Re: [ox-en] Germ of a new form of society or germ of a new form of business?
- From: Robin Green <greenrd greenrd.org>
- Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 17:32:20 +0000
On Sun, Feb 01, 2004 at 06:03:47PM -0000, Niall Douglas wrote:
Any lengthy propaganda piece by the FSF or those associated with them
will illustrate how "lesser" licenses than the GPL don't offer the
same protection. What the LGPL preamble says they apply to all non-
GPL free licenses when no one asks if commercialisation is really a
bad thing? Sure, if a company steals your work and markets it
ruthlessly you have a right to be bothered, but a company could also
integrate your work and return enhancements it makes back to the
communal fold. It's too easy to see dragons everywhere and worse, to
scare people into thinking there are more dragons than there are.
So what _exactly_ are you implying here? That the situations the GPL is
designed to prevent are unlikely? OK, but then what's the harm in
licensing under the GPL anyway?
Free software is not about control. It's about liberation. It's about
improving the lot of mankind.
Agreed.
This vision is growing increasingly out
of step with the FSF's practice
I don't agree with that at all.
eg; acceptance and use of copyright
when it's a bad law and should be replaced.
We have to live in the real world, Niall - even the FSF does. What do
you _suggest_ to replace copyright, and how do you suggest we should
go about getting it replaced?
Therefore you can't commercialise GPLed code which is the whole
point of it after all.
Not true! You can't *proprietize* code. You're more than welcome to
commercialize it. You are using a very uncreative (and incorrect!)
definition of commercialize. This is a prevalent misconception but
it's still a misconception.
Where's the proprietising if you don't alter the original? Where's
the proprietising if you use the exact same binary DLL in a closed
source application versus a GPL one? How can it be that the identical
binary DLL is being "stolen" just because of what links to it?
Because a derivative work is arguably being created without the permission
of the copyright holder.
I do agree that the notion of derivative work is confusing and problematic,
however. It seems clear to me that if there exist a GPL implementation and
a non-GPL implementation (which allows free linking) of the same API, then
a package which links against the GPL library is no longer a derivative
work of it (as long as it only links to the common public API) because it
does not depend on the GPL code in any way. The GPL code may offer various
advantages such as freedom and performance, but as long as there is no longer
a dependency there is no longer a derivative work.
More problematically, I don't quite see where to draw the line between
in-process linking and inter-process communication. Why should the
operating system notion of process have any bearing on copyright law?
It may be that the GPL reduces to the LGPL in some jurisdictions. But
that is very very different from what some clueless observers are speculating
in the SCO case: that the GPL might be reduced to public domain. That is
nonsense.
One of the great things about the software ecosystem is that maybe
Mozilla by absorbing ideas from all other comers does become the
perfect browser? When I say "waste of time" I don't mean that it's a
pointless piece of software, I mean that it's highly inefficient to
develop six web browsers all of which do the same thing. Better that
those superfluous developers be off doing something new.
Mozilla and KDE serve different targets: Mozilla was targeted at all
major desktop platforms, whereas KDE was targeted at Unix systems
(although at least one Windows port has been done, there is not as
much interest in it).
I think the developers of the latest incarnations of Mozilla looked
around at the available ways of writing cross-platform portable code,
and decided that their NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime) and related
code was still the best, most mature framework for their needs. And
no-one else was using the NSPR to build a browser, so they couldn't
merge with any other efforts.
Were they mistaken? I'm not sure. But I think they had what they thought
were very valid reasons for spending all that effort. Don't you?
The same probably goes for all other seriously large software projects.
GNOME, for example, is preferred by some developers because (a) they
don't want to learn C++, or more importantly (b) because they perceived
that g++ and Qt still waste a lot of space (although this is being
worked on for the next version of Qt). And I say this as a KDE fan.
--
Robin
"The vast, vast majority of this work in unpaid and therefore lost
productivity to the economy." -- Niall Douglas' view of volunteering
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