Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, with Horrifying Book Curses | Hacker News Reader

Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, with Horrifying Book Curses

atlasobscura.com

77 pointsdiodorus24 comments

One of the headline quotes in this article may be a forgery:

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand & rend him. Let him be struck with palsy & all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, & let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, & when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever.”

I don't know anything about this topic, I just saw this after looking it up real quick:

"The book curse from the San Pedro monastery is no such thing. It is an amusing hoax dating from 1909. Edmund Pearson, joker, librarian and true-crime writer, claimed it was part of a rediscovered Old Librarian's Almanack originally published in 1773. The Old Librarian dated the translation to 1712, "English'd by Sir Matthew Mahan" in a guide to his Spanish travels." https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/marx-pandora-a...

Today we protect our libraries with the GPL, a different kind of horrible curse.

Upvoted because it was funny, not because it was right.

I really struggle with AGPL however.

I write GPL software for a living, I mean it in the best possible way.

What's your problem with the AGPL? I'm pretty neutral on it myself, I havn't used it for my own projects but it seems like an ok license to have around for people who don't want their code used in locked up SaaS.

I interpret a lot of AGPL projects I see as "we're willing to negotiate a secondary license to your private business". If you're the best in class (or just the only available public option) it can make sense as a way to try and make money. If there's a more liberally licensed substitution, however, it's probably best read as a "don't use me for your business" flag...

Right, but, from a business perspective, the same argument goes for GPL vs permissive licenses; why use GPL if there's an Apache or BSD alternative.

I'm ok with dual licensing, what annoys me is businesses that makes nominally free software but puts half the core functionality in proprietary extensions. It feels like they're saying, we want the community to contribute to our core, but we're going to sell the profitable parts.

Even worse is a company like Odoo (not to name anyone...), who switched from all AGPL + selling support model to a free core + proprietary modules model. They relicensed their codebase, claiming they own copyright for all of it since they rewrote all community-contributed parts, but that's really questionable. You can't erase 10 years of community contributions.

I don't really have a problem with this sort of practice, and I think it is reflective of the model I feel most companies should use: keep the core-to-your-business software for your company proprietary and open-source all non-core-to-your-business software. It is the only model that will help keep open-source alive and well funded.

It is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect a company to open source everything it creates; there are legitimate competitive advantages to keeping that software to yourself. It is much easier to convince companies to share their non-core software, and companies will actually gain from doing this.

Late but:

Kudos to you.

The reason I dislike AGPL is the confusion around it (I think I have seen it interpreted as both 1. Same as GPL only for web apps and 2. You must buy an exception or everything that ever communicates with it is also AGPL.)

AGPL seems like a completely logical extension of the GPL. Being in favour of one and not the other seems hypocritical to me.

edit: I just looked it up on the GNU site. > However, some companies that develop and rely upon free software consider this requirement to be too burdensome. They want to avoid code with this requirement, and expressed concern about the administrative costs of checking code for this additional requirement

So much for user freedom being #1.

You already have to check the license of any code you use, not sure how this is an extra burden. You just have to decide once upfront if the particular project will be AGPL.

At work some clients don't want the extra burden of the network distribution clause, when that's the case we don't use AGPL code; but that's precisely the point - the authors don't want them to be able to use the code on their server without sharing.

Should thou not copiest this book most faithfully, taking care afterwards to dispatch it to three of thy brothers, thy brains shall be cudgelled forth and fed to the crows.

Clever and relevant. We look back on these sorts of things with a certain conceitedness, yet we still have the modern day equivalent with chain letters and social media posts.

Hah, I was not thinking of chain letters and social media posts. My mind was going in this direction:

> You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:

>You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and*

>You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and

>You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;

We still use these today. We call them copyright notices. "If thou copies or distributes this work without thy lord permission... bad things." Then as now, the most ominous warnings are reserved for situations with the least likelihood of being caught.

Sure. I you got caught back in the days, horrible things would happen to you indeed.

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...rolls eyes.

So, no different from a standard EULA?

Quicker to read and easier to understand, actually.

I wonder how many medieval book thieves could read?

Also relevant as an early form of DRM: http://www.wimborneminster.org.uk/110/chained-library.html

I wonder if these would work on eBooks? :-P

"If you are reading this on an unauthorized device, it will explode when you turn the page."

Which, given the recent news with Samsung, is now actually a somewhat believable curse.

I can understand this one: May the sword of anathema slay, If anyone steals this book away.

And this one: If anyone take away this book, let him die the death; let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever size him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen.

But I'm puzzled by this one: Get our latest, delivered straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter.

  One newsletter he did slay
  but two rose up from where the first one lay
  two, then four, then eight and more
  A mere human cannot defeat this beast
  "Unsubscribe" he set the auto-reply
  but thousands, no millions, no billions, no trillions
  of newsletters filled up his dying inbox
  Perhaps the first one wasn't so bad?

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