new extension generator for C++

[Paul Boddie]

Relative to what they could have done with a more permissive license?

Well, yes. Some people would have it that the only reason why BSD
variants never became as popular as Linux (or rather, GNU/Linux, but
lets keep this focused) is because the litigation around the BSD code
base "scared people away". Yet I remember rather well back in the
mid-1990s when people using the same proprietary-and-doomed platform
as myself started looking into Unix-flavoured operating systems, and a
group of people deliberately chose NetBSD because of the favourable
licensing conditions and because there was a portability headstart
over Linux, which at the time people seriously believed was rather non-
portable. So, that "scary AT&T" myth can be sunk, at least when
considering its impact on what people were doing in 1994. Although the
NetBSD port in question lives on, and maybe the people responsible all
took jobs in large companies, its success on that platform and its
derivatives has been dwarfed by that of the corresponding Linux port.

Yes.  GPL hurts everyone relative to licenses that don't drive wedges
and prevent interoperability between software.

I can think of another case, actually connected to the above
proprietary platform and its practitioners, where software licensing
stood in the way of "just getting on with business" which is what you
seem to be advocating: a company released their application under the
GPL, except for one critical library which remained proprietary
software. Now, although you can argue that everyone's life would be
richer had the GPL not prohibited "interoperability" (although I
imagine that the application's licensing actually employed an
exception to glue everything together in that particular case), a
community never formed because people probably assumed that their role
would only ever be about tidying up someone else's code so that the
original authors could profit from it.

All the GPL is designed to do in such cases is to encourage people to
seek control (in terms of the "four freedoms") of all the technology,
rather than be placated by the occasional airdrop of proprietary
software and to be convinced never to explore the possibility of
developing something similar for themselves. The beneficiary of the
refusal to work on the above application was the GPL-licensed
Inkscape, which might not be as well-liked by many people, but it does
demonstrate, firstly, that permissive licences do not have the
monopoly on encouraging people to work on stuff, and secondly, that
actually going and improving something else is the answer if you don't
like the licensing of something.

You might argue that GPL is sometimes better than proprietary closed
source, and I won't disagree, but it's nearly always worse than other
open source licenses.

For me, I would argue that the GPL is always better than "proprietary
closed source", recalling that the consideration is that of licensing
and not mixing in other concerns like whether a particular program is
technically better. In ensuring that an end-user gets some code and
can break out those "four freedoms" on it, it is clearly not "worse
than other open source licenses", and I don't accept that this is some
rare thing that only happens outside a theoretical setting on an
occasional basis.

It doesn't matter what the GPL "meant" to do, it matters what it does,
which is hurt everyone (relative to almost all other licenses).

This is your opinion, not objectively established fact.

I don't agree with FSF's defintion of free software and refuse to
abide by it.  GPL isn't free software; any software that tells me I
can't compile it in with a closed source API isn't free.  Period.

Well, if you can't (or can't be bothered) to distinguish between what
is known as Free Software and "open source", then I'm hardly surprised
that you take offence at people releasing software for one set of
reasons while you only consider another set of reasons to be valid
ones. Throughout this discussion I've been accused of not being able
to put myself in the position of the other side, but I completely
understand that people just want as much publicly available software
as possible to be permissively licensed, frequently for the reason
that it will "grease the wheels of commerce", that it reduces (but,
contrary to popular belief, does *not* eliminate) the amount of
thought required when combining works, and that "the boss" or "the
company lawyers" feel more comfortable with permissive licences,
perhaps because they are scared about what might happen to their
patent portfolio or something (in which case they might want to re-
read some of those licences).

It isn't news to me that some people emphasise developer "freedoms"
and others emphasise user "freedoms", and frequently advocates of the
former can only consider unrestricted personal gratification as
"freedom". But to argue for the latter, I don't need to argue about
how some style of licence is "better" according to some hastily
arranged and fragile criteria: it's clear what the goal of copyleft
licensing is; take it or leave it. There's no real disinformation
campaign or "propaganda"; the FSF aren't "forcing" people to do
anything, in contrast to various proprietary software licences and the
way that most people are more obviously "forced" to buy a Microsoft
product when they buy a computer (and be told that there's no refund,
that it's "part of the product", contrary to what the EULA actually
says for obvious regulatory reasons).

So, given an acknowledgement of the motivation for copyleft licensing,
the argument for applying it practically makes itself. I don't need to
bring terminology like "holy war" or references to Bin Laden to make
my case. I wonder, then, why people feel the need to do just that.

Paul

 

[Patrick Maupin]

Sure, but all he's asking you to do is to make the software available
under a GPL-compatible licence.

I'll be charitable and assume the fact that you can make that
statement without apparent guile merely means that you haven't read
the post I was referring to:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html

[...]

rst2pdf was licensed under the MIT license before I started
contributing to it, and there is no way I was going to even consider
adding patches for a GPLed package (which would certainly have to be
GPLed) into the rst2pdf repository.  (Say what you will about how
sometimes differently licensed code can be combined, but RMS has to
share quite a bit of the blame/credit for the whole combining licenses
FUD.)

I think the FSF are quite clear about combining licences - they even
go to the trouble of telling you which ones are compatible with the
GPL

Yes, but one of the things they are quite clear on is that the overall
work must be licensed as GPL, if any of the components are licensed as
GPL. They claim this is true, even if a non-GPL work dynamically
links to a GPL work.

- so I don't see where "FUD" comes into it, apart from possible

corner cases where people are trying to circumvent the terms of a
licence and probably know themselves that what they're trying to do is
at the very least against the spirit of the licence.

Legally, I don't think they can dictate the license terms of, e.g.
clisp just because it can link to readline. But practically, they DID
manage to do this, simply because Bruno Haible, the clisp author, was
more concerned about writing software than spending too much time
sparring with Stallman over the license, so he finally licensed clisp
under the gpl. clisp *could* use readline, but didn't require it;
nonetheless Stallman argued that clisp was a "derivative" of
readline. That case of the tail wagging the dog would be laughable if
it hadn't worked. In any case, Stallman's success at that tactic is
probably one of the things that led him to write the paper on why you
should use GPL for your library. (As an aside, since rst2pdf *can*
use GPL-licensed svglib, it could possibly be subject to the same kind
of political pressure as clisp. But the fact that more people are
better informed now and that the internet would publicize the dispute
more widely more quickly means that this is a battle Stallman is
unlikely to wage at this point, because if the leader of any such
targeted project has enough cojones, the FSF's inevitable loss would
reduce some of the FUD dramatically.)

Even then,
warning people about their little project to make proprietary plugins,
or whatever, is not really "FUD".

I think that, legally, they probably don't have a leg to stand on for
some of their overarching claims (e.g. about shipping proprietary
software that could link to readline, without even shipping
readline). But morally -- well, they've made their position
reasonably clear and I try to abide by it. That still doesn't make it
"not really FUD." I'd call this sort of badgering "copyright misuse"
myself.

As for rst2pdf, what your modifications would mean is that the
software would need to be redistributed under a GPL-compatible
licence.

That's parsing semantics rather finely. In practice, what it really
means is that the combination (e.g. the whole program) would
effectively be GPL-licensed. This then means that downstream users
would have to double-check that they are not combining the whole work
with licenses which are GPL-incompatible, even if they are not using
the svg feature. Hence, the term "viral."

I'll accept that this does affect what people can then do
with the project, but once again, you've mentioned at least one LGPL-
licensed project which was previously in this very situation, and it
was never actually GPL-licensed itself. Here's the relevant FAQ entry:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL

Yes, I've read that, but this is much more informative:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem

"A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version
of that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program
must be released under the GPL if it is released at all."

This makes it clear that the overall work must be GPLed. Now, all of
a sudden, downstream users cannot do some things they could have done
before. Can you not see that taking a preexisting MIT-licensed
project and adding code to make it GPL could negatively affect some of
its users and that that is not necessarily an unalloyed good?

[...]

This is exactly the same situation that Carl was describing, only with
two different open source packages rather than with a proprietary
package and a GPL package.  The whole reason people use words like
"force" and "viral" with the GPL is that this issue would not have
come up if svglib were MIT and rst2pdf were GPL.  (Note that the LGPL
forces you to give back changes, but not in a way that makes it
incompatible with software under other licenses.  That's why you see
very few complaints about the LGPL.)

Actually, the copyleft licences don't "force" anyone to "give back
changes": they oblige people to pass on changes.

True, if pedantic. I meant "give back" in the more general sense.

[...]

But I have definitely seen cases where people are offering something
that is not of nearly as much value as they seem to think it is, where
one of the goals is obviously to try to spread the GPL.

Well, even the FSF doesn't approve of trivial projects using the GPL:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatIfWorkIsShort

Sure, that's a pragmatic view -- copyright might not even be permitted
on something that short that is mainly functional. However, length is
not the only arbiter of trivial. To stay with the same example,
personally, I would consider readline "trivial" within the context of
a lot of software which might use it, regardless of whether the
readline implementation itself used all sorts of fancy neural net
technology to predict what word the user was going to type or
whatever. But whether it was trivial or not, if I ship software that
*could* link to it but doesn't *require* it (like the case of clisp)
without shipping readline, I think it's FUD and an attempt at
copyright misuse to call my software a derivative work of readline.
But obviously YMMV

Regards,
Pat

 

[Aahz]

Actually, the copyleft licences don't "force" anyone to "give back
changes": they oblige people to pass on changes.

IMO, that's a distinction without a difference, particularly if you
define "give back" as referring to the community rather than the original
project. With the FSF itself using "pressure" in the FAQ entry you
linked to, I have no clue why you and Ben Finney object to my use of
"force".

 

[Aahz]

[we have previously been using "MIT-style" and "BSD-style" licensing in
this thread for the most part -- given the poster who suggested that
Apache makes more sense these days, I'm switching to that terminology]

You might argue that GPL is sometimes better than proprietary closed
source, and I won't disagree, but it's nearly always worse than other
open source licenses.

That I completely disagree with. I'm not going to bother making
arguments (Paul Boddie et al has done a much better job than I could),
but I wanted to register my disagreement as someone who generally prefers
Apache-style licenses. I will just add that I believe that Apache-style
licensing could not work in the absence of GPL software. IOW, I believe
that GPL confers a form of herd immunity to Open Source in general, and
Stallman gets full credit for creating the idea of GPL to protect Open
Source.

I believe that Stallman understands this perfectly well and it in part
represents why he is so opposed to non-GPL licensing; it makes sense that
he feels some resentment toward the "freeloading" from the rest of the
Open Source community. OTOH, I also believe that having only GPL would
destroy Open Source as a viable development environment and community;
it's too restrictive for some very valuable projects (including Python in
specific, to bring this back on topic).

Each project needs to think carefully about its relationship to the Open
Source ecosystem and community before deciding on a license. But for
small projects trying to get users, defaulting to Apache makes sense.

 

[Paul Boddie]

IMO, that's a distinction without a difference, particularly if you
define "give back" as referring to the community rather than the original
project.

There is a difference: I know of at least one vendor of GPL-licensed
solutions who received repeated requests that they make their sources
available to all-comers, even though the only obligation is to those
receiving the software in the first place. Yes, the code can then
become public - if Red Hat decided to only release sources to their
customers, and those customers shared the sources publicly, then
CentOS would still be around as a Red Hat "clone" - but there are
situations where recipients of GPL-licensed code may decide that it is
in their best interests not to just upload it to the public Internet.

 With the FSF itself using "pressure" in the FAQ entry you
linked to, I have no clue why you and Ben Finney object to my use of
"force".

Because no-one is being forced to do anything. Claiming that "force"
is involved is like hearing a schoolboy saying, "I really wanted that
chocolate, but why is that man forcing me to pay for it?" Well, you
only have to pay for it if you decide you want to take it - that's the
only reasonable response.

Paul

 

[Patrick Maupin]

There is a difference: I know of at least one vendor of GPL-licensed
solutions who received repeated requests that they make their sources
available to all-comers, even though the only obligation is to those
receiving the software in the first place. Yes, the code can then
become public - if Red Hat decided to only release sources to their
customers, and those customers shared the sources publicly, then
CentOS would still be around as a Red Hat "clone" - but there are
situations where recipients of GPL-licensed code may decide that it is
in their best interests not to just upload it to the public Internet.


Because no-one is being forced to do anything. Claiming that "force"
is involved is like hearing a schoolboy saying, "I really wanted that
chocolate, but why is that man forcing me to pay for it?" Well, you
only have to pay for it if you decide you want to take it - that's the
only reasonable response.

I've addressed this before. Aahz used a word in an accurate, but to
you, inflammatory, sense, but it's still accurate -- the man *would*
force you to pay for the chocolate if you took it. You're making it
sound like whining, but Aahz was simply trying to state a fact. The
fact is, I know the man would force me to pay for the chocolate, so in
some cases that enters into the equation and keeps me from wanting the
chocolate. This isn't whining; just a common-sense description of
reality. Personally, I think this use of the word "force" is much
less inflammatory than the deliberate act of co-opting the word
"freedom" to mean "if you think you can take this software and do
anything you want with it, you're going to find out differently when
we sue you."

Regards,
Pat

 

[Paul Boddie]

I'll be charitable and assume the fact that you can make that
statement without apparent guile merely means that you haven't read
the post I was referring to:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html

Of course I have read it, and not just recently either. But this is a
position paper by the author of the licence, and it doesn't mean that
someone who has written a GPL-licensed library completely agrees with
that position. And anyway, it's a case of "take it or leave it" - it's
not like the author or the FSF are sneaking stuff into every product
and every corner of the market and then telling you that you can't
"unchoose" their stuff.

[...]

Legally, I don't think they can dictate the license terms of, e.g.
clisp just because it can link to readline.  But practically, they DID
manage to do this, simply because Bruno Haible, the clisp author, was
more concerned about writing software than spending too much time
sparring with Stallman over the license, so he finally licensed clisp
under the gpl.  clisp *could* use readline, but didn't require it;
nonetheless Stallman argued that clisp was a "derivative" of
readline.  That case of the tail wagging the dog would be laughable if
it hadn't worked.  In any case, Stallman's success at that tactic is
probably one of the things that led him to write the paper on why you
should use GPL for your library.

Although it seems quite unfair, the e-mail discussion about the
licence does show that Stallman was not initially convinced that works
should be affected in such a way (with regard to the Objective-C
compiler developed by NeXT), and that Haible was not strongly opposed
to changing the licence. You can argue that Stallman overreached by
demanding a licence change and that consideration of such matters has
progressed since that time, but Haible always had the option of not
using or supporting readline - only the latter is contentious, and the
obligation of GPL-compatible licensing (as opposed to GPL-licensing)
now diminishes how contentious this is today.

[...]

I think that, legally, they probably don't have a leg to stand on for
some of their overarching claims (e.g. about shipping proprietary
software that could link to readline, without even shipping
readline).  But morally -- well, they've made their position
reasonably clear and I try to abide by it.  That still doesn't make it
"not really FUD."  I'd call this sort of badgering "copyright misuse"
myself.

Again, you have to consider the intent of the licensing: that some
software which links to readline results in a software system that
should offer the "four freedoms", because that's the price of linking
to readline whose licence has promised that any system which builds
upon it shall offer those privileges.

That's parsing semantics rather finely.  In practice, what it really
means is that the combination (e.g. the whole program) would
effectively be GPL-licensed.  This then means that downstream users
would have to double-check that they are not combining the whole work
with licenses which are GPL-incompatible, even if they are not using
the svg feature.  Hence, the term "viral."

Once again, I refer you to the intent of the licensing: if someone has
the software in front of them which uses svglib, then they need to
have the privileges granted to them by the GPL. Yes, if the software
also uses some component with a GPL-incompatible licence, then this
causes a problem.

[...]

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem

"A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version
of that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program
must be released under the GPL if it is released at all."

This makes it clear that the overall work must be GPLed.  Now, all of
a sudden, downstream users cannot do some things they could have done
before.  Can you not see that taking a preexisting MIT-licensed
project and adding code to make it GPL could negatively affect some of
its users and that that is not necessarily an unalloyed good?

Well, I have referred several times to WebKit without you taking the
hint, but that provides a specific case of a project which is LGPL-
licensed despite being based on (in GPLv3 terminology) libraries which
were distributed under the GPL and combined with that software.
Similarly, the effort to ensure that CPython's licence was GPL-
compatible had a lot to do with the right to redistribute with GPL-
licensed code (actually readline, if I remember correctly).

[...]

Sure, that's a pragmatic view -- copyright might not even be permitted
on something that short that is mainly functional.  However, length is
not the only arbiter of trivial.  To stay with the same example,
personally, I would consider readline "trivial" within the context of
a lot of software which might use it, regardless of whether the
readline implementation itself used all sorts of fancy neural net
technology to predict what word the user was going to type or
whatever.  But whether it was trivial or not, if I ship software that
*could* link to it but doesn't *require* it (like the case of clisp)
without shipping readline, I think it's FUD and an attempt at
copyright misuse to call my software a derivative work of readline.
But obviously YMMV

Is readline trivial? Was readline trivial in 1992? Does it even
matter, because the author is more or less saying that they don't want
their code incorporated in a proprietary system? It's interesting to
see that GPLv3 doesn't talk about derived works or derivatives (at
least not as much as GPLv2), but instead talks about things being
"based on" other things, but as I've already said, at the point of
someone running a bunch of software components together, the intent of
copyleft licences is to say that the user should be able to take that
(or part of it, in the case of "weak copyleft" licences) and change,
recompile and distribute its sources, modified or not.

Paul

 

[Paul Boddie]

I've addressed this before.  Aahz used a word in an accurate, but to
you, inflammatory, sense, but it's still accurate -- the man *would*
force you to pay for the chocolate if you took it.

Yes, *if* you took it. He isn't forcing you to take it, though, is he?

You're making it sound like whining, but Aahz was simply trying to state a fact.

It is whining if someone says, "I really want that chocolate, but that
nasty man is going to make me pay for it!"

 The fact is, I know the man would force me to pay for the chocolate, so in
some cases that enters into the equation and keeps me from wanting the
chocolate.

If the man said, "please take the chocolate, but I want you to share
it with your friends", and you refused to do so because you couldn't
accept that condition, would it be right to say, "that man is forcing
me to share chocolate with my friends"?

 This isn't whining; just a common-sense description of
reality.  Personally, I think this use of the word "force" is much
less inflammatory than the deliberate act of co-opting the word
"freedom" to mean "if you think you can take this software and do
anything you want with it, you're going to find out differently when
we sue you."

The word "freedom" means a number of things. If you don't like the way
Messrs Finney and Stallman use the term, please take it up with them.
But to say that someone entering a voluntary agreement is "forced" to
do something, when they weren't forced into that agreement in the
first place, is just nonsense. It's like saying that the shopkeeper is
some kind of Darth Vader character who is coercing people to take the
chocolate and then saddling them with obligations against their will.

Paul

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

It's like saying that the shopkeeper is some kind of Darth Vader
character who is coercing people to take the chocolate

Last time I came home with chocolate, I tried that excuse on my wife. She
didn't believe it for a second.

Next time, I'll try claiming that I was obliged to eat the chocolate
because of the GPL.

 

[Lie Ryan]

Of course I have read it, and not just recently either. But this is a
position paper by the author of the licence, and it doesn't mean that
someone who has written a GPL-licensed library completely agrees with
that position. And anyway, it's a case of "take it or leave it" - it's
not like the author or the FSF are sneaking stuff into every product
and every corner of the market and then telling you that you can't
"unchoose" their stuff.

Come on, 99% of the projects released under GPL did so because they
don't want to learn much about the law; they just need to release it
under a certain license so their users have some legal certainty. Most
programmers are not lawyers and don't care about the law and don't care
about the GPL; if a commercial programmer want to use the GPL-code in an
incompatible licensed program, and he comes up asking, many would just
be happy to say yes.

Most people release their code in GPL just because it's popular, not for
the exact clauses in it. Heck, many people that releases code in GPL
might not actually have read the full license.

Only big GPL projects have the resources to waste on a lawyer. And only
very big projects have the resources to waste on enforcing the license
they uses. The rest of us just don't care.

 

[Paul Boddie]

Come on, 99%  of the projects released under GPL did so because they
don't want to learn much about the law; they just need to release it
under a certain license so their users have some legal certainty.

Yes, this is frequently the case. And the GPL does offer some
certainty that various permissive licences do not.

Most programmers are not lawyers and don't care about the law and don't care
about the GPL; if a commercial programmer want to use the GPL-code in an
incompatible licensed program, and he comes up asking, many would just
be happy to say yes.

Yes, quite possibly. I did mention this myself elsewhere.

Most people release their code in GPL just because it's popular, not for
the exact clauses in it. Heck, many people that releases code in GPL
might not actually have read the full license.

Yes, this is also probably the case for a number of people. Although
many probably understand the principles of the licence and feel that
it represents their wishes most accurately.

Only big GPL projects have the resources to waste on a lawyer. And only
very big projects have the resources to waste on enforcing the license
they uses. The rest of us just don't care.

Well, that's always an option as well, but at the same time, there are
people willing to pursue licence violations, and these people have
done so successfully. There's no need to make an impassioned argument
for apathy, though. Some people do wish to dictate what others can do
with their work.

Or are you trying to make another point here? That people would choose
something other than the GPL if only they "knew better", perhaps?
Since the FSF goes out of its way to list lots of Free Software
licences, GPL-compatible or otherwise, and those other licences aren't
exactly secret anyway, I hardly think there's a conspiracy at work.

Paul

 

[Patrick Maupin]

Of course I have read it, and not just recently either. But this is a
position paper by the author of the licence, and it doesn't mean that
someone who has written a GPL-licensed library completely agrees with
that position. And anyway, it's a case of "take it or leave it" - it's
not like the author or the FSF are sneaking stuff into every product
and every corner of the market and then telling you that you can't
"unchoose" their stuff.

OK. Now I'm REALLY confused. I said "Certainly RMS
carefully lays out that the LGPL should be used sparingly in his "Why
you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library" post. (Hint:
he's not suggesting a permissive license instead.)"

to which you replied:

"Sure, but all he's asking you to do is to make the software available
under a GPL-compatible licence."

and then I tried to politely show that you were wrong about RMS's
intentions, but now, but you're saying "oh, of course, he'd say that
-- he wrote the license" which is basically what I've been saying all
along. But if you have read it like you say, then it appears you were
being very disingenuous in your original reply!

Although it seems quite unfair, the e-mail discussion about the
licence does show that Stallman was not initially convinced that works
should be affected in such a way (with regard to the Objective-C
compiler developed by NeXT), and that Haible was not strongly opposed
to changing the licence. You can argue that Stallman overreached by
demanding a licence change and that consideration of such matters has
progressed since that time, but Haible always had the option of not
using or supporting readline - only the latter is contentious,

"was not strongly opposed to changing the license" As I already
mentioned, he was more interested in doing useful stuff than worrying
about the license. Yes, readline was the hook that sucked him into
using the GPL, but IMHO RMS was flat out wrong about the licensing
implications. As I mentioned, though, the morality and the legality
are probably different animals.

and the
obligation of GPL-compatible licensing (as opposed to GPL-licensing)
now diminishes how contentious this is today.

NO. If you are building an application, and distributing GPLed stuff
as part of it, the FSF still maintains that the license is such that
the entire application must be GPLed. You keep acting like this isn't
true, but it absolutely is if you're distributing the entire
application.

Again, you have to consider the intent of the licensing: that some
software which links to readline results in a software system that
should offer the "four freedoms", because that's the price of linking
to readline whose licence has promised that any system which builds
upon it shall offer those privileges.

But I did consider the intent, and as I have made clear, I think
that's a bullying tactic that fragments the software world
unnecessarily. Obviously YMMV.

NO. You're still not paying attention. The FSF's clear position is
that if you actually *redistribute* software under the GPL as *part of
a system* then the full package must be licensed *under the GPL*.

Once again, I refer you to the intent of the licensing: if someone has
the software in front of them which uses svglib, then they need to
have the privileges granted to them by the GPL. Yes, if the software
also uses some component with a GPL-incompatible licence, then this
causes a problem.

It appears that the FSF's position is the ability to link to svglib
would require software to be licensed under the GPL. I don't believe
that, but I do believe that if rst2pdf distributed svglib (or even
patches to svglib which were clearly derivative works) then yes,
rst2pdf would have to be distributed under the GPL. This kind of
bullshit is only acceptable to people who only think a single license
is acceptable.

[...]

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem

"A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version
of that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program
must be released under the GPL if it is released at all."

This makes it clear that the overall work must be GPLed.  Now, all of
a sudden, downstream users cannot do some things they could have done
before.  Can you not see that taking a preexisting MIT-licensed
project and adding code to make it GPL could negatively affect some of
its users and that that is not necessarily an unalloyed good?

Well, I have referred several times to WebKit without you taking the
hint,

OK, I don't work with webkit. I knew you were hinting at something,
but why the games, I don't know. I guess it's all about mystique and
games.

but that provides a specific case of a project which is LGPL-
licensed despite being based on (in GPLv3 terminology) libraries which
were distributed under the GPL and combined with that software.

What other libraries? I don't know it's history. I give you specific
examples at problems; you hint around at things you claim are not
problems and then still don't give specifics.

Similarly, the effort to ensure that CPython's licence was GPL-
compatible had a lot to do with the right to redistribute with GPL-
licensed code (actually readline, if I remember correctly).

Yes, but the Python project doesn't actually distribute readline, and
(as I mentioned) people are more informed now, and it would be
difficult for RMS to bully Python into relicensing. But if the Python
distribution *included* GNU Readline, then RMS would be on firmer
ground, and the license would probably have to be changed. This is
*exactly* the situation I was describing with svglib -- can you still
not see that it is a problem to just toss unsupported free software
out there with a GPL license? Unsupported Apache or MIT is fine --
fix it or ignore. Unsupported GPL is an attractive nuisance.

Is readline trivial? Was readline trivial in 1992?

Again, you could have neural net prediction and other fancy
technologies, but in general, yes, the concept is pretty trivial and
there were many systems that already had such things back then.

Does it even
matter, because the author is more or less saying that they don't want
their code incorporated in a proprietary system?

Yes it matters because as others have pointed out, sometimes people
use stuff which is purported to be "free" without a full understanding
of all the implications. But this gets back to my general complaint
about co-opting the word "free" which you don't think is a problem
because you have chosen to use other words.

It's interesting to
see that GPLv3 doesn't talk about derived works or derivatives (at
least not as much as GPLv2), but instead talks about things being
"based on" other things, but as I've already said, at the point of
someone running a bunch of software components together, the intent of
copyleft licences is to say that the user should be able to take that
(or part of it, in the case of "weak copyleft" licences) and change,
recompile and distribute its sources, modified or not.

Trust me, I know the intent, and could even consider it a noble goal.
But I think a lot of the means employed in getting to this end are
simply wrong.

Regards,
Pat

 

[Patrick Maupin]

Yes, *if* you took it. He isn't forcing you to take it, though, is he?

No, but he said a lot of words that I didn't immediately understand
about what it meant to be free and that it was free, and then after I
bit into it he told me he owned my soul now.

It is whining if someone says, "I really want that chocolate, but that
nasty man is going to make me pay for it!"

But that's not what happened. I mean, he just told me that I might
have to give some of it to others later. He didn't mention that if I
spread peanut butter on mine before I ate it that I'd have to give
people Reese's Peanut Butter cups.

If the man said, "please take the chocolate, but I want you to share
it with your friends", and you refused to do so because you couldn't
accept that condition, would it be right to say, "that man is forcing
me to share chocolate with my friends"?

But the thing is, he's *not* making me share the chocolate with any of
my friends. He's not even making me share my special peanut butter
and chocolate. What he's making me do is, if I give my peanut butter
and chocolate to one of my friends, he's making me make *that* friend
promise to share. I try not to impose obligations like that on my
friends, so obviously the "nice" man with the chocolate isn't my
friend!

The word "freedom" means a number of things. If you don't like the way
Messrs Finney and Stallman use the term, please take it up with them.
But to say that someone entering a voluntary agreement is "forced" to
do something, when they weren't forced into that agreement in the
first place, is just nonsense. It's like saying that the shopkeeper is
some kind of Darth Vader character who is coercing people to take the
chocolate and then saddling them with obligations against their will.

I explained this very carefully before multiple times. Let me give
concrete examples -- (1) I have told my children before "if we take
that candy, then they will make us pay for it" and (2) if we included
(GPLed software) in this (MIT-licensed software) then we will have to
change the license. In both these cases, once the decision has been
made, then yes, force enters into it. And no, I don't think the
average shop keeper is nearly as evil as Darth, or even RMS.

Regards,
Pat

 

[Patrick Maupin]

Yes, this is frequently the case. And the GPL does offer some
certainty that various permissive licences do not.

Huh? Permissive licenses offer much better certainty for someone
attempting a creative mash-up. Different versions of the Apache
license don't conflict with each other. If I use an MIT-licensed
component, it doesn't attempt to make me offer my whole work under
MIT.

[..]

Well, that's always an option as well, but at the same time, there are
people willing to pursue licence violations, and these people have
done so successfully. There's no need to make an impassioned argument
for apathy, though. Some people do wish to dictate what others can do
with their work.

Oh, I get it. You were discussing the certainty that an author can
control what downstream users do with the software to some extent.
Yes, I fully agree. The GPL is for angry idealists who have an easily
outraged sense of justice, who don't have enough real problems to work
on.

BTW, I'm here to make an impassioned argument for apathy. For
example, I think the world needs fewer suicide bombers, and the more
apathy we can get.

Regards,
Pat

 

[Patrick Maupin]

Last time I came home with chocolate, I tried that excuse on my wife. She
didn't believe it for a second.

Next time, I'll try claiming that I was obliged to eat the chocolate
because of the GPL.

Good luck with that. Women can always see right through bad
analogies, especially where chocolate is concerned!

Regards,
Pat

 

[Lie Ryan]

Huh? Permissive licenses offer much better certainty for someone
attempting a creative mash-up. Different versions of the Apache
license don't conflict with each other. If I use an MIT-licensed
component, it doesn't attempt to make me offer my whole work under
MIT.

Legal certainty as in, imagine if you released a piece of code, and use
this as the license:

"Feel free to use the code"

Then some other programmers see it, and use it in their project. The
original author then sued them because he actually intended the code to
be linked to, not copied pasted into another code base.

Then he modified the license to sound:

"Feel free to link, include, or use the code"

Then some other programmers see the code, and modified it to fit their
purpose. The original author then sued them because he only intended the
code to be "used unchanged" not "modified".


"Feel free to link, include, use, or modify the code"

Then some other programmers see the code, and used it in some commercial
project. The original author then sued them because he only intended the
code to be used in open source projects.


Lather, Rinse, Repeat and you get twenty page long license like GPL or
OWL[*]. By this time, the other programmer have learnt not to use code
with such uncertain license and the original author would either have
taken a law degree or learn to use a well-known licenses (GPL or
whatever) instead of writing his own.

The other programmer would always find a loophole in such ad-hoc
license, inadvertantly or otherwise. If the original author used GPL
(or OWL), the other programmer knows exactly when their use case is
protected by GPL/OWL (i.e. even if the original author later found that
he disagrees with a certain clause in the license he choose, it then
becomes his fault for choosing it; the other programmer's use case is
protected by the license and thus he have the legal certainty).

[*] OWL: other well-known license

As a plus, using a well-known license means the other programmer also
don't need to hire a lawyer to determine whether he can use your code.
The other programmer sees GPL and remembers that FSF listed the license
he's using as GPL-compatible, he knows immediately he can use the code
without reading the full text of GPL. The other programmer sees some
Apache and he remembers previously he had used another Apache-licensed
code and knows immediately that he can use this other Apache project. If
everyone writes their own license, then this knowledge reuse wouldn't be
possible.

Oh, I get it. You were discussing the certainty that an author can
control what downstream users do with the software to some extent.
Yes, I fully agree. The GPL is for angry idealists who have an easily
outraged sense of justice, who don't have enough real problems to work
on.

The point is, GPL (and OWL) is for programmers who just don't care about
the legal stuffs and would want to spend more time writing code than
writing license.

 

[Lie Ryan]

But the thing is, he's *not* making me share the chocolate with any of
my friends. He's not even making me share my special peanut butter
and chocolate. What he's making me do is, if I give my peanut butter
and chocolate to one of my friends, he's making me make *that* friend
promise to share. I try not to impose obligations like that on my
friends, so obviously the "nice" man with the chocolate isn't my
friend!

The analogy breaks here; unlike chocolate, the value of software/source
code, if shared, doesn't decrease (in fact, many software increases its
value when shared liberally, e.g. p2p apps).

There might be certain cases where the software contains some trade
secret whose value decreases the more people knows about it; but sharing
does not decrease the value of the software, at least not directly, it
is the value of the secret that decreases because of the sharing.

 

[Paul Boddie]

OK.  Now I'm REALLY confused.  I said "Certainly RMS
carefully lays out that the LGPL should be used sparingly in his "Why
you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library" post.  (Hint:
he's not suggesting a permissive license instead.)"

to which you replied:

"Sure, but all he's asking you to do is to make the software available
under a GPL-compatible licence."

Alright, then, all he's asking you to do is to make *your* software
available under a GPL-compatible licence. That's what I meant in the
context of the discussion. Usually, people complain about how the GPL
dictates a single licence, forbidding all others, that is then
inseparable from their work ("It's my work but they make me GPL it! I
can't even control my own work any more! The FSF owns it!" and such
nonsense), but I've already given examples of this not being the case
at all.

and then I tried to politely show that you were wrong about RMS's
intentions, but now, but you're saying "oh, of course, he'd say that
-- he wrote the license"  which is basically what I've been saying all
along.  But if you have read it like you say, then it appears you were
being very disingenuous in your original reply!

What the licence asks you to do and what the author of the licence
wants you to do are two separate things.

[...]

NO.  If you are building an application, and distributing GPLed stuff
as part of it, the FSF still maintains that the license is such that
the entire application must be GPLed.  You keep acting like this isn't
true, but it absolutely is if you're distributing the entire
application.

I wrote "the software" above when I meant "your software", but I have
not pretended that the whole system need not be available under the
GPL. Otherwise the following text would be logically inconsistent with
such claims:

[...]

But I did consider the intent, and as I have made clear, I think
that's a bullying tactic that fragments the software world
unnecessarily.  Obviously YMMV.

More loaded terms to replace the last set, I see.

NO.  You're still not paying attention.  The FSF's clear position is
that if you actually *redistribute* software under the GPL as *part of
a system* then the full package must be licensed *under the GPL*.

Again, what I meant was "your software", not the whole software
system. As I more or less state below...

It appears that the FSF's position is the ability to link to svglib
would require software to be licensed under the GPL.

It would require the resulting system to be licensed under the GPL. As
it stands by itself, rst2pdf would need to be licensed compatibly with
the GPL.

I don't believe
that, but I do believe that if rst2pdf distributed svglib (or even
patches to svglib which were clearly derivative works) then yes,
rst2pdf would have to be distributed under the GPL.  This kind of
bullshit is only acceptable to people who only think a single license
is acceptable.

Take it or leave it, then.

[...]

OK, I don't work with webkit.  I knew you were hinting at something,
but why the games, I don't know.  I guess it's all about mystique and
games.

You mentioned WebKit as a non-GPL-licensed project which attracted
contributions from hard-nosed business. WebKit started life as KHTML
and was (and still is) LGPL-licensed, but for all practical purposes,
KHTML was only ever experienced by KDE users whilst linked to the Qt
framework, then available under the GPL. Now, given that WebKit now
works with other GUI frameworks, yet is still LGPL-licensed (and this
has nothing to do with recent Qt licensing developments, since this
applies to the period before those changes), it is clear that any
assertion that WebKit "was made GPL-only", which is what a lot of
people claim, is incorrect.

What other libraries?  I don't know it's history.  I give you specific
examples at problems; you hint around at things you claim are not
problems and then still don't give specifics.

I've now given you the specifics.

Yes, but the Python project doesn't actually distribute readline, and
(as I mentioned) people are more informed now, and it would be
difficult for RMS to bully Python into relicensing.

All RMS and the FSF's lawyers wanted was that the CNRI licences be GPL-
compatible. There are actually various aspects of GPL-compatibility
that are beneficial, even if you don't like the copyleft-style
clauses, so I don't think it was to the detriment of the Python
project.

But if the Python
distribution *included* GNU Readline, then RMS would be on firmer
ground, and the license would probably have to be changed.  This is
*exactly* the situation I was describing with svglib -- can you still
not see that it is a problem to just toss unsupported free software
out there with a GPL license?  Unsupported Apache or MIT is fine --
fix it or ignore.  Unsupported GPL is an attractive nuisance.

Well, if you're planning to release code and just walk away from it,
then choosing a permissive licence might be acceptable, but not all
code "found" by people on the Internet is abandoned, even if it is
apparently mere fodder for their super-important project.

Again, you could have neural net prediction and other fancy
technologies, but in general, yes, the concept is pretty trivial and
there were many systems that already had such things back then.

Well, that may not be a judgement shared by the authors. There are
numerous tools and components which do dull jobs and whose maintenance
is tedious and generally unrewarding, but that doesn't mean that such
investment is worth nothing in the face of someone else's so-very-
topical high-profile project.

Yes it matters because as others have pointed out, sometimes people
use stuff which is purported to be "free" without a full understanding
of all the implications.  But this gets back to my general complaint
about co-opting the word "free" which you don't think is a problem
because you have chosen to use other words.

Well, if people are making use of "some good code found for free on
the Internet", particularly if they are corporations like Cisco, and
they choose not to understand things like copyright and licensing, or
they think "all rights reserved" is just a catchy slogan, then they
probably shouldn't be building larger works and redistributing them.
This may seem unfair to you, but there are plenty of other
organisations who are much less charitable about copyright
infringement than the FSF or the average Free Software developer.

But if you're more or less saying that the intentions of an author can
(or should) be disregarded if the desire to use that author's work is
great enough, well, that's certainly interesting to learn.

Paul

 

[Paul Boddie]

Huh? Permissive licenses offer much better certainty for someone
attempting a creative mash-up.  Different versions of the Apache
license don't conflict with each other.  If I use an MIT-licensed
component, it doesn't attempt to make me offer my whole work under
MIT.

What certainty does the MIT licence give contributors to a project
against patent infringement claims initiated by another contributor?

[...]

Oh, I get it.  You were discussing the certainty that an author can
control what downstream users do with the software to some extent.
Yes, I fully agree.  The GPL is for angry idealists who have an easily
outraged sense of justice, who don't have enough real problems to work
on.

Again, the author does not exercise control when people must
voluntarily choose to use that author's work and thereby agree to
adhere to that author's set of terms.

Paul

 

[Paul Boddie]

No,  but he said a lot of words that I didn't immediately understand
about what it meant to be free and that it was free, and then after I
bit into it he told me he owned my soul now.

Thus, "owned my soul" joins "holy war" and "Bin Laden" on the list.
That rhetorical toolbox is looking pretty empty at this point.

[...]

But that's not what happened.  I mean, he just told me that I might
have to give some of it to others later.  He didn't mention that if I
spread peanut butter on mine before I ate it that I'd have to give
people Reese's Peanut Butter cups.

He isn't, though. He's telling you that you can't force other people
to lick the chocolate off whatever "Reese's Peanut Butter cups" are,
rather than actually eating the combination of the two, when you offer
such a combination to someone else. Is the Creative Commons share-
alike clause just as objectionable to you, because it's that principle
we're talking about here?

[...]

But the thing is, he's *not* making me share the chocolate with any of
my friends.  He's not even making me share my special peanut butter
and chocolate.  What he's making me do is, if I give my peanut butter
and chocolate to one of my friends, he's making me make *that* friend
promise to share.  I try not to impose obligations like that on my
friends, so obviously the "nice" man with the chocolate isn't my
friend!

Yes, he's making everyone commit to sharing, and yes, it's like a
snowball effect once people agree to join in. But unless you hide that
commitment, no-one imposes anything on anyone. They can get their
chocolate elsewhere. They join in; they are not conscripted.

[...]

I explained this very carefully before multiple times.  Let me give
concrete examples -- (1) I have told my children before "if we take
that candy, then they will make us pay for it" and (2) if we included
(GPLed software) in this (MIT-licensed software) then we will have to
change the license.  In both these cases, once the decision has been
made, then yes, force enters into it.  And no, I don't think the
average shop keeper is nearly as evil as Darth, or even RMS.

Entering an agreement voluntarily does not mean that you are forced to
enter that agreement, even if the agreement then involves obligations
(as agreements inevitably do).

Paul