On 2001.12.13 18:43 Patrik Stridvall wrote:
Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
Umm. I feared that question would come. The "protection"
the LGPL (or GPL)
that Marcus proposed is IMHO largely an illusion when it
comes to libraries.
Sure we might use a strict interpretion as a weapon in
a PR campaign
against possible voilators but we don't have the
resources to sue
somebody and I very much doubt we would succed either.
I think you greatly underestimate the power of such licenses.
That is what remains to be seem. Many laws doesn't make logical
sense anymore or becomes inconsistant in the new brave world and
the attempts to adapt them often introduces new problems.
The attempts of various courts the interpret the uninterpretable
inconsistancies, without realizing it, futuremore adds to
the confusion.
Expect extreme uncertainty to be the keyword for the
immediate future.
Patrick, is your glass always half-empty? There is no need to be
completely and totally pessimistic about everything. Just
look at the
archives. Almost every argument you have ever made on this
list begins
with some statement about the courts being stupid or corrupt or
something.
I do not believe that the courts are corrupt just that they haven't realized
that world is much more complex than current laws seems to think it is.
This is of course not only the courts problem. It is primarily political
problem but I do not believe the politians will figure this out before
a court point this out to them.
Actually I quite optimistic than they will figure it out eventually.
I do believe in the democratic process, however I'm very pessimistic
than this will happend anytime soon, ie in the next few years, and in
the meantime it will do considerable harm by adding confusion to
the marketplace.
Really dude, lay off the slashdot for a while.
Well. Kuro5hin is still down. :-)
With that said I'd also like to apologize for saying that
(but it still
needed to be said).
No need to apologize.
Alexandre is correct that you are greatly underestimating the
power of the
FSF licenses. Remember, the GPL and LGPL and also the X11,
BSD, etc. all
give you rights that by law you would not have.
True, they do. But if you don't need thoses rights, being
bound by the obligations is ridicoulus.
What part of:
I do not distribute any (L)GPL code. I just ship my
work under whatever license I wish so the end user
after he has fullfilled his legal obligations to me
can combine some (L)GPL:d code, that he can legally
download seperately, with my work.
AFAIK
nobody in the world is currently shipping code (except maybe by
mistake) in violation of the GPL or LGPL, despite the
fact that it has
never been taken to court.
True, it does have some power because few wants to be
named a bad boy, but that might mean less and less in the future.
You are deluded if you think companies who have been in this
position were
only concerned about PR.
That was exactly was I said. Many companies in the open source world
care about PR right now, however that might change in the future as the
market grows.
Money talks...
Companies are concerned about only
one thing:
money. Any company that is not conerned about money as
priority number 1
is broken. Hell, by law they have to be.
... bullshit walks and I see there is no disagreement from
your part here.
In short, I think we agree.
The bottom line is that someone decided that the cost of
bringing their
product into compliance with the (L)GPL one way or another
was less than
the cost of the alternatives.
Exactly and since I think the (L)GPL as applied to libraries
is very weak there is not much we can do about it.
Then we have the middle case by have say the Crypto API that is
a part of ADVAPI32. Does distributing a whole file replacement of
dlls/advapi32/crypt.c represent a violation of GPL or LGPL?
In that case why? The Crypto API is largely independent of the
rest of ADVAPI32 it could as well be a separate DLL.
Hmm, let me think here about what the LGPL states. Let's say
Advanced
Crypto Systems (made up company, hereafter refered to as ACS)
decides they
want to write a proprietary implementation of the crypto code
in ADVAPI32.
The LGPL specifically states that you may statically link
LGPL code and
proprietary code to form a new library provided you follow the
conditions. Basically that means the same as usual, that
end-users must
be able to replace the LGPL part with a newer/modified
version given that
the interface remains the same. So ACS would be entitled to
provide for
example a libadvapi32.so file that could drop into an existing wine
installation as long as they also at the very least provided
their object
code before linking it with the rest of wine which would
allow an end-user
to compile a newer version of wine and link in the ACS crypto
support.
ACS could instead provide source code, but it need not be under the
(L)GPL. It could be under a license only allowing redistribution to
people who have a license for the binary.
So basically to answer your question: no, it does not violate
the LGPL,
though it sure as hell would violate the GPL.. But as
Alexandre said, the
GPL is extremely inappropriate for Wine, and as such I
recommend we drop
the GPL issue immediately and focus on LGPL.
OK. So since to take Transgaming's implemention of DCOM (in order to run
InstallShield) as an example there is nothing we even if we used LGPL
since DCOM is a distinct part just like the Crypto API.
So what is the point of using LGPL?
Any protection that (L)GPL provides is to a large part based on
myth and legend.
In addition hypocritical people at for example Slashdot also
seems to wish to apply different standard at open source licenses
and proprietary licenses.
So company cries that their products shouldn't be hacked (having a
part replace) should be ignored despite their insistance that a
paragraf of their license has been violated, while any violations
of the (L)GPL doing essentialy the same thing (replacing a part)
should be strictly enforced. :-)
As Alexandre said in his reply to this message, these are two
different
things. As noted above, the (L)GPL gives you privileges you don't
otherwise have. An EULA takes away rights you should have.
EULAs are
actually pretty questionable if you think about it.
First of all note that I'm primarily talking about an EULA as a license
presented pre sale not a license presented post sale ie a shrink wrap
license.
Yes. EULA:s take away some of your rights, but whether you should
have some rights is a matter of law (or the constitution).
If you are say a beta tester of say some game you are often
forbidden to talk about the game to others. This is a clear
violation of right to free speech. However that is not legally
a problem since you recieved some consideration in return
ie you got to play the game in advance.
Of course public intrest sometimes forbids enforcement of
some clauses like for example reverse engineer is legal and
can't be taken away with a license.
Furthermore the right of first sale gives the right to resell
the work. (providing of course that a sale has taken place which
is probably not so in the beta tester case above).
The point is that the difference is not that great.
Any clause whether it is in the GPL or in an EULA is
that are not enforced is because of public intrest
not because of some other reason.
But
copyright on a
written work is pretty well established.
Yes, but I need not distribute your work I distribute
MY work and the end user combines them either through
compiling or through runtime linking.
Note that I'm not accusing you of being hypocritical, I just
point out the we can't both have the cake and eat it.
What if Microsoft licensed their code as is not allowed to
run under an emulator or something similar?
Tough cookies for them. EULA is really a questionable thing.
No, shrink wrap licenses are questionable things,
but EULA in themselves are not questionable.
True, many paragraphs in normal EULA:s is quite questionable because
of law and the constitution but that is something else.
Of course myth and legend can be a powerful ally. Just look
at all thing done, good or bad, in the name of Christianity,
Democracy or whatever, regardless of whether what was done was
was logically consistant with whatever else was done.
Where you are going with this I have no idea, but while your
at it why not
mention the people (using the term broadly here) that are
doing bad stuff
in the name of Islam.
I specifically refrained from doing since Christanity or for that
matter Democracy is quite enough to serve as an example.
What I ment to say is that whether some things are true or not,
I this case whether I'm right or not, matters less if some people
in this case Open Source movement believe because of their
"faith" that thing that are really true are not true.
In short:
Even if LGPL is actually very weak as I believe it might not
matter so much if a lot of people believe it is true.
However beware that someday some nasty companies may come anyway
and do we you wish not to happend and then we sue them we
lose in court.
In the meantime we have scared away a couple of other nice
companies that believe that the LGPL forbid what they wished
to do but it didn't.
However, my opposition to (L)GPL is not based primarily on that,
but rather the alleged, and by you, it seems, supported, features
of it. See below.
Right, so your opposition to the LGPL is not based on the
first 60% of
what you said... Why did you bother saying it then.
There are two main possibities
1. I'm right
2. I'm wrong.
If I'm right (the LGPL is weak) the first 60% was to convince
you not to use the LPGL since it is close to meaningless and
only add to the confusion.
If I'm wrong (the LPGL is strong) the last 40% was to convince
you that you don't want a LPGL as license since you might scare
away potential nice companies.
Once companies are being to migrate to Linux/Wine we will hopefully
get an influx of new developers to fix less important problems.
The work of companies that we don't trust is ignored and we work
on as we always have.
That's true if that work is kept completely proprietary.
But the thing
that the Transgaming stuff should make us realize is that
if that work
is released under a free but non open-source license, it
competes with
Wine for user and developer mind share, and it hurts Wine
no matter
how much we try to ignore it. That is a new situation
that I believe
we didn't take into account when picking the current license.
That is true, but I still think we made the right choice.
If we had made Wine LGPL we might have prevent Transgaming
from entering the market and a change now might prevent others
from doing so.
Bullshit. The LGPL is actually pretty damn liberal. I think one
advantage here is that it would actually require the
transgaming peices to
be in different object files so they could be relinked, or in
different
source files (possibly under the AFPL) so that they can be
recompiled and
then relinked.
Whereby increasing the work Transgaming and other companies
have to do and thereby increase to cost for entry to market.
In the advantages for us _really _that great?
I think it is very dangerous for us to reject the help we can get
to increase the mind share of Wine and derivates as a whole,
inspite of any inconviences for the core Wine project.
Wine has not yet accieved the breakthrough on the desktop market
that Linux did on the server market and until then we need all the
allies we can yet, regardless of their actually "loyalties".
In short:
We have to take the good with the bad.
Sorry, I totally disagree with this. Wine exists because
developers like
us enjoy hacking on it.
Sure and now it happends that nobody enjoys working on DirectX
since they, if Transgaming think they are good enough, will get
payed to hack on it insteed.
What are you going to do about that?
Complain that you don't get for free want to
haven't payed or worked for?
Is the goal really to try to bring
as many people
away from MS Windows regardless of what platform the move to.
What if
people decide to move away from Windows and to some other proprietary
WinAPI platform. Has this really furthered the Wine project?
Yes, because the proprietary WinAPI platform are likely to run on Linux or
some other platform Wine supports. Now we continue competing we them
instead of Microsoft.
With the
risk of sounding too much like Stallman, I think the real
goal is to get
as many people using free software as the base system.
The keyword is base system. Linux is the base system in the
example above isn't it?
I
will stop with
that because I don't think at this point forcing the issue of free
software for everything (including applications) is going to work.
Exactly and now they run proprietory WinAPI platform under Linux
and you can continue to hack on Wine that you love so much knowing
that Linux has one more user that can potentially contribute to it.
In any case, going LGPL would not affect TransGaming
horribly. They would
still be free to release proprietary components such as the DirectX
libraries. And by my reading of the LGPL they would even be able to
implement parts of a DLL as long as they are in seperate objects.
And the advantages for us would outweight to all problems for others
including Transgaming and benifit Wine in the long run?
Furthermore, moving to LGPL is not as bad as moving from the original
license to X11 was. As has been mentioned the only thing
that needs to be
done is to make new contributions LGPL. I will actually extend this
idea. Give developers a choice of whether they want to use
LGPL or X11
for their contributions. The idea being that to use Wine as
a whole you
must comply with the LGPL, but for any existing code and for any new
contributions under X11 a user or developer could use the code for
anything. The only thing that needs to be done to make this
happen is for
Alexandre to start accepting code licensed under the LGPL
into the Wine
tree.
No, please. That will be incredibly messy and evenmore add to
the confusion in the market place.
Patrik Stridvall