From: Tobiah on

> Assertion II:
> If person A is free do perform an action person B is not free to
> perform then person A is free to do more than person B.

This does not hold water. Let's say there are only 10 activities
available. Person A can do number 1 and person B can not. Person
B can do activities 2 through 10, while person A can not. Therefore,
Person A is indeed free to perform an action that person B is not
free to perform, but person a is *not* free to do more than person B.

Tobiah
From: Paul Boddie on
On 14 Mai, 17:37, Patrick Maupin <pmau...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Before, you were busy pointing me at the GPL FAQ as authoritative.

No, the licence is the authority, although the FAQ would probably be
useful to clarify the licence author's intent in a litigation
environment.

[Fast-forward through the usual tirade, this time featuring words like
"bible", "moral", "evil"...]

> Well, I thought I was before, but then the discussion about
> downloading an ISO and burning it and giving it to a friend came up.
> This may be technically allowable under the license, but nothing you
> or anybody else has written has yet proved that to me.

Section 3 of GPLv2 (and section 6(d) of GPLv3 reads similarly): "If
distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access
to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to
copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the
source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the
source along with the object code."

And here's that FAQ entry which clarifies the intent:

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

Like I said, if you really have a problem with Ubuntu shipping CDs and
exposing others to copyright infringement litigation - or even
themselves, since they (and all major distributions) are actively
distributing binaries but not necessarily sources in the very same
download or on the very same disc - then maybe you should take it up
with them.

Paul
From: Patrick Maupin on
On May 14, 10:20 am, Paul Boddie <p...(a)boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 14 Mai, 09:08, Carl Banks <pavlovevide...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On May 13, 10:59 pm, Steven D'Aprano <st...(a)REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> > > On Thu, 13 May 2010 17:18:47 -0700, Carl Banks wrote:
> > > > 2. Reimplment the functionality seperately (*cough* PySide)
>
> > > Yes. So what? In what possible way is this an argument against the GPL?
>
> [...]
>
> > It's not.  It's an argument that the GPL doesn't do much good.
>
> Right. So nobody got the benefit from Qt under the GPL or PyQt under
> the GPL? Even the PySide developers seem hell-bent on picking over the
> work of the PyQt developers for ideas, although they obviously won't
> touch the code. Nokia seem to have accrued tremendous benefit from the
> existence of PyQt because I rather doubt that anyone would have
> bothered rolling a set of mature, usable Python bindings for Qt now
> had some not existed already and proved that dynamic languages are
> worth supporting.

Perhaps he should have said "the GPL doesn't do any more good than any
other commercial license."

After all, lots of software ideas proved their worth in proprietary
systems, and then were later cloned by FOSS developers. In many
cases, these clones are, functionally, almost exact copies. That's
why all the really proprietary people are hell-bent on trying to get
or maintain patent protection -- copyright doesn't protect
"inventions".

Would you have agreed had he had said that "MatLab's license doesn't
do much good" and assigned the same sort of meaning to that statement,
namely that the MatLab license prevented enough motivated people from
freely using MatLab in ways that were important to them? Obviously,
it was important enough to enough people that they went and built the
GPLed Octave software, which now emulates MatLab very closely. As I
think both Ed and I have said before, the GPL can be a great license
for a full-blown *program* (like Octave) that people can just download
and use, but is not always so great for program *pieces* that are
designed to be used in the programmatic equivalent of a "mash-up",
like PyQt/PySide, so the cloning of PyQt into PySide is as inevitable
as the cloning of MatLab into Octave, or Unix/Minix into Linux. As
far as your comments about PyQt proving out the concept, well duh!
Just as there are a lot of proprietary programs that are relatively
useless and *won't* have any GPLed versions written, nobody's going to
waste time rewriting a marginally useful GPLed library just to put a
permissive license on it, either. They are either going to write
something completely different in the hopes that their vision is
correct, or are going to copy at least some parts of the design and/or
vision of something that is popular and useful. And that's a great
thing. It would have been horribly unproductive if the Linux API
weren't at least reasonably close to the Unix API, for example.

It's an interesting tension between the licenses. Nobody rewrites
permissively licensed software as GPL simply because the license is
unacceptable, but just as people will rewrite proprietary programs and
libraries as GPL because the license is unacceptable, so will some
rewrite GPLed libraries as permissive because the license is
unacceptable.

Regards,
Pat
From: Patrick Maupin on
On May 14, 11:48 am, Paul Boddie <p...(a)boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 14 Mai, 17:37, Patrick Maupin <pmau...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Before, you were busy pointing me at the GPL FAQ as authoritative.
>
> No, the licence is the authority, although the FAQ would probably be
> useful to clarify the licence author's intent in a litigation
> environment.

Agreed.

> Section 3 of GPLv2 (and section 6(d) of GPLv3 reads similarly): "If
> distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access
> to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to
> copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the
> source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the
> source along with the object code."
>
> And here's that FAQ entry which clarifies the intent:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DistributeWithSourceOnInternet

That entry, along with the written offer, certainly covers Ubuntu when
they distribute a CD.

But if I *download* an ISO, burn it on a CD, and give it away, *I* am
the one distributing the physical copy, not Ubuntu, and I am not going
to put up an FTP server just so my friend can get source from it. And
as section 6 of GPL v3 makes clear, I am not allowed to piggyback on
Ubuntu's source offer. My situation *really is* covered by the FAQ
entry I referred you to:

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

> Like I said, if you really have a problem with Ubuntu shipping CDs and
> exposing others to copyright infringement litigation.

So, deliberately or not, you're trying to change the discussion
again. I *never* discussed Ubuntu shipping a physical CD, and never
intimated that that was a problem. My discussion was *always* about
an individual *downloading* an ISO and *burning* a CD himself, then
*distributing* the CD to someone else.

> - or even
> themselves, since they (and all major distributions) are actively
> distributing binaries but not necessarily sources in the very same
> download or on the very same disc - then maybe you should take it up
> with them.

Again, I never intimated this. Please read more carefully in the
future before you reply, and then perhaps you will actually make
cogent replies that address my points, and then I won't be so
frustrated that I make snide comments you take offense at, OK? This
has happened on at least 4 separate occasions in this thread, and
sometimes a single misunderstanding goes on for quite a few posts, so
I'm starting to wonder if it's deliberate.

Regards,
Pat
From: Albert van der Horst on
In article <4be95545$1(a)dnews.tpgi.com.au>,
Lie Ryan <lie.1296(a)gmail.com> wrote:

<SNIP>

>
>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.

This is a big reason for me to release everything (see my website,
it is a *lot*) under GPL. If someone wants to use it they can,
if someone wants to use it commercially, they can too, as long
as they pay me a little bit too. Really, I'm reasonable.

Groetjes Albert

--
--
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
albert(a)spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst