Picking a license

Thu May 13 19:39:42 EDT 2010

On Thu, 13 May 2010 08:06:52 -0700, Patrick Maupin wrote:

> If I download an Ubuntu
> ISO, burn it and give it away (let's say I give away 100 copies, just to
> remove the fair use defense), then I have violated the GPL.  I provided
> chapter and verse on this; go look it up.

I'm sorry, I can't see where you have provided "chapter and verse", or 
even a URL.

>> If you compiled the CD yourself, and failed to provide a written offer
>> on the CD, then yes absolutely you would be in violation of the licence
>> terms, and shame on you.
> 
> Not relevant.

You didn't specify whether the "Linux CD" you were distributing was a 
mere copy of an existing CD , or one you created yourself, so you will 
pardon me for covering both possibilities.

>> The GPL doesn't require you to force source code on those who don't
>> want it, but it does require you to make it available if they ask, and
>> for you to notify them appropriately of this fact. You don't even have
>> to explicitly tell your friend he can have the source code. You just
>> have to make sure that the written offer is available on the disk you
>> give him.
> 
> There is no written offer on the disk, because I burned it from Ubuntu's
> repository.  It really is that simple -- if I give away copies I've made
> of Ubuntu, I've violated the GPL.

No, I think this use-case would count as "propagation without conveying", 
since you are merely acting as a mechanical proxy between your friend(s) 
and Ubuntu.

I will admit that the GPL FAQs are not as clear about this matter as they 
should be.

> Unless you can cite some authority
> that tells me I'm wrong and gives real reasons.  I actually quoted
> chapter and verse from the license, but you chose to ignore that and
> make unsubstantiated claims.

I'm sorry, I can't find where you have quoted "chapter and verse" from 
the licence, so I can't comment.

[snip]
>> but imagine if everyone did it, if Red Hat and Debian and Ubuntu etc
>> didn't bother passing on the source code (or a written offer).
> 
> Then somebody else would.  How does Apache work?

Apache is niche software, and sadly its popularity is falling 
significantly. (~200 million webservers is a large niche, but it's still 
a niche.) The scales on the Netcraft graph are useless, so I can't read 
accurate numbers, but it looks like it has fallen from approximately a 
75% market share to under 55%.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html

Perhaps the Apache model doesn't work quite as well as you think?

As far as not-so-niche software goes, the GPLed Linux OS is far more 
popular on the desktop than FreeBSD and OpenBSD together, and about equal 
in popularity to Mac OS. I'm not suggesting that the popularity of an OS 
is *entirely* dependent on the licence, but it may be a factor.

>> Only a
>> tiny proportion of people would discover by their own efforts that the
>> source code was available
> 
> No, I tell my friends that source is available, and they can come and
> see me if they want to know more.

That doesn't scale to distributing hundreds of copies of the CD, let 
alone tens of thousands. If you're handing over a single copy to a friend 
(which is the example you gave earlier) then a verbal offer works well, 
and is only a technical breach of the GPL. If you're distributing 
hundreds of copies, I don't believe any such verbal offer is practical.

> This may have been a viable argument
> in 1989 (doubtful) but it's extremely silly today.

So you say.

>>, and only a proportion of them would learn
>> where it was available from. The result in practical terms would be a
>> major decrease in the number of people granted the freedom to modify
>> the source code, and a correspondingly larger decrease in the number of
>> people both free and able to modify the source code.
> 
> I sincerely doubt your dystopian vision, which, like the GPL and many
> laws, is predicated on some outmoded views about how humans interact.
> 
> The reason some people say that the GPL protects the "freedom of the
> code" is because the GPL assumes that code needs to be nurtured, instead
> of taking the viewpoint that, while there may be some freeloaders,
> sharing code is obviously so valuable to most of humanity that it will
> just happen.  We don't live in medieval Europe any more where the rules
> of glassmaking are so secret that you'll be hunted down like a dog if
> you try to leave.  We live in a world where "co- opetition" has been
> shown to be so valuable we had to make up a word for it, and even for
> those secrets that people are willing to kill to keep, we have
> wikileaks.

I admire your optimism, but don't share it.

> Let's face it -- a software freeloader is not the most evil thing in the
> world.  

*A* software freeloader certainly isn't a big problem. Cutting down *a* 
tree is no big deal either, but consider what happened to the people of 
Easter Island, Ethiopia and Haiti when *everyone* did so. The terms of 
the GPL exist to discourage freeloaders, lest everyone does so. The 
obligations it imposes are not onerous by any stretch of the exaggeration.

>> It's not enough to be granted freedom to modify source code in theory,
>> if you know about it, if you can find some hard-to-locate website which
>> may or may not be running. The practicalities are equally important.
> 
> That's another thing.  Even if I downloaded all the source from Ubuntu,
> what assurances do I really have that I have all the source? I could be
> in technical violation of the GPL without even knowing it, even after
> wasting an extra two days grabbing the source.  Best to use Gentoo to be
> sure, and even then, I need to build it twice running strace just to
> make sure that I really built everything.

That's a silly objection to the GPL. When you include an MIT-licenced 
library in your project, you can't be sure that the library wasn't stolen 
from Microsoft and you've therefore accidentally infringed Microsoft's 
copyright. This isn't an argument against the MIT licence any more than 
your hypothetical is an argument against the GPL.

>> In
>> theoretical terms, everyone has the freedom to legally modify and
>> distribute the source code to Microsoft Windows. All you have to do is
>> buy 51% of the stock so as to become majority shareholder, then make
>> sufficient changes to the board of directors so that the new board
>> grants you a licence to do so, then fight off the lawsuits from the
>> rest of the shareholders. Anyone could do it! Not.
> 
> So "everyone" could own 51% of Microsoft?  That means 100% of the shares
> would be around 350,000,000,000%.  Wait, that can't be right, what? :-) 

Obviously not all at once, silly. But "in theory", everyone could become 
the majority shareholder -- there is no law or physical law of nature 
that says "Patrick Maupin is prohibited from being majority shareholder 
of Microsoft".

Anti-competition laws or similar may prevent a person from becoming 
majority shareholder unless they (e.g.) gave up their shares in another 
company, but again, there's nothing stopping them from doing so, if they 
wished.

> Can you come up with a sillier analogy?

I'm sure I could, but you seem to have entirely missed the point that 
such theoretical "freedom" is entirely illusionary, since *in practice* 
very few people actually can partake in it.

>> Another, more practical example: here in Australia our government is
>> hell- bent on introducing an ineffective and expensive Internet
>> censorship scheme. It seems that under Australian law, it will be
>> completely legal to circumvent the filter, but our government is
>> investigating ways to make it illegal to tell anyone how to circumvent
>> it. In other words, Australians will have permission to circumvent the
>> nanny filter, but since few people will know this, or know how to do
>> so, it will be a meaningless freedom.
> 
> Yes, that's basically how the DMCA works, and that's evil, and that's
> one of the reasons I sometimes give money to the EFF.  But, you can't
> seriously be comparing making speech a crime and making not speaking a
> crime (or a copyright violation), can you?  Maybe you *did* manage to
> come up with a sillier analogy...

There are situations where not speaking is a crime. If you witness a 
crime, and fail to report it, there are circumstances where you may be 
liable to be persecuted for aiding and abetting.

>> The GPL concerns itself with the *practical* freedom to gain access to
>> source code, not merely the theoretical freedom represented by
>> permission without opportunity.
> 
> No, the GPL is ideologically opposed to anything related to practicality
> (although in practice, its adherents have to bend a bit to avoid being
> made irrelevant, and Linux, the shining success, is led by someone who
> arguably cares not one whit for GPL ideological purity).

And yet Linux is distributed under the GPL, which pretty much sinks your 
argument.

[...]
> But the GPL wording required to enforce what you call a practical
> freedom imposes so many impractical costs that there are probably
> millions of people in the world who have violated this license, in the
> good-faith attempt to spread free software around.

As I admitted earlier, there is an apparent grey area there, at least 
according to the FAQs, but I don't think it is anywhere near as obvious 
as you claim that it is a licence violation.

-- 
Steven