Free?

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2011-10-22 at 16:55 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[ . . . ]

I wonder if there is a problem of old uninformed opinion from ages back
becoming accepted fact due to it being promulgated as fact over and over
again?

> Even ignoring the viral nature, the "hundred page wall of legalese" alone is 
> enough to make me very, very nervous about going anywhere near it (same goes 
> for creative commons). Not to mention the thousand different versions of 
> [L]GPL.

I agree that the GPL is an irritatingly long document, but it is
uniquely trying to do something that the other licences are not, so it
is worth giving some leaway on that.

There is only one GPL v3 and only one LGPL v3, there are no different
versions of the (L)GPL just the official ones.  People who start
fiddling with "classpath variations" etc. are not using the LGPL.

It funny how when it comes to licences, viral is used as a derogatory
term, but when used in marketing, viral is a positive goal that everyone
wants to achieve.

> But I find those issues extremely frustrating, because there's two things I 
> do like about GPL:
> 
> - From what I've heard, it bans usage in the creation of closed/proprietary 
> platforms and devices. (I've come to have a enormous seething hatred for 
> such things. Absolutely fed up with them.) I'm sure I could make a 
> derivative of zlib/libpng/etc. that adds such a prohibition clause, but that 
> would kick it out of the "OSI-approved" category, and would probably create 
> a bit of a PR problem. (Plus I imagine I'd probably need to hire a lawyer to 
> make sure it would actually work as intended.)

This is indeed one of the goals of GPL and LGPL, and since the Tivo
incident prompted the creation of GPLv3, it is well handled by the
language Eben Moglen et al. introduced.  Of course Linux remains GPLv2
so is still open to "tivoization".

This is why I like GPL and LGPL, it stop organizations stealing FOSS
generated work and using it for their own gain, without any
responsibility to "give back" in some way that the FOSS community finds
constructive and supportive.

> - Dual-licensing software under both GPL and paid-proprietary is feasable. 
> I've never been able to think of a way to do the same with something more 
> free like zlib/libpng/BSD/MIT/etc, and I think about that a lot. The only 
> ways to get paid with those seems to be donations (would that ever even earn 
> enough for a pizza? and are there any realistic options besides FraudPal 
> *cough* I mean PayPal?) and paid support (which isn't always particularly 
> applicable to every program; not everythng really needs much support).

Qt has made positive gains from GPL/proprietary dual licencing by
switching from GPL to LGPL.  This allows use by proprietary systems of
an LGPL library.  Sadly PyQt fell into the pit of not switching from GPL
to LGPL for their adapter from Python to the Qt libraries.  Hence PySide
which is LGPL.

It never ceases to amaze me that "being business friendly" has become a
phrase for "allows business to steal FOSS work for profit" and conned
the FOSS community into thinking this is a good thing!

I feel it is important to have a way for proprietary systems to use FOSS
software by linking to it hence I like LGPL where GPL can be a problem.


-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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