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This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
51–60 of 110 posts
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lawyers make a distinction between "illegal" (crimes) and "unlawful" (torts) that is mostly lost on the general public.
And some acts, like copyright infringement, can be both criminal and civil violations.
See also 'wrongful death'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_death_claim
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#53I am not a lawyer either, but as a practical matter, it's not illegal unless a judge says so. reminder
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#54> Can someone please tell me what the fuck is going on with licensing because I am losing my goddamn mind. This seems like a storm in a tea cup to me. Distros are made of thousands of packages. The maintainers are supposed to get the license details correct but sometimes humans error. When these errors get buried deep into things and no one is auditing them, they go unnoticed. No need for anyone to lose their mind ov…
Its not a storm in a tea cup.
A lot of people had relaxed attitude towards licensing text. Then SCO came a long, partially funded by Microsoft and threatened everyone using Linux due to alleged licensing issues. This was a major issue.
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#55Haha, this is why I am using Unlicense license for almost everything. Licenses create unnecessary fuzz. As a technician I have no interest in them
It's my cursory understanding that the Unlicense is equivalent to "© iamcorpix, All rights reserved" in jurisdictions that don't have a legal mechanism to completely disclaim copyright (e.g. the United States). Essentially, you can dedicate your copyright interest to the public domain, but you will always retain the ability to revoke that dedication as the original author of the work. It's much easier to just use MIT…
While there is legitimate variation in how jurisdictions will treat a public domain dedication (e.g. wrt rights which can be relinquished vs can't be relinquished vs must be explicitly forgone, which a public domain dedication doesn't necessarily achieve), realistically (a) you're pretty unlikely to get sued by someone who tried to dedicate their thing to the public domain (b) the intersection of "jurisdictions that will read a foreign litigant's public domain dedication as All rights reserved" and "jurisdictions whose opinions anyone particularly cares about" is approximately empty.
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#56Anything unlicensed should be treated as coming with a permissive license. If you care so much about protecting your IP, take the effort to write up a license or make it proprietary.
I am aware that is not how it is now, but in my opinion that is how it should be.
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#57> Can someone please tell me what the fuck is going on with licensing because I am losing my goddamn mind. This seems like a storm in a tea cup to me. Distros are made of thousands of packages. The maintainers are supposed to get the license details correct but sometimes humans error. When these errors get buried deep into things and no one is auditing them, they go unnoticed. No need for anyone to lose their mind ov…
Its not a storm in a tea cup. A lot of people had relaxed attitude towards licensing text. Then SCO came a long, partially funded by Microsoft and threatened everyone using Linux due to alleged licensing issues. This was a major issue. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes
That is quite a different beast in numerous ways, and I'm failing to see the connection.
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make it sound like copyright infringement is never a crime, when that isn't true at all. 18 U.S.C. § 2319. Now, the commercial use or intent of the software in question isn't analyzed in the OP (or in your comment) and I haven't dug into it. In this particular case it may or may not meet the elements of the five-year federal felony. But your comment is far too quick to dismiss the possibility. (Additionally, as a…
Just because statute says something is wrong doesn’t make the act criminal automatically. For anything to be criminal there either has to be intent or the crime should be strict liability tort where intent does not matter. It is arguable whether copyright infringement is strict liability tort in practice or not - there are arguments on both sides, so context of the particular case or similar cases that can set preced…
tort = civil, a crime can not be any kind of tort...
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speeding in the US ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶i̶s̶ (edit: can be) a criminal summary offense.
I believe speeding tickets are generally civil summary offenses. Criminal summary offenses are apparently even called "non-traffic summary offenses" in some places to distinguish them. Every speeding ticket I've ever gotten specifically noted that it was a civil infraction. When a police error resulted a summons for attaching license plates to a car they weren't registered to, the ticket in the mail specifically said…
In Texas traffic tickets are criminal offenses, generally class C misdemeanors. I don't think we're unique in that, either. For this reason many questions baout crimes you may have committed will ask "other than misdemeanor traffic offenses" or such...
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#60Anything unlicensed should be treated as coming with a permissive license. If you care so much about protecting your IP, take the effort to write up a license or make it proprietary. I am aware that is not how it is now, but in my opinion that is how it should be.
While I might agree that it would be nice that code without a license was public domain, that's most certainly not the legal situation we have right now. If there's no license, you can't redistribute it at all.