Microsoft Joins Group Working To 'Cure' Open-Source Licensing Issues (zdnet.com) 104
Microsoft is joining Red Hat, Facebook, Google and IBM in committing to extending right to "cure" open source licensing noncompliance before taking legal measures. From a report: On March 19, officials from Microsoft -- along with CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, SAP and SUSE -- said they'd work with open together with the already-committed vendors to provide more "predictability" for users of open source software. "The large ecosystems of projects using the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.x licenses will benefit from adoption of this more balanced approach to termination derived from GPLv3," explained Red Hat in a press release announcing the new license-compliance partners. The companies which have agreed to adopt the "Common Cure Rights Commitment" said before they file or continue to prosecute those accused of violating covered licenses, they will allow for users to cure and reinstate their licenses.
BSD is the cure (Score:1, Insightful)
just use that license, np
Re: BSD is the cure (Score:4, Insightful)
The GPL and LGPL aren't exactly hard to understand. I think the issue in most cases is that people don't read the license that allows them to use the software they use. In which case they just make random assumptions and move on.
Such irresponsibility would lead to BSD violations too.
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they just make random assumptions and move on.
People do this with proprietary software as well. They don't read the EULA and they copy from friends. Why should they only get impunity for copyright violations of the GPL? Why doesn't Microsoft support a "first time free" policy for their own software?
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They don't want to support it. They feel like they have to. They make a lot of money from fees due to proprietary license violations. They would not give that up. They cannot make money from fees from GPL violations, so they might as well support what everyone else is doing to look good.
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Why should they only get impunity for copyright violations of the GPL? Why doesn't Microsoft support a "first time free" policy for their own software?
This isn't "first time free", it's that you get impunity if you come into compliance.
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It is if you are trying push it to its limits, trying to mix non-GPL with GPL technologies. Using GPL technology as part of a larger service... Real life stuff, where it isn't as black and white as RMS sees it. And the GPL while may be written clearly, does have interesting loopholes. Such as the Anti-Tivoization rule, that makes the exception for IBM to do it on their mainframes. Cloud and SaaS usages havn't been completely defined.
Re: BSD is the cure (Score:5, Interesting)
>> It is if you are trying push it to its limits, trying to mix non-GPL with GPL technologies
No problem here.
You can do pretty much everything with a GPL program, except statically link or mix in code with a non GPL compatible licence.
BSD is GPL compatible.
No problem here.
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Agreed. I was once an open source nut during my college years, but attempting to coerce someone to give away the changes they make to an openly available source code base is nuts.
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I too was an Open Source nut in college. However giving away changes to a an Open Source Application isn't nuts, it is probably the responsible thing to do. However if your changes do something significant to change the application, the GPL is a ball and chain.
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I was once an open source nut during my college years, but attempting to coerce someone to give away the changes they make to an openly available source code base is nuts.
That's Free Software, not Open Source. Open Source only means that you can get the source code, it means nothing whatsoever about distribution rights. The OSI likes to claim that they invented the term in 1998, but I have diehard proof that the phrase was already in use in the sense in which I have described by 1995 [hyperlogos.org]. I knew this of course, because I was one of the persons so using it, but the leading lights of the OSI would like us to believe differently because the lie makes them more influential.
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You don't necessarily have to give away the changes either.
Two options:
You distribute a modified binary and a matching modified source code.
You don't distribute either. --- this is perfectly acceptable (!).
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but attempting to coerce someone to give away the changes they make to an openly available source code base is nuts.
Why? Maybe GPL in particular is not all that useful for some applications, but, e.g., in case of LGPL, the idea that if you manage to improve a component not related to the core of your product, you can pay for it by sharing these non-core-related features to be useful to others seems pretty neat. After all, you *did* use someone else's work to lessen your workload in that particular non-core area by using said component in the first place.
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Nobody's asking people to do that. Copyleft licenses say that, if you publish, you need to share your changes. You can't just release the binaries.
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Came in here to say just that. Copyfree [copyfree.org] licenses, such as BSD, are what you should use if you want your code to be free and used for any purpose. GPL is what you want to use if you want to prevent commercial use of your code inside of another program. Or if you want to be an ass and make other copyfree things GPL/non commercial. It's the libertarianism vs communism of licensing.
(Yes, you can throw the argument of commercial GPL software out there. It exists, I know. And now you have cloud services as a resu
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And that's you're right to support copyleft. However if I release FOSS software, I don't give two shits what someone does with it as long as it doesn't violate my life, liberty, or property. And guess what? As long as my code is copyfree it won't. If someone takes my work and turns it into copyrighted work. I don't care if they "abuse" their users. Because their users CHOOSE to be their users.
Your idealism makes you sound more like a Faux Libertarian, if you are even one.
That being said, I believe GPL and c
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Bullshit, BSD has restrictions that don't work for everybody, it is just a lie to represent it the way you do. It is your favorite, that's great. But it doesn't have the least restrictions, and it isn't for any purpose.
There are more than 2 licenses in use, BTW. Look it up if you don't believe.
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I gather you've never heard of the Affero GPL.
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Nope, you still have the exact same problem because BSD has very strict compliance requirements that not everybody is even willing to engage in.
The weird part is that you seem to be claiming to have knowledge about different licenses, and yet even though you've been corrected about this point on this very website repeatedly, you still make the same idiotic claim about the BSD license. You spam the same words every time it comes up.
So look, No. The only license that lets users stop caring about it is the Apa
Yes, that sound you heard (Score:1)
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Nope, that was just a giant wooshing sound, not a flushing sound.
These particular types of copyright violations don't result in cash payments, they result in the withdrawal of a free license. It doesn't result in billions of dollars in lost legal fees, because the non-monetary nature of the case substantially limits the legal work involved.
Also, there is nothing to fight when you're out of compliance; you can't use tactics like attacking the contract, because you'd only lose your license that way too. So if
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Image people jumping to that conclusion just because of three decades of bad behaviour.
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Funny, I see any article with M$ offering to help "cure" licensing issues as both bullshit, and they're looking for some way to game the system for their own uses.
You know, "oh, this license doesn't work for us, but if we decree it's covered under a more favourable license it will be".
Sorry, but the only people who see issues with open sourced licenses are people who make closed source software.
Re:Ah, so.... (Score:4, Insightful)
So, the GPL isn't as cut a dried and obvious as Slashdotters insist it is.
And the issues regarding the license wasn't FUD after all.
Color me surprised! I thought all Slashdotters were legal experts.
The license is clear on what you are allowed to do (which is more than copyright law requires them to do) with the copyrighted material. These companies want to restrict copyright holders who use the GPL from using the legally allowed means of ENFORCING that copyright once it has been violated. Where do these companies get the right to dictate to the copyright holders how they will enforce it?
I'll take these guys seriously once they make a legally binding commitment to handle violations of THEIR copyrights by the same rules that they want to impose on people using the GPL.
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Reading comprehension fail. From TFS: "The companies which have agreed to adopt the 'Common Cure Rights Commitment' said before they file or continue to prosecute those accused of violating covered licenses, they will allow for users to cure and reinstate their licenses."
They use the GPL. They are pledging to to this with the
Re: Ah, so.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Or they have been practicing what they preach, and are now putting a public face on the policy in order to pressure others to do the same. Just because the FSF/SFLC works with those in breach to resolve the problem without litigation does not mean that there are not bad actors [opensource.com] as well.
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I think the GP is referring to the MS & IBM membership in the BSA. Which they still are. The BSA, where you are guilty until you expend the resources to prove without a doubt, your innocence. Kind of the opposite of this where someone already finds you guilty and now you want to negotiate how to come into compliance and waive the punishment.
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There seems to be one "bad actor". Just one. But he's only a bad actor in terms of a completely voluntary community norm which nobody is compelled to follow, rather than the law.
Also, these companies would be practicing what they preach if they extended cure periods to their proprietary licenses. Which I doubt they do. They are still BSA members, and BSA has been a model for copyright trolling which the bad actor in this case might have been inspired by.
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Minimize and excuse while attacking the "posturing" companies for following the community norm [kroah.com]? Surely you're better than that, Bruce.
Apple and oranges, Bruce. Their proprietary licenses do
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The kernel developers have some chance of bringing suits, and all who would actually do so had already offered much longer periods for infringers to resolve their issues before this agreement. Companies that are involved in Open Source software have a strong business reason not to sue and scare customers away. So, there is a pretty big element of posturing IMO.
And if the kernel team are now so enamored of GPL3's terms, why don't they adopt the license, which they so defamed when it came out?
I am not convinc
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I'm sorry, Bruce, but are you referring to that nonsense where you claimed that customers of a distributor who received GPLv2 software would be violating the GPLv2 if their distributor had violated the GPLv2 because they had not received a valid license?
Do you car
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Not yours. Potentially because you can't distinguish between a contraction (who's) and a possessive (whose).
And I think that a monkey could have beaten that SLAPP suit, which did not rule on whether there actually was any GPLv2 violation or not.
9 months running says that it doesn't happen.
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Perhaps that "one sentence" was within this gem:
"Similarly, Mr. Perens -- who is not a lawyer -- voiced an opinion about whether the Grsecurity Access Agreement violated the General Public License. No court has addressed the legal issue. Thus, his 'opinion' is not
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The GPLv2 does not impose any obligation to provide current, much less future support, to distributed code.
The GRSecurity "separate writing" only terminates an obligation to provide future support (updates and source code to update) if the source code is disclosed.
Ego, it is not an "additional restrictive term" under the GPL.
It is you who is simply wrong.
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For values of "bad" that equal, "takes a position contrary to mine," sure.
But that isn't what "bad actor" actually means in English. He's acting in exactly the way that was anticipated by the copyright strategy of the Linux kernel. If they decided at this point that they were wrong that that strategy was good, well that is them realizing that they were bad in the past, it doesn't make the one guy who agreed with their original position into a "bad actor."
The accusation that he's a "bad actor" appears to be
Re: Ah, so.... (Score:3)
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Of course to us it's as if you don't exist as well.
"Us"? Since when do you get to speak for Free Software, when the Open Source Initiative which you champion is diluting its message with your talk of what supposedly is and is not Open Source?
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This is new. I've not seen you actually attempt to champion Free Software.
Well, I'm a Free Software author, and in general apply FSF licenses like the GPL to my work. Thus, I apply words like we and us to myself and other people like me.
Also, as is widely published and I'd hope you would have read it by now, my founding
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While I normally am happy to join in complaining about people speaking for others, here he only declares that some "us" exists, and have a shared experience.
As he has actually followers in real life on this very topic, it seems rather obvious that he can represent anything he says as being the opinion of "us" instead of himself.
Notice you're the one saying his "us" would have to be all of Free Software, not him?
At the top... (Score:4, Insightful)
You find yourself at the top of the slippery side of Mt. Software License.
Companies tired of getting called out for violating your open source license are offering you an olive branch one step down the slippery side.
Think hard before walking out to greet them...
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If you'd stop standing on your head, you could probably see plainly that it is the authors of the software who are reported as having done something, not the users of the software. Whoopsie, you were only off by *-1
Great ! That's exactly what we needed... (Score:1)
Just keep the damn thing simple. licenses don't need more than a couple of lines to describe what you can and cannot do with the product. until everybody KISS, there will be more and more violations, and corporate lawyers aren't gonna KISS for sure.
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Just keep the damn thing simple. licenses don't need more than a couple of lines to describe what you can and cannot do with the product. until everybody KISS, there will be more and more violations, and corporate lawyers aren't gonna KISS for sure.
Well I for won't kiss a corporate lawyer either.....
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I'm afraid you have to work on your understanding of licensing.
All copyright holders can bring suit. Thus, if some company modifies your GPL software to which you own the copyright, you can still bring suit regarding the part you wrote.
Also, the word "proprietary" in this context is referring to licenses that do not give the rights required [opensource.org] in Open Source licenses.
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Also, the word "proprietary" in this context is referring to licenses that do not give the rights required in Open Source licenses.
Ahh, the OSI. Still trying to claim ownership of the term "Open Source" even though it becomes more and more clear that you have no right to do so [hyperlogos.org].
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Hi Martin,
I hope you're doing well. As we've previously discussed, the fact that someone else used the words "Open" and "Source" together simply doesn't matter. And nobody but you seems to care about this. Certainly it is your first amendment right to make as much noise as you wish about it, even though as far as I can tell nobody's really listening and your effort serves only to bring the heat death of the universe a millisecond closer.
Other than this particular tilting at a windmill, you seem to be a nice
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I hope you're doing well. As we've previously discussed, the fact that someone else used the words "Open" and "Source" together simply doesn't matter.
It matters very much. It matters because you're attempting to redefine the phrase to mean something other than what it actually means, and what it meant before you ever even heard the term, let alone claim to have been present at its co-creation. If it didn't matter, then you frauds at the OSI would stop lying about its creation.
Certainly it is your first amendment right to make as much noise as you wish about it, even though as far as I can tell nobody's really listening and your effort serves only to bring the heat death of the universe a millisecond closer.
People are listening. And it will be relevant when the OSI inevitably attempts to copyright the term, which is clearly what these attempts at redefinition are about. Members of the
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Trademark, not copyright. I suspect that ship has sailed. Note also that there are trademark categories, one does not register the word for all possible uses.
It also seems to me quite silly for you to rail about this because SCO, the organization that inanely tried to sink the ship of Linux, used the term once, not meaning the same thing, back when they were still called Caldera and were releasing the source for DR-DOS.
Perhaps you should bother Intel about previous uses of their corporate name as a short f
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Whee, my ISP went down literally in the middle of my writing this comment, but I saved it to notepad ahead of submission because I am used to them (Digital Path) failing miserably. They're not even going to send someone out to look at it for several days. What country is this? I thought I lived in California, not Afghanistan.
Anyway, back to topic.
Trademark, not copyright.
Yes, of course, trademark. That was a foolish error, of which I am of course as capable as anyone. The point, however, stands.
I suspect that ship has sailed.
So why the ongoing bullshit claims ab
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No, I live in California. You live in the State of Jefferson, where there is "more freedom" (so that rich folks like your internet provider, their executives, and their venture capitalists don't have to concern themselves with poor folks like you), lower taxes (so that the folks who would have protected you all have to get jobs elsewhere), and less government (meaning they don't give a s**t what happens to you anyway). Might as well be Afghanistan.
I was a lit
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That isn't how words work.
If a phrase is known to have a specific meaning beyond the meaning of the constituent words, that doesn't somehow preclude other meanings of that same combination of words. Just as a word having a meaning doesn't stop it from having a second meaning.
All the known meanings of a phrase are correct, just as all the known meanings of a word are correct. The only time the meaning is incorrect is when it is not internally consistent, or when the speaker decides that they used the wrong w
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"All the known meanings of a phrase are correct,"
No, that is abject bullshit. The OSI is attempting to invent am invalid meaning out of whole cloth, and support that invention with a deliberate falsehood, a total fairy tale. If it weren't relevant they wouldn't have to keep telling these lies. They keep lying about invention of the phrase specifically because it IS how words work. They can call a license OSI-approved, but they have no right whatsoever to decide what is or is not "open source", "open source
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No, your claims of prescriptive linguistics are bovine exhaust. There is nothing invalid about the meaning OSI applies to the phrase "Open Source". It's common for people to take words or short phrases and add additional meanings.
The way words work is that they have meanings, which can change over time, and phrases can mean something other than what their constituent words mean. A vacuum cleaner does not clean a vacuum. It doesn't create a vacuum, and won't even work in a vacuum. It really has nothi
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I don't think he misunderstood proprietary, rather he was using a broader definition to make a funny statement that is true as he said it, but has the same words as a false thing that pedants might jump at. It is perhaps a disguised invitation to think more carefully about the meaning of the words used, instead of just glancing at them to figure out which team is Virtuous.
But then he misunderstands "loophole," so that really ruins it for me. Both as word play, and as a valid point.
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It's all fake (Score:5, Interesting)
Fox fixing the hen-house (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft is as likely to cure OSS licensing problems as undertakers are to cure cancer.
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I wouldn't be quite so cynical. The President of Microsoft is a lawyer, and out of my small group of friends, three are lawyers that work at Microsoft. I'm sure they would like to decrease their legal costs. I know their move to Git was held-up for months by their lawyers.
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>> three are lawyers that work at Microsoft. I'm sure they would like to decrease their legal costs. I know their move to Git was held-up for months by their lawyers. :)
Microsoft should hire programmers. Not lawyers.
You should search some new friends
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No, but having spent a long time fighting Microsoft's lawyers when they were working to get royalty-bearing patents in Internet standards, which would have been bad for Open Source, I think they are guilty of the same sins as Oracle.
The Easiest Cure... (Score:2)
I'm confused... (Score:3)
...Is this is "Extend" or "Extinguish" phase?
It's surely one or the other.
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MS is confused also
Taking the teeth out of GPL (Score:2)
If they really wanted "a more balanced approach", they would give a Mulligan to anyone caught using their code. And just to be fair and balanced, they would need to make all of their code available for everyone's perusal. Yeah, right. That's going to happen.
sure (Score:2)
'fix' the license problem.
and it's a problem for who, exactly?
riiiiight...
Translation: (Score:2)