Quote:Original post by wendigo23 As a spinoff of this comment... can't one release only a binary distribution of a lib and have it be GPL? GPL doesn't imply open-source does it (for the licensor)?
How can a binary-only product be open source?
As for the retarded debate over the difference between the GPL's effect and its "stated goal," realize that the GPL is born of a socialist philosophy and is more of a political argument/document rather than a technical one. Its genuine purpose is to stand in direct opposition to proprietary software development, not to protect philanthropic code. It has its place, but it is likely to be marginalized as the larger world and market embrace the notion of open source as part of the exclusivity lifecycle and public knowledge store: we need a more flexible and proprietary-friendly license to be "the face of open source."
Imagine a future in which every proprietary codebase reverts to the public domain to serve as the basis for the next iteration of innovations, with the caveat that attribution remains required and the "derivative innovator" receives exclusivity protection akin to current patents. This would be a society in which proprietary and philanthropic software development are integrated complements in the software ecosystem, where commercial incentive drives innovation and open source idealism provides the successive refinements and maintenance for the software that serves as foundational to our very society, at once providing access to powerful code to those unlikely geniuses as well as effectively auditing the code that handles our personal information and social infrastructure.
Quote:Original post by wendigo23 As a spinoff of this comment... can't one release only a binary distribution of a lib and have it be GPL? GPL doesn't imply open-source does it (for the licensor)?
How can a binary-only product be open source?
That didn't answer my question. My question is: does GPL imply open source?
Quote:Original post by wendigo23 As a spinoff of this comment... can't one release only a binary distribution of a lib and have it be GPL? GPL doesn't imply open-source does it (for the licensor)?
How can a binary-only product be open source?
That didn't answer my question. My question is: does GPL imply open source?
Quote:Original post by wendigo23 As a spinoff of this comment... can't one release only a binary distribution of a lib and have it be GPL? GPL doesn't imply open-source does it (for the licensor)?
How can a binary-only product be open source?
That didn't answer my question. My question is: does GPL imply open source?
You're not very smart, are you?
Oh, come on now, Oluseyi. You don't need to be so condescending. Obviously GPL requires open source on the part of the licensee. I am curious about this on the part of the licensor. Sneftel's link to the GPL doesn't contain the term 'open' a single time.
"There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers."
Let's suppose you, Alice (omg ur a girl), made a program (all your own work) and released it under the GPL. Then you give the binary to Bob. This is fine. Bob says "Hey, Alice, under the GPL, I'm entitled to the source code too!" And you say "Screw off." Bob says "Oh yeah? I'll sue!" And you reply "No you won't. This is a copyright case. Only the copyright holder has standing to sue for copyright infringement. Additionally, as the author, I automatically have full rights to the work, including the ability to give a copy to you." So Bob stomps off in a huff. Later, he decides to give a copy of the binary to Carol (omg another girl). Carol says "Hey Bob, what about the source? This is GPL!" to which Bob replies "Sorry, Alice never gave it to me." Now _you_ can sue _Bob_. After all, he broke the terms of the GPL by not providing Carol the source!
So you see, GPL without source really just becomes a run-of-the-mill closed source license. It wasn't intended to act as this, of course, so there are likely to be all sorts of inadequacies if used for this sort of thing.
(Oh, and although the GPL doesn't contain the word "open", it does contain "Source". Many many times.)
Quote:Original post by wendigo23 Oh, come on now, Oluseyi. You don't need to be so condescending. Obviously GPL requires open source on the part of the licensee. I am curious about this on the part of the licensor. Sneftel's link to the GPL doesn't contain the term 'open' a single time.
But it contains "source code," which makes sense since FSF is the Free Software Foundation (as in, they don't much care for the term "open source"; read a Stallman interview sometime).
GPL has no effect on the licensee until he decides to modify and redistribute the code. GPL can not be applied to a binary, since its terms refer to the modification and redistribution of code. If you write a binary that spawns a GPL binary as part of its solution, your binary is free from GPL restrictions unless you decide to license your code as GPL.
Further, how can GPL possibly require open source on the part of the licensee if the licensor only released an opaque binary?
Personally I don't have a problem with the GPL. In the project I'm working on now, I am forced to release it as GPL, because I used flex and bison to generate the effect parser in it. That doesn't bother me, I chose to use bison and flex, rather than writing my own parser from scratch. No one forced me to do it. Secondly, I wanted to release the source anyway. While I highly doubt anyone will ever look at it, I want to release it, in the hope that one day, someone like me might be able to learn from it in future. I gained a lot of my game programming knowledge from other people that gave information freely, it's only fair that I try to give something back.
No one is forcing companies to build upon GPLed software. They are free to come up with their own solutions, if they don't want to release their source, just as they would have done if GPLed software did not exist.
I think in this day and age of companies using restrictive formats, and software patents to restrict our freedoms, we need something like the open source movement to act as a counter balance. Software development thrives on the free sharing of information.
I think it's fantastic, that I have access to all these free libraries, to do all sorts of different things. Given that I paid absolutely nothing for all these libraries, the restrictions on their use don't really matter much to me.
Companies like Microsoft don't care about anything but money. I don't see how they have the right to complain if someone makes a free alternative. Microsoft really is not going to go out of business because of open source.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't believe that all software should be free. I'm a realist, not an idealist. I just believe that people should have the right to share knowledge and ideas freely, as they are doing through the open source movement.
Quote:Original post by Oxyacetylene No one is forcing companies to build upon GPLed software. They are free to come up with their own solutions, if they don't want to release their source, just as they would have done if GPLed software did not exist.
The problem, as I see it, is license creep. Suppose that RMS, stalwart penguinaut that he is, releases a tiny library to determine the timezone, which is GPLed. I then write a larger library, but I incorporate his functionality because I don't particularly care whether my code is GPLed or not. Now another guy uses my library as part of a larger framework... he doesn't particularly want to GPL his code, but he figures that the work I did on my library would take long enough to replicate, that it wouldn't be worth it. Now yet another guy uses that guy's library as part of a webserver; he also doesn't want to GPL it, but the last guy's library is the only really, really good library out there that does what he wants; to replicate all the functionality could take months. So he has to GPL his webserver. Congratulations, RMS: for the price of a time-zone checker, you just bought yourself a webserver. This isn't a counterbalance: it's a coup.
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I think it's fantastic, that I have access to all these free libraries, to do all sorts of different things. Given that I paid absolutely nothing for all these libraries, the restrictions on their use don't really matter much to me...I just believe that people should have the right to share knowledge and ideas freely, as they are doing through the open source movement.
What you probably don't realize is that open source was around long before the GPL hit its stride. Programmers have historically been quite happy to release and share their source. They just didn't have five pages of licensing requirements looking over their shoulder and forcing them to.
