221–230 of 388 posts
Licenses are cancer and the enemy of opensource.
There would be no open source without the gpl
The 25519 crypto package that's built into practically everything these days (SSH, TLS, most e2e messaging) was released as both a spec and a C reference implementation _in the public domain_.
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> This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower: That example is not analogous to the topic at hand. But furthermore, it also is specific to French/European copyright law. In the US, the US Copyright Act would not permit restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces.
actually, the US Copyright Act does in fact allow restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlandia_(statue) the Portlandia statue is one such architectural work - and its creator is fairly litigious.
> The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.
This codifies an already-established principle in US law. French law does not have that same principle.
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There's a subtext in your point that I want to expand on. Tech people, particularly engineers, tend to make a fundamental error when dealing with the law that almost always causes them to make wrong conclusions. And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic . An example I like to use is people who do something illegal on the Internet and then use the argu…
> So, when this gets to a court (which it will, it's not a question of "if"), the court will consider how necessary the source work was to what you did. If you used it for a direct translation (eg from C++ to Go) then you're going to lose. My prediction is that even using it in training data will be cause for a copyright claim. This has a lot of similarity to when colorization of film started popping up. Did colorizi…
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I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.
The GPL exists for the benefit of end users, not developers. It being a chore for developers who want to deny their users the software freedoms is a feature, not a bug.
Does anyone understand the intent behind the changed license on the package, why are the current maintainers trying to do it in the first place? What's actually going on?
Unicode detection is the kind of utility the language maintainers want in their package collection if not in the standard library, and programmers who have to do anything with "plain text" files might want to rely on. Releasing a core library like this under a genuinely free licence (MIT) is a service to anyone working in the ecosystem.
Does anyone understand the intent behind the changed license on the package, why are the current maintainers trying to do it in the first place? What's actually going on?
See what FFmpeg writes on this topic: https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html
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No. Because they couldnt have done any of that refactoring without a licence to do so, and that licence forbids them from relicencing it.
Ok since this is not really answered... Hypothetically, If I'm a maintainer of this project. I decided I hate the implementation, it's naive, horrible performance, weird edge cases. I'm wiser today than 3 years ago. I rewrite it, my head full of my own, original, new ideas. The results turn out great. There's a few if and while loops that look the same, and some public interfaces stayed the same. But all the guts are…
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Afaik you can do whatever you like to GPL licensed code, you do not need a license to refactor it. I understand you need to publish the source code of your modifications, if you distribute them outside of your company.
You also can't relicense it to be less restrictive
Does using the old version’s tests to create a new version make it a derivative work? That’s certainly some pretty tight coupling.
The copyright argument is a sidetrack both in the PR comment thread and here. The issue opened claims the new code is based on the old code, and therefore derivative, and therefore must be offered in a modified version of the source code under the previous license, LGPL. The complaint is the maintainers violated the terms of LGPL, that they must prove no derivation from the original code to legally claim this is a le…
Now, whether chardet 7.0.0 is a derivative of chardet or not is a matter of copyright law that the LGPL has no say on, and a rather murky ground with not that much case law to rely on behind it. If it's not, the new author is free to distribute chardet 7.0.0 under any license they want, since it is a new work under his copyright.