Caine
Hardcore Member
Is this license discussion still running?
I am impressed, but not in a good way.
I am impressed, but not in a good way.
Power, Memory and Schematics
- Thread starter EvilDragon
- Start date
comradekingu
Glowing ember
WTFPL is a non-starter in that regard.
I think (?) we can say that the idea of time-based public domain coincides with countries that have some form of copyright protection. The idea is some form of fairness, and advancement of culture.
Having no copyright, and no patent law, would upen this up for debate, but that country is not Germany.
Free and open not mean the same thing in this sense, if you just publish stuff, it is not fully proprietary anywhere. (?) Emphasis on fully here.
A free open license, is in the case of software, as per the Bernstein link, a free license, it just wastes a word. FOSS to me just seems to qualify the open source. And one would think that to be as gratis, seeing as OS would otherwise be redundant.
An open license does not distinguish itself from being open, for the user. That is a technicality that doesn't make any sense in this context. It is for the end user and ecosystem not a distinction upon open that matters, but what free brings.
The benefit to society, is being able to share modified versions. You similarly don't get to compile anything just because it is open. Similarly, this personal use provision, exists, as per the link, for software. And the digital millennium stuff supersedes that link.
It doesn't matter much what rights you have, so long as the proprietor reserves the rights to prevent you from having them. That is the point of the tivoization clause from GPLv3 wrt. v2. So free can for the purpose of being useful, be thwarted too.
It gives you more tools, but may turn out to be a crucial difference. Nobody cares what rights you have foremost, they care about what rights they have first. This could not be more apparent in the hardware world, because here consumers do not posses the means to copy, and the cost of manufacture is still what prevents it from being perfectly copy-able. There is however a framework on the protection of ability, legally speaking.
Again, hardware does not have the same copyright law governing it. You need to disclose its method of operation, into the open, to be able to have a legal protection that applies to distribution.
This is what a patent is.
Edit: I don't know enough about patent law to understand what happens when you just publish stuff. It seems to be the tangent that upholds the faith in some of these open hardware licenses. And possibly why a non-commercial clause is void. If true, this would still not be open necessitating free, it would just be the nature of copyright law applied to hardware.
Maybe it is the clause of not suing the whole on patent grounds if one finds use in any of the open hardware works published under the license that has this provision, that makes it work. The concept is not unfamiliar, and this turns it on its head.
Holding a patent gives protection, that much seems clear. Unless you upset someone with a bigger portfolio, of, for the case of argument, software patents, as those are a thing in the US, where one may want to distribute, a thing which is both hardware, and computer software.
If you can "just do what you want", it is certainly also every means of ripping off the idea, and the work.
Minus maybe "prior art" in patent law, and those by-default provisions for copyright.
I think (?) we can say that the idea of time-based public domain coincides with countries that have some form of copyright protection. The idea is some form of fairness, and advancement of culture.
Having no copyright, and no patent law, would upen this up for debate, but that country is not Germany.
Free and open not mean the same thing in this sense, if you just publish stuff, it is not fully proprietary anywhere. (?) Emphasis on fully here.
A free open license, is in the case of software, as per the Bernstein link, a free license, it just wastes a word. FOSS to me just seems to qualify the open source. And one would think that to be as gratis, seeing as OS would otherwise be redundant.
An open license does not distinguish itself from being open, for the user. That is a technicality that doesn't make any sense in this context. It is for the end user and ecosystem not a distinction upon open that matters, but what free brings.
The benefit to society, is being able to share modified versions. You similarly don't get to compile anything just because it is open. Similarly, this personal use provision, exists, as per the link, for software. And the digital millennium stuff supersedes that link.
It doesn't matter much what rights you have, so long as the proprietor reserves the rights to prevent you from having them. That is the point of the tivoization clause from GPLv3 wrt. v2. So free can for the purpose of being useful, be thwarted too.
It gives you more tools, but may turn out to be a crucial difference. Nobody cares what rights you have foremost, they care about what rights they have first. This could not be more apparent in the hardware world, because here consumers do not posses the means to copy, and the cost of manufacture is still what prevents it from being perfectly copy-able. There is however a framework on the protection of ability, legally speaking.
Again, hardware does not have the same copyright law governing it. You need to disclose its method of operation, into the open, to be able to have a legal protection that applies to distribution.
This is what a patent is.
Edit: I don't know enough about patent law to understand what happens when you just publish stuff. It seems to be the tangent that upholds the faith in some of these open hardware licenses. And possibly why a non-commercial clause is void. If true, this would still not be open necessitating free, it would just be the nature of copyright law applied to hardware.
Maybe it is the clause of not suing the whole on patent grounds if one finds use in any of the open hardware works published under the license that has this provision, that makes it work. The concept is not unfamiliar, and this turns it on its head.
Holding a patent gives protection, that much seems clear. Unless you upset someone with a bigger portfolio, of, for the case of argument, software patents, as those are a thing in the US, where one may want to distribute, a thing which is both hardware, and computer software.
If you can "just do what you want", it is certainly also every means of ripping off the idea, and the work.
Minus maybe "prior art" in patent law, and those by-default provisions for copyright.
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Well, here is the problem with licenses, they are sticky and stay with us forever. And in the long run a mis-selection of a license WILL make problems and collide with valid use cases. We see that now more and more in the FOSS software domain: for instance the collision of Linux kernel (GPLv2) + ZFS (CDDL).
Or Pandora relevant the license selection for Homeworld: while meant to be available, stupid license clauses requiering an account of a service long dead limiting the progress.
License selection is a hard business & shouldn't wiped under the rug as "boring legal stuff, let's chose something as fast as possible and be done with it"
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Letalis Sonus
Advanced Member
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2009
- Messages
- 1,530
The lack of intentional public domain is not about protection. Ownership is a double-edged sword, you don't just get granted rights for your creations, you're also responsible for them. When you put something into public domain, you do not only drop your rights, you also lose the responsibility because the object effectively becomes author-less - which is not acceptable for several jurisdictions for obvious reasons.
Well, copyleft/share-alike was made with this idea in mind. "I give you my stuff but require you to give back".
CC BY-SA, GPLv2/3 etc
On the other hand, if you define rip off as : "I give you my stuff, do what you want, but don't step into my commerical business"
than indeed CC BY-SA-NC is the right selection.
(But again, why is this thread (understandable) going on, even if it annoys some? As this was not defined early enough in the "open" announcement!)
ClockworkCoder
Chaotic Neutral
Threads should be focused. This is not a thread in which to have long discussions about licensing.
Someone please created a dedicated thread, and sit those issues out separately and respect those of us that are not interested at this stage.
In Germany you can give up the ownership rights, while being forced to keep the responsibilities... so it kind of works.
And it is well enough emulated with the CC0 licnese. which works everywhere, analyzed for Germany law.
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Letalis Sonus
Advanced Member
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2009
- Messages
- 1,530
You're not telling me anything new, I already named the WTFPL as a way of doing exactly that. But that's still not public domain, you simply grant everyone the right to do what the fuck they want to with it.
The WTFPL actually being a valid license is kind of a joke in itself, though.
Well, WTPFL or CC0 are from my understanding for the common use cases (?) functional identical to "real PD" .... WP calls them PD equivalent licenses. Good enough for me
I hate threads about licenses, I hate discussing them, I hate licenses. I'm software developer and electrical engineer and business person, not a lawyer. But my life as software developer, esp. as active member of one of the largest free software projects in existence, as electrical engineer, and as business person, is, unfortunately, affected heavily by licenses. So we need to discuss such issues. Maybe not in this thread. Shall we start another one? So that people who don't want to be bothered don't have to follow it?
fusion_power
Advanced Member
+1
99% here will never even get in touch with any license stuff, why people are so mad about that things?
The sad truth is this stuff is ridiculous import, not only for developers but also or even more for the end-users. It should not (e.g. by fixing our broken IP/copyright system).... but as matter of fact, it is.
If we don't care, corporations and other big entities will care (see this John Deere example which affects anyone as this targets the end-users) and utilize the possibilities in the most harmful way for society and common folks. So you should be glad that some of your community's fellows trying to understand this dry crap and trying to prevent the most sever mistakes with their feedback.
TLDR: Yes this is boring crap, but sadly of uttermost importance, for anyone. Be glad that some care for it and you don't have to.
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comradekingu
Glowing ember
It is at least the other way around. Planned obsolescence doesn't work as well when you give away clues.
At least over 1% know more about electronics to improve their stuff, given the schematics to do so.
It is not the same what kind of stuff you support.
I don't know what kind of planet you live on where you haven't been into contact with closed source software that sucks. I laude the idea though.
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Shaddim, if you actually read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Adoption you would see you cited someone doing statistical anaysis without disclosing their methods.
GPL software is on the rise, not on the decline. Someone licensing their javascript two-liner as MIT, does not mean old and new projects stay shy of GPL.
Needless to say commercial GPL games exist.
The linux kernel is GPLv2 only because 1. linus wants it that way. 2. He, nor anyone else are really in the power to do anything about it. You would need consent out of every contributor for a change.
There is no link between sharing source and not being commercial. You will find what you linked to here doing a multitude of things. GPL is by far the most popular on that list btw.Here is a fresh grab off F-droid:
The user protections in GPLv3 and AGPLv3 work just fine.
In 1999 things were the same, apart from spying firmware not being a thing. I think pentium 2 processors had serial numbers that were reported, but nothing more, and that changed to voluntary status anyhow. You quoted both me and RMS into a context it does not belong. Read either one and you will see that.
Edit: Found statistics for software on f-droid https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/stats/licenses.txt
At least over 1% know more about electronics to improve their stuff, given the schematics to do so.
It is not the same what kind of stuff you support.
I don't know what kind of planet you live on where you haven't been into contact with closed source software that sucks. I laude the idea though.
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Shaddim, if you actually read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Adoption you would see you cited someone doing statistical anaysis without disclosing their methods.
GPL software is on the rise, not on the decline. Someone licensing their javascript two-liner as MIT, does not mean old and new projects stay shy of GPL.
Needless to say commercial GPL games exist.
The linux kernel is GPLv2 only because 1. linus wants it that way. 2. He, nor anyone else are really in the power to do anything about it. You would need consent out of every contributor for a change.
There is no link between sharing source and not being commercial. You will find what you linked to here doing a multitude of things. GPL is by far the most popular on that list btw.Here is a fresh grab off F-droid:
The user protections in GPLv3 and AGPLv3 work just fine.
In 1999 things were the same, apart from spying firmware not being a thing. I think pentium 2 processors had serial numbers that were reported, but nothing more, and that changed to voluntary status anyhow. You quoted both me and RMS into a context it does not belong. Read either one and you will see that.
Edit: Found statistics for software on f-droid https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/stats/licenses.txt
- GPLv3 808
- Apache2 470
- GPLv3+ 250
- MIT 235
- GPLv2 121
- GPLv2+ 85
- NewBSD 37
- GPL 25
- AGPLv3 18
- MPL2 17
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WizardStan
Mega GP Mania
- Joined
- May 24, 2008
- Messages
- 16,731
No they don't. The original copyright holder can, at any time, re-release their work under a completely different license. The original work still exists and is bound by the same license, but the "new" work (even if it is effectively identical) gets a new license. That's why it's strictly superior (from a literal copyright perspective) to start with a restrictive license and open it up over time: you can grant new rights by re-releasing with a different license, but taking away rights is virtually impossible since someone can just grab the original with its old license.
Yes, which is another form of saying "once released under a license it stays so forever", or do I miss something?
Yes, and we can release again under different license terms, but this doesn't reduce the infinity of the original release.
WizardStan
Mega GP Mania
- Joined
- May 24, 2008
- Messages
- 16,731
True, the original keeps the same license, but you aren't "stuck": just use the re-release with the different license.
It seemed to me that you were arguing that it is important to get the license perfect the first time because otherwise you'd be locked into a bad license from the start, hence why this discussion was important. That's entirely untrue: if ED starts with something restrictive it is trivial to move to something less restrictive in the future, so there's no need to argue about licensing here and now, it can (and will) happen elsewhere at a later time.
If that wasn't what you were saying then I apologize for misunderstanding and ask for clarification.
It seemed to me that you were arguing that it is important to get the license perfect the first time because otherwise you'd be locked into a bad license from the start, hence why this discussion was important. That's entirely untrue: if ED starts with something restrictive it is trivial to move to something less restrictive in the future, so there's no need to argue about licensing here and now, it can (and will) happen elsewhere at a later time.
If that wasn't what you were saying then I apologize for misunderstanding and ask for clarification.
ahh... Now I see your point. Yes, licensing is fixable (as long as there is someone who can and cares) by re-releasing under a better license.
But here lies some kind of risk: developers might be tempted to shift the final release in the future again and again... until it is to late for multiple reasons.
Therefore I think an automatism is a good idea, like: "this stuff is currently NC/proprietary but in 6 years it is automatically CC BY-SA" -> timebomb license. Clarity and no risk that something might get wrong in the future.
And specifically about the current situation: I would be very fine with a clear statement of ED that the stuff will be released in the forseeable future under a less restrictive license, FOSS/WP compatible license.
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comradekingu
Glowing ember
WizStan: The same can be done with CLAs. I dont understand why users must have less rights, because the original author wants control over the project licensing course
They don't "want", they have already by the current copyright. Licensing is about giving up somewhat of their complete and exclusive control.
Copyright was invented to protect creative authors from instant theft while their investment has not yet paid out. A situation which applies here....
On the other side is the interest of the society (or in this case the "community") that a work does not get lost or becomes unavailable or unusable or unextendable in the long run. There are licenses available which achieve proper balance between the interests, with also CC BY-NC-SA somewhere inbetween.
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Kippykip
BFG 9000
You bois should learn to not read the terms and conditions when installing programs, it's great.
