Naughton didn't do enough research to justify his conclusions. [LWN.net]

Naughton didn't do enough research to justify his conclusions.

Posted Mar 21, 2011 14:52 UTC (Mon) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048)
In reply to: Naughton didn't do enough research to justify his conclusions. by vonbrand
Parent article: Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

Re 1) I'm not complaining -- but instead advocating -- glibc in this context. Since glibc has a genesis that is fundamentally different from that of Bionic, you can't infer anything from the fact that glibc is legally safe according to industry understanding. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Bionic used glibc, or a similar library derived from the sanitized headers.

It seems @vonbrand that you don't fully understand the genesis of the sanitized headers, so please educate yourself before you confuse people here. Again, I'm all for glibc, but Bionic is a very different animal.

Re 2) What Linus Torvalds and RMS said is not related to Bionic and doesn't answer any of the legal questions at issue here.

Re 3.1) You conflate Google's objective with the legality of its chosen means in a way that distorts what I said. The objective clearly was to work around, or "circumvent", the GPL. TheFreeDictionary defines "to circumvent" in this context as "to go around; bypass; avoid or get around by artful maneuvering." So it can be legal or illegal. In that nonjudgmental sense, there's no doubt Google sought to circumvent the GPL, and the use of a script to cut out parts of approximately 750 header files to declare the remainder (which is actually the essence of those files) non-copyrightable is at least "artful".

Re 3.2) Your bet just shows that you're unlike the decision makers at commercial software companies (or hardware and other companies that build software for commercial purposes). His bet is meaningless -- and so is your support of it -- because real decision makers will take a different perspective and Google will only convince them by actually delivering a fix, not by saying it's easy to deliver one if and when needed.

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Naughton didn't do enough research to justify his conclusions.

Posted Mar 21, 2011 16:35 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Re 1: Google doesn't want glibc, they wrote their own. Perfectly allowed. There never has been a requirement to use glibc (Yes, I was around when it was adopted). If they start with the headers sprinkled with holy penguin pee by doing "make install_headers" or the raw ones is something easy to fix, and probably not enough of a difference to do any harm.

Re 2: Linus and RMS are talking explicitly about this exact point in the emails I link. Their intent surely means something here... if somebody came out of the woods and claimed their lines in *.h were meant only for use in GPLed code, the above, unambiguous, statements to the contrary (which as a contributor to the kernel everybody is aware of) would surely get them into big trouble.

Re 3.1: OK, if it is called "circumvent the GPL" or not isn't the point. The point is that what they are doing is exactly in line with what the copyright holders intended (and stated very explicitly). If something is being done "artfully" (skillfully, clever) or plain bluntly is besides the point here.

Re 3.2: My bet is mine, and mine only. Yes, extremely paranoid decision makers might shy away because of this brouhaha, but I daresay they won't take decisions for long if they insist in such views... there are certainly much more tangible risks in all sort of routine activities.

Naughton didn't do enough research to justify his conclusions.

Posted Mar 24, 2011 5:27 UTC (Thu) by jtc (subscriber, #6246) [Link]

"Re 2: Linus and RMS are talking explicitly about this exact point in the emails I link. Their intent surely means something here... if somebody came out of the woods and claimed their lines in *.h were meant only for use in GPLed code, the above, unambiguous, statements to the contrary (which as a contributor to the kernel everybody is aware of) would surely get them into big trouble."

In other words, this quote, above, is 100% incorrect:

"Re 2) What Linus Torvalds and RMS said is not related to Bionic and doesn't answer any of the legal questions at issue here."