Glibc Is Finally Free Software 337
WebMink writes "Despite the fervour of some, the dark secret of every GNU/Linux distribution is that, until August 18 this year, it depended on software that was under a non-Free license — incompatible with the Open Source Definition and non-Free according to Debian and the FSF. A long tale of tenacity and software archeology has finally led to that software appearing under the 3-clause BSD license — ironically, at the behest of an Oracle VP. The result is that glibc, portmap and NFS are no longer tainted."
Much better explanation here... (Score:5, Informative)
http://spot.livejournal.com/315383.html [livejournal.com]
This actually gives details.
Wait what...Oracle isn't being evil...? (Score:4, Funny)
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Oracle not being evil? Yeah, I tried to check the temperature down there, too. Unfortunately, all of my equipment loses too much precision in the microkelvin range.
SCO (Score:4, Interesting)
What? All this time and SCO never found this?
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What? All this time and SCO never found this?
A. I'm pretty sure we've established that SCO never really audited the code like they claimed
B. Even if they had found this, it isn't their copyright and they have no standing to sue.
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SCO actually did hire a consultant to audit the code. Then they ignored his report that there was no infringement.
Re:Wait what...Oracle isn't being evil...? (Score:4, Interesting)
Larry Ellison is one of the most contemptuous little pricks I've ever seen at the helm of a major software company. Unlike SCO (new and old) however, Oracle always did actually produce something real.
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Unlike SCO (new and old) however, Oracle always did actually produce something real.
SCO had a couple of very real UNIX products out there in the '90s, especially back when Linux was still an unsupported toy. I was even unlucky enough (from an ease of use perspective they made Solaris look like Ubuntu) to have to look after a bunch of them in a previous job - though by the time I'd left I'd gotten them about 90% migrated to a combination of RHEL and WBL.
Re:Wait what...Oracle isn't being evil...? (Score:5, Informative)
>SCO had a couple of very real UNIX products out there in the '90s
No they didn't. You're confusing SCO from Utah with Santa Cruz Operations. SCO is a rename of the old company Caldera after they bought the name and rights from the original SCO - now known as Tarantella.
PLEASE GET THIS CLEAR: The company that sued Linux and the company that made unixware ARE NOT THE SAME COMPANY. They are completely seperate corporations in completely different places started by completely different people and have NOTHING common.
SCO actually did have two fairly decent products back in the Caldera years. Caldera Linux was perhaps the best desktop distro in it's day (though they were also the first distro to ship with a non-free DE by default [they used KDE back when QT was still non-free]), and DR-DOS was probably the best DOS replacement ever developed.
The things - Caldera basically died during the UnitedLinux fiasco and never really had another product, they bought the unix business from SCO along with the name, while the old SCO focussed on their security business and became Tarantella, but never did anything with it - except to make the source code of the very first unix kernel available as a free download for curiosity purposes (this ended up counting severely against them in the case they lost- they had effectively declared the unix they owned to be a valueless thing of purely historic interest- and now they want to sue others for supposedly stealing it - ironically there really wasn't any of that code in Linux at any time because it really WAS just of historic interest. What the hell would Linux want with code written in the 1970's for 8-bit CPU's ?)
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Oracle benefits from Linux: they can provide a complete platform for the main product on it.
Re:Wait what...Oracle isn't being evil...? (Score:4, Informative)
RTFA. The code was used within the permissions granted, so there was no copyright infringement. The problem was that the license, while permissive for 1984 was not up to modern FSF standards and was not GPL compatible (falling foul of the "no other restrictions" clause).
There was no financial or legal reason for Oracle not to release the code and bad PR if the didn't. It is nice that they did release it of course, because, as I understand it, rewriting it would of been a nightmare.
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The code was used within the permissions granted, so there was no copyright infringement
Actually, there was, just not in the way that you are thinking. The code contained conditions not present in the LGPL, and this meant that distributing LGPL'd code linked to it is a violation of the LGPL. This means that any downstream distribution of the LGPL'd code (glibc) was a violation of the copyright (owned by the FSF).
Somewhat amusingly, this now means that the FSF has standing to sue anyone who has ever distributed a version of the GNU platform.
There was no financial or legal reason for Oracle not to release the code and bad PR if the didn't
Unless, of course, they wanted to point out the p
Year of the Linux desktop! (Score:5, Funny)
Now with that glaring hole in Linux's offering solved we can move on continuing to ignore the terrible User Experience.
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Yes, but it'll cost them a beer.
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That's because Firefox is hueg. It takes just as long to start up in Windows (if not longer).
By the problems/software you reference, I take it you're on Ubuntu. If you're using a recent version, it should include ureadahead, which should make frequently-accessed files load faster (through caching or something).
I had Firefox start up auto
Re:Year of the Linux desktop! (Score:4, Insightful)
The reasons that you gave, plus the rest of your comment, tell me pretty conclusively that you don't.
Re:Year of the Linux desktop! (Score:5, Insightful)
My last upgrade still required me to purge PulseAudio before my audio worked, and I get regular notices that "composting was too slow and has been disabled". The last time that happened, I was sitting with my hands 6" from the keyboard and mouse, reading slashdot, with no other programs running. I hadn't touched the computer for at least a minute. And this is on a dual-core desktop, with a decent video card, and a couple GB of ram.
I've been holding off on an entire system wipe and reinstall, because I need to get around to getting a couple new hard drives anyway. I'm hoping that fixes at least the Compiz problem. But I'm still not impressed with Compiz. If I'd ever seen PulseAudio do anything but destroy all the sound on my computer, I might like it. The philosophy is fucking fantastic, and I've been drooling about it ever since it was announced. It's something that Linux desperately needs. To generically say that everything is fixed, however, is a sweeping overstatement. For you, perhaps. But based on my searches to fix the issues I have, a ton of people are still having a terrible time with those things
I think I see your problem... (Score:3, Funny)
You need to upgrade you're chipper-shreder to a quad core.
Oh no! (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been living a lie all these years??? Fuk!
That pisses me off (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, that's aggravating as hell. I just kind of assumed that GNU would have released all of their flagship software under the L?GPL and had no idea that they were distributing non-Free software. They were the one distributor I figured I'd never have to audit the licenses from. Are there any other hidden gems? Is there some shareware in Emacs? Maybe a bit of Shared Source in binutils?
People have laughed at the BSDs for replacing a lot of common software with locally-developed, BSD-licensed equivalents. That's starting to seem like a much saner alternative.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
and to boot, even though this was championed by Fedora, Fedora will probably stay on fsf's list of non-free software distros.
fsf non-free distro list [gnu.org]
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FSF's non-blob criteria is incompatible with being able to boot modern PC's on modern CPU's. Good job, guys. Fedora, on the other hand, remains as free as possible a distro for modern PC's. I'll be interested to see how hurd deals with this problem.
If this was really a concern they'd work hard on advancing the PC architecture to the point that it didn't need such reliance on firmware uploaders. I've never seen FSF do anything like that. Perhaps I missed it, but it seems like it's just ego-inflating to
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Debian, too? (Score:2)
Seriously, that's aggravating as hell. I just kind of assumed that GNU would have released all of their flagship software under the L?GPL and had no idea that they were distributing non-Free software
Seriously. Same for the Debian folk. For years I had to compile netatalk by hand because the debian folk threw a shitstorm over compiling it against OpenSSL because of licensing problems, so it had no encrypted auth support.
People on debian-legal are famous for being the most righteous, die-hard, by-the-bo
Why no rewrite in 25 years? (Score:4, Interesting)
I still don't understand why someone didn't just rewrite the code from scratch, using the original as a spec. The original code was released 25 years ago, and is not that huge an amount of code.
Re:Why no rewrite in 25 years? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a handful of unix libc implementations out there, so someone, in fact, did.
Additionally, have you ever heard of a derivative work?
Sigh (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a super-easy way to handle this. (Score:2, Insightful)
Call it the Zero-One Distribution License.
The license simply states "You may expand upon the works of these two programs as long as you distribute your derivative works freely, full source included, upon completion of a stable build of the program."
Then have the two programs simply be a binary 1 and binary 0.
Just get about ten million geeks to sign the thing to make it a solid license, and then start contacting lawyers.
Collectively sue the absolute shit out of everybody. Force change in software licensing/E
Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:4, Funny)
I've got an idea! What we really need is some kind of license that's like BSD, but requires people distributing derived works to do so under the same license. I can't believe nobody's thought of this yet!
Sleepycat (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sleepycat (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have read the GPL many times over the years (as well as US copyright law) and while I can grok most of the GPL, parts of it continue to elude me. Its textual representation reminds me of bad software writing, decidedly worse than average federal law standards.
At the very least, it's better than the English translation of the Treaty of Armens [memory-alpha.org].
Different Audiences (Score:5, Insightful)
Sleepycat isn't NEARLY as comprehensive, but simplicity is usually well worth that loss.
When dealing with normal, reasonable people I agree because your audience is trying their best to understand the information you are trying to impart. When dealing with the law your audience is deliberately trying to misinterpret everything you have said to their advantage so you need everything specified absolutely precisely so that there is no possible way they can do that.
Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:5, Informative)
Good suggestion, but keep in mind that CC licenses are not designed to be used with software. As they say on their FAQ [creativecommons.org]:
Can I use a Creative Commons license for software?
We do not recommend it. Creative Commons licenses should not be used for software. We strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed at the Open Source Initiative. Unlike our licenses, which do not make mention of source or object code, these existing licenses were designed specifically for use with software.
CC is a great set of licenses, but as they say, if you're dealing with software you're probably better off using one of the licenses designed with it in mind.
Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:5, Interesting)
The usual reason for this is that most software licenses are designed to distinguish between source code and binary/object code. However, if you intend to put both in the public domain, I see no reason why you couldn't use cc0, hypothetically.
IANAL.
Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:4, Informative)
What do you mean by, "legally protect them to be in public domain?" When something is in the public domain, absolutely anyone can use it in any way they want. Including using it as part of a non-free, non-public domain product. They can do whatever they want with it, just as everyone else can.
Perhaps you're asking about copyfraud, where someone falsely claims to have exclusive rights to a work in the public domain? For example, publishing a copy of Shakespeare's plays and putting a notice on it that says, "No part of this may be reproduced without permission from the publisher." That's just lying. A license like GPL wouldn't prevent that either. Licenses only apply to people who are honest or who get caught. If someone intentionally lies about what rights they have, the only thing you can do is call them on it (and sue them if you're sufficiently motivated).
Or maybe you're just asking what the mechanism is? In most countries, all you need to do is stick a notice on it saying, "This work is in the public domain."
Irrevocability of public domain dedication? (Score:2)
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Re:Irrevocability of public domain dedication? (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't need to. That's the whole point. At the top of the code, when it was written, it says, PD, date, author. There's your starting point. That chunk is PD. What you do with it is up to you. You can make a chunk exactly like it and make it proprietary; that's fine. The original is still PD, though, and there's nothing you can do to change that. Nothing at all.
It's PD. You can be sued (you can be sued for anything) but all you need to win is "Here's this thing, it's PD, by so and so, date whatever, and I used it as such. Thank you, I'll be leaving now, and by the way, I'll have court costs, too."
Nothing stops you in the first place. That's the idea, see, the code is FREE. So there's nothing to worry about. Absorb away. (Though it is traditional to eat pizza while you do so, no one will force you.)
It's whatever you say it is. Once you change it, it isn't the original code. So you're free (get that, FREE) to do anything you want. Call it proprietary, send it back to the author with a thank you note, charge huge amounts of money for it, etc. Anything you want. The only thing you can't do is take the original chunk out of the public domain. That's a done deal, and anyone can use that original chunk any way they want and there isn't squat you can do about that.
The original PD code stays public and available. But the author doesn't claim that changes you make are owned by him, or that he has a right to tell you what to do with them. He respects your freedom. The GPL does not. The GPL says there IS a cost for this, and it is that you will do as we say, or you are subject to these limitations. PD says, here it is, have a party, bye.
And that, my friend, is why all the FREE software I write is PD. Not GPL.
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And that, my friend, is why all the FREE software I write is PD. Not GPL.
BSD may be a better idea since it has a waiver of responsibility if the code breaks, but IANAL.
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I seem to recall that Woody Guthrie wrote on at least one of his songbooks, in reference to 'This Land is Your Land', "This song is copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.". Ludlow Music enforces copywrite on this song even today. So sometimes things that see
Re:Irrevocability of public domain dedication? (Score:5, Interesting)
Guthrie presumably sold that right; that's pretty typical for the publishing industry. They don't produce anything, they're just middlemen, and so rights are their handle on the material.
You'll notice that Woody did *not* say that the song was public domain; he said it was copyrighted. That's like the GPL: You see it, you should make sure you understand the terms, because whatever else they may be, they are not grants of freedom. More of a license to employ a lawyer.
I own a literary agency, and we deal in precisely those kinds of contracts. We try - very hard - to protect the author's rights, one as distinct from the next, so that, for instance, having sold a book to print, the author retains the rights to make a movie, an e-book, etc. Publishers, on the other hand, come at it the other way. The typical contract tries to vacuum up every right known, and any that might not be specified.
This is one of the reasons that I *really* welcome e-books; the main reason publishers were able to maintain their position is because it was expensive, very, to print a book. An e-book... no longer true. A good literary agency can provide the editing an author needs, or the author and a few beta readers can get it handled my themselves, and that's a *much* better model for both authors and readers.
The author removes a middle entity, and that raises compensation; that encourages the author; that's good for everyone. Borrowing is reduced, and pass-along is as well. This tends to mean that you'll actually get your income on a per-reader basis. Shops are never "out" of your book; books never have to be out of print. A book can become a hit years after it is released. Advances are not required and earnings are no longer encumbered. Release times are vastly reduced. Whole libraries can be carried in your palm. You can read anywhere. It's not perfect, but man, is it ever better.
Bit of a digression there, sorry. :) The subject is very much on my mind right now.
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Yes, I mean something along the lines of copyfraud. More notably, how can I defend a work against copyfraud, what sort of evidence do I need?
Does it ever occur to you fucks to contact an attorney when you have a legal question?
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You need the same thing as you need with any software: A copy of the original, with the terms, in this case a statement that the code is PD. The Internet, bless its digital little heart, probably remembers when it appeared, too. If terms are obeyed, no problem will arise. Its the liars and the cheats you have to watch out for, and that's true no matter what mode of release you choose from commercial to PD.
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As for Shakespeare's plays -- even though they were used only as an example here -- be careful. Old texts often undergo serious editing before being published, and the edited version is quite definitely not in public domain. That's the reason why journal article preprints are usually freely distributed by the authors, while the final, edited and published version would be illegal to distribute. Same goes for translations: even though a translation is a work derived from another work in the public domain, it
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How exactly do you put something into public domain legally, such that you can legally protect them to be in public domain?
Really, serious question.
You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a very good question, and the answer is to use the GPL.
Um, WTF? GPL is absolutely not similar to public domain; the gpl-violations people repeatedly make this very clear.
A better answer is, "that's not very clear, could you give an example of what you mean?". About the only thing I think it can sanely mean, is how to prevent other people from claiming it as their work (ie, plagiarism) and suing people (kinda like SCO suing people over Novell's copyrighted code). Maybe something like CC-zero is the answer (you keep a copyright, so you can sue them for... I think it was "slander of title" that Novell used), maybe just make sure your copy with the non-copyright notice gets well indexed by the search engines so any potential victims can find it when they need to defend themselves, maybe plagiarism can be a suable offence separately from copyright violation (I don't think that's the case here in the US, but I hear it might be in much of Europe).
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cc0 doesn't let you keep a copyright in countries in which the copyright can be dissolved, such as the US. Slander of title may apply even if the code has become PD, as long as the statement is false and harmful. In the case of Novell, it was false (the code was GPL, PD, or (c) Novell) and harmful (SCO was suing Novell's customers, or threatening to sue them). IANAL, this isn't legal advice, etc.
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Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:4, Insightful)
You keep saying "public domain", but you are using it to define nearly the opposite concept.
I like to think of it this way. Least free to most free: GPL, BSD/MIT, Public Domain. GPL is very restrictive as to what the licensee can or cannot do with the work. BSD/MIT both allow nearly any use/modification/extension, but requires the licensee to retain copyright notices. Public Domain requires neither; anyone can use and abuse it without retaining copyright notices.
So is GPL more or less free than a commercial license? Usually less free, but it depends on what you want. The GPL is more restrictive in that source code must be provided, no charge, to anyone who gets a binary copy. Typical mega-corporation commercial licenses prevent modification or extension, and many times even use and reverse-engineering, but I'd say that smaller companies tend to be less restrictive in their licenses than the GPL (barring, of course, redistribution of the original source code).
Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:5, Informative)
Usually less free than a commercial license? I'm curious about your definition of less.
You can copy GPL software to any and all machines you want without restrictions. (commercial software doesn't usually let you do that)
You can give or sell GPL software to anyone, as long as you provide them the source code. (commercial software doesn't usually allow that)
You can modify it and use it anywhere (commercial software doesn't usually allow that)
You can incorporate it into your own code, provided that you license your code as GPL (commercial software doesn't usually allow that)
You can pay for the rights to do all of these things with commercial software, subject to the copyright holders predilection for selling those rights.
The only thing you cannot do is incorporate GPL software into your own NON-GPL code without paying the copyright holder for those additional rights, subject to their willingness to license those rights, but you can't do that with commercial software either.
As I see it you are never more restricted by the GPL than a commercial license. There exist commercial licenses that allow unlimited use and distribution and modification and distribution of the modified code, but they are extremely rare big $$$$ licenses - Sun's license for Unix and Microsofts license for SQL Server are good examples.
If you are a developer and want to sell binary only copies of a modified version of something, then you may be better off starting from something that isn't GPL licensed. But that doesn't make it more free, just better suited to your particular purposes, and describing it as more free is inaccurate. It is simply more convenient to license the particular rights you are interested in. A software USER always has more freedom under the GPL than a commercial license because the only right constrained by the GPL is one that does not impact them, and commercial software nearly always constrains usage rights in some way. Users can even legally use GPL'd software without agreeing to the license!
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In theory, GPL is less free than PD. In practice though - standing matters in court. It's hard to get a court to hear a case over someone fraudulently claiming to own a Public Domain work. If they actually filed suit against you, you would have clear standing, since they were threatening to damage you by taking your money if they won the suit. But, what if they just sent you a cease and desist, falsely claiming to own the work, but not actually announcing they plan to file charges if you publish or distribu
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I like how you use a whole paragraph explaining why commercial licenses are more free than the GPL and then gloss over the friggin huge reason for the GPL in the first place parenthetically as if it was an afterthought. The freedom of modification and redistribution is huge, and central to the GPL.
But maybe you're right, that software license I got from Microsoft for Windows was way mo
Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:4, Informative)
Did you even read my post? That was my whole point, that you can't create a license to mandate that something stay in the public domain after someone else takes a hold of it because inherent in the definition of public domain is the ability for anyone to do whatever they want with it, including the ability to make their version not public domain. I was suggesting to the OP that if what he meant by "public domain" (notice the ironic quotes there and in my original post) was that the work would stay available for everyone even after someone else takes it and releases it as their own, then "public domain" is not the proper release strategy for him, and that he's probably looking for something like the GPL.
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Horseshit.
If your answer to "how do you
Re:They released it under the BSD license? (Score:4, Interesting)
It all comes down to what one means by "stays in the public domain."
If they mean that mere duplication stays in the public domain, then the PD satisfies that already so there is no question apart from what is called "copyfraud" elsewhere in thread. I am not sure whether PD blocks copyfraud (claiming authorship of material verbatim); I suspect it depends on whether the country has a concept of moral rights apart from intellectual property rights.
So, the alternative is that if by "stays in the public domain," they mean that derived works stay in the domain declared for the original work. OK, now strictly speaking we've reached a contradiction since the public domain does not allow this. However, we may consider a quasi-public domain in which this property holds. It is obvious that there is no way whatsoever to do this for an open release, without something GPL-like (feel free to prove me wrong). Specifics may differ, but that part of GPL which is called "viral" by its detractors and called "spider plant-like" by rms exactly identifies what is necessary for derived works to stay in the original domain.
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Wow, I think I just bumped into the first person who actually read what I wrote. I don
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Is that you Steve Ballmer?
Re:Shut The Fuck Up (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this just a troll or are there people who seriously get this upset over a software license? If so can I get a link to a description of the controversy please?
Serious question.
That's probably a troll but yes there are people who seriously get this upset over a software license. Well, they don't precisely get upset over the license itself. They get upset that anyone else would use a license that they would not use. The fact that your choice to use whatever license you like for what you create does not prevent them from using any license they like for what they create won't give them a moment's pause.
It's like the people who will get upset that you might drink alcohol, because they don't drink. Prohibition never could have gotten off the ground without folks like them. Or the people who think it's a good idea to arrest you if you smoke marijuana, because they wouldn't smoke marijuana. Or the people who think you should go to hell, or at least that they certainly shouldn't associate with you and treat you with respect, because their religion is not your religion. Or the people who think that all adults should have porn banned/censored for them because they themselves do not wish to see pornography. Or the people who think that anything which offends them is inherently evil and must be stopped at all costs, rather than viewing that as the way they have chosen to react to something that is otherwise harmless.
I like the term Bill Hicks used, which was "fevered egos". Just be glad that when people like this make new laws, they have largely overlooked the realm of software development.
the word you are looking for is bigot (Score:3, Insightful)
lots of them around . They typically aim for positions of power .
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One problem with all freedom-vs-authoritarianism arguments is that each side takes such a long time to acknowledge that the other has a different view of the notion of "harmless".
One of the consequential mistakes made by those campaigning for the freedom[tm] side is the assumption that the authoritarians just have a huge ego: "How dare you impose your opinion on me!!!"
But the authoritarian is sometimes (N.B.) the one with the lesser ego. He doesn't want alcohol or drugs or gambling or driving or whatever re
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Serious question: can I take a PD work verbatim and claim authorship? Or more precisely, in which countries can I do this?
typical lack of comprehension (Score:3, Informative)
Or, should I say, typical lack of reading the friendly article.
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Just like you're never really free, unless you have the freedom to lock people up.
Amusingly, when people use that extra freedom the BSD-license provides, people like you complain.
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Just like you're never really free, unless you have the freedom to lock people up.
You are thinking of the BDSM license...
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We really need to get away with this obsessive legality, and just start giving code away. Someone should be able to say "here, take my code and use it" without someone lecturing them on what they're doing wrong while the free software song is sung out of key in the background. Why don't people want to write or eve
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What.. how... huh?
All that shows is someone not understanding their chosen license and getting angry that they didn't get credit for their work.
Restrictions in the name of freedom is not freedom. Perhaps what you mean is that BSD doesn't work quite so well in a world where people hunger for fame and recognition. I'd bet Data would be BSD if Soong lived long enough to perfect things.
Re:that's great now fix NFS (Score:5, Funny)
I can't fucking upload shit to my NAS without my desktop freezing
A computer is not a toilet.
Try uploading files instead.
Re:What was the original license? What's the new o (Score:5, Informative)
/*
* Sun RPC is a product of Sun Microsystems, Inc. and is provided for
* unrestricted use provided that this legend is included on all tape
* media and as a part of the software program in whole or part. Users
* may copy or modify Sun RPC without charge, but are not authorized
* to license or distribute it to anyone else except as part of a product or
* program developed by the user.
*
* SUN RPC IS PROVIDED AS IS WITH NO WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND INCLUDING THE
* WARRANTIES OF DESIGN, MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
* PURPOSE, OR ARISING FROM A COURSE OF DEALING, USAGE OR TRADE PRACTICE.
*
* Sun RPC is provided with no support and without any obligation on the
* part of Sun Microsystems, Inc. to assist in its use, correction,
* modification or enhancement.
*
* SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. SHALL HAVE NO LIABILITY WITH RESPECT TO THE
* INFRINGEMENT OF COPYRIGHTS, TRADE SECRETS OR ANY PATENTS BY SUN RPC
* OR ANY PART THEREOF.
*
* In no event will Sun Microsystems, Inc. be liable for any lost revenue
* or profits or other special, indirect and consequential damages, even if
* Sun has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
*
* Sun Microsystems, Inc.
* 2550 Garcia Avenue
* Mountain View, California 94043
*/
The new one is:
/*
* Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle America, Inc.
*
* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
* modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
* met:
*
* * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
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Re:What was the original license? What's the new o (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting. But how is this "more free"? It's not quite a BSD license if they require the source and binaries contain that notice. Further, what I see is this re-branding of everything from Sun to Oracle all over the place. The latest updates for VirtualBox, OpenOffice and Java did little to patch or improve but most significantly changes everything to containing Oracle branding. I see this as no different.
Calling this more free while also including requirements such as the ones illustrated above it s bit of a mixed message.
Re:What was the original license? What's the new o (Score:4, Informative)
It's not quite a BSD license if they require the source and binaries contain that notice.
That's a pretty vanilla 3-clause BSD licence just like you'd see anywhere else, I don't see a problem with it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a pretty vanilla 3-clause BSD licence just like you'd see anywhere else, I don't see a problem with it.
Yup. The only thing different about it is that somebody actually bothered to change "The Regents of the University of California" to something else, and put in a date and so on.
That's actually fairly rare to see. Most people who license code under BSD do so very poorly, just copying the boilerplate and never filling in the blanks.
Re:What was the original license? What's the new o (Score:5, Informative)
The original license said:
"Users may copy or modify Sun RPC without charge, but are not authorized to license or distribute it to anyone else except as part of a product or program developed by the user."
which breaks most definitions of "free software". You can't give it to someone else without having used it in something, or wrapped it up with something. The new license is a 3-part BSD standard.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
First of all, that *is* the BSD license.
Second of all, the previous license was not even FOSS:
* Users
* may copy or modify Sun RPC without charge, but are not authorized
* to license or distribute it to anyone else except as part of a product or
* program developed by the user.
That could be interpreted to greatly limit the redistributability of the code.
So, this is great news.
Re:What was the original license? What's the new o (Score:5, Interesting)
How exactly is this code "copyright 2010", if it was written in the 1980s?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It looks like they're trying to pull a Lucas and reset the copyright clock.
Not ironic; more like intentional (Score:2)
The submitter seems to think it's "ironic" that the license was changed at the behest of an Oracle VP. But looking at the code above, it seems the non-free portion in question was owned by Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems is now Oracle America. When you see the phrase "Oracle America" (as opposed to just plain Oracle), you know they're talking about the former Sun Microsystems.
So this is not "ironic" at all. Oracle America had the power to adjust the license, and Oracle America chose to do so. It makes on
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Did you even read the article? They began work on the issue while Sun was still Sun, but it was interrupted by the acquisition by Oracle.
"But then there was some sort of foul-up after it was all agreed and Red Hat (who were making the change) never received documentation of the decision that was sufficient to give them confidence it was all over. They tried contacting people at Sun, but by then acquisition of Sun by Oracle was in full swing and no-one was allowed to make any changes affecting copyrights any
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It makes one wonder why it was so hard to do while the code was still under the independent Sun Microsystems. Patents, maybe?
They might have been holding onto it in hopes of one day monetizing it.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm going to point your attention here [slashdot.org]
Did you even read the article? They began work on the issue while Sun was still Sun, but it was interrupted by the acquisition by Oracle.
"But then there was some sort of foul-up after it was all agreed and Red Hat (who were making the change) never received documentation of the decision that was sufficient to give them confidence it was all over. They tried contacting people at Sun, but by then acquisition of Sun by Oracle was in full swing and no-one was allowed to make any changes affecting copyrights any more."
Re: (Score:2)
google "sun rpc license" [google.com]
(Interesting that the parameters for firefox brought the one on Apple's site up before the one on Microsoft's.)
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(Interesting that the parameters for firefox brought the one on Apple's site up before the one on Microsoft's.)
What? Can you elaborate on that some? AFAIK your browser doesn't change Google's search results display order...
Diffs here (Score:2)
This text links to a git commit [redhat.com]. Click any of the diffs to read the old and new licenses, as long as you aren't red-green color-blind.
Re:I wonder why did it take so long (Score:4, Informative)
The article goes into some detail. To change a license you need the agreement of the authors. Over time the authors become hard to track down.
Re:I wonder why did it take so long (Score:4, Interesting)
The tricky part was determining if the work was derived from something else, under a restrictive copyright. The copyright still belongs to Sun but they could be bound by contractual terms to other parties because of the way the works originated. Incidentally, this is the reason NVidia always gives for not open sourcing their 3D drivers for Linux.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not necessarily. It's only a "work [made] for hire" if the coders were employed by the company (not independent contractors), or the work falls into a narrowly defined category of things that *can* be explicitly made works for hire.
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html [copyright.gov]
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Grats, but why did that hypocritical Stallman allow Glibc to keep the G in identical circumstances to the XEmacs situation and demonized us?
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He was too busy fuming over (non-GPL) gnuplot.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The official FSF position was that they could take the code and release it under the LGPL. They thought that the license was structured in such a way that it basically lost its force once the covered software was built into another piece of software. I'm not sure if they have ever stated that analysis publicly.
Sometimes, I wish they would take this pragmatic approach towards the 4-clause BSD license.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember -- RMS *did* bitch about the copyright assignment thing.
Correct. It wasn't enough that we were GPL (v2), but we had to get copyright assignments to the FSF from an organization that didn't exist and people who were unwilling to do that.
My only personal contact with Stallman was a phone call just a bit after I took over from Chuck and he promised to "go to war against me" (his words) if I didn't get all the copyright assignments. I couldn't and he did.
In an interesting twist, my successor has managed to get the code base to GPL v3. Sigh.