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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Are you at all involved with software development? How do you feel about people breaking the GPL?

> Are you at all involved with software development?

I've been programming since I was about 13 years old. I am no longer a professional software developer though. I've released some works on my GitHub. My most recent contributions to free software: binary QR decoding for ZBar and a small program for configuring my laptop's backlit keyboard. I also reported a GPG bug and sent in a fix some time ago.

> How do you feel about people breaking the GPL?

It's pointless. People can use your software despite any terms and your only recourse is legal action. Seriously doubt individual developers will waste their time and money pursuing violators in court. Even the organizations dedicated to GPL violations won't take all cases. Violators in foreign countries might as well be untouchable, especially developing countries which have better things to do than police the use of imaginary property. The GPL is most useful to projects like the Linux kernel which have massive amounts of leverage over the companies that want to violate the license.

Like copyright, I don't think licenses in general should exist. The GPL was itself created in reaction to copyright protection being extended towards software. It depends on copyright in order to work.

The real value of the GPL is the hacker spirit it represents. I give you the source code and you send back any improvements you make. This core virtue is widely shared and respected by the developer community.

> binary QR decoding for ZBar

I just saw a video the other day about storing video games in QR codes where the poster submitted a patch for ZBar. Was that you?

Video games in QR codes? That's interesting. Do you have the link to the video? Is it this one?

https://youtu.be/ExwqNreocpg

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/commit/5bc323849569a629aa0d1...

If so, then the patch he submitted builds upon my work! He fixed a line feed conversion bug that was present in Windows. I use Linux so I did not experience this issue.

I remember seeing that patch get merged but I didn't know about the whole video game context. This is amazing. I wrote the patch because I was trying to print a 4096 bit RSA secret key as a QR code. Awesome to see it getting used for something even more awesome.

Here are the links to my contributions and related pages:

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/64

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/issues/55

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/issues/82

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=703234

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=710009

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Paperkey#Restore_the_se...

https://stackoverflow.com/a/60518608/512904

ZBar used to automatically convert binary data to text when decoding 8 bit QR codes, mangling the data in the process. My patch adds the option to disable that, enabling the data to be extracted without corruption.

I also added the one shot feature to the ZBar tools to make it easier to use in automated scripts that expect exactly one output:

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/60

Looks like we have a real world application for tiny ELFs now!

https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht...

Yes, that's the one!

Storing secret keys as QR codes is an interesting application as well. I remember reading on here about a CEO who printed out a database encryption key as a base64 string and then couldn't type it in correctly when it was needed to restore backups. A machine-readable format definitely seems the way to go.

I'm not arguing in favor of piracy, but isn't GPL anti copyright (copyleft)

Fair question. =) No, it's not.

"Copyleft licenses exist within the legal structure of copyrights. Despite what the name implies, copyleft isn't about abolishing copyrights. Rather, copyleft licenses are a subset of copyright licenses, and the goal is to restore freedom to users."

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copyleft-copyright-key-concept...

You are right, thanks for clarifying.

I asked that question as the GP made the case that breaking GPL is equivalent to pirating (breaking any other copyright). But GPL ensures a resource is always shareable and anyone who tries to break it would be limiting shareability of the resource, essentially it would be opposite of piracy.

If you use GPL software in non GPL code, you are still “pirating” the code and using it in a way that the person/group didn’t give you permission to use the license. This is no different than sharing any other copyrighted content. The copyright holder controls how the content is shared.

Pirating GPL-licensed software is explicitly allowed by the GPL. That's kind of the whole point of the GPL, to ensure that that stays true.

That's more like the BSD/MIT licences. GPL goes beyond that, in particular requiring that if you distribute modifications you have made to someone else's GPL'd code then you must also distribute your own source code. It is a different kind of restriction on taking without giving back, and it too relies on copyright to be effective.

> GPL goes beyond that, in particular requiring that if you distribute modifications you have made to someone else's GPL'd code then you must also distribute your own source code.

> > That's kind of the whole point of the GPL, to ensure that that stays true [even of future uses of that code].

Distributing a copyrighted work in a mangled, unreadable format to impede and discourage people from exercising their rights (to share or modify it) is basically DRM, and the GPL is right to prohibit that.

(And yes, this would apply to, eg, Photoshop project files, although even more so than video game source code, I don't consider prefered editing forms for primarily artistic works to be a particularly high priority.)

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