171–180 of 185 posts
I'm not contributing to open source projects privately right now. But if I was publishing code on my own, I would probably make it actually unlicensed at first to keep my options open as much as possible. I would just put it somewhere and say: "here is code, you are technically able to look at it, but I am not giving you any permission". If somebody wants to use it and needs to follow copyright (for example in a comm…
You are probably not very old but anyway . Let's say you die in accident. Nobody will be able to use your code until either copyright is repealed (the boomers half life has kicked in long enough such that they are irrelevant and we can change copyright) or you are 70 years dead. I understand you wanting to keep your options as long as possible. I see three options for you: - leave it without license and hope you will…
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We can do better than "at least sounds reasonable". Wiktionary is a detailed source for etymology (albeit not itself sourced): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let#Etymology_2
In my response I was addressing the specific phrase “let or hindrance”; that let has historically been auto-antonymic is incontrovertible and well-documented and (whether rightly or wrongly) I was interpreting samatman’s comment as referring to the two specific contexts where I say it is still exhibits its historical auto-antonymicity.
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Freedom to me is whatever exists in the absence of coercion. GPL licenses depends on coercion, so they cannot produce freedom as I see it. To illustrate this, imagine an alternative universe where violence is impossible. In this universe IP as we know it including copyleft licenses couldn't exist as violence or credible threats of violence by a state (or similar entity) is required for enforcement. I want to get as c…
The only thing that the GPL family prevents is coercion, effectively reaching a local minima of coercion-by-others as a function of coercion-by-vendor. Granting the freedom to coerce doesn't reduce coercion.
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Freedom to me is whatever exists in the absence of coercion. GPL licenses depends on coercion, so they cannot produce freedom as I see it. To illustrate this, imagine an alternative universe where violence is impossible. In this universe IP as we know it including copyleft licenses couldn't exist as violence or credible threats of violence by a state (or similar entity) is required for enforcement. I want to get as c…
You're right that in a universe where everyone grants their end users necessary freedoms and don't use coercion to limit those rights, GPL would be completely unnecessary. Until that happens, coercing people to stop further coercion is the best thing we have.
I'm fundamentally opposed to the idea of forcing people to do what I want and that's the clear purpose of GPL.
Somebody not doing what I want is not coercing me. I'm free to use or not use a binary distributed without it's source code, or I can try to reverse engineer it. Forcing them to do the additional work of sending me the source code would be coercing them, it would be impossible in my hypothetical alternative universe, and it would be wrong in this universe.
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> pretending we are living in a post-copyright utopia severely limits the reach of your work And severely limits the freedom of end users! GPLv3 protects around tivoization and proprietarization. Other licenses do not. The net effect is that end users are unable to benefit from the openness.
Freedom to me is whatever exists in the absence of coercion. GPL licenses depends on coercion, so they cannot produce freedom as I see it. To illustrate this, imagine an alternative universe where violence is impossible. In this universe IP as we know it including copyleft licenses couldn't exist as violence or credible threats of violence by a state (or similar entity) is required for enforcement. I want to get as c…
These are all things that currently threaten the freedom of users and developers.
Ramblings about impossible alternative universes adds very little.
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> Making my users do so might constitute cruel and unusual punishment The very opposite. GPLv3 is written by lawyers and for very good reasons. The more detailed a license is the more clear it is. That's why it clearly defines what constitutes distribution and so on. This is also why things like rent contracts have long lists of what is allowed and expected and what is not, and when and why and so on: it creates clar…
> If you want legal trouble, sign a very short contract. If the length of contract is what is protecting you, you're already in court. If it's a jury trial, all bets are off no matter what the law or contract says.
Not at all! A strong, detailed, clearly written contract reduces the amount of "wiggle room" for litigation.
The other party is much more likely *not* to sue you in the first place if they know they would be fighting an uphill battle against a strong contract.
That's why GPLv3 has anti-patent-troll clauses for example.
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Nevertheless I suspect sqlite is used in Europe or parts of Asia without trouble.
1) Hipp, Wyrick & Company, Inc. (Hwaci, the legal owner of the code) does not actively enforce its rights available. This does not mean it will not affect operations in certain countries, while computer code is not (yet) affected, music definitely is (see GEMA in Germany). Additionally, in an adverse purchase of a company Hwaci could be bought by a scrupulous corporation (à la patent trolls of today) and enforce the…
I'm glad they offer the warranty of title and take money from companies with edgy lawyers, though. $6k is small as legal fees go. It's in general a lazy monetization strategy I broadly agree with and I've been hoping GitHub under MS's stewardship would help spearhead a simple way for people/companies to buy secondary-licensed copies of software without having to contact the author about it. (I think I got the idea from Zed Shaw around the time MS bought GH.) Like, a lot of software out there isn't a mess of contributors like the linux kernel each holding their own copyright, and thus much of it can be relicensed or dual-licensed without fuss. When people license something under the AGPL or even public domain if they're copying sqlite, sometimes they include something in the readme about being open to selling an alternatively licensed version/warranty of title to companies who have some issue. But even if they don't explicitly mention it, companies can still fruitfully contact such authors and make a deal. This happens all the time on twitter of all places, with journalists asking some user (who may not even be legally identifiable from just their handle) to re-use their apparently original photo or video. Sometimes the user just gives permission, sometimes they demand "pay me", sometimes a payment is actually made. Douglas Crockford has given permission (not sure if he got any money out of it) at least to IBM to use his software for evil, again showing his infamous clause is only a problem for people who decide to make it one.
Basically, I'd rather not tell people how they can license (or not license, as per public domain declarations) their code, and while it's fine to be aware of usability tradeoffs and it's fine to know that some edgy companies or users in other countries might write you off for your choice, it's important not to overstate the actual risks involved relative to the base rate risks already out there (like patent trolls) and it's important to recognize that solving the problems in ways even the edgiest of lawyers can be mostly happy with is often possible. Having blanket policies instead of pursuing those solutions is also a choice people are free to make.
(Writing this comment led me to https://web.archive.org/web/20120510151444/http://methodlogi... which is interesting in that it could suggest how further knowledge of tradeoffs and future pushback in the beginning may have led sqlite to be put under a license, however I don't suppose anything legally stops the authors agreeing to relicense in a new version since they retain a clean title, it's just there's no compelling practical reason like seeking more contributors.)
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Freedom to me is whatever exists in the absence of coercion. GPL licenses depends on coercion, so they cannot produce freedom as I see it. To illustrate this, imagine an alternative universe where violence is impossible. In this universe IP as we know it including copyleft licenses couldn't exist as violence or credible threats of violence by a state (or similar entity) is required for enforcement. I want to get as c…
GPL *protects* against tivoization, proprietarization and patent trolling. It partially protects from SaaS. These are all things that currently threaten the freedom of users and developers. Ramblings about impossible alternative universes adds very little.