GPL Violators On The Prowl 636
ravenII writes "GPL Violations.org are looking after the GPL. Warning letters were personally handed over to companies at their CeBIT booths by Mr. Harald Welte, free software developer and founder of the gpl-violations.org project.
It seems big boys like Motorola, Acer, AOpen, Micronet, Buffalo and Trendware seem to violate GPL. Please visit the site for more information on GPL enforcements and violators."
Court? (Score:3, Insightful)
No teeth (Score:2, Insightful)
They have no standing - only the copyright holders have this, and if they don't do anything then nothing will happen.
They might be able to whip slashdot into a frenzy though.. maybe that's all that it's all about?
all negative (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ooohhh.. Leters! (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GPL too restrictive (Score:5, Insightful)
Good thing you're not. We don't need any more ignorant developers.
Those like me who've read and understand the license, use it to make sure the programs we distribute are not redistributed without source. We *want* that restriction. If you don't like that restriction, feel free to not use the code and go the hell away.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
And those rules, by contrast, are incredibly simple: Pay for what you take, and don't give people copies. But any time somebody like the RIAA or the MPAA try to enforce those rules, you guys go positively batshit over it.
That's the contradiction. That's what I'm trying to point out. Hopefully somebody will read this and go, "Huh. I don't know if I agree, but he's got a fair point."
Held accountable? When? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:GPL too restrictive (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess what, most companies don't want to give back source code, and its apperant by how many companies are violating the GPL. Having the restrictions the GPL does, it causes the companies to give back, which helps the community. Take PearPC for example. CherryOS has (obviously) ripped the code from them, and claimed that they wrote it all (in a few months or something, by one man, with no programming experience, which is bullshit) Nowadays, PearPC doesn't get many updates, because everytime they do, CherryOS does too. It's dampened the whole thing for the developers. If CherryOS was forced to obey theGPL (which they will eventually, some organization like the EFF or something will take them to court) then this wouldn't happen. Now tell me how limiting restrictions would help this case.
Re:Later that same day (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the most sensible thing I've seen written on this subject thus far. It's a good point: WHY does FOSS not have representation in the BSA?
Copyright infringement (Score:-1, Insightful)
I Am GPL, Hear Me Roar! (Score:3, Insightful)
Given this, I think few companies will intentionally violate the GPL. So I think that most smart companies if informed of a problem, will probably rectify it one way or another rather than risk an uncertain threat of liability. Certainly any high profile organization with a smart legal counsel would. The not so smart ones are another story!
Re:Sigh (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:GPL too restrictive (Score:5, Insightful)
See, writing programs, especially *good* programs, isn't easy. It takes skill, patience, and experience, as well as a certain type of mind that isn't very common. And, before you tell me that even your seventy-two year old mother knows how to program, ask yourself this -- does she know what an eigenvector is? How about maxtrix transforms? Relational algebra? Multivariable calculus?
Why are these important? Because programming requires a high level of mathematical ability, at least if you want to have any understanding of why you are writing code a certain way.
So, all of this together makes a programmer, and people who do this sort of thing pour hours into their work. This is something they have created, and honestly, they should, and do, have the final word over what happens to their works. Some people are generous enough to release their works under a license like the GPL, which enables anyone else to use the program which the programmer has created, but with the caveat that the program can't be stolen and sold.
As a programmer, I'm happy the GPL exists, because there are a lot of ideas I've had for 'open-source' programs, and while I am happy to write them, I don't want to spend months coding, just so that some asshat can try to charge money for something I, as the creator of that thing, have released for free.
Finally, information doesn't 'want' anything -- it's an intangible concept, like 'santa claus' or 'income tax reform'. People want information to be free, and while that's all and good, there are far too many people demanding free information, and far too few people willing to work to provide it.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
What, everyone who writes GPLed software is a music pirate?
Unlike all those Windows users who, undoubtedly, have never broken IP laws by, say, borrowing somebody's copy of Office or downloading a Dreamweaver zipfile?
Dear me.
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:1, Insightful)
Because it's wrong, and it's on Slashdot?
If you had RTFA, you might have noticed that the *author* of the code is the one sending the letters.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect the fraction of free software developers who infringe many copyrights is lower than the fraction of general internet users who infringe many copyrights, just because the former tend to be more familiar with the law and what it takes to produce a copyrightable work.
Don't confuse GPL developers with file traders just because they both read Slashdot.
Re:Later that same day (Score:5, Insightful)
The BSA hounds whoever it's masters tell it to hound.
3 simple changes to hypocricy! (Score:1, Insightful)
3 words,
1 hypocrite
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
"From my (albeit limited) understanding of the GPL, it just wants you to give credit to the original authors of the code. When someone downloads a song, they are not in any way claiming that they wrote the song. There's the difference betwen the two."
The forms of art are inherently different. The average pirate doesn't incorporate a downloaded song into their own work without credit, and the average GPL violator doesn't listen to the code. The implicit rationale here is "I follow this certain set of rules for one piece of media, and if another medium has different rules, then they're wrong and can be ignored." Different media have different uses, and thus, sets of rules.
In situations like this, the golden rule still applies: treat others as you would like to be treated. If a software developer -- big or small -- wants you to honor their wishes and respect their rights, do so. Likewise, if a musician -- or even a record company -- wants you to respect their wishes and respect their rights, you should as well. Because some day -- whether you're a musician or a programmer or a painter or an author -- it may be your own rights that somebody has taken the libery of ignoring.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
"Pay for what you take...."
"Take"? It's 'copy', not 'take', one source of the confusion.
Re:No teeth (Score:2, Insightful)
When it comes to GPL'd software, who IS the copyright holder?
Sure, one person starts the code. But when other people submit patches, improvements, branch the code, etc, etc. . . are they ALL copyright holders? If somebody, for instance, ripped off the Linux kernel, would only Linus Torvalds be eligible to sue, or would every single developer who'd submitted code to it be able to start up a suit?
Just curious. . .
Re:Sigh (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Sigh (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but an MP3 of a Britney Spears song hardly qualifies as "information." It is (at least by the legal definition) a work of art. And it is therefore protected by copyright.
The author of a copyrighted work can choose to publish it or not. That's THEIR decision--not YOURS. IF they chose to share or publish it, they have the legal right to impose terms on that sharing. If you don't like the terms, you don't have to accept them. But then you don't get to see/hear/use that person's creation.
But to somehow claim that YOU PERSONALLY have some kind of "right" to take whatever you chose from whoever you chose whether they want you to or not under some "principle" of information freedom, frankly, offends me, and should offend anyone who has ever created something, be it art, music, or software. I made this--it's mine. It's not yours. If I'm so inclined, I am willing to let you share it if you agree to some rules. To say you can ignore any rules you don't agree with is arrogant beyond measure.
You're making the mistake of ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess you flunked out of charm school, and I guess you've never heard of the old adage "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar", so I'll spell it out for you here:
Making threats against a neutral party will usually make them a hostile party.
If they are neutral and you threaten them, you're damaging your own cause, because you'll be souring them on OSS and the GPL.
If they're hostile and you threaten them, then you don't gain anything.
If they're neutral and you ask them nicely, they just might comply.
If they're hostile and you ask them nicely, you haven't lost anything.
By sending the letters, the companies who are doing this understand that we're not all rabid loser anti-corporate zealots. Making threats will do nothing more than sour them on the GPL and open source in general.
GPL vs RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
I write GPLed code as a step towards making someone else's life better. I like writing software, the code I GPL I would be writing anyway, and making it GPL doesn't harm me in the least. I make it GPL instead of BSD or public domain because I want to see the amount of freely available software increase as rapidly as possible, and I think the GPL promotes that.
Now, what's wrong with the RIAA and MPAA trying to enforce their copyright? If it were that simple, nothing. But I'll tell you what... these guys have successfully lobbied to take the vast majority of what would be in the public domain, a part of common culture expected to be commonly available, and made it their private property. Companies like Disney are founded on public domain material - Grimm's Fairy Tales, Pinnochio, Sleeping Beauty, you name it. They didn't pay a dime for those stories, stories that someone else wrote and the culture validated, because those stories had passed into the public domain.
Since then, Disney and other MPAA companies have successfully lobbied a 28 year copyright period into *120 years*. They go back and lobby for another 20 years every time their oldest works, the ones they built on public domain material, are about to fall out of copyright. This is no less than organized crime - bribes given to lawmakers to steal our culture from us. That's item 1.
The MPAA and RIAA are working very hard to make general computing illegal. A general computer is fantastically useful - it has transformed the lives of billions. Open systems based on simple principles can yield unbounded potential. The internet is a new testament to that fact, if the prior success of general computers weren't enough. But the MPAA and RIAA believe that general computing is a danger to their revenue, since it allows copying without flaw any information you have available to you. So the MPAA and RIAA, whose members' revenue is a fraction of that of the computing industry, but who control access to public attention and famous figures, lobby governments continually to make computers without DRM illegal. Have no doubts about it, mandatory DRM *will* cripple your computer. It *will* end up in a place where all of your personal information is available to "reputable" companies, where use of programs written by "unreputable" companies will be illegal to run, and where government sanctioned monopolies will charge exorbitant fees to vendors so they can release programs that actually run under DRM. You will see programs that cost money each time you use them, and more money to use them in more sophisticated ways. And using them in innovative ways that the creator never thought of? This will be simple impossible. This is the future if mandatory DRM is allowed to pass. That's item 2.
Finally, the penalties for copying the mass marketed tripe they produce are ludicrous. Charging 10 times the value of the illegally copied goods might be reasonable, both as a penalty and to account for the offenders that you can't catch. But the penalties are 100s or 1000s of times the cost to buy legal copies in stores. The penalties are totally disproportionate to the offense. That's item 3, minor as it may be in comparison to the other two.
That's why some of us get outraged when organized criminals call us communists for happily giving away our works, and name people who copy material that should have been part of the common culture after brigands of the sea who rape, murder and steal.
Re:Good thing! (Score:2, Insightful)
thank you for clearing that up, slashdot is only one entity with one opinion on everything.
idiot...
Re:"Seem to" (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, that 'innocent until proven guilty' thing's a real bitch, ain't it?
Man, I'm glad I don't live in a country where you can't just throw unproven accusations around all willy-nilly.
Re:Good thing! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a double-standard pure and simple. I'm not saying that the majority of slashdotters are downloading movies and music against copyright law unlike the GP but I will say this.
The same fucking power and ruleset that the GPL is using is the same fucking power and ruleset that copyright holders are using.
The GPL is a copyright. Copyleft is just a cutsie term that the FSF attached to it. I love the GPL. I love libre software. I appreciate the FSF working WITHIN the law just as the Nature Conservancy works with contract law to preserve greenspace.
The question of someone's vigilante method of serving notices (I can't read the original site to determine if he is operating as counsel for the FSF) is a different issue. The pure and simple fact is that people who download or distribute music against the original terms of copyright are just as shitty as people who download or distribute GPL code against the terms of the GPL.
Re:You're making the mistake of ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wait (Score:3, Insightful)
a big part of the problem (the problem that people don't RTFA before posting, that is)
The bigger problem is that young geeks tend to assume that everyone other than them is stupid. A more sensible person who is unable to read the site might presume to give Mr. Welte the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he is not doing the absolute dumbest thing possible.
In general, I find that assuming that people are intelligent, and sensible, and have reasonably good reasons for their actions makes me more often right than wrong. Especially if I'm willing to dig a little bit to find out what those reasons are, rather than just assuming that because I wouldn't do what they're doing, they must be stupid/zealots/whatever.
OTOH, Slashdot would be much less entertaining if things were different. Half the reason I come here is the chuckles I get out of the silly foaming-at-the-mouth rants.
Re:What about Iomega (Score:3, Insightful)
Now the zip disk format is the storage equivalent of the green-screen VGA monitor. The world has moved on to better things, and Iomega is stuck in 1992.
GPL problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I've often wondered about that. If I keep the original copyright notice in there, and make modifications (perhaps significant) and release my changes under the GPL, how do I label it? I have to keep a copyright notice that attributes the code to someone else? What about my contributions? What if it's a complex mix where I can't nicely label just my parts? The GPL tells you what you're allowed to do and what your obligations are, it doesn't tell you how to do this in practice. Does the FSF have documentation on this? I haven't seen it.
Could have backwards affects: (Score:2, Insightful)
This really could have a reverse affect. What I do not see here is "We try to work with companies to find a suitable path to bring them into GPL compliance". What I do see is the GPL version of scare tactics and lawsuits.
Most companies, especially the smaller companies, may be trying to be in compliance. They may not know how. This effort is most likely going to scare many companies off by showing how successful companies have tried to work with OSS and wound up being stuck in legal battles. The GPL is confusing for many and is mostly understood by word-of-mouth and/or other peoples confused interpretation. Not every company has a legal department to assist.
Let us take Sveasoft for example. Many people are outraged by the companies refusal to freely distribute (paid subscription required) their binaries and often scream "GPL VIOLATION". They do have their sources available for the public. According to Sveasoft, as well as my understanding, the GPL restricts the sources and not the binaries to be freely available.
A "strong arm" is not what Linux needs to assist with wide spread adoption. A community of people to assist with compliance is.
Re:They are still going about it wrong... (Score:1, Insightful)
It's a stunt. It's a good one, because we're all talking about it. I'm pretty sure that doing it this way will generate more attention in the biz than a letter to the legal department would have.
Way more engineers--the folks who might be tempted to recycle GPL material--will be reading slashdot than hanging around the legal department, and they're the ones he's trying to scare off.
Re:No teeth (Score:2, Insightful)
All authors who contributed a significant enough piece would be copyright holders. What constitutes 'significant' would be one for the lawyers, but a small bugfix or one-liner doesn't necessarily let you have a claim to copyright.
Many projects require copyright of submitted work to be assigned to the original copyright holder.
The GPL doesn't do anything to assign or negate copyright in any way, it just passes on some rights that would normally be restricted to just the copyright holder.
The linux kernel does not have a policy of rights assignment I don't believe, but any author who's work is being used without license would be able to sue.
"GPL violation" is a bit of a misnomer. A company distributing code that is available under the GPL without following the terms of hte gpl is simply distributing code without license to do so. The copyright author can say "Who gave you permission to distribute my code?". The answer is either "The GPL it was distributed under" if they are following it, or "Nobody", in which case it's lawyer time.
Re:They don't like listening to logic.... (Score:2, Insightful)
and the reasonable position is thus
the RIAA and MPAA are unreasonable for calling me a pirate for making a copy of my cd/DVD for the car/van/boat/kids and securing the other in my closet.
the BSA are unreasonable for calling me a pirate if I re-sell my copy of office 97 on EBAY
and companies who use GPL/OSS without following the terms(give credit and open the code) are being unreasonable for not passing on what they got for free.
NOW, do these reasonable people likely have copies of music or software they haven't paid for? yes, possibly.
Re:Four Questions (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets call my code X and their code Y.
Imagine I have a system that uses Code X. I know all about Code X and how it works. I know that with stimulus A, Code X has a bug that causes it to crash and burn.
I can take code Y and see how it handles stimulus A, if it crashes and burns too then I form a hypothesis. Now I keep doing this with stimuli B C D E and see what happens. If you get the same results with both stimuli all the time the codes are probably derived from or related to each other.
This works for many kinds of comlex systems where you cant just "read" the code.
Re:all negative (Score:3, Insightful)
Score 0 for the geeks
On Value and Human Perception (Score:1, Insightful)
For illustration on this point of human nature, when I was a kid, it was free to go to the various museums in the area. However, one new curator was dismayed to learn that buses were using the museum as a stop, solely to let their passengers use the washrooms. Shortly thereafter, the museum started charging admission, and is currently $27 to enter; there may be a free day once a week, but last time I was around there, this was not the case.
Moral of the story: whenever there is no cost to use something, eventually that resource will be abused. People will always equate costless with worthless.
Moreover, and more to the point, there is no 'money' behind open source code. Their threats have no teeth, since they are not backed up by lawyers and legal action. Sure, there are eventually victories, like against SCO, but it is costly to fight such things, and Im guessing that smaller targets will submit to getting 'screwed' by a large company rather than risk entering the courts. Sure, people are happy to pony up cash to help defend linux, but what about a small OSS app some college kid made in his spare time? If a large company blatently rips off his code, it is first unlikely he would even know, and second it is unlikely he would persue a legal recourse. And, any victories would be uncertain, come at great personal expense, and may not even be worth it in the end.
Re:Perhaps (Score:2, Insightful)
Part of it is because I think these extra domains are a pointless pollution of the DNS namespace. Part of it is because IME, these domains are mostly inhabited by peddlars of penis extensions, fake Rolex watches and generic Viagra.