Hacker News Reader

Comment by turblety | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I don't know the full story, but from reading this post and the comments it's a shame how peoples attitudes are towards this.

When people violate the GPL, it's most likely due to ignorance.

I really think we should encourage and act positively when commercial/corporate/enterprise crap opens up their source code.

When we find a GPL (or any license violation), why can't we approach it politely (in the first case), educate on the license terms and ask them to comply.

In this case, it's seems that's what happened. We notified, educated and they complied. Shouldn't this be rewarded and hailed as a success?

But now my worry is, with the amount of hate these guys received, other companies that are already worried about opening up their codebase and contributing back to OSS, have had their fears confirmed.

View on HN

That is true, but I feel like we should apply different levels of scrutiny to some small project and an app developed by people with close ties to government officials who received literally millions of Euros in public funding to develop and license this app.

This isn't even a GPL violation as the code in question was licensed under a BSD license. They simply removed the original copyright notice, which may have been a genuine accident caused by misconfigured tooling (especially since someone mentioned they changed the formatting).

The reason people are outraged is entirely that this is a publicly funded multi-million Euro project that is already facing accusations of corruption/nepotism and tried to open-source wash a proprietary product (as the app wasn't even published under an open-source license at the time). You can't really point at this incident and derive a general point about "people's attitudes towards violating the GPL".

I am not familiar enough with BSD, but would it not be a licence breach, when you alter libraries with a BSD licence and redistribute those in a closed-source app?

At least with GPL that would most likely be the case.

If so, regardless of their "accidental tooling removing the copyright notice", they would be violating that copyright.

Also, IANAL.

Oh, I'm not saying what they did wasn't illegal (tho IANAL, so I can't say whether this would indeed be considered copyright infringement and warrant damages in Germany). I'm just saying that forgetting that your autoformatter strips license comments when you copy permissively licensed third-party code into your codebase is a different level of impolite than using copyleft licensed third-party code with no intention to adhere to the copyleft restriction.

> When people violate the GPL, it's most likely due to ignorance.

"OH, hey, a licence file. Let me delete that, I don't want to be bound bit it".

> When we find a GPL (or any license violation), why can't we approach it politely (in the first case), educate on the license terms and ask them to comply.

That was done, wasn't it? It was pointed out to the rightsholder that this commercial company was selling a product that included his code and were not complying with the licence.

> But now my worry is, with the amount of hate these guys received, other companies that are already worried about opening up their codebase and contributing back to OSS, have had their fears confirmed.

They can sometimes pay for separate licensing, or they can spend the money and write the software themselves. They want to keep it closed source and earn money by selling licenses (oh, the irony!) but shouldn't be called out when they violate other's rights because it might deter other violators? meh, I'm not buying it.

Completely agree, they were hit by an angry mob of unthankful people.

I think most in the mob are aware that their reaction is overblown. The list of OSS licenses is usually buried deep inside the docs and few ever read it. Luca made themselves vulnerable by opening up their code and the mob is using this weakness to attack them.

It's really about not wanting this app to succeed, because they are making good money and because there are valid privacy concerns. Maybe Luca should not be widely used, but then the politicians who bought it are at fault, not the developers. Also nobody is forced to install it.

Then there's the complaint about Luca's license. They open up their codebase and people complain that the license is not free enough? Mind blown, try that with any large company and see how far you get. Microsoft, give me your Office source code, or... I'll write an angry tweet!

>I really think we should encourage and act positively when commercial/corporate/enterprise crap opens up their source code.

This is true.

>When we find a GPL (or any license violation), why can't we approach it politely (in the first case), educate on the license terms and ask them to comply.

I partially agree, but those companies often have an army of lawyers. It shouldn't be the responsibility of the internet to find GPL/license-violations in their code.

>But now my worry is, with the amount of hate these guys received, other companies that are already worried about opening up their codebase and contributing back to OSS, have had their fears confirmed.

Hate is too strong. It's more criticism.

it was BSD not GPL

Reply on news.ycombinator.com