opinion on Willem programmer?

[Wouter van Ooijen]

> I don't remember agreeing to give up my copyrights to
> anything I write here, so who owns the rights to messages I post?

That is an interesting question, but I doubt you will get the final
answer to that within a few 10s of years and/or without spending $$ on
lawyers. There is a borderline between copyright and "freedom of
gathering news" (the english term is probably a bit different), and
newsgroups might be somewhere near that borderline.

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[Wouter van Ooijen]

> So, as a result I don't build the product, and the end-users' lose the
> ability to get a better solution to their problem at a reasonable cost. And
> of course, I lose out on the opportunity to make a reasonable profit
> building and selling the product.

IMO what you are missing in your reasoning is that if the difference
between this new product and an existing GPLed product is not too large,
it won't take long for someone to write the extra part anyway. So end
users win both ways: the 90% product was already free, so it probably
had a lot of users, and the 100% product will probably appear soon.

If fact they might win a third way too: you will spend your effort on an
area that is not yet covered by GPLed products, so the range of
available software will grow, more that when you had spent your effort
on the 10% part.

Note that this works best for tools that are (often) used by
programmers, because then the users are also potential writers of new parts.

So I see the various license as more or less complementing each other:
newer areas are 'explored' by commercial licenses, well-trotten areas
are secured by free software.

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[Cedric Chang-2]

I would like to see intellectual property vendors required to escrow  
all the source and if the IP owners go down under ( ha ha ) , the  
source becomes available to users of the IP.  I don't want to see  
this as a law.... rather as a standard practice that buyers expect  
from vendors.  I have seen many wonderful products disappear when the  
vendor disappears and no one knows where the vendor or the IP got to.

cc
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[Sean Breheny]

I have heard of this being done in individual cases under NDA and
other such agreements. The entire IP would revert to the user party to
the agreement if the original IP owner went out of business.

Sean


On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Cedric Chang <cc@...> wrote:

> I would like to see intellectual property vendors required to escrow
>  all the source and if the IP owners go down under ( ha ha ) , the
>  source becomes available to users of the IP.  I don't want to see
>  this as a law.... rather as a standard practice that buyers expect
>  from vendors.  I have seen many wonderful products disappear when the
>  vendor disappears and no one knows where the vendor or the IP got to.
>
>  cc
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[Byron Jeff]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 09:33:46AM -0400, M. Adam Davis wrote:
> On 5/12/08, Byron Jeff <byronjeff@...> wrote:
> > There's a misconception with the GPL/LGPL that you have to release your
> > code to everyone. You only have to release the code to those you distrubute
> > the product to. And you can have them sign an NDA so that they cannot
> > further release that code to anyone else because of the NDA.
> >
> > End user means end user, not all users.
>
> Then I am misadvised.

Actually you are right and I am wrong. I misread it.

> I've been told that once I distribute the GPL'ed code to my end users
> with the GPL license intact, then that license gives them the right to
> re-distribute the GPL'ed code.

That is correct.

> Since I have made changes, and released my changes to them under the
> same GPL license that I received the code under, then they have the
> same rights to modify, use, and distribute all the code that has the
> GPL license applied which I delivered to them.

Again correct.

>
> Are you saying that there are legal insturments at my disposal which
> allow me to override clause 1 of the GPL (V2):
>
> "1.  You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's
> source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you
> conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate
> copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the
> notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty;
> and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License
> along with the Program.

Only for your own employees. This is my misreading. Work for hire is not
considered a distribution.

> You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and
> you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a
> fee. "
>
> If so, I would like more information on this.

My mistake. I apologize. You can find Stallman's response to the question
here:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-07/msg01342.html

BAJ
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[Peter P.]

Cedric Chang <cc <at> nope9.com> writes:
> source becomes available to users of the IP.  I don't want to see  
> this as a law.... rather as a standard practice that buyers expect  
> from vendors.  I have seen many wonderful products disappear when the  
> vendor disappears and no one knows where the vendor or the IP got to.

It is not a law it is reality. Talk to someone in the telco, scientific, medical
electronics, aerospace or military technology domains and you will see that
these industries have 'slightly' more concern for the lifetime of their
investments than the average mp3 player maker, salesman or buyer. In the second
hand, services (like maintenance and operations)  and refurbished equipment
markets there are two options for each complex piece of equipment: a) provide
documentation including pin-outs and some arcane details and sell for the going
price or b) sell for the price it is worth on the scrap metal market.

It's the 'consumer' slant on electronics which has propagated into software that
is causing the current problem, sometimes known as upgrade-itis. It is bad
enough that one's <censored popular word processing program> documents tend to
'lose' formatting and tables whenever a <censored popular operating system
maker> upgrades some library or the program itself (and that happens every 3-4
years at most, or so I have seen it happen during the last 13+ or so years). Now
how do you use documentation in that format when the time comes, say, 10 years
into the lifespan of a product that is meant to last 20+ years? Oops? I was
reading recently that the aeronautical industry *still* uses microfiches
attached to a special kind of punched card to maintain and distribute data about
spare parts. Surely that is not an accident in an industry that used computers
since before almost anyone else did.

And we are not talking tool-chain and drivers yet, just pin-outs scrambled by
formatting loss. I have seen schematics drawn in programs that no longer exist,
which could no longer be opened (and the price tags of the unique tools someone
makes to allow that anyway). And on and on and on. There were several postings
on this list some time ago, about some small software or hardware tool provider
who was suddenly not answering emails and the phone, for very serious (health?)
reasons. I believe that some company eventually took the relevant product over.
I do not remember the details.

I try to do what I preach. Since I had to do a lot with old architectures and
refurbishing and testing and such I tried very hard to use only open source
tools (both hard and soft). I even made my own when there was time for this,
for that reason. 2N2022s and other standard parts are still around after 20+
years of doing things like this. It has paid off.

Just for laughs, and slightly off topic, I found some old *nix source code on
the net, from ~1985 or so, compiled it after minor cosmetics (header files
changed etc) on a recent machine and it worked. Manual pages looked right
(tables and all), X11 GUI and timing delays work in despite of 200 times faster
execution and all that.

Peter


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[Gerhard Fiedler]

Byron Jeff wrote:

>>> There's a misconception with the GPL/LGPL that you have to release your
>>> code to everyone. You only have to release the code to those you distrubute
>>> the product to. And you can have them sign an NDA so that they cannot
>>> further release that code to anyone else because of the NDA.
[...]
>> Then I am misadvised.
[...]
> My mistake. I apologize. You can find Stallman's response to the question
> here:
>
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-07/msg01342.html

He writes there:

"It is possible for a person or company to develop changes to a GPL-covered
program and sign an NDA promising not to release these changes *to anyone*.
This is a different case.  As long as these changes are not distributed at
all, a fortiori they are not distributed in a way that violates the GPL.

"However, if and when the changes are distributed to another person or
outside the company, they must be distributed under the terms of the GPL,
not under an NDA."

I wonder where the distinction between employees of a company, a contracted
programmer working for a company and everybody else comes from.

What is the difference between 1) a (non-employee) programmer who develops
modifications to GPL code under an NDA (which seems to be ok), 2) a company
employee who receives modified GPL code but may not disclose the
modifications to anyone outside the company (which seems also to be ok),
and 3) a client of the company who receives modified GPL code under an NDA
that says that he may not disclose the modifications to anyone (which seems
not to be ok)?

Gerhard

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[Gerhard Fiedler]

Peter wrote:

> Just for laughs, and slightly off topic, I found some old *nix source code on
> the net, from ~1985 or so, compiled it after minor cosmetics (header files
> changed etc) on a recent machine and it worked. Manual pages looked right
> (tables and all), X11 GUI and timing delays work in despite of 200 times faster
> execution and all that.

FWIW, not that elaborate (no compiling and no X11 GUI), bit I still have
MS-DOS software around (binaries) that work on my WinXP machines. I don't
have to run them often, and I don't run them more often than I have to :)
but the only ones of these oldies that I found don't run anymore are system
tools. Which is ok... these are for system maintenance, and I don't need
maintenance tools for 286 MS-DOS machines with FAT file systems.

So far I also haven't had any problems reading older files with newer
software from that "censored" manufacturer. (Which shouldn't be constructed
to mean that I don't think that using open formats is a good thing.)

Gerhard

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[Wouter van Ooijen]

> What is the difference between 1) a (non-employee) programmer who develops
> modifications to GPL code under an NDA (which seems to be ok), 2) a company
> employee who receives modified GPL code but may not disclose the
> modifications to anyone outside the company (which seems also to be ok),
> and 3) a client of the company who receives modified GPL code under an NDA
> that says that he may not disclose the modifications to anyone (which seems
> not to be ok)?

1) and 2) are legally operating as part of the company, 3) is not.

I think that for case 2), the external programmer could not legally
provide the modified code to his own company, not even to himself
working for his own company.

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[Peter P.]

Gerhard Fiedler <lists <at> connectionbrazil.com> writes:
> So far I also haven't had any problems reading older files with newer
> software from that "censored" manufacturer. (Which shouldn't be constructed
> to mean that I don't think that using open formats is a good thing.)

Try to run a game from that period on a new machine. Preferably a character mode
one that relies on display quirks of a certain kind (CGA 'secret modes',
Hercules, where are you?). Not to mention timing loops (there is shim software
that is supposed to fix that). Brr.

With formats, I have my own bad experiences and those of close relatives whose
irreplaceable autobiographies were written on ancient versions of something or
other and which they were no longer able to open 10 years later. I had to tinker
with scripts and filters for two weeks until I pried a reasonable, horribly
mangled in formatting, plain text version out of the binary clutches of whatever
it was that was used to scramble the data on the floppy disks I got by snail
mail (!). Diacritics and other important stuff like special guilemettes used in
certain languages for quotations got lost and there were 120+ pages to correct.
Rendering this with minimal markup in TeX took all of 30 seconds. The result is
now safely stored as a tiny TeX source file that includes the plain text
chapters and as PDF, PS and so on, and I am confident that there will be no
further problems of this nature. If there had been a graphic in the original it
would have been lost. Before choosing TeX I had a brief thought of just running
the plain text through nroff/groff and trust it as is. By the way, their (my
elderly relative's) email does not work *again*. I *wonder* how come my email
never seems to be broken. Lucky guess?

Peter


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[Peter Todd-2]

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On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 11:15:23PM +0200, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

> > What is the difference between 1) a (non-employee) programmer who develops
> > modifications to GPL code under an NDA (which seems to be ok), 2) a company
> > employee who receives modified GPL code but may not disclose the
> > modifications to anyone outside the company (which seems also to be ok),
> > and 3) a client of the company who receives modified GPL code under an NDA
> > that says that he may not disclose the modifications to anyone (which seems
> > not to be ok)?
>
> 1) and 2) are legally operating as part of the company, 3) is not.
>
> I think that for case 2), the external programmer could not legally
> provide the modified code to his own company, not even to himself
> working for his own company.

The GPL3 has language specificly making case 1 and 2 explicitly allowed:

You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having
them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with
facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the
terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not
control copyright.  Those thus making or running the covered works for
you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and
control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your
copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.


But as you say, the modified source must be entierly for the use of the
entity that is having the source modified on it's behalf.

3 however is still disallowed as it would allow a company to effectively
"sell" a modified work of software to "clients" who could not make
changes too it, exactly the sort of thing the GPL is supposed to prevent
in the first place.

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[sergio masci-2]

All this GPL stuff is so much BS.

Copyright works because governments recognise it, in fact one of the
things the UN was set up to supervise was... yes you've guessed it
copyright.

Some a*hole can't just invent copyleft and expect it to have the same
legal weight as copyright. Oh yes I forgot they've thrown up a smoke
screen by devising the GPL, which in my mind holds even less water.

Firstly, here in the UK, you cannot supply goods or services and then
apply restrictions after the fact. Providing all the source code and then
saying "actually you can now only use it the way I say you can" is a BIG
no no.

Secondly, if anyone were mad enough to try to enforce GPL through
litigation, the most they could hope to win are damages. Can someone
please explain to me how the original authors of the software have
incurred a financial loss because an individual did not respect GPL. I
mean the original authors are getting zero finiancial compensation for the
code they have made public so exactly how much are they loesing if someone
else derives a work from theirs and will not share his source, let me see
0 times 1,000,000 - yep still ZERO!!!

And what REALLY gets up my nose is the argument that having access to the
source means the user can fix it. Please, give me a break. Having access
to the source actually means that you have a garantee that you can't be
charged for minor fixes made by someone else. Who in their right mind is
going to spend weeks trying to understand how GCC works in order to fix a
bug in their own program. What they will actually do is try to figure a
work-around

</rant>

Regards
Sergio Masci
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[Xiaofan Chen]

On 5/14/08, sergio masci <smplx@...> wrote:
> All this GPL stuff is so much BS.

This is a bit too harsh.

> Copyright works because governments recognise it, in fact one of the
> things the UN was set up to supervise was... yes you've guessed it
> copyright.
>
> Some a*hole can't just invent copyleft and expect it to have the same
> legal weight as copyright. Oh yes I forgot they've thrown up a smoke
> screen by devising the GPL, which in my mind holds even less water.

You can have your opionion. I think GPL makes a lot of sense for
a lot of software packages.

> Firstly, here in the UK, you cannot supply goods or services and then
> apply restrictions after the fact. Providing all the source code and then
> saying "actually you can now only use it the way I say you can" is a BIG
> no no.

I believe GPL is also quite popular in UK. So a lawyer may have better
authority to say whether it is a big no-no or not.

> Secondly, if anyone were mad enough to try to enforce GPL through
> litigation, the most they could hope to win are damages. Can someone
> please explain to me how the original authors of the software have
> incurred a financial loss because an individual did not respect GPL. I
> mean the original authors are getting zero finiancial compensation for the
> code they have made public so exactly how much are they loesing if someone
> else derives a work from theirs and will not share his source, let me see
> 0 times 1,000,000 - yep still ZERO!!!

The main object for the GPL related litigation to to force the vendor
to withdraw the product or release the code under GPL, not to seek
damages.

> And what REALLY gets up my nose is the argument that having access to the
> source means the user can fix it. Please, give me a break. Having access
> to the source actually means that you have a garantee that you can't be
> charged for minor fixes made by someone else. Who in their right mind is
> going to spend weeks trying to understand how GCC works in order to fix a
> bug in their own program. What they will actually do is try to figure a
> work-around
>

There are many people working on GCC, either paid by the companies
(eg: companies like ARM are paying developers for gcc, companies
like Suse/Redhat have in-house compiler engineers, companies like
Microchip pays engineers to port gcc to PIC24/dsPIC and PIC32). There
are also lots of people send patches to GCC (and other open source
packages) without any intention to get paid.

Even a non-programmer like I have just sent two patches to the Linux
kernel for USB PIC related things.

Having access to the code gives you one more option.

And take note I am not a Linux fan boy. I am not a GPL fanatic since
I think other open source licenses have some better aspects. But in
general, I do think open source movement is a good thing since it
offers the end user more choices.

I can understand that a lot of small software developers may be
afraid of open source alternatives since they have to adapt to
survive. Still there are success stories of small developers
adopting open source models.

Xiaofan
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[peter green-2]

sergio masci wrote:

> All this GPL stuff is so much BS.
>
> Copyright works because governments recognise it, in fact one of the
> things the UN was set up to supervise was... yes you've guessed it
> copyright.
>
> Some a*hole can't just invent copyleft and expect it to have the same
> legal weight as copyright. Oh yes I forgot they've thrown up a smoke
> screen by devising the GPL, which in my mind holds even less water.
>  

Under copyright law the default state is that other than a few very
limited fair use/fair dealing rights you are not allowed to copy. If you
want to copy then you need a license from the copyright holder. That is
where the GPL comes in. If you don't like it you are free to negotiate
with the copyright holder to see if they are prepared to offer you an
alternative license.

> Secoyndly, if anyone were mad enough to try to enforce GPL through
> litigation, the most they could hope to win are damages.
I'm not sure what the situation is in the UK but in many countries there
are rather high "statutory damages" availible in copyright infringement
cases regardless of what the actual damages are. There are also
injunctions to consider.
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[Peter Todd-2]

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On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 02:46:32AM +0100, peter green wrote:
> > Secoyndly, if anyone were mad enough to try to enforce GPL through
> > litigation, the most they could hope to win are damages.
> I'm not sure what the situation is in the UK but in many countries there
> are rather high "statutory damages" availible in copyright infringement
> cases regardless of what the actual damages are. There are also
> injunctions to consider.

Simply not being allowed to keep using infringed upon GPL'd code has
been quite enough to get a lot of violators to choose to comply with the
GPL by releasing the own they have based on that code in it's own right.
It's an easy solution really and saves a lot of work at the price of
releasing something that you can't use anyway.

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[William "Chops" Westfield]

>> Some a*hole can't just invent copyleft and expect it to have the same
>> legal weight as copyright.

A lot of the license agreements and similar that people "agree" to  
every day are not actually legal, and yet still carry weight in that  
they carefully spell out  how they want the various parties to  
behave.  The primary purpose of a legal agreement is to get  
understanding and AGREEMENT between the parties involved, not to make  
sure you can collect damages and similar if someone breaks the  
agreement.

I think GPL and similar are reaching a point where they do this  
pretty well.   I think a lot of people just jumped on the wagon  
without paying much attention, and I'm not terribly happy about the  
period during which the meaning of GPL was more obscured, but that's  
coming to an end.

Of course, it's still a real pain to apply to the embedded space, but  
that's a separate issue...

BillW

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[Peter Todd-2]

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On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 04:12:05AM +0100, sergio masci wrote:
> And what REALLY gets up my nose is the argument that having access to the
> source means the user can fix it. Please, give me a break. Having access
> to the source actually means that you have a garantee that you can't be
> charged for minor fixes made by someone else. Who in their right mind is
> going to spend weeks trying to understand how GCC works in order to fix a
> bug in their own program. What they will actually do is try to figure a
> work-around

There is a reason why GPL software is most used by organizations with
lots of programmers on staff. Look at how incredibly advanced, say, the
git revision control system is. It's used by programmers exclusively,
and for that task is just brilliant work solving a very difficult
computer science problem. Complex and not as user friendly as it could
be, yes, but for the user group it was designed for there is simply
nothing even remotely like it available commercially. (open source is a
different matter and there are a pile of other revision control systems
similar to it ;))

Now lets take the example of leading edge open source 3d solid geometry
CAD programs. Another very difficult comp-sci (and geometry) problem.

What's available? Well, I guess you could say Blender, but it's not
really for CAD. BRL-CAD fits the bill, but it's actually an ex-US
military project dating back to 1979. There is also an open source
constructive geometry *kernel* available, aparently funded by a bunch of
industry partners, but it's useless for an end user. In the end, how
many mechanical engineers are good programmers?


That s