A view from the "other side"

Posted Apr 13, 2017 11:45 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: A view from the "other side" by rakoenig
Parent article: Defending copyleft

Out of interest, what would the process look like if you wanted to ship a few DLLs from Microsoft Office with your product? In other words, what would the policy make you do if you wanted to take part of Microsoft's proprietary code and ship that as part of a device you sell? Note that I'm not talking about shipping the full Microsoft Office product - just a small subset of the code - so it's not as simple as "buy an Office licence and ship that with the device".

My experience is that it's harder with proprietary code than with FOSS - proprietary companies don't like you splitting their product up like that, and want you to treat it as a giant blob. We've now got a generation of developers who grew up with a mix of pirate software and FOSS available, and who don't expect to have to go through this pain for their personal projects, and who thus don't know how to cope with it when it becomes an issue at work.

A view from the "other side"

Posted Apr 13, 2017 18:14 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (4 responses)

The process for getting approval to ship some code from Microsoft Office is simple: get denied. It doesn't make sense to compare the difficulty of shipping code the owner doesn't want you to ship with the difficulty of shipping code the owner does want you to ship.

You should compare with the difficulty of embedding a proprietary codec implementation, where the owner wants to make arrangements for you to do this. That's generally easier for a business to do than legally using an open source codec because: (1) the legal department can rely on contract law, rather than a license grant, because your company is paying the other company, which creates obligations on the owner; (2) all of your company's obligations under the agreement can be satisfied at the time when you ship the product, not going into the future; (3) your company probably has a process in place to prevent distribution of any third-party code, and no process in place to support distribution of the correct third-party code.

A view from the "other side"

Posted Apr 13, 2017 22:21 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

Firstly, who says that open source software authors want you to ship it in your proprietary gadget?

Secondly, who says that proprietary software that they want you to ship is always that easy? The last proprietary codec I was involved in licensing required, among other things, that when they shipped us a new version, we updated the codec for all devices we had shipped in the last 10 years, and offered the upgrade to our customers at no more than the cost of shipping upgrade media - if the device was not field upgradable to the new codec (and, to be fair, they had to fit within pre-specified CPU, RAM and storage limits to invoke this clause), then we were expected to offer a trade-in program at no more than the cost of shipping the devices to and from our offices.

The rationale was that the licensor wanted to have just one variant of the codec in the field, and for everyone to have the latest version - thus, instead of having to have a formal spec (as MPEG does, for example), they knew that if they saw behaviour that didn't match the current codec, they could simply tell people to upgrade.

A view from the "other side"

Posted Apr 13, 2017 23:34 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (1 responses)

On the first point, from the preamble of the GPL (v2):

"Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things."

They're using a license designed to let you ship their code, so they probably want you to do so. They also want to give your users the ability to change it further. They generally don't want to encourage you to write your own thing that you're not even supposed to give the source of to users, or use a proprietary library instead. A lot of this discussion is about how to maximize the number of people with hardware whose firmware they can make changes to derived from the open source authors' code.

On the second point, I've only used proprietary libraries on occasion and not recently, so you'd have a better idea of what they're requiring these days. That still does sound a little easier than the GPL in terms of tracking: you can send out the latest version of the firmware for each device, and don't need to be able to produce the source of the old firmware that shipped on a device with a particular serial number, which is technically required and sometimes desired ("The manufacturer changed the UI in the latest firmware, and I want the old UI back along with the ability to combine that with security fixes").

A view from the "other side"

Posted Apr 14, 2017 7:01 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

To the first, that's a conditional grant of distribution - taking away the verbosity it's "if you're producing free software, then I want you to be able to distribute my code, too"; what about it makes you think that an author using such language wants you to use it as a component in your proprietary product (even if that's legal)?

You're forgetting the compulsory audits that come with a proprietary codec, too; you must be able to produce full source and build system (and demonstrate that you can rebuild it from scratch) for any version of firmware that you've ever shipped for a long duration (last one I saw said 5 years) after you ship the last unit of a device - and note that this means that if you ship the same device for 3 years, but only ship the original firmware for 3 months before replacing it, you have to be able to reproduce the original firmware for 8 years, even though you've not shipped it for 7.5 years.

So no, I disagree that it's easier than the GPL; for the last fully proprietary codec I dealt with, it's harder in every respect, and the obligations last longer. This differs with commodity implementations of standard codecs (like a H.264 codec), where they're aiming to make it easy as long as you give them money, but in the open source world, that's the equivalent of choosing BSD licensed code instead of GPL licensed code - choose what works for you.

A view from the "other side"

Posted Apr 14, 2017 5:57 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

(2) can be achieved for GPL code too, just ship the source with the binaries.