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Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?Posted Mar 21, 2011 4:40 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559)Parent article: Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?
i'm not entirely sure why the open source community continues to rally to google's defense. google has excelled at deftly maneuvering around license and copyright issues to create something which on its own, arguably does not satisfy the open source ideals from which the original works were derived.
all of these cases will continue to pile up because there is a grey area here that lawyers will exploit for years to come. had google just made sure their codebase was BSD-licensed and their programming language wasn't being sold to oracle, they'd be in the clear...like apple is today and will continue to be. sorry but the apple lawyers got this one right.
these cases won't kill android, but there's a strong possibility that google will have to devote energy walking a tightrope with regards to licensing instead of builing great code.
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Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line? Posted Mar 21, 2011 5:59 UTC (Mon) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link] i'm not entirely sure why the open source community continues to rally to google's defense I wouldn't say that it's "the open source community". In many discussions taking place on the Internet and in real life, there are voices like yours that criticize Google for what they're doing. There are also a number of apologists, but they aren't "the open source community". That said, I agree with you it's strange that anyone from that community should rush to Google's aid at all. It calls into question whether certain people are committed to ideals and principles, or more inclined to take the "he's a [self-censored] but he's our [self-censored]" approach common in foreign policy (but not really in a values-based community). Those who view themselves as advocates not only of open source but of free software (hey, @bkuhn) should certainly not have the attitude that software freedom only matters when someone actually sues... I'm now going to do a post on what this approach here means with a view to proprietary loadable kernel modules, which is an example of the wide-ranging implications it might have if one supported Google's reprocessing and repurposing of raw kernel headers.
Proprietary loadable kernel modules -- did a post but it doesn't appear here Posted Mar 21, 2011 6:41 UTC (Mon) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link] I just posted a comment on proprietary loadable kernel modules and it is actually online at http://lwn.net/Articles/434491/, but it doesn't seem to appear on the "Has Bionic stepped..." page. Maybe that's due to update cycles (hopefully not a bug in the forum software).
Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line? Posted Mar 21, 2011 16:16 UTC (Mon) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
I don't quite agree. In many cases google is simply weakening copyright, that is always welcome in my book. Naturally by weakening copyright, they weaken copyleft too. Do not forget that without copyright, copyleft would be mostly unneeded. I realize that fighting patents and tivoization with the GPL3 would no longer be possible at all, but I doubt the GPL3 has been very effective at that anyway. Those 2 issues are likely better off fought by some other means, hopefully one as clever and effective as the GPL2 will be found eventually.
Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line? Posted Mar 23, 2011 3:56 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
??
without copyright there would be no copyleft
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