Avoiding LispWorks Personal annoyances
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From: Alessio Stalla on 30 Sep 2009 04:57 On Sep 30, 12:32 am, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall...(a)pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > On 2009-09-29 16:24:10 -0400, Alessio Stalla <alessiosta...(a)gmail.com> said: > > > I completely agree. > > I doubt that courts would, and what courts hold is the only relevant > point. They've held click-through licenses to be valid and enforceable. I agree to how Kaz believes things should be - I know that actual law is different, and until my secret world domination device is complete, I cannot pretend that every law is in accordance with my beliefs. > The very fact that someone might hack the installer and circumvent the > license approval step is in itself proof that the user was aware that > there was a license agreement for the software. That's why no one makes > this hack-the-license-approval argument in a real court. Awareness of > the agreement (or lack thereof) is the crucial point in court holdings > in this area. The point imho is that, unlike a signed contract, it is not objectively verifiable that the user has read and accepted the license. Who provides the proof of the acceptance of the license? Not a third party, but the installer of the software itself. What if, for example, the installer has a bug (or even a malicious feature) and allows you to proceed without accepting the license? Unlikely, but not provably impossible. Making a software dictate law is giving powers to the makers of the software, powers that they shouldn't have. Again I'm reasoning about what I think things *should* be, not what they are now. > What courts have held to be an exception is when the user is arguably > *unaware* that there is a license agreement, when the software is made > available by the copyright holder for installation and/or use without > the need to explicitly agree to a license. In these cases, courts have > held that any license unilaterally imposed by the copyright holder is > not valid. But of course, that isn't the case with LW personal, where > you do have to agree to the license before you can use the software. > > -- > Raffael Cavallaro
From: Pascal Costanza on 30 Sep 2009 05:13 gnubeard wrote: > On Sep 30, 5:29 pm, Tamas K Papp <tkp...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> The whole thread reminds me of a civil law class that I have taken >> (IANAL, but it seemed -- and turned out to be -- interesting). It was >> a course for non-law students, most had a mathematics/science >> background. _All_ questions from the audience were like this, >> students thinking that laws are like an algorithm that they can hack. >> The professor was very understanding and actually stopped to explain >> that legal systems don't work that way -- common sense is present in >> both Common Law and continental European systems, and you can't expect >> to get away with technical tricks like that. > > Well, yes - of course! That is what judges and juries are for - to > bring common sense to bear on particular situations. > > To me, it is common sense that in a software package given away with a > perpetual license (i.e. this is NOT an evaluation demo designed to > provoke a sale. It is a license for personal, non-commercial USE - not > testing) that I am free to modify it on my own machine, so long as I > don't break copyright laws by redistributing it. > > Applying the LD_PRELOAD technique to the 30-day evaluation copy of LW, > or other packages would clearly violate the license and intended use. > Those packages are _licensed_ for 30 days - and thats it. LW Personal > is _licensed_ for as long as I desire to use it non-commercially. The > 5-hour restriction is a technical limitation, and my kludge gets > around that limitation. > > I really don't feel this is an infringement on the license. If I did, > I wouldn't have done it. Guys, we are all not lawyers. Why are we having this discussion? Even if what you did were legal to every single letter of the law, the question remains whether it's ethically responsible. LispWorks Inc. is not a big corporation, it's a small company with only a handful of people running it, who are part of the Common Lisp community, actively supporting it, including open-source projects - in other words, they are our friends. Just like the other commercial Common Lisp vendors. We are not talking about Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Oracle, or any of those big beasts who couldn't care less about such minor incidents (but contrary to small companies have all the money in the world to actually pursue action). So, please don't try to find excuses that what you did is actually defensible. Be honest and say that it's not really the right thing to do. If you do it anyway, that's fine, but please make sure that the damage doesn't spread. You wouldn't do anybody a service. It's important that the commercial vendors survive as much as it is important that the open source vendors do well. Pascal -- My website: http://p-cos.net Common Lisp Document Repository: http://cdr.eurolisp.org Closer to MOP & ContextL: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
From: Anti Vigilante on 30 Sep 2009 06:54 On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 16:05 +0530, Madhu wrote: > * gnubeard > Wrote on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:31:23 -0700 (PDT): > |> > |> |> 1. But you've already posted here in a public forum that your reason > |> |> for using a different version of gettimeofday was an attempt to > |> |> reverse engineer and modify the behavior of LW. > |> | > |> | Yes, I had an intention to modify (the LW personal license grants me > |> | that right). I do not have an intention to reverse engineer, and I do > |> | not believe what I did can really be considered reverse engineering, > |> | even if I did learn a bit about the inner workings of LW in the > |> | process. > |> > |> No, your post specifically mentioned specific timing information (about > |> how gettimeofday is used by the software in enforcing the time limit) > |> which could not have been obtained without reverse-engineering the > |> product. This information is essential in circumventing the limit. > | > | I did not have to reverse engineer LW in order to know any of this, > | just like I don't need to reverse engineer ANY C program to know that > | it will be using the C Library. > > But you did reverse engineer the product in violation of the agreement > and your attempts at justifying it by redefining what the clause means > are exhibits of rank dishonesty on your part. > > It wouldn't bother me if it weren't for the gobs of `moral high ground' > you keep spewing on the newsgroup. There is a contradiction that can > only be killfiled. > > -- > Madhu You know I've stayed out of this but there's a lot of 'moral high ground' stomping going around. 'You didn't pay for it... you stole.' 'You changed your C library... that's a modification of LW' 'Pay what you get for' Automatons would be puzzled by this.
From: vippstar on 30 Sep 2009 07:18 On Sep 30, 10:29 am, Tamas K Papp <tkp...(a)gmail.com> wrote: <snip> > The whole thread reminds me of a civil law class that I have taken > (IANAL, but it seemed -- and turned out to be -- interesting). It was > a course for non-law students, most had a mathematics/science > background. _All_ questions from the audience were like this, > students thinking that laws are like an algorithm that they can hack. > The professor was very understanding and actually stopped to explain > that legal systems don't work that way -- common sense is present in > both Common Law and continental European systems, and you can't expect > to get away with technical tricks like that. Right - you need money too.
From: Dave Searles on 30 Sep 2009 14:50
Alessio Stalla wrote: > Probably the installer is not considered a copy of the software Also ridiculous. Clearly it is, or contains, a copy. You might as well argue that a CD single with a song on it is not considered a copy of the song, but rather a "medium for getting the copy". > I'm not saying I think this is sane - in my opinion a contract should > ideally always involve two human beings and a way to verify with 100% > accuracy that they both actually agreed to the contract. I'm glad to find that you're one of the few other people out there showing signs of sanity in regard to "license agreements". > Granting an automated mechanism (like a software) the right to decide > whether a contract has been agreed or not is very dangerous as it makes > the parties be on different levels - whoever writes the software gets > to decide how and when the contract is considered to be signed, and can > in theory revoke it at any time. My copy of X stops working and says I > haven't accepted the license, how can I prove I did accept it? It's much worse than that. What if it siphons money from your bank account, and then announces that you implicitly activated some term of its "license agreement" that expressly allows it to assess a fine against you, automatically? I'm sure you can think of even worse. The problem is ultimately an attack on our fundamental property rights. We NEED, for a proper capitalist society and for a *free* one, that OUR things are actually OURS. If our software, and maybe appliances, cars, and so on cease to be ours and become agents of organizations whose agendas are not always going to dovetail with our own, with this relationship actually considered legally binding, then we cease to become citizens and property owners and we become a new class of serfs with a mixture of corporate and governmental overlords. This is also why the FSF and free software (like Clojure (EPL), ABCL (GPL), and SBCL (BSD)) are so important. |