A view from the "other side"

Posted Apr 13, 2017 23:34 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: A view from the "other side" by farnz
Parent article: Defending copyleft

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.