and they have not got another license, it is unlicensed and hence illegal.
[0] https://thenewstack.io/the-open-source-lesson-of-the-linksys...
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One can verify and sign off on computations that approximate the physics or chemistry that will occur in a structure or machine, as a well established chain of procedures exist to go from crude formulaic approximations to micro or, if necessary, nano-scale simulations of electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes, and we know what to look for. I don't think the same is true for software "engineering," as it seems…
Having studied both mechanical and software engineering at uni, I feel that you _can_ make the parallel between the two. It's just that in mechanical engineering we've converged a lot more over time. Out of convention and need for accountability much more than necessity. For example, for mechanical calculations we have converged on using mostly the same algebraic notation (never mind having minor differences here and…
For example, a memory allocator can be studied in the usual algorithmic sense or perhaps how they impact the stability of the system under randomized load. Can you prove the system remains stable? Yeah. Is it worth it when you can reboot machines and add some heuristics? No.
Currently, the big places which are getting any attention for verification of functionality are embedded applications and OS kernels. Even then, the depth of verification is limited to common bug categories.
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I don't like the idea of gatekeeping, it's hard enough to hire people. In the US we don't really have licensing for engineers (there is PE, but it's not anything close to ubiquitous). I think it's one of the best parts of our engineering/tech culture. You're an engineer based on the skills you employ to solve the problems you do, not because some body of people gave you a slip of paper that says you can employ those…
In the US, PE has made it so the word “engineer” is legally protected, like “doctor”. No one enforces it for software, so I wonder if it’s even enforceable anymore. But the law is there.
https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...
TL;DR: such restrictions violate your freedom of speech.