Prev: German Language in Europe
Next: Memory Leak Issue in Weblogic, SUN, Apache and Oracle classes
From: Nigel Wade on 28 May 2010 04:19
On Thu, 27 May 2010 23:21:16 -0700, Mike Schilling wrote:

> ClassCastException wrote:
>> Upshot: I think I'll use BSD-type licenses for now. They're compatible
>> with almost anything, license-wise, including the GPL and Clojure's
>> license, and have a decent level of respect in the open source world. I
>> don't think I can go far wrong if I use the two-clause BSD license on
>> my code.
>
> The main difference between BSD and GPL is that BSD doesn't preclude use
> in for-profit software. If that's your intent, it's a good choice.

The GPL makes no such exclusion. I presume that you've been reading the
FUD rather than the GPL.

This comes direct from the GPL FAQ:

"If I use a piece of software that has been obtained under the GNU GPL,
am I allowed to modify the original code into a new program, then
distribute and sell that new program commercially?

You are allowed to sell copies of the modified program commercially,
but only under the terms of the GNU GPL. Thus, for instance, you must
make the source code available to the users of the program as described
in the GPL, and they must be allowed to redistribute and modify it as
described in the GPL.

These requirements are the condition for including the GPL-covered
code you received in a program of your own. "

--
Nigel Wade
From: ClassCastException on 29 May 2010 03:56
On Fri, 28 May 2010 16:09:36 -0400, David Lamb wrote:
> Does this quote mean that, although one can legally sell modified code,
> there is little incentive for anyone to pay for it, since they can
> obtain, use, modify, and redistribute for free?

Red Hat makes quite a bit of money selling copies of GPL'd software on
physical media.

This might have something to do with the fact that Aquafina makes quite a
bit of money bottling and selling stuff that pretty much all of their
potential customers can get out of a faucet for free.

It might also have something to do with the fact that the entertainment
industry is not, contrary to popular belief, losing revenues to piracy.
Declining sales of things like DVDs and recorded music have a complex web
of causes, in which the effects of online piracy are not reliably
different from zero according to the statistical studies.

It *is* possible to compete with free, generally by segmenting the market
and taking the high end somehow. Image, branding, convenience, or some
other thing can differentiate you from the free competition. For example,
bottled water comes complete with a new, clean bottle to carry it in and
can be an image thing. Red Hat sold on a CD is as simple to get and
install as buy in store, stick in disk drive, run, similar to other store-
bought software, without having to do anything special like download gigs
of .iso possibly over a shoddy line and then figure out how to turn
a .iso file into a working bootable install disc and etc., so there it's
convenience. If you have the money, buying a DVD is probably more
convenient than trying to find a good, non-foreign-language rip on
BitTorrent and buying a Blu-Ray is almost certainly more convenient than
trying to find a good, non-foreign-language HIGH-DEF rip on BT. CDs are
pretty much toast but a 99 cent iTunes download is more convenient for
anyone who owns a credit card than an attempt to find and download a good
rip on LimeWire.

The moral of the story: the GPL absolutely is NOT incompatible with
profiting from selling software, NOT EVEN if you restrict your business
model to selling copies. When you broaden that to include selling support
and ancillary merchandising of various kinds, it's even more possible.

Someone suggested game content, but that's also ultimately copyable --
unless it resides server-side. An MMORPG could be entirely GPL'd,
including the server code, and even without any copyright enforcement on
the game content, and still be easily profitable. First, you run servers
time and bandwidth on which are scarce and charge for this. Competitors
can duplicate your service and, with some effort, duplicate your content
more-or-less, but any such competitor can be kept ahead of by developing
fresh content (necessary anyway to hang onto long-time players). On top
of that if your game gets popular enough you can make a sideline selling
plush toys, action figures, or whatnot of game characters, potentially.
If these are not trademarked or otherwise "protected" you'll have
competition there too, but there's plenty of competition selling, say,
chicken nuggets or chairs, but plenty of money to be made in the chicken
nugget and chair industries too, and your game's popularity will grow the
market for this merchandise and, with it, your slice of the merchandising
pie for those characters, even if that slice is not the whole pie.
Indeed, almost anything you or your competitors do will grow the overall
market and cause all of you to sell more of everything.

A strange game -- the only losing move is not to play.
From: ClassCastException on 29 May 2010 04:17
On Fri, 28 May 2010 20:31:14 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> On 27-05-2010 22:58, ClassCastException wrote:
>> In dealing with Java, OpenJDK, and Clojure stuff in recent months I'd
>> come to suspect that open source licensing is itself a source of
>> trouble. Notably, Clojure's license is incompatible with the GPL, under
>> which large chunks of other open source software is licensed.
>
> And so what?
>
> This means that you can not modify the Clojure compiler using GPL code.
>
> Very few libraries are GPL. LGPL and GPL with linking exception was
> invented for libraries.
>
> And it has no impact on people writing apps in Clojure.

Actually, it does; if you GPL Clojure code and distribute it it will
violate at least one license because the GPL'd code will link against
(and thus try to force the "viral" GPL upon) code that comes with Clojure
and has a GPL-incompatible license.

You can add a linking exception to the GPL on your Clojure code that
permits linking against Clojure libraries and the like without requiring
the GPL attach to those, but this has two problems:

1. If existing, say, Java code is GPL, and you want to use it in your
Clojure project, you still can't, since the GPL without linking
exception will "contaminate" your own code and then the base Clojure
code that's not GPLable.
2. This, and similar situations, will lead to the proliferation of
hundreds of almost-GPLs with different and incompatible linking
exceptions.

In hindsight, the linking requirement in the GPL, which was made in the
days of C, was a big mistake. But it's one it's apparently way too late
to fix.

The GPL v3 apparently tries. It has something in it about an automatic
linking exception for the code's programming language's "base libraries",
but someone said this was vague enough or otherwise had loopholes that
made it impossible to confidently apply to Clojure's GPL-incompatible
libraries.

>> So I decided to do a little reading on copyright in general. Why does
>> it even exist? The nominal purpose, it turns out, is to "promote the
>> progress of science and the useful arts" by providing a way for the
>> creators of any popular or important work to ensure remuneration,
>> basically. Which smells suspiciously like a grant of monopoly -- which,
>> barring the notion of "fair use", it basically is.
>
> If everybody could copy software exactly as they wanted then I am pretty
> sure that the software industry would be in a very poor shape.

I actually doubt this; I think it would work rather differently from now
in some ways, but that people would have found a way to make it work and
to profit in it. Plenty of businesses profit from open source software in
various ways, including by selling support or simply by funding
development of open source software that they use in-house and get
productivity gains from, and, by funding it, get more influence to have
features they'd find useful added and the bugs that particularly harm
their productivity prioritized.

> Sounds like blogs from teenagers that wants to be able to download
> everything for free and have parents to pay the bills.

I have my doubts whether Against Monopoly (run by a pair of degreed
economists) and Techdirt (run by a successful dot-com entrepreneur) are
"from teenagers that want to be able to download everything for free and
have parents to pay the bills". :)

>> It thus seems that copyright was twisted away from its original
>> purpose, to which it might have been poorly suited to begin with, and
>> open source licenses try to twist it back toward that purpose.
>
> Not really.
>
> Open source use copyright the exact same way as closed source. The only
> way.
>
> Open source has different license terms than closed source, but that
> does not change the copyright as such.

I'm sorry you don't seem to get what I'm driving at.

Copyright was born from the theory that letting authors of "writings and
discoveries" close off access and control the use of their work, e.g. to
set up a tollbooth, would promote progress.

At least in the case of software, this turned out to be wrong (in some
opinions), and the GPL's "copyleft" was specifically designed to force
copyright to do the reverse: force access open as widely as possible, by
requiring publication of the source code and disallowing monopoly. The
theory this time being that maximizing access and minimizing any one
vendor's control over program code would promote progress.

Judging by the stellar progress made in improving Linux since its
inception, copyleft is at least as viable as traditional exclusive
copyright in promoting progress in software.

However, both have proven capable of getting in the way in various
(separate sets of) situations.
From: Tom Anderson on 29 May 2010 06:54
On Sat, 29 May 2010, ClassCastException wrote:

> On Fri, 28 May 2010 20:31:14 -0400, Arne Vajh?j wrote:
>
>> On 27-05-2010 22:58, ClassCastException wrote:
>>> In dealing with Java, OpenJDK, and Clojure stuff in recent months I'd
>>> come to suspect that open source licensing is itself a source of
>>> trouble. Notably, Clojure's license is incompatible with the GPL, under
>>> which large chunks of other open source software is licensed.
>>
>> And so what?
>>
>> This means that you can not modify the Clojure compiler using GPL code.
>>
>> Very few libraries are GPL. LGPL and GPL with linking exception was
>> invented for libraries.
>>
>> And it has no impact on people writing apps in Clojure.
>
> Actually, it does; if you GPL Clojure code and distribute it it will
> violate at least one license because the GPL'd code will link against
> (and thus try to force the "viral" GPL upon) code that comes with Clojure
> and has a GPL-incompatible license.

Wrong. The GPL does not forbid you from linking against any libraries at
all. It (effectively) forbids you from *redistributing* the *products* of
linking against libraries that are not GPL'd. Do you want to distribute
binaries that include both your GPL'd Clojure code and the Clojure
runtime? No. So you're fine.

This is an important point: *none* of the open-source licenses restrict
what you do with code on your own machine, or inside your own company. The
*only* apply to *redistribution* of the code.

tom

--
This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.
From: ClassCastException on 29 May 2010 15:25
On Sat, 29 May 2010 11:54:35 +0100, Tom Anderson wrote:

> On Sat, 29 May 2010, ClassCastException wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 28 May 2010 20:31:14 -0400, Arne Vajh?j wrote:
>>
>>> On 27-05-2010 22:58, ClassCastException wrote:
>>>> In dealing with Java, OpenJDK, and Clojure stuff in recent months I'd
>>>> come to suspect that open source licensing is itself a source of
>>>> trouble. Notably, Clojure's license is incompatible with the GPL,
>>>> under which large chunks of other open source software is licensed.
>>>
>>> And so what?
>>>
>>> This means that you can not modify the Clojure compiler using GPL
>>> code.
>>>
>>> Very few libraries are GPL. LGPL and GPL with linking exception was
>>> invented for libraries.
>>>
>>> And it has no impact on people writing apps in Clojure.
>>
>> Actually, it does; if you GPL Clojure code and distribute it it will
>> violate at least one license because the GPL'd code will link against
>> (and thus try to force the "viral" GPL upon) code that comes with
>> Clojure and has a GPL-incompatible license.
>
> Wrong. The GPL does not forbid you from linking against any libraries at
> all. It (effectively) forbids you from *redistributing* the *products*
> of linking against libraries that are not GPL'd. Do you want to
> distribute binaries that include both your GPL'd Clojure code and the
> Clojure runtime? No.

Yes. Any packaging of an application for end-user use (that an end-user
is realistically going to be able to install easily) is going to include
the runtimes and thus violate one license or both. The effect is for
GPL'd Clojure code to effectively be stamped "hacker use only" and be
inaccessible for normal, end-user use.

Use it privately? Sure. Share with other Clojure hackers? Ditto. Make a
killer game with GPL'd Clojure code and post it somewhere, or write and
publish something to beat Photoshop *and* the GIMP, or whatever? Uh-uh,
sorry, no can do.
 |  Next  |  Last
Pages: 1 2 3
Prev: German Language in Europe
Next: Memory Leak Issue in Weblogic, SUN, Apache and Oracle classes