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Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet)
ZDNet's Paul Murphy is trying to convince us that the GPL is a problem.
"The GPL works, and works well, to empower innovation - but also
represents a peaceful implementation of Karl Marx's famous dictum that the
state should take from each individual according to the individual's
abilities, and give to each individual according to that individual's
needs. Indeed the GPL doesn't different in principle (although it's
certainly dramatically different in practice!) from the communist Chinese
policy of state confiscation of intellectual property for state
use." It seems he prefers the CDDL.
(Log in to post comments)
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 14:57 UTC (Wed) by mcm (guest, #31917) [Link] This article is the low-point of journalism.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 15:39 UTC (Wed) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link] Since it's posted on their "ZDNet Blogs" site I'm assuming that it's not supposed to be a "real" article and isn't held to the same editorial standard.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 17, 2005 21:11 UTC (Mon) by alext (guest, #7589) [Link] Besides"take from each individual according to the individual's abilities, and give to each individual according to that individual's needs" is wrong. In the case of Free Software development it is a case of taking according to the contributors ability * time and giving to everyone equally. Each person gets the same rights over the particular item (plus any rights due to and over their specific contribution).
If my need concerning the particular tool is greater than yours I have to add the features myself or find someone willing to do the adding for me. Which might involve paying them.
So some serious flaws as usual in the Marx invocation.
Interestingly a recent BBC poll for the greatest philosopher was won by Marx. So the tendency of people to utter the name intending others to quake fearing the loss of their jobs and consumer goods might be a failing gambit.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet)
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 7, 2005 17:58 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link] I don't know about ZDnet in general but I have to say that I've been very impressed with Ingrid Marson at Zdnet UK, who did an excellent job of covering the software patent debate in Europe. So ZDNet is certainly not exclusively rubbish.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 15:13 UTC (Wed) by alspnost (subscriber, #2763) [Link] ...and yet, I could have sworn that Paul Murphy has written some good stuff in the past. Am I hallucinating?
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 6, 2005 3:51 UTC (Thu) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link] I think you might be hallucinating, from what I can see. The other recent articles feel very similar. "GPL impedes", Prescription for Linux Success(TM), book review, apple news, "Sun is being overlooked!", "Linux users are idiots who administer via root logins over Windows telnet," "The Linux-nature is holding Linux back," "Sun Ray networks beats Windows or Linux", ... . He's a proprietary UN*X geek, raised that way. He doesn't think community.
Here, his inevitable point of view fails to see the GPL as the same class of object as MS-EULA, and fails to see Linux as the same class of object as Windows. Thus, the disparities are compared from one side, and not the other, or he wouldn't say things like:
- "So what's a smart developer to do? for the risk averse the answer is obvious: Microsoft is the low risk choice, Linux the high risk choice - so what if Linux works better? you don't get sued going Microsoft."
No-one Ever Got Sued For Using Windows. Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM. How nice. How ignorant of fact, but how nice. Notice how nobody ever says the practically tautological "Nobody ever got sued for rigidly obeying license terms," and he cannot imagine comparing them by the benefits granted to both sides by the respective licenses.
- "In other words, Joe developer can adopt openSolaris and the CDDL ( Common Development Distribution License) without spending a nickel on legal fees and be reasonably confident that not doing something criminal (or just criminally stupid) will suffice to protect himself from legal action."
Joe developer can adopt *practically any license*, and be reasonably confident that *not doing something criminal* will suffice to protect him from legal action, as violating any license's terms-of-contract is a criminal act. He needs to consider which license, MS-EULA, CDDL, ..., or GPL grants the most non-criminalizing aspects to himself and his users, and he needs to be comfortable with the balance. If Joe wants no power over the software he uses, he can choose Microsoft -- for use. He can no more develop from MS code than he can from GPL code without considering the usage allowed by the respective licenses. As an independent entity, Joe *can actually use* GPL code, and not burden his users by simply giving them the same freedoms he enjoys.
Moreover, he implies that CDDL gives more freedom and less use-liability than GPL. I don't know where he gets that. Maybe *he's* hallucinating. Anybody else know of an indemnification advantage to CDDL that is missing in GPL?
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 15:23 UTC (Wed) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link] People really should stop listening to places like ZDNet.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 15:35 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Ahh, nothing like the Specter of the Communist Boogieman (tm) to start a Wednesday morning...
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 17:45 UTC (Wed) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link] <off-topic>Funny thing is, Marx didn't make this up, but got it from the Bible! (Acts 11:29, Acts 2:45.) A tidbit which U.S. conservatives in particular seem eager to overlook.</off-topic>
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 21:28 UTC (Wed) by JamesErik (subscriber, #17417) [Link] I'm in the U.S. and consider myself conservative on many points. I was, in fact, immediately familiar with the second passage you cite. The fact that the small-scale communal environment in the early church failed doesn't make such an arrangement any less ideal (dare I say idyllic), but it clearly points to the impracticality of such an approach for a whole society, which is also borne out by the fall of communism in eastern Europe. If U.S. conservatives overlook Marx's references, it's not because acknowledging them would undermine their position, but rather that those references **and the history surrounding them** don't speak nearly as powerfully as gleeful Berliners perched atop a crumbling wall.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 6, 2005 7:04 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] Something else which Americans seem to eager to gloss over ...
It was NOT COMMUNISM that failed in Europe. It was Stalinism.
As a whole, Europe is pretty socialist, and pretty successful. While I don't know too much about Communism as preached, it's probably a lot closer to Socialism than it is to Stalinism.
Oh - and the other thing Americans like to forget - small-town America is pretty socialist, too - what else is a barn-raising?
Cheers,
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 6, 2005 8:42 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Actually, end-stage no-state Marxism is a long way from any political system currently in use, and anything which has ever been stable for more than a few months.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 7, 2005 1:44 UTC (Fri) by gilb (subscriber, #11728) [Link] Barn raising isn't socialist, it is a voluntary activity. Socialism is forced, you can't opt out. The net result is that it dissuades people from being successful because they aren't rewarded for it.
Calling Europe successful is a bit of a stretch. It isn't a failure, but the double digit unemployment found in Europe would be considered a crisis in the US. Likewise, the economic growth is less than the US. It may not be due to Socialism, but you can hardly use the EC as a shining example of economic prosperity and growth.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 9, 2005 23:01 UTC (Sun) by danielos (guest, #6053) [Link] hi gilb, you surely are from US, and this kind of talk are the most irritant, and most typical from US Citizen about Europe.
Here, in Europe (in the third world), people do not die down in the street, if someone is hill he is medically assisted. Unemployed are assisted on finding a work. There is a lower bound for monthly fee too.
And Europe is not growing as USA or Cina just because here we respect humans being .. or at least I hope we do it. Europeans are an example of the last socialist countries which try to stay with people. (I am not socialist, I use socialist here as a non-U.S.-Person-thought).
This evening for dinner I heat pizza and drink a beer. Tomorrow I will not work because I am not rewarded for it.
You are forced to write stupid sentence with your keyboard, you can't opt out, it is in your nature.
(never heard something like "social culture" there in the far America?)
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 7, 2005 15:54 UTC (Fri) by JamesErik (subscriber, #17417) [Link] It seems reasonable to me to characterize Stalinism philosophically as a subset of communism. When you look at 20th century **implementations** of communism, you'd be hard pressed to find non-Stallinist varieties, I believe.
I can't speak to Europe, not having lived there, but I did have the good fortune to live in Chile for a while in the 90s, which has many socialist characteristics such as state-owned industries (esp. mining, copper being their largest export), and state-run medical services. At the same time, it has vibrant free-market dynamics in very many sectors. Yes, taxes might be viewed as high (I know a higher percentage of my paycheck went towards taxes than would have in the US at the time), but neither was the state seizing private assets and forcibly redistributing wealth (tax-is-weath-distribution arguments aside for the moment) as is characterized by communism.
So, I don't think of socialism as evil in the same was as I view communism. Also, as another posted out, a barn-raising is completely a voluntary event, which is actually much more similar to the early church descibed in Acts 2, cited by hazelsct, than it is to socialism as a government-imposed policy.
In summary, I don't think you're being very objective, and likely not very informed, when you assert "Americans seem eager to gloss over" something or that "Americans like to forget" something. I may be wrong, but I doubt you've sampled a significantly large group of Americans to credibly make that claim, although you can certainly find individuls in the U.S. or elsehere who do "gloss over" or "forget" whatever you're concerned about.
Something else which Elbonians seem eager to gloss over is that tomatoes are NOT VEGETABLES. They're fruit. I hear about those darn Elbonians all the time on the news.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 15:36 UTC (Wed) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] What'a kindergarden.
A license is by its definition a barrier. Any license.
It works like front door in your house: you let in only who you like.
Bold speak of patents is just non-sense. Legal field of patents is known, studied and has amny precedents. In particula, software patents is minor problem: after all it is specific to single country - USA. Rest of the world is still free of the plague.
It was proved that trademarks are even bigger problem - even is projects want to cooperate. Most publicized is Mozilla vs. Debian conflict. Thou I have witnessed several others: people were dropping trade marks just to be able to merge/fork projects. And again, the problem with trademarks is mainly USA specific: USA is the only country i know, where you can loose *all* rights to trademark enforcement, once you let *single* trademark misuse case to slip. And in US almost any use of (tm) outside of company products is misuse. Go figure.
As to the main point of what i'm trying to say: do simply add zdnet to ignore list. I did it long time ago - mainly due to exceptional peices of David Berlind. Seems like Murphy character is in no way better. Same level of journalism, one-sided thinking and boring writing style.
To conclude with something good. TheRegister's stuff is magnitude better. They are still people and people use to take sides - but they always give a chance to other side to respond - and normal people like i am to comment - what makes their stuff even more interesting reading. ElReg doesn't ignore stuff it doesn't understand. http://www.theregister.co.uk/ - Enjoy! P.S. I'm in no way affiliated with ElReg - just enjoy reading it last 6 years.
Copyright is the restriction, license is the freedom Posted Oct 6, 2005 21:03 UTC (Thu) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link] > A license is by its definition a barrier. Any license.
No. Copyright is a barrier; it artificially restricts what anyone other than the copyright holder can do.
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly to a particular entity, allowing that entity sole discretion over a set of actions. The law, in this case, provides a barrier that otherwise would not naturally exist.
The copyright holder, if they choose, can grant license to anyone else, on whatever terms they choose, to perform the actions covered by their copyright monopoly. They are unable to introduce new restrictions though; they have only the power to grant new freedom to others.
Thus, the copyright as given to a holder is the barrier. The license is the exact opposite: it relaxes the barrier, under terms chosen by the copyright holder.
> It works like front door in your house: you let in only who you like.
Exactly; the only thing a license can do is *let people in*. The copyright is the barrier; the license is a lessening of the barrier. In your analogy, copyright is the solid door; the license is the gap allowing people in.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 16:29 UTC (Wed) by troberto (subscriber, #7240) [Link] By definition, he is welcome to use any license he wishes for what HE writes.No problem.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 16:41 UTC (Wed) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] Since the GPL is the most common license these days, I'd say that it is GPL-incompatible licenses that is a barrier to developers, not the GPL.
As Bugs would say: "What an ultramaroon!" Posted Oct 5, 2005 16:53 UTC (Wed) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link] Huh. The GPL == Communism canard again. Isn't this like a second form of Godwin's Law?
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 18:12 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link] It's obvious that he's right. I mean, just look at the facts. BSD, which has a much more liberal, supposedly-business-friendly license is an overwhelming success compared to Linux. Right? _Right?_ :)
(Not to disparage BSD, which is an excellent system that I use and love, but still...)
Note: I didn't read the article because I don't like to help trolls earn advertising dollars.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 19:36 UTC (Wed) by pjs (guest, #10927) [Link] One could easily argue that BSD "lost" and Linux "won" the market due to... drum roll please... a looming spectre of legal complications. Had the lawsuit between AT&T/USL and Berkeley not dragged on and on for years, it's quite possible we'd all be using BSD now rather than Linux.
But it is true that BSD-like licenses promote "participation" from corporations by forking to add proprietary code which rarely (if ever) gets contributed back to the community. Good if you want to gift code to the world, but not so great for a long-term viable free software project.
Murphy's arguement, FUD aside, consists of little more than Solaris. Apparantly the "openSolaris community is exploding". Maybe I missed it?
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 20:42 UTC (Wed) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link] One could easily argue that BSD "lost" and Linux "won" the market due to... drum roll please... a looming spectre of legal complications. Had the lawsuit between AT&T/USL and Berkeley not dragged on and on for years, it's quite possible we'd all be using BSD now rather than Linux.That's a common argument, but it only holds up until about 1994 when the suit was settled and Unix was sold to Novell. At the time, both Free/NetBSD and Linux were essentially hobbyist systems with little integration, with BSDI selling a real commercial OS that was, by all accounts, a truly excellent Unix. Linux at the time clearly lagged BSD (even the free variants) in both checklist features and guru mindshare, yet by 2000 or so had easily "won" the war for market share and features set. It can be argued this it was in fact BSD's lack of a copyleft license that caused this. The first class work being done at BSDI was firewalled off into a commercial product and ultimately forgotten, whereas Red Hat et. al. were forced into a business model where they had to share with the community. So commercial work done by developers on Red Hat's payroll fed back into the software shipped by SuSE, who payed their own developers to work on the features they wanted, and everything snowballed from there. BSDI had a handful of great developers, but got crushed by the aggregate development work done by the Linux vendors.
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 22:55 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Apparantly the "openSolaris community is exploding". Maybe I missed it?Wikipedia counts more than 8500 members, whence it does not say; let us suppose it is official data. So yes, it is exploding: from nothing to 8500 members in a few months. Yet a "member" is just someone who has gone to a web page and entered some data into a form. Is it relevant that there are 8500? Who knows. This battle for users is so blatant that it is not funny. And I think it is a battle lost from the start. Everyone knows what it is competing against, and the results are just as predictable; Solaris insiders and current users will love it, while outsiders will just look at it and yawn. What does it offer that we do not already have elsewhere, in a more convenient form? What about the missing binary-only bits? What about community governance, instead of a Sun employee conclave? Questions we don't have to worry about with other free software. In short, looks like another OpenDarwin to me. Thrilling.
I have no problems with the competition Posted Oct 6, 2005 4:52 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Let's face it, there isn't going to be much difference between running Gnome or LAMP on top of Solaris, from running Gnome or LAMP on top of Linux; same for rendering CGI for movies or doing place and route for ASICs. The kernel doesn't matter that much, provided that both kernels support the devices you want to use. There are certainly loads consisting of high disk I/O volumes and tons of multithreading where the kernel gurus can brag about configuration X being twice as fast as configuration Y, but most of the applications I'm interested in are compute-bound, so the difference the kernel makes is essentially zero, and for many server apps the network pipe saturates long before your Linux or Solaris box does.The problem, though, is that Linux got there first, so there isn't going to be a compelling reason to switch to Solaris, unless Solaris can find specialized loads for which it is clearly superior.
On drugs or what? Posted Oct 5, 2005 20:35 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] > Indeed the GPL doesn't different in principle (although it's certainly dramatically different in practice!) from the communist Chinese policy of state confiscation of intellectual property for state use.
Whoa! So, the fact that I have _chosen_ the GPL as a licence for some of my code is in principle equivalent to _confiscation_? I simply fail to see how these two (a voluntary act and a forced act) can have anything in common. But, hey, if PM says is, it must be true. Right? :-)
> Combine the CDDL with the fact that Solaris is the best OS around
Sorry, Solaris isn't the best OS around. That would be Windows. Seriously, I read that on Microsoft's web site ;-)
OK, OK, I give in - Solaris is the best OS around. What a childish statement - I can't believe PM actually wrote that.
I just don't get this whole thing with the CDDL and legal protection. So, if I rip out some code from my employer, whack it into the CDDL licensed code (e.g. OpenSolaris), I'm legally protected from copyright infringement? Wonderful! Linus, please relicense Linux today :-)
Newspeak Posted Oct 5, 2005 21:16 UTC (Wed) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link] The phrase "state confiscation of intellectual property" is the demented end-product of the "intellectual property" metaphor. What he calls confiscation is just the state declining to grant a monopoly.
Newspeak Posted Oct 5, 2005 22:17 UTC (Wed) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] Not to mention that the person has no right to a monopoly of someone else's work under copyright law. I know I'm preaching to the choir but people put the GPL on their work voluntarily and people who incorporate those works into their own do so voluntarily. What would the results be with a more standard corporate software license rather than the GPL? Obviously it wouldn't be pretty. Would he also call that "state confiscation"?
Linux Licensing: barriers to developers (ZDNet) Posted Oct 5, 2005 23:26 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link] I gave Paul a call yesterday to see where he's coming from. Paul would like OpenSolaris to be exploding with success. It's not. He really likes Solaris very much. He even has some technical reasons to like it, but they don't matter to most people and Linux will have what he wants soon enough. He thinks the CDDL is going to protect developers from patents. It's not. About the best we can do is not give him more attention until he's off this topic.<p><i>Bruce</i>
Polite discussion Posted Oct 6, 2005 15:49 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] We have all seen a number of people going around in fora singing the excellences of the CDDL above the GPL. It is not very reasonable to assume that they are all affiliated to Sun or Microsoft. I wonder what they want.Probably they are just tentatively exploring the "virality" of the GPL. They are new to the game, they have read some anti-GPL stances and are trying them on their own; I know this happens because I was there once. I think what Bruce just did is optimal: just point out politely where they are wrong, and let them figure it out. They are not trolls, just trying to challenge accepted beliefs -- that in this case happen to be true.
Polite discussion Posted Oct 13, 2005 16:22 UTC (Thu) by robilad (subscriber, #27163) [Link] Domain specific variations on the LGPL (i.e. weak copyleft) allow people controlling them to control their interpretation. I guess that's the main reason for their existance, to avoid having someone else authoritatively interpret one's own license terms. Their agenda may differ from $BIGCORP's.
The end result are many variations on the LGPL, starting from NPL, to whatever the MPL-derviative-du-jour in the specific domain is.
It's not that exciting to watch, after one's seen a couple of them. It usually ends up with the new, improved, cheered license being vaguely relevant for the domain the $BIGCORP can influence, and irrelevant for the rest of the world. After a while, $BIGCORP usually figures out that not being GPL-compatible is not a real benefit, and fixes that, removing a barrier for adoption of their code outside of the sphere of their influence. If they care at all about that. :)
cheers,
No one ever seems to capsulize the GPL correctly Posted Oct 8, 2005 16:44 UTC (Sat) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link] Or, more accurately, the reasons why you aren't really losing when working with GPL software.And it's this: what do you lose? Well, other people can take advantage of the labor you've invested in creating whatever derivative products they might come up with from whatever application you create using GPL'd code, libraries, or what-have-you. But what do you gain? Well, you didn't have to write all that other code you're depending on, and, oftentimes, you don't have to maintain it much either. Clearly that lack-of-investment of development labor has a monetary cost. But that's the comparison no one ever seems to make both sides of. There *is* another cost, though, and it's hidden, and it can be a much larger impediment to using GPL'd OPC. I see this a lot lately, as I have a tendency to implement fairly sizeable software systems (like WebGUI and RT) for my clients... and I don't see it discussed much: Componentized software can push someone over the edge into Dependency Hell. That might be the development team, or it might be you. My impression is that the development and release management tools currently available don't do nearly as much to relieve the burden as they might. Notable examples are perl's CPAN and PHP's PEAR networks, which appear (unlike the Linux library management system) only to allow you to have the *most recent* version of a module installed at one time. And, if you're *exceedingly* unlucky, you might find yourself in the situation I've narrowly avoided a couple of times:
While it's all well and good for a developer to say "that's not my problem", it would certainly be a lot nicer if developers had a standardized way to accept reports of what versions of the modules they depend on actually *work*, and make their installation scripts more flexible. "This program expects v1.6 of module Q, but has been reported to work with v1.5-1.9." If you could *have* multiple versions of a module installed, it wouldn't really matter, but the range-of-acceptance solution would certainly smooth the way until that time comes. This is fairly common: lots of packages depend on perl's Mason or PEAR's DB, and upgrades in those two packages have recently broken major apps like RT and Seagull. I guess, in the end, it all really comes down to "how much expertise is it reasonable to expect from software installers?" Certainly, Linux servers aren't Windows workstations. But have *you* ever installed a big componentized app on a busy server? I dunno; maybe it's just me.
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