Toward a "modern" Emacs [LWN.net]

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 26, 2020 20:40 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Toward a "modern" Emacs by NYKevin
Parent article: Toward a "modern" Emacs

> This is a Good Thing. It means the Linux kernel developers are exercising personal agency over their code, rather than blindly allowing people who have contributed nothing to the kernel's development to make decisions on their behalf.
The lack of enforcement means that bad actors have competitive advantage over good actors.

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Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 27, 2020 6:33 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

The problem with the word "bad" is that it's ridiculously subjective. Canonical is, to the best of my knowledge, still shipping ZFS binaries, which may or may not be a GPL violation depending on which group of lawyers you ask (e.g. the SFC and the SFLC disagree), and as far as I can tell, nobody has sued them or expressed any interest in doing so. We may never get a legal resolution to this case, and we may never know whether this is a violation or not.

Is Canonical a "bad actor" within your definition?

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 27, 2020 6:38 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Canonical is not a bad actor. A smart device manufacturer that doesn't supply the kernel source is one of them.

A couple of jobs before, we had a NAS appliance that ran a copy of Linux with special RAID drivers and device management drivers (cooling, temperature sensors). Without any source code provided. This is another example of a bad vendor.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 27, 2020 18:29 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (5 responses)

> The lack of enforcement means that bad actors have competitive advantage over good actors

Just like they have with a permissive license.

I think the tl;dr is "The kernel uses the GPL in a more permissive way". Nowhere near as permissive as a BSD license of course but more permissive than Emacs and other FSF software. I can understand the frustration of the "real" copyleft fans seeing their (world-domination...) tool used in a weaker way than intended.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 27, 2020 19:05 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

> Just like they have with a permissive license.
No, it's not.

GPL has very real compliance costs that a good actor has to pay. This will increase the price of the product and/or make it more complicated (for example, you might have to move your "secret sauce" from kernelspace to userspace). A bad actor can just ignore these costs.

With permissive licenses the compliance cost is usually trivial. So all vendors are on the level playing field.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 10:04 UTC (Mon) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (3 responses)

As the grand parent wrote, the notion of a bad actor very subjective. For a consumer of the device who saved some money because that actor passed some of the savings from not complying to GPL to the consumer that actor is good.

And again, the license alone just sets an upper bounds on efforts to comply. The real required efforts depends on copyright holders. And in case of Linux those effectively decided that it is better to have Linux on more devices even if the collateral is that in a lot cases the device manufactures do not follow GPL.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 16:17 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> As the grand parent wrote, the notion of a bad actor very subjective. For a consumer of the device who saved some money because that actor passed some of the savings from not complying to GPL to the consumer that actor is good.

Good and bad can be subjective but I think you're stretching that a bit too far. I doubt violating software licences for profit is considered "good" in any culture. I'm sure it's "not as bad" in some or can yield precedence to some higher cause in others but "good"?

Now of course most consumers will have no idea that their device violates the GPL but that's ignorance not subjectivity.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 16:38 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

OK. Change the word "bad" to "software license violator" then.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 19:17 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

The licenses you have on a piece of software set the requirements you have for distributing that software. You can argue an implied license, but arguing that it's okay to copy a whole work with no possible fair use argument just because you don't think you'll get sued is simple piracy.

In the case of Linux, like any other work with so many copyright holders, it's clear that at least some copyright holders don't agree with this implicit license, even if they don't always have the will to go through with a court battle. That's why we have explicit licenses, so all the copyright holders on Linux can get together and agree on the terms.