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GNU is Not Unix Programming Technology Your Rights Online

Tracking GPL Violators 316

Posted by CowboyNeal from the coercing-compliance dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week, open source developer Harald Welte made headlines when he personally served warning letters to 13 technology companies for alleged GPL violations. Now in a ZDNet interview, Welte explains the challenges behind tracking down these violators and how he persuades them to comply."
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Tracking GPL Violators More

Tracking GPL Violators

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  • Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)

    by Raul654 ( 453029 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:19AM (#11973881) Homepage
    When I saw this story, I immediately thought of that simpsons episode where Homer has the internet startup, and Bill Gates tells his two goons to "Buy him out, boys"

    • Who are the lawyers that will litigate this? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by turnstyle ( 588788 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @08:44AM (#11974283) Homepage
      Who are the lawyers that will litigate this, presumably pro-bono? The "free as in beer" that goes hand-in-hand with "free as in speech" doesn't help here, and that's a shortcoming of OSS that should be acknowledged.

      Even the big companies that donate to big OSS projects aren't going to donate $$$ to litigate specific GPL violations.

      • The cost of litigation (Score:4, Informative)

        by cbr2702 ( 750255 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @09:09AM (#11974394) Homepage
        It is costing ~$16K to litigate each case, but the loser pays. And Welte is pretty confident.

        • Re:The cost of litigation (Score:4, Insightful)

          by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:01PM (#11977346) Homepage Journal
          Which is precisely the point that bothers me. Welte donates his own time and takes all the financial risk. This only works because everybody he's gone after has quietly backed down. (Probably most or all of them were just sloppy about compliance.) But suppose just one company takes the "fuck you" approach? All of a sudden Welte is spending enough time to impact his day job and spending more money than hey can afford.

          In any case, he's eventually going to get bored, get sick, get too involved in his day job, die, whatever. Having the whole GPL licensing system depend on the voluntary efforts of one individual strikes me as a fragile setup.

      • Re:Who are the lawyers that will litigate this? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Sique ( 173459 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @12:39PM (#11976439) Homepage
        Harald Welte mostly operates within german legislation. He even said in the interview, that he goes after resellers rather than the OEMs, because the resellers are within german law.

        And in german civil law, the loser pays. Or to be more exact: At the beginning of the process the demands of both parties are put on file (this is the so called Streitwert, the value of the suit), and at the end the resulting awarded damages are compared with the initial demands. The money you have to pay is depending on how much of your own demands got awared to you, and how much you have to pay to the other party. The cost of the suit is determined from the Streitwert (and the cost involves also the payments to the lawyers of both sides), and you pay the cost relatively to your payment to the other side.

        This makes it rather risky to pull an SCO in a german court. If any SCO demands 1 billion Euros in a german court, the Streitwert will be at 1 billion Euros. And if SCO in the end gets awarded 10 Mio Euros, SCO would get 1% of the initial demand, so SCO had to pay 99% of the cost of the lawsuit. (In fact it's a little more complicated, this is Germany after all.)

        But back to Harald Welte. He doesn't claim financial damage, so the Streitwert is rather low. He normally starts with an injunction requesting the other party to comply to the GPL and release the code in question or to stop infringing on his Urheberrecht (his Author's right to iptables/netfilter code according to the Berne convention), which amounts to stop selling the software or firmware.

        A reseller then has to stop selling the product in question, because resellers almost never do have the source code. But they then can either sue the OEM for damages because of lost business or try to get the source code from the OEM and then open it to the public (or at least to the own customers). According to the GPL this heals the infringment. In the end it's the most easy thing for a reseller to press his OEM for the source code than to stop selling a product and even try to get all already sold stock back and destroy it. Only the company Sitecom tried to strike down the Injunction in question and lost in court, which uphelt the injunction. This was a 100% win for Harald, so 100% of the cost of this suit was paid for by Sitecom.

  • Here are your options (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mancat ( 831487 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:26AM (#11973897) Homepage
    1. License software under GPL. Worry about who is using it illegally, devote efforts to tracking down violators and prosecuting them. 2. License software under BSDL. Sit back and relax with a beer.
    • How about these options?
      • License software under GPL, sit back and relax with a soft drink or coffee (I don't drink beer ;-))
      • License software under BSDL and worry about who is using it illegally (without the advertising clause), devote efforts to tracking down violators and prosecuting them

    • Re:Here are your options (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:35AM (#11973915)
      In order to prove the superiority of the BSDL, I hereby provide a list of successful commercial forks of programs under BSD or Apache style licenses:
    • And for those who want bugfixes to be contributed back to the community?

      Not everyone wants the BSD license.
    • Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the BSD license state that you must give credit in the software to your code meaning that, for example, CherryOS who violates the GPL (using PearPC's code) would violate the BSD license if PearPC was under the BSD license (CherryOS are claiming that they wrote all the code)?

      • Correct me if I'm wrong

        Ok :) There are two types of BSD license, one with the advertising clause and one without. The vast majority of BSD licensed code is under the no advertising clause license, because the advertising clause was rescinded by the Director of the Office of Technology Licensing of the University of California on July 22 1999.

        All that the official BSD license requests you do these days is the following:

        1. Retain the copyright notice, disclaimer and list of conditions within the sour

    • Good reasons for chosing GPL over BSD (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ites ( 600337 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @07:08AM (#11974003) Journal
      I've written many free software tools over the years. I've licensed these using the GPL, BSD licenses, and finally switched a couple of years ago to GPL for everything.

      Why? There are several reasons:

      1. I relicense the same source code commercially. This means companies pay for commercial licenses which do not have any GPL-like requirements. This is of course my right since I'm the author. It provides some nice income. Not possible with BSD licenses.

      2. Other free software developers are given a competitive advantage when they use my GPL'd code. Commercial developers can choose to pay if they want to escape the GPL license. When I used BSD licenses, I was actually giving a competitive advantage to those who reused my source code in commercial products.

      The GPL is a weapon, of course, and no-one likes being at the receiving end. But for any developer who has spent years (decades, even) writing open source, it's an excellent and far-sighted choice.

    • 3. License software under GPL. Sit back and relax with a beer.

      Works For Me (tm).

  • I really, really hope (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:39AM (#11973923)
    that they had the sense to serve on SCO..

    Please tell me they did..

    • Also I hope one of the companies was sveasoft. If you dont know about them they took the wrt54g firmware and modified it and made people pay 20$ for it.
      • Free Speech != Free Beer. Or do you think redhat are GPL violators because they sell their distro?

        You can charge anything you like for GPL software - sveasoft are in compliance with the GPL. Their source code is downloadable from their website for their customers (who are then theoretically free to pass it on).

        • If i dont pay 20$ i cant get the source. Also they give me a binary. [slashdot.org] look there. Red hat also gives the source code AND thier money is for support. Sveasoft changed the GPL code into "a closed company beta".
        • You need to check again. Current "subscriber" versions no longer have source code available. The source only will become available once it becomes "public", available to non-subscribers. Sveasoft is distributing GPLed derived code without source. Period.
          • RTFGPL.

            They only have to provide source to those that that they distribute binaries to. They don't distribute binaries of current versions to non-subscribers.

            If you are a subscriber (FFS it's only $20!) you can download the source and do what you like with it.

  • Just call the BSA (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:42AM (#11973930)
    It's easy... just tip off the BSA. Aren't they the organization that's supposed to enforce stuff like that?

  • MorphOS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:44AM (#11973934)
    There is a lot of violation of Open Source stuff. A lot of violation is being found on MorphOS where a lot of Open Source stuff is being used.

    ixemul, libnix, gcc, binutils and other things and when asking for the source codes then you get a reply telling you that the sources got lost. But still the stuff is being worked on and put in the binary release of their OS.

    • Mod parent up (Score:3, Informative)

      by FidelCatsro ( 861135 )
      I did a little snooping and found .-.-.-.
      MorphOS Developer Connection Terms Of Use
      1 Content copyright

      Files and data you get access to within the MorphOS Developer Connection (MDC) may not be copied or spread in any way without prior written permission from Genesi Luxembourg S.à.r.l (Genesi). No part of this website may be copied. Forum entries may not be quoted or copied outside of this website unless you are the sole author of the entry you quote. .-.-.

      on the developers license for morhpos
      So i would

    • Re:MorphOS (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As a former amiga user, I find the community to be a rather odd one when it comes to licensing. Mutter a hint of a suggestion that AmigaOS be open sourced, and the abuse is incredible. You may as well have asked if you could kill their first born. To many of them the only way to make an OS or platform work is proprietary software and licenses that pay the programmers to put food on the table.

      This in itself isn't odd, but I also found amigans to be the most blatant copyright infringers, who despite all the

      • Re:MorphOS (Score:5, Interesting)

        by johannesg ( 664142 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @09:17AM (#11974442)
        I once released a small but popular Amiga icon editor and image converter as shareware.

        Was that Iconian? If so, I beta tested for you long ago. Sorry to hear you didn't get much for it - it was a great tool.

        Anyway, I know the feeling. I spent about six years of my life on fMSX Amiga, which was free (both speech and beer). I didn't formally license it (I was young and naive at the time), but I did put some restrictions on the source: I wanted to be properly credited, and I didn't want the completely disfunctional Colecovision support enabled because it just didn't work yet. Neither of these seem particularly unfair to me, and anyway, it was (and still is, for at least the next 80 years) _my_ source.

        The result: there were four different "Colecovision emulators" around that were direct rip-offs of my source code. I don't know what I hated more: the ones that replaced my name with their own, claiming all rights to the work, or the ones that left my copyright notice intact, somehow making it seem I had released the utterly non-functioning software.

        Anyway, I made a grand total of not even 20 euro's with fMSX Amiga, so don't feel too bad about it. As for the Amiga community, it turned unbelievably poisonous at some point. I'm not surprised if there are GPL-related problems now.

    • You may be right, but ixemul was originally created by Markus Wild in 1991, and contains BSD-licensed code. Of course I have no idea how it evolved over the years, I've lost touch with the community. There is some information here [compuserve.de].

  • It is legal to use it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:51AM (#11973956)
    Using and modifying GPL code is absolutely legal. What is illegal is distributing it only in binary form, and not allowing access to the modifications. This difference isn't very well stated in the article (yes, I read the article, and anyone who doesn't read past the first page won't see it on the second page), it simply says it is illegal to use the code.

  • Does a 24 hour DoS count? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Or should we just Slashdot the scum ;-)

  • GPL violation trolls (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ites ( 600337 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:56AM (#11973974) Journal
    There are some voices on Slashdot that claim that GPL violators are just like file sharers. (And that to treat them differently is hypocritical.)

    Indeed, both discussions are about copyright. But they are also more fundamentally about fair use.

    The GPL is based on the author's copyright and a very generous fair use license that promotes shared investment in the work. When a company takes GPL'd work and resells derived works without respecting the author's copyright, they are taking someone's work and reselling it without respecting the original author's rights.

    Now to file sharing. Yes, this is also about copyright and fair use. However, it is rarely about restricting access to a work, it is about broadening that access.

    The moral debate is simple: all technology, all creative work, all artistic creation and invention is the result of a continuous cultural stream that stretches back to the origins of our species. Every single creative act is a pebble placed on a mountain built by our ancestors.

    Slashdotters tend to understand this intuitively. We don't like patents because they claim ownership of something we know to belong to us all. We don't like GPL violators because they take common property and resell it under false pretenses. We don't like DRM because it takes common property and fences it off. We tolerate file sharing and defend those who do it because we know that the alternative is cultural sterility, decay, and evetually extinction.

    There is no contradiction here. Anyone who takes sacks of pebbles from the mountain and says "these are now mine" is a simple rogue, legalised or not, and we all know it.
    • We tolerate file sharing and defend those who do it because we know that the alternative is cultural sterility, decay, and evetually extinction.

      I'm pretty sure that copying the latest crap from Hollywood/Universal Music is *contributing* to the decline.

      ; )

      PS Extinction is surely hyperbole no?

      • Re:Extinction! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ites ( 600337 )
        PS Extinction is surely hyperbole no?

        No, it's not. Many cultural artifacts: languages, forms of art, even technologies have gone extinct because they were unable to spread. Culture is like an organism, it's evolved together with our genome, and it can go extinct just in the same way.

      • PS Extinction is surely hyperbole no?

        Not really. Entire branches of expression have been driven to extinction (or at least legal limbo and extreme obscurity) by restrictive copyright laws.

        For example, look at the amazing breadth of derivative works based on recent and current books, movies and songs, which build on the ideas that the original works have generated and let us examine them from angles which the original authors may not have considered, and from hundreds of fresh and different viewpoints

        • I have been thinking about this problem for a while and i would like to get a group together to push for certain copyright reforms, such as providing full copyright protection to "any unique creative literary, film, or musical work regardless of derivation" with unique requiring that it not simply be a remake of an existing work, but a significantly seperate work. so releasing Harry Potter and the sorcerers stone in 1337 would still be illegal, because it is mostly a simple transformaiton of an existing w

    • Re:GPL violation trolls (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mqx ( 792882 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @07:26AM (#11974048)
      Now we can all sleep with a conscience, knowing that we've reasoned ourselves around how theft of music/software copyright is "okay" because it "broadens its access", but theft of GPL works is not okay because it "restricts its access".

      Superficially, that looks like a great argument. However, you forgot something important: fundamental rights of freedom and choice, because in both cases, the theft is ignoring the original choice and intentions of the copyright holder. You simply optioned for some so called "public good" at the expense of the creative individual, but really, your "public good" is just your own justification to suggest that music/software theft is acceptable.

      Really: if you don't like copyright restrictions on works, choose alternatives, don't steal and then try to use a "robin hood" style argument to justify "public good". If you were stealing essential foodstuffs from wealthy to feed the poor, I could understand. However, music/software are not essential foodstuffs, and even if they were, there are plenty of free/share versions you can use without resorting to theft.

      Bluntly: you don't need to steal music/software any more: there are a lot of free/share alternatives, and, the more you use those alternatives, the greater the critical mass, and the more they will grow and expand.

      • Well said.

        I've always been of the opinion that the wealth of material that's fallen out of copyright or was made publicly available to begin with is the ideal use for file sharing networks.

        I also feel the copyright period should be reduced - 10 to 15 years is more than sufficient to recoup on an investment, and even when it's in the public domain, it's not as if a publish can't continue to publish... people like 'convenience products' - box sets with collected works and additional content still continue

      • Re:GPL violation trolls (Score:3, Interesting)

        by hyfe ( 641811 )
        fundamental rights of freedom and choice, because in both cases, the theft is ignoring the original choice and intentions of the copyright holder.

        It's all a matter of mindset, and you're not listening

        He is basically arguing that some things fundamentally belong to everyone/no-one, and that no-one has any rights to them. There are countless of examples of this I'm sure you'd agree to; the air being most prevailant of these I'd guess.

        Wether or not you think music / intellectual property / business method-

        • Re:GPL violation trolls (Score:5, Insightful)

          by mqx ( 792882 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @08:44AM (#11974277)

          You (and the couple of others that responded to me) are not listening either.

          You moved onto the philosophical debate about "property" and "ownership" and whether intellectual property and music/software does have these properties. This is a good debate to have.

          However, if you pay attention: we are in a free society where not everyone agrees to your view about property. The IP system, and copyright, allows individuals to make the choice either way. It's obvious that some other people have chosen to protect their property, and some have given it away (GPL). The most important thing for you is to respect their choice, not trample all over their choice and their rights to satisfy your own view of how things should work.

          Back to the OP: social arguments about whether something should be free or not are good arguments: but they come before the point at which someone decides to apply GPL or other rights restrictions. Once they do decide to apply their choice of licensing, you should, as a mature and civil person, accept their choice. Otherwise, quite simply, you (or a large enterprise) are trampling over those rights for your (or the enterprise) benefit, against the wishes of the licensor.

          • Once they do decide to apply their choice of licensing, you should, as a mature and civil person, accept their choice.

            You're basically right in that respect. But for your system to work, you need mature and civil persons doing it.

            And libertarians already showed us that individual convenience takes priority over civility, and a system that doesn't address that will most likely fail.
        • "Property is by nature theft".

          Ah, nothing like little word-games only intended to jam communications...

          As for the actual debate, there are legitimate gripes regarding the constant expansion of copyright in areas where their actual usefulness is in doubt.

          Regarding music for instance, it would be very interesting to see what would happen if copyright collapsed - my guess is we would only see a modest decline in customer satisfaction, if any.

          With regards to computer games, advanced proprietary software and

        • Re:GPL violation trolls (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @09:39AM (#11974542)
          Property is by nature theft

          How can something that you just synthesized - produced where it didn't exist before - be theft? You must mean that producing something, and then not giving it to someone for free is what you consider theft. So, how do you rate labor? Is not laboring for someone for free also theft? If that's the case, than not agreeing to be your slave is the same as stealing from you. Your concept makes everyone a slave to everyone else, all the time, and if they don't like being a slave, then they are a thief.

          You'll be a lot more pursuasive if you actually use words in a meaningful way. Defining the limits by which you're willing to spread around that which you have created is not "limiting other people's right to intellect."

          From M-W [m-w.com]:

          Intellect - a: the power of knowing as distinguished from the power to feel and to will: the capacity for knowledge b: the capacity for rational or intelligent thought especially when highly developed

          That's a good definition of the word. Your intellect is your capacity for intelligence. My not entertaining you for free with my music or movie does not limit your intellect. Limited intellect is as limited intellect does (and argues).
      • "Robin ood" was seen as, and it always portrayed as, a hero in stories including him. Why is the modern 'Robin Hood' suddenly the villain?

        • Re:GPL violation trolls (Score:4, Informative)

          by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @10:33AM (#11974987)
          "Robin [H]ood" was seen as, and it always portrayed as, a hero in stories including him. Why is the modern 'Robin Hood' suddenly the villain?

          Because we're not talking about the same thing. If fact, if you look at the hostorical (well, obviously fictional) Robin Hood, and step back for a moment: what was he an outlaw from? He was cast outside a brutal, feudal system run by parasitic thugs that used violence to make slaves of the local peasants. "Stealing" the product of those peasants, from whom it was stolen, not purchased, is a lot different than stealing movies and music and given it teenagers too lazy to mow lawns so they can afford to pay for their own witless entertainment.

      • The right to copyright (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ites ( 600337 )
        All property is a compromise. The reason we don't live in a socialist paradise (which we used to, a hundred thousand years ago before agriculture and the concept of 'property') is because without ownership, common assets lack stewardship and can be degraged. The tragedy of the commons...

        Defining an asset as "property" is a compromise for those cases where it is less evil than the alternatives.

        There is no other moral justification for claiming ownership of something. No natural law that says "this land,

        • Re:The right to copyright (Score:4, Insightful)

          by mqx ( 792882 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @08:48AM (#11974299)
          "Personally I'm a prolific writer and programmer and I do think that I have the right to do what I want with my work, but within reason. If I can't maintain my source code, improve and invest in it, I should lose the rights to it."

          Then copyright provides you with a way to do this: license your code under a "free-if-I-fail-to-maintain-it" license. There's nothing stopping you doing this.

          "Property rights should, morally, be tied to stewardship. Take care of something, and we the people grant you the right to "own" it."

          If you want to change the default law to make this happen, then you need to convince the rest of society that it's a good model. They don't get convinced that it's a good model if you're not respecting their rights and plundering their goods.

        • All property is a compromise. The reason we don't live in a socialist paradise (which we used to, a hundred thousand years ago before agriculture and the concept of 'property') is because without ownership, common assets lack stewardship and can be degraged. The tragedy of the commons...

          Somehow, I suspect that the concept of property predates agriculture. It probably originated about the same time that someone discovered that this sharp stick is better at poking things than that one. Heck, all carnivores

          • Somehow, I suspect that the concept of property predates agriculture.

            You don't even have to theorise on this. Study any pre-agricultural society and you will remark that there is an almost total lack of (a) personal property and (b) privacy. Tools are made as needed and discarded when blunt.

            Why? Non-agricultural societies are almost always migratory (since they have to move to follow their food). Migration means walking and as any traveller knows, "property" just means extra weight to carry and lose.
      • There is a very good, if not essential point in your post somewhere. Too bad it gets entirely snowed under by your repetitive use of the inflammatory and incorrect [fallinggrace.com] terms "theft" and "stealing".

    • Re:GPL violation trolls (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @07:35AM (#11974078)
      Anyone who takes sacks of pebbles from the mountain and says "these are now mine" is a simple rogue, legalised or not, and we all know it.

      There are some "pebbles" that simply would not be added to your metaphorical mountain if their creators/innovators didn't have some expectation of being able to earn a living while producing them. Most creative types don't say to themselves, "I'm about to invest a couple-plus years of my life writing Cryptonomicon... but I'd better keep sucking up to my boss at the IHOP because my cultural history tells me I shouldn't expect a paycheck from book royalties, ever."

      There is a contradiction in your message. People create under a legal framework upon which they base their expectations of interaction with other people. If they want to GPL their work, great. That defines a certain expected course of events and options. If they want to limit the distribution of their years of work to those people that are willing pay for entertainment, and thus stop waiting tables at IHOP (I know, Neal did not wait tables at IHOP), then that choice is also well supported under law. The problem we have is that people confuse the technical ability to avoid paying for someone's labor of years with the right to do so. Those authors/artists/developers that do indeed want a broader audience for their work do not necessarily mean that they want that to happen without expecting that audience to realize that the work has value, and to pay for it.

      Your cultural stack of pebbles wouldn't exist without the daily work of creative people who continually add to it and also need to pay the rent. Culture is not some fixed pie to be divided up for free. It's the result of people's daily work, creativity, and commerce, and it thrives best when the most creative people available know that they can make a living doing what they do best. We all benefit, and paying an artist a few cents for their song is just fine. If you don't like that approach, then that means you don't like the artist for having made the choice to profit from their labors. And if you have any intellectual honesty, you'll decide you don't want to hear that artist's music anyway (since you can't stand the idea of them having decided to earn a living by selling, rather than giving away, their life's work).
      • Read my comment above about "the right to copyright".

        Yes, of course people expect to be rewarded for their effort. That is so evident I did not feel it was necessary to say. "Reward" does not need to be strictly financial but whether it's status, reputation, groupies, or cars, something has to get us out of bed in the morning. Of course.

        But it's the relationships between "reward" and "ownership" and "creation" that are under debate here.

        Personally I'd love to see all music (for instance) sold along th
      • I simply disagree. I think the phenomenon of artists and musicians being paid huge amounts of money for their work is relatively new. I also don't believe writing and recording an album is a full-time job. I have enough friends who are musicians to understand that there are FAR more people who work full-time jobs and yet manage to make great music, record it, and even play out quite often than there are musicians who record an album, make millions and sit around being fed grapes all day. People who love
        • I think the phenomenon of artists and musicians being paid huge amounts of money for their work is relatively new.

          Adjust for inflation, both cultural and financial. Financial, in the sense that an artist that makes, say, $200,000 over the life of an album's sales is hardly making "huge" sums of money. Cultural inflation: the "artists" who make truly huge sums of money are way more than just singers, etc. They are cultural icons (for better or worse - gag me with a Britney), and are the loose equivalent o
      • Most creative types don't say to themselves, "I'm about to invest a couple-plus years of my life writing Cryptonomicon... but I'd better keep sucking up to my boss at the IHOP because my cultural history tells me I shouldn't expect a paycheck from book royalties, ever."

        Obviously you are not a writer. Most of them do have to keep their day jobs. You shouldn't expect a paycheck from book royalties, because you probably aren't going to get one any time soon, and if you ever do, it's not going to be very much
        • Only the top end of the scale get paid enough to support themselves.

          Which is exactly my point! I cited Neal Stephenson specifically because, as a supremely creative writer and all around cool guy, he still only makes (by his own description) a middle class income. If he couldn't bank on that income, he couldn't even begin to put in the uninterrupted creative hours that it takes to produce recent treasures like The Baroque Cycle. His work would be wildly inferior if he also had to wait tables, or crunch i

    • In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shivetya ( 243324 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @07:46AM (#11974102) Homepage Journal
      If you make something and don't share it your in the wrong? Sorry but that doesn't work.

      The whole twisted idea of trying to disassociate ownership from original works is a very selfish position.

      Those pebbles that came off the mountain only did so because someone put the effort into doing so. If you want their pebbles you can meet their requirements or go get your own. You however do not have a right to take their pebbles just because you might have/could have/would have done it. Anyone who wants to take the effort/work of others without compensation is just a selfish bastard.
      • "The whole twisted idea of trying to disassociate ownership from original works is a very selfish position."

        It's not selfish if you are the ceator of the original work, and you disassociate ownership so that you can give it away for everyone to use; or, it's not selfish, if our entire social model is one where there is no individual ownership in the first place (the first part of the sentence assumes there is ownership in the first place).

        However, while these are nice points, they are simply not the reali
    • I like most of your other posts, but this one seems wrong to me.

      From the formal point of view, violating any license is the same and should be treated the same way.

      However, the GPL violators are (partially) basing their business on an illegal activity while file-sharers just trying to get something for free.

      It's like shoplifting vs. selling loads of stolen goods. Both are the same crime but the damage is orders of magnitude different. That's why people tend to defend filesharers. (And no infringment isn'
      • I know my post seems wrong. And yet it's an honest statement of what I feel, and what I've noticed the majority here feels. GPL violators and file sharers are nominally breaking the same code but in reality, not.

        The nominal code is "illegal copying is theft", but the real code is, I believe, "culture wants to be free".

        Illegal copying is a violation of someone's rights, yes. No debate about that. But throttling a culture is a violation of many more people's rights, I believe. Stallman's great vision w

  • Did you know... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TheStick ( 847894 )
    The Taïwanese company X-Micro responded to the letter, and said they didn't know about the GPL licence restrictions... Wow, they can make hardware, but they can't read a licence agreement.

  • Easier way. (Score:4, Funny)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @07:09AM (#11974004) Journal
    Simply talk to the **AA. Tell them that so and so company is about to release GPL software that is designed to download all sort of movies and music in a fully encrypted fashion. Watch how fast the FBI move in.

  • Avoidance and respect as alternatives to coercion (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eloquence ( 144160 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @07:47AM (#11974106)
    While I used to be a GPL advocate, I now put all my code in the public domain. There are two primary reasons for that:
    • The GPL and other copyleft licenses weaken our position in lobbyism against insane copyright laws. I've personally been on a panel with a typical WIPO representative who argued that all us copyleft people should be understanding of her mission because we all needed copyright enforcement so badly for our own works. That is misleading to say the least, but it is difficult to refute in front of a neutral audience. The best response is: "No, we don't. We use the public domain. So there."
    • It generally sends the wrong message. I want to build a world of free sharing, not one of coercion. I want people to share because they believe in sharing, not because the law forces them to. Let's pretend there was no copyright law. Would we then still need a "copyleft law" to make sure that people share their source code (reverse engineering wouldn't be enough, since you can't reverse engineer code comments)? I don't want to replace one control regime with another. You could say that copyleft is socialist ("share for the good of the people"), while the public domain is more libertarian in nature ("do whatever you want").

    So, if you use the public domain, how do you prevent people from abusing your work? By naming them when they take work without credit, by avoiding them and refusing to cooperate with them in any way, by expressing respect for people who share work freely and who give proper credit, and by gently trying to convince others to do so.

    Many companies which ignore the GPL don't understand the benefits open sharing of their code contributions would give them. It's important for us to communicate better how an open source development model helps everyone (an open code contribution may inspire others to contribute more, to fix bugs, and so on; it is much easier to maintain over version upgrades when it's in the main tree). The problem with the GPL is that it's not a tool of communication. We have focused too much on forcing people to do the right thing, instead of convincing them of the benefits of our approach.

    We also need a generally accepted registry for public domain works so that it is provable who the first creator of a work is (that's also necessary as a defense to make sure other people don't claim copyright and sue people for using a work that's in the public domain).

    I do value the copyleft effect of the GPL. I think its significance is overestimated, but it does have value. In spite of the arguments above, I think it is of enormous importance that we avoid a split between the copyleft and the non-copyleft camps. In the larger scheme of things, these differences of opinion are minor, and what is important is that we all support the goal of free content. So while I don't approve of the means in this case (GPL enforcement), I do approve of the end (more free content). Still, I ask you to consider putting your code in the public domain.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • "So, if you use the public domain, how do you prevent people from abusing your work? By naming them when they take work without credit, by avoiding them and refusing to cooperate with them in any way, by expressing respect for people who share work freely and who give proper credit, and by gently trying to convince others to do so. "

      That's never going to work.

      Scenario: you write a successive UNIX derivative, and it is put into the public domain, then installed into a successful embedded product that is so

    • The best response is: "No, we don't. We use the public domain. So there."

      No, a much better response is: "Reasonable copyright laws, with durations and scope that actually maximize the public good, serve our purposes as copyright owners just as well as laws that are insanely restrictive and have uselessly long terms. GPL software authors would be perfectly happy with copyrights that lasted 28 years, or even less."

      As for the argument that we should simply allow everyone to choose whether or not they want to share their changes to their code, rather than "enforcing" it through the GPL... either you're naive or a Microsoft et al shill.

      There's nothing morally wrong, or inferior, about using the GPL, any more than there's something wrong with wanting to be paid for your work. Following your line of thought, you should also donate your physical labor to the public good as well, right? And, more specifically, donate your labor to your employer and then argue that you've donated it to the public good.

      Developers use the GPL because they hope to get paid for their work. Not paid in currency, typically, and the payment isn't guaranteed by any means, but they do want to be paid by receiving improvements to their own work. The logic is: "I want to write X because I need X, but I don't have the time or resources to create it all by myself. Perhaps if I write half of it, producing something useful but not really complete, and publish the code under the GPL, others will contibute their time to help me complete it. And perhaps they'll even help me make a better X than I would have even if I had time."

      Of course, you can do the same thing with public domain code, but if you use the public domain you run a much greater risk of not seeing any of the improvements.

      The notion that you can successfully shame people into sharing is simply naive. In particular, it doesn't work well if the non-sharer has a large advertising budget and you do not.

  • GNU GPL for documentation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xiando ( 770382 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @08:06AM (#11974157) Homepage Journal
    I used to publish documents under teh GNU GDL, the GPL for text http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-howto.html [gnu.org] - but after actually reading it I found it had some very strange points that kind of limits "fair use" (freedom) as I instended. Now I use Creative Commons 2.0, a license I find more suited for the modern Internet.

  • From the ZDNet article... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zotz ( 3951 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @08:32AM (#11974232) Homepage Journal
    "If companies are only using GPL-licensed software internally, they only need to distribute the source code to their employees."

    Is he sure about that? First time I have heard this as a requirement.

    all the best,

    drew

    http://zbcw.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

  • Question.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Chanc_Gorkon ( 94133 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <nokrog>> on Friday March 18, 2005 @09:32AM (#11974506)
    Is there a e-mail address where we can anonymously send information on suspected violations??
  • Has anyone has to use the courts to enforce the GPL?

    Has it actually stood up as being of any relevance?

    No, not an anti GPL troll here, im really curious if we have yet to PROVE it has legal weight behind it.

    Was hoping the SCO/IBM thing would do it, but that apparently has fizzled out..

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