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Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

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Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#91

Post by Beltiras »

jsgo wrote: post #78
lkschubert8 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there value in having the story version controlled as well? Separating them just sounds like needless complexity.

I certainly wouldn't fault them for putting the story under source control/versioning or even the location they did it, but there'd be benefit in separating them into two different projects/solutions as you could essentially have a separate "engine" project that could be reused for future games and then different projects with assets/story/etc for any game that comes down the pipe. Now, if the intent is a one off and…

Thank you! This, a million times this!

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#92

Post by markjenkinswpg »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #62
Fnoord wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone can invite rms to speak, and given some minor conditions, he will come. He will come and talk because he believes that everyone deserves Free Software. Oh? Here [1] he wrote this: > I am selective about the events I participate in. If you are inviting me to speak at a larger event, please inform me now of the overall nature of the event, so I can make an informed decision about whether to participate. Mr Sta…

RMS used to publish academically when he was at MIT. I remember reading a paper about Prolog backjumping written by him which had nothing to do with software licensing.

That was before anyone did permissive licensing and at a time when it wasn't even clear if software was copywritable.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#93

Post by SonOfLilit »

Beltiras wrote: post #63
Beltiras wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story sounds like data to me. Data should not be in the repo, just the means to fetch it.

What the hell are the downvotes for? Seriously?

You are being downvoted because you're preaching a terrible game programming mistake as the only reasonable approach.

I didn't downvote you, but I wrote enough games to hope no young programmer takes your advice.

Games, as iteratively developed creative products, always interweave engine with content. Trying to write a generic engine in parallel to your game is a surefire way to never release a game.

Even if you set out in advance to write an engine, you should do like most market leading engines and develope a game first, then extract the engine out from it (Quake, Half Life, Unreal, Far Cry... the only counterexample I can think of is Unity, wait no wiki says "Over the Edge released its first game, GooBall, in 2005.[4] The game failed commercially, but the three founders saw value in the game development tools that they had created to simplify game development, and so they shifted the company's focus to create an engine for other developers.")

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#94

Post by cptskippy »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #60
toyg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also people thinking an open license is a free-for-all. I put out some simple scripts some time ago to move data across a couple of sites, under MIT - super liberal license, “just keep the credits” and you can do anything you want. Simple, right? After a few years I checked the forks and the first (and often only) thing they were doing was to strip attribution everywhere. I mean, it’s github, you forked right fr…

Does anyone here on HN know of lawyer companies that would follow up on license violation requests in bulk? E.G. there are services like small claims court in the UK that _mostly_ automate the billing on unpaid invoices, is there something like that for licensing?

Maybe we need something like the DMCA Takedown Tools in Youtube for GPL License violations on GitHub? /s

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#95

Post by ryukafalz »

ChrisSD wrote: post #75
belorn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to Stallman, MIT is compatible with GPL but the reverse isn't true What are you talking about? Let say we have code A licensed as MIT and code B licensed GPL. You can combine A with B and distribute it. You can combine B with A and distribute it. AB or BA is both a legal combination that a distributor can do. In both cases the distributor need to follow the condition of both MIT and GPL. You can not distr…

I mean you can very easily add MIT code in a GPL licensed project because MIT is more permissive. However adding GPL code to an MIT licensed project means you now have to comply with GPL's more restrictive "list of permissions" when you weren't before.

Sure, but that doesn't mean the two are incompatible! It just means that you also now have to comply with the terms of the GPL if you use GPL-licensed code in that project: something that the MIT license is flexible enough to allow.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#96

Post by kerkeslager »

belorn wrote: post #70
ChrisSD wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Stallman, MIT is compatible with GPL but the reverse isn't true. You can freely use MIT code (including linking) in a GPL project so long as the source is available. In Rust most code is dual licensed as MIT or Apache 2. You can pick which one to use although IIRC Apache 2 is considered the "primary license" because it provides protections from patent trolls and an explicit contribution licensing clause.…

> According to Stallman, MIT is compatible with GPL but the reverse isn't true What are you talking about? Let say we have code A licensed as MIT and code B licensed GPL. You can combine A with B and distribute it. You can combine B with A and distribute it. AB or BA is both a legal combination that a distributor can do. In both cases the distributor need to follow the condition of both MIT and GPL. You can not distr…

Okay, so we have A licensed as MIT and B licensed as GPL, your example. Let's specify that B is licensed under GPL3 so it's clear:

Under MIT, Microsoft can take code from A and put it into the source code of Visual Studio, provided that they keep the copyright and license with the code they've copied. Visual Studio can then be licensed however they want.

Let's say that project A takes code from project B. Now because they have GPLed code, A has to be distributed with terms at least as open as the GPL3's terms, due to copyleft.[1]

This might not matter to the maintainers of project A, but it certainly matters to Microsoft, because now if they use code from project A, they also have to distribute it with terms at least as open as the GPL3's terms. So if they use code from project A in Visual Studio, they've effectively licensed Visual Studio under the GPL3.

The GPL3 is "infectious" in this way--once you use GPL3 code in your project, your project is effectively licensed under the GPL3.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Cop...

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#97

Post by bscphil »

toyg wrote: post #51
mikekchar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure exactly what he meant by software license hygiene, but if it's what I imagine, it's a significant problem. Often people don't quite understand the licenses they choose and they get into trouble as a result. For example, there is a free software game that I follow which is licensed under the GPL. The author made a passing statement that the game is under the GPL, but none of text of the game is (it's an R…

It’s also people thinking an open license is a free-for-all. I put out some simple scripts some time ago to move data across a couple of sites, under MIT - super liberal license, “just keep the credits” and you can do anything you want. Simple, right? After a few years I checked the forks and the first (and often only) thing they were doing was to strip attribution everywhere. I mean, it’s github, you forked right fr…

> It’s also people thinking an open license is a free-for-all. I put out some simple scripts some time ago to move data across a couple of sites, under MIT - super liberal license, “just keep the credits” and you can do anything you want. Simple, right?

This seems like a reasonable enough place to ask: if you have a project under MIT, and I pull a function out of one file to use in my project, where exactly do I owe credit? In a comment above the specific function? At the top of the file? In the main license file for the project (even if the whole project is under e.g. GPL)? Some combination of the above?

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#98

Post by baybal2 »

toyg wrote: post #56
de_watcher wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do. Just need to ditch everything except WSL - and we've got an acceptable MS OS.

NT is not a bad OS, it makes some different tradeoffs than traditional POSIX systems and in some cases it’s objectively superior. It’s just the ecosystem on top that is a pile of flaming trash.

How soon are we getting GNU/NT?

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#99

Post by mark-r »

kgwxd wrote: post #73
ChrisSD wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that surprises people is not that Stallman went to Microsoft but that Microsoft invited him to talk. Back in the day Bill Gates would make signs to ward against evil if Richard "communist cancer" Stallman was anywhere near Redmond. How times have changed.

Wonder how current-Bill feels about previous-Bill saying things like that.

I'm sure current-Bill is too busy enjoying his billions to worry about things like that.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#100

Post by belorn »

ChrisSD wrote: post #75
belorn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to Stallman, MIT is compatible with GPL but the reverse isn't true What are you talking about? Let say we have code A licensed as MIT and code B licensed GPL. You can combine A with B and distribute it. You can combine B with A and distribute it. AB or BA is both a legal combination that a distributor can do. In both cases the distributor need to follow the condition of both MIT and GPL. You can not distr…

I mean you can very easily add MIT code in a GPL licensed project because MIT is more permissive. However adding GPL code to an MIT licensed project means you now have to comply with GPL's more restrictive "list of permissions" when you weren't before.

If we imagine a project with only MIT code that want to add GPL licensed code, the only significant additional legal action needed to be compatible is that you now need to give a patent grant that covers the combined work, and in the case of GPLv3 not distribute the combined work in hardware devices that use access control to prevent the installation of modified versions by the owner.

If neither aspects is an issue then the additional work needed to add GPL code to an MIT licensed project is practically zero.

There are however naturally implication for downstream which in combination of additionally third licenses (such as proprietary licenses) can cause real issues, and the relationship between such downstream and the MIT project could as a result lead to reasons why the MIT project feel like they can not include GPL into their code. There might even be contractional reasons involved which mean not only do you now have three different copyright licenses to follow but you also have contract law involved in order to follow the law and have a legal right to distribute the combined work. I can see how the permissive licenses in those kind of situation feel simpler since they do not interact much with the other legal stake holders.

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