Voice.ai: GPL Violations with a Side of DRM
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I strongly suggest contacting the owners of the open source projects and talking them into having a lawyer send a message to them. Those projects have the necessary legal standing to bring a meaningful copyright infringement case against Voice.ai.
There are plenty of lawyers that will send a suitable message, at no cost to the projects, For example, the Software Freedom Law Center [0] provides free consultations and has a good track record.
Nevertheless, I (and I'm sure many others here on HN) would enjoy seeing the response from the FSF.
If someone does violate the license on your code, they are also transitively doing it to a bigger, angrier fish as well.
Nothing requires them to give over the source code. They just have to stop distributing the software which is violating the license.
i.e. The cat is out of the bag.
Even they you were to distribute the code after the fact that doesn't forgive the copyright infringement they did early. In the end releasing the code doesn't do anything for them other than give away their IP. The best option in this scenario for them is to stop distributing the binary to avoid willful infringement and then work to remove the GPL code from the project and then start distributing it again.
Do remember that the GPL is not a EULA. It only applies when you make copies of the code.
Also random people can't sue over this infringement. Only the copyright owner of the code can do so.
They have been made aware via email, and they continue to distribute it via the download link. The is no need to couch this as a hypothetical scenario.
Morally, it's definitely NOT fine.
It will probably have no significant bad effect on their business, iow, it is fine from a business perspective.
It's unfortunate, but likely true.
So they aren't actually infringing the copyright unless they not only don't provide the source publicly, but also don't provide it on request for at least three years.
b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years
While this is true, it should be noted that we can't know which license will be applied at this point.
Remember that (L)GPL forces you to release your source code under some specific circumstances, and the implied condition here is that you have accepted the license in the first place. If you didn't ever agree to that license, you are clearly violating GPL but otherwise any other restriction of GPL doesn't immediately apply to you; it will have to be resolved in the court. And it is entirely possible that you and original software author(s) can reach an entirely different agreement that doesn't involve GPL at all. So as a user, you can't technically request for source codes right now. (Of course, it still is a not-too-bad strategy for users as original software authors can always demand GPL.)
This is ironic considering how aggressive the language is on their branding page: https://voice.ai/branding-guidelines
> WARNING:
> We use technology to check for infringement on the Internet and on social platforms and may automatically (or manually) issue takedown notices for content that infringes on our IP. Simply add our approved clip to your content to avoid takedown notices. We reserve all rights.
They should be fined too, but the above at least would solve their miscreantic behaviour.
If someone in the EU were to request the source code, wait a while to give them a decent amount of time, and then get the source out themselves, I don't know if the court would argue in favour of Voice.ai.
You could argue that distributing the decompiled source would violate some kind of copyright, however the GPL also includes the freedom to redistribute the requested code.
Alternatively, only contributors to the GPL'd software have any legal standing against voice.ai as a random user's freedoms being violated are probably not enforced by the users themselves. The Praat people (a university) and the libgcrypt people (GnuPG) are the ones whose license has been violated so they should be the ones free to sue, possibly with external help (EFF etc.)
I've read about more unexpected turns happening in IP court, who knows what will happen. Morally decompiling would be right, but in a legally speaking I wouldn't risk it.
The comment you're replying to doesn't advocate hacking
Wasn't the EFF in a lawsuit just to prove that also users have a legal standing?
reference libFLAC 1.2.1 20070917
The license requires Voice.ai to include the license text somewhere in the distribution or documentation, yet they do not.
All software must be paid for, with the exception of countries which have an actual public domain. Some software is paid for with money, some with acknowledgments, and some with source code sharing. Sometimes the developer demands postcards, and sometimes they demand that you not use it for evil purposes. All of these are forms of payment.
If you don't pay for it, you don't have certain rights to it.
"Licensing" does not have to involve any sort of payment (or even compensation). There are free software licenses with no compensation requirements at all, yet they are not covering public domain software.
Edit: Instead of voting me down point out the relevant US law that allows copyright law that applies after the distribution like a TOS to person who didn’t distribute the code.
> But suppose the program is mainly useful on servers. When D modifies the program, he might very likely run it on his own server and never release copies. Then you would never get a copy of the source code of his version, so you would never have the chance to include his changes in your version. You may not like that outcome.
> Using the GNU Affero GPL avoids that outcome. If D runs his version on a server that everyone can use, you too can use it. Assuming he has followed the license requirement to let the server's users download the source code of his version, you can do so, and then you can incorporate his changes into your version. (If he hasn't followed it, you have your lawyer complain to him.)
Copyright law only covers distributed software. It is not a terms of service and cover usage. GNU site has a bunch of articles on what it covers and what it doesn't.
AGPL doesn't cover internal software if you don't expose it outside of the company.
Originally you said "Only if you distribute the code."
If you run software on your server, and someone outside accesses the software via a web page, even if the software is still only running on your server and hasn't been distributed outside the company, if it's under the AGPL, the company must make available the source code.
No. It's because Mongo is AGPL in your case.
If you used a brand new implementation of whatever protocol Mongo uses that's under a less restrictive license than AGPL, you would not trigger any obligation to share the source code.
"Proprietary" in "Proprietary protocol" pretty much means "specific" / "non-standard". And you can't legally prevent someone to reimplement your proprietary protocol. I don't even think you can copyright the protocol itself. You can copyright the documentation / specification document at best, and actual implementations of it.
In "proprietary software", though, "proprietary" means "non-tree", that is, not open-source as defined by the OSD / not free software as defined by the FSF / the GNU project. The meaning of this word is very different in those two separate concepts.
I don't see anything about integration in the license, there is no trigger about use AFAICT.
However, in item 13, it specifically says "if you modify the Program":
13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.
c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.
See also, paragraph (b):
b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to "keep intact all notices".
Yes indeed, you can use AGPL software internally without redistributing the source code, as you can with GPL software by the way (since AGPL is GPL + restrictions). The FSF actually considers a license that doesn't allow private use without distribution non-free, like the Watcom 1.0 license [1,2] (while the OSI does consider this license open source [3]).
Now, I think this is a property of the license, not the copyright laws which do allow authors to place such restrictions. That's why you can't freely use Windows or Photoshop privately.
Making the user click a "I agree" checkbox is one way of letting them know the terms and conditions, but not the only one.
[1] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Watcom-1.0
Yes it does. AGPL is set up in a very strange way. The source code offering is a condition of modification. It has to be kept up to date at all times, even on software that can only be accessed internally.
What about "internal" users of the company modified AGPL software (eg. employees)? I would be surprised if they are not entitled to having access to the source code under the very same AGPL terms (which gives them the right to distribute the software as well).
GPL and related licenses do allow personal use of modified software without publishing or distributing it, but company internal is not "personal" use: you are exposing some users to modified AGPL software.
I haven't read AGPL in detail so I could very well be wrong: can you point to the exact clauses which allow this exception? (Or rather, exact language that does not forbid it)
Note that users (in case of AGPL) or recipients (in case of GPL) of the software might decide not to exercise their rights, which could be pretty common for employees.
To quote AGPLv3 from https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html:
> 13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.
Live application runtime bytes streamed vs bytes written to a disk is not a meaningful distinction.
For example both AGPL and GPL3 say
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.
To me, I get the feeling the drafters of the license believe that modifiying code, even privately, and not distributing it any further than your own laptop, requires acceptance of the license, thus modifying AGPL code would require acceptance of that license.
I'm not convinced that's correct, but maybe courts see it that way. After all I suspect if I modify a copy of close source software (to say bypass some security lock) that I obtain in accordance with copyright law, not making any copies (for the purpose of copyright law) of it, I would be in breach of copyright.
If that's the case, then if you don't modify an AGPL software and just run it, you don't need to agree to the license, but if you do modify it you are in breach of copyright law unless you agree to the license.
Distribution is distribution: sharing the binary / source code of the thing.
Network protocols are not involved at all. Network connections between the software and the end-user are.
If a particular implementation of ANSI SQL was AGPL, and you modified and used this particular implementation and exposed it to the world, you would need to redistribute the code of this particular implementation.
But that does not change anything about ANSI SQL or about any other implementation of ANSI SQL.
They don't seem to have made such an error though. Their comment was very general, and permissive licenses still have conditions like giving attribution.
In general I abhor the whole concept of the "blessed app" walled garden gatekeeping, but if they're doing it anyway (and they are) they may as well do some good while they're at it.
I imagine at the least the original developers could file a DMCA notice.
Perhaps the authors of praat or libgcrypt could issue a DMCA takedown request to apple and google?
Maybe it'd help to instead call it "IP theft", which still sounds a bit serious.
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how this would work, but something like the following seems interesting...
In those cases in which IP theft appears to be intentional or grossly negligent, don't respond like a nonprofit flowerchild bringing peace and love to someone who simply didn't know. Instead, get a pitbull of a lawyer, to make the perpetrator actually regret it.
Which, for startups that made claims to investors regarding ownership/rights to the IP they used, could then trigger an additional concern: defrauding investors.
Then, after news of companies sorely regretting IP theft, a lot of companies proactively ban IP-theft-laundering tools like Copilot. And the companies that keep using tools like Copilot (or who don't excise existing stolen IP code quick enough, before forensic tools catch up, and catch them), start getting called to account by the pitbulls.
It's not a problem of naming but of who can afford fighting a legal battle in court and who cannot.
There's been many famous episode of big companies going to court for copyright infringement. But they know they can ignore individual developers.
As an example, a very long time ago, I was ripped off by a software company for about $10k. I talked with my (rabid dog) attorney about suing them. His response: we would have to sue in a different state, where he wasn't licensed. That means I'd have to hire another attorney. While I would almost certainly win the lawsuit, once you added up my expenses to get there, I was likely to come out of it with little actual money even assuming that my costs in pursuing the lawsuit were covered (which is not guaranteed). When you take into account the time and energy I'd also have to put into it, there wasn't much chance that I'd come out ahead over just dropping the issue.
So his question was: the only reason to sue them is on principle. Financially, I'd come out behind. Can I afford to pay to stand on principle?
In my situation with my business, I could not.
We'll open source it.
so if the code owners do not care why should the companies infringing on the license.
Then there is big problems with calling it theft, as legally is it not. Infringement is not theft and in most jurisdictions (if not all) in the US you are barred from calling it theft in court.
They are business association much like BSA, and less of an Open Source Steward these days and it is highly concerning the number of open source projects they hovering up under their "protection"
Praat would actually be a good candidate with just 2 people contributing majority of the code.
Record labels argued in court that each song shared in p2p networks that was downloaded at least once entitled them to statutory 150k USD in damages. Using that same logic Praat authors could demand 150k per release of voice.ai software at the very least.
In fact I would really like them to do that - it would fund further development of Praat at least and set a precedent showing that GPL != public domain, which seems to be the perception of many companies including large corporations, simply because nobody will care to enforce it.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
devil's advocate
Why should they? The original point of the GPL was to be the anti-copyright, the copyleft. The original point was to prevent companies suing individual developers, not to be some sort of gotcha for developers to sue companies. GPL is a shield, not a sword. Why would a company care about using GPL code in their proprietary products? It's fair use. Oracle vs Google proved it. You have no rights over code you released for free, and nobody is going to side with you as a developer suing to protect those rights. Everyone sees it as a bait and switch.
That isn't what happened in that court case, less what it "proved." Fair use is highly dependent on the specific details of the usage. Before it was ruled fair use, the specific kind of code in question in that case (headers/API definitions) was ruled, and long believed to be, ineligible for copyright.
The preamble to GPL v1: "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.html
To Google v Oracle, that was IIUC down to APIs usage being fair-use, not the code itself.
> GPL is a shield, not a sword.
Imagine explaining a soldier that they don't need to worry about being bashed to death with a shield because it a shield was designed to block blows.
Like the purpose for which the GPL was created is irrelevant to how it's being used, and people who are aware and desire to mitigate risks will be mindful of that.
Please don't. "Theft" is something very different. We're talking about contract violations.
> Instead, get a pitbull of a lawyer,
This is a piece of advice I give to everyone starting their own business anyway. Have a attorney, and it should be the meanest attorney you can find. Especially if you're a nice person.
If neither of those were true (let's say it was company secret source code, which was never licensed, but a copy was obtained and used anyway), would it still be a contract violation?
Not because of that, no. It's a contract violation because there is a contract of sorts (the license agreement). If the code was obtained through hacking, breaking and entering, etc., then we would be talking about theft.
> Or because there was a license that could be used without signing?
It is not necessary to sign something in order to enter into a contractual relationship. There is some gray area in terms of whether or not specific sorts of licensing is legally effective (click-wrap agreements, etc.), but the principle holds generally.
A license is type of contract. If you are using something under the terms of a license, violating the terms of that license is a kind of contract violation.
> If neither of those were true (let's say it was company secret source code, which was never licensed, but a copy was obtained and used anyway), would it still be a contract violation?
No, there is no license there. It's hard to say what, if any, violation there is in that case without knowing the specifics of the case. It could be a copyright violation. If the code was actually stolen, then it could be theft or receiving stolen property. Or it could simply not be a violation.
IANAL, by the way. I'm just relating my understanding of things. I could be wrong.
I would assume that it also takes a certain scale to be able to manage things well in this regard. There's a nasty gap in between one person and ten people, made far worse if the company needs to hit a milestone yesterday or cease to exist.
I'm sure that these violations are 100x more common than they appear, and that most of the culprits go out of business for unrelated reasons before anyone notices. Even when stealing to get a head start, running a successful business is hard.
Hasn’t stopped wage theft.
Their business model is creepy and unethical.
> Our Voice Universe community of contributors are training incredible voices every day to create hyper-realistic replicas that sound exactly like the real person!
And they even get their users to do the dirty work for them. Classy.
>Their business model is creepy and unethical.
That's the weird thing to me, at least market it in some way that's not creepy. This tech can be amazing for people who have recordings of their voice but lost the ability to speak out loud since; I certainly would want to use this software for that purpose if I were ever to lose my voice long term. Or you could go the unexplored business direction and market it for voice actors and the companies that hire them (especially the lower segment, like for ads) because a voice alone cannot be copyrighted.
But no, they went the "creepy internet stalker/misinformation generator/scammer" way. Quite unimaginative.
Doing things like this really should be an ethical violation for engineers. Every engineer should be able to say no to building something like this
Considering it is illegal, every person is able to say no. The engineers are likely complicit, either that they didn't check, or didn't care about the license.
Would anyone want to participate in a more coordinated effort urging them to comply?
I wish the OSS community had a legal team that would represent license violations like this. I have heard the FSF doesn't go after these, and EFF doesn't really tackle licensing issues like this does it?
The Software Freedom Conservancy is another place to look. They defend the GPL for a number of member projects, much like FSF does for GNU projects. (I don’t know how a project would go about becoming a member of the Conservancy)
This is exactly what the GPL license was made for!
> In accordance with the LGPL v2.1, I am requesting a copy of the libgcrypt source code plus the source code of VoiceAILib.dll and of any other components, tools, and/or scripts necessary to reproduce a working executable with my own version of libgcrypt.
I thought the required binaries (needed to re-link, .obj for Windows) could be requested but the source was not required, isn't that the point of LGPL?
The wording in the original article seemed to imply turning over the source was required by the LGPL, but if I understand what you're saying (You can still request a copy of the source of that library though) it should be more of a "pretty please, if you're feeling generous".
The piece I didn't understand (under LGPL) was "source code of VoiceAILib.dll".
They have to provide a way to rebuild VoiceAILib.dll with a modified version of LGPLed library, or just link the LGPL licensed library into it's own dll and don't bundle it with their own code into the same dll.
Providing the full source code for the whole dll is also a way to satisfy the LGPL's license requirements, of course.
From a quick google they have to release the code under a compatible license or provide a way to relink with with the LGPL code.
If they had dynamically linked they would have been fine.
The GPL code they statically linked in… they’re just screwed.
I'm far from an expert but thought this was an interesting technical issue affecting open source licensing (perhaps similar to closed-source kernel drivers?). If anyone has recent experience sorting this out "in the real world" (amicably or not!) I'd love to hear about it.
This has been done for QEMU in the past, for example (QEMU for historical reasons is a mishmash of GPLv2-compatible licenses, which is fine as long as the combination is distributed under the rules of GPLv2).
It does not. There is no such thing in copyright law as one work changing the license of another work. The idea of "virality" is incorrect.
If an author is violating the GPL by distributing e.g. MIT licensed code that links to GPL code it's up to them to choose between switching the whole work to GPL, or stop distributing it, or keep using MIT and stop including the GPL part.
They can even keep using MIT in libraries that are included in the main project and other combinations.
edit: see @bonzini reply
Well, in this case it appears that they're violating the license of the permissively licensed code, which still requires attribution. Points for uniformity, I guess...
For the GPL portion they need to release the code for the whole binary.
Create a separate service with all the GPL codes. Write your own micro service API to communicate with it. And then open source your micro service code without opening up your propitiatory part.
Of course someone else should have thought of it before. Searched and found first hit on stackoverflow. That says it's OK at least when used in a separate VM, no shared memory between the two.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/40420/gpl-licensed-c...
The moment you include an AGPL licensed piece of code this no longer works, though. The post only mentions GPL and LGPL, but they're also violating other licenses as pointed out here in the comments. I wouldn't be surprised if there's also an AGPL licensed piece of code in there that makes this workaround impossible.
Honestly, this workaround sounds like a lot of work to maintain long term while also putting you at the whims of library maintainers who may just switch out the license on you with newer versions, leaving you to do the maintenance and security monitoring of your dependency. If you need to put so much work into avoiding complying with the license you should consider just writing your own code instead.
We can all do the same and file complaints like this one [0] about GitHub, OpenAI and Microsoft with their Copilot product and model being trained on AGPL-3.0 code and a mixture of incompatible licenses and also outputs sensitive info of developers.
Give that Truth Social was caught using Mastodon's source code and violated the AGPL license by giving no attribution and no copy of the source code which they later complied, now we are starting to see this with AI projects violating licenses of open source projects; the same should also apply to GitHub, OpenAI and Microsoft with their Copilot product.
As far as copilot is concerned, those repos might as well be closed source. They are not accepting the license, and don't care about it. Their goal/claim is that the language model will not retain copyrightable sequences.
In case people are not aware, we know for a fact this is demonstrably false. It may not even be possible to achieve this with existing models. People have replicated entire sections of GPL code (with comments) using CoPilot. This is true of other models, like image generation models which can return clearly recognisable images which were present in their training sets.
However, I think this may be intentional, as an AI that doesn't spit out the occasional bit of training data may not be delivering output of a high enough quality.
I'm sure it's not as simple or hypocritical as the same people saying both things. And this specific story is about a very specific subversion of intellectual property rules to make it open. But it's a little weird hearing a complete lack of "information wants to be free" when the thing being "stolen" is our work.
(Yes I know de jure copyleft relies on copyright to exist, but morally they are diametrically opposite)
It is a extreme reaction to extremely dire copyright situation.
If information cant be free in this system, then let’s add a restriction that it must be free.
Briliant!
Free software, apart from some very permissive licenses, requires copyright to exist.
You are right that regulations need to exist for free software to exist but copyright isn't necessary one of them.
If a judge rules that AI will regurgitate existing code or that the network stores this code, these models will very quickly infringe the GPL and all matter of licenses at the same time.
If this is the case, you'll also need to figure out what GPL compliance looks like. The code training the network likely doesn't contain any code that must be shared, only the model being executed. Does that mean that providing the entire data set complies with GPL, leaving it up to the user to spend millions on training their own network? Or does the model file itself need to be distributed as-is?
The AI people argue that AI learns concepts from code and does not store or replicate the input code directly, though I very much doubt that given that AI will spit out code it has been trained on verbatim. If this is the case then the code may have been processed by the algorithm, but the license impact would be similar to processing it in another way: just because you compress up a bunch of code doesn't mean you need to open source your compression tool.
We need clear legislation for this because the court cases are going to be a clusterfuck.
So I think I would apply the same rules to AI. In general not all code produced is infringing on the copyright of all authors of training data. However there have been some clear cases of copying (GPL license text and a matrix multiplication routine for example) that do appear as copyright violations.
Truth is that the insight that there is no difference on data and program code in particular stands here. If the model can act on the code. It can be said to execute it.
- Training isn’t the same thing as actually using the code
- The training process doesn’t change the code of GPT-3, it changes the parameters, which are input data to the code and not a part of it
- They aren’t distributing any binaries for GPT3, though for AGPL that wouldn’t matter
If Voice.AI attempts to enforce their ToS anyway, they are violating the GPL. IANAL, but because of the clean-hands doctrine, such a suit would fail.
The doctrine if unclean hands may only be used as a defense in claims of equity – which are claims in which the court seeks to make things equal or fair, though not by ordering the payment of damages
This approach is what drives corporations to adopt zero-GPL policies. The GPLv3 explicitly includes language about how to cure a violation (spoiler alert: it's not "haha, we caught you - now hand over all of your source!"), and both of the mentioned violations are available under GPLv3.
This person needs to notify the copyright holders of the GPL libraries, who can then contact the copyright holders of the violating software, starting the timer on the window in which the offending software must be cured.
Good. It's literally the point of choosing the GPL that organisations producing proprietary software can't benefit and mix in GPL licensed work without publishing the source.
The copyright-holder can take action against an organization producing proprietary software who is violating their copyright. Legally, they're violating the rights of the copyright-holder, not the end-user.
> The claim that a GPL violation could lead to the forcing open of proprietary code that has wrongfully included GPL'd components is simply wrong. There is no provision in the Copyright Act to require distribution of infringing work on altered terms. What copyright plaintiffs are entitled to, under the Act, are damages, injunctions to prevent infringing distribution, and--where appropriate--attorneys' fees. A defendant found to have wrongfully included GPL'd code in its own proprietary work can be mulcted in damages for the distribution that has already occurred, and prevented from distributing its product further. That's a sufficient disincentive to make wrongful use of GPL'd program code. And it is all that the Copyright Act permits.
> A defendant found to have wrongfully included GPL'd code in its own proprietary work can be mulcted in damages for the distribution that has already occurred, and prevented from distributing its product further. That's a sufficient disincentive to make wrongful use of GPL'd program code. And it is all that the Copyright Act permits.
From your own quote. This is ultimately good enough. You either get the source or the proprietary software is knee-capped/no longer allowed to be distributed. From a Free Software perspective that's a win.
Good! That’s precisely the whole point of the GPL. That is: to prevent proprietary code, which harms users, from being mixed with Free Software! Proprietary software is harmful to the users. OpenAI is malware, it has cryptominers in it. It also sets off antivirus scanners. Now we’ll get to see if their claims are true by looking at the code for ourselves
Such companies are freeloaders at best and sometimes even hostile to FOSS and to users.
I prefer Apache 2.0, as who knows where chunks of code end up 10 years from now.
If you are able, than its good karma to support the community with your own development hours and or fiscal donations. =)
You are correct in that Bezos does little for the community, and AWS tends to repackage community projects. Yet, most firms do put in many paid hours on kernel development etc.
Have a wonderful day =)
Linux kernel uses GPL.
Have a great day =)
Nothing in the GPL requires this, only distributing sources down to your users, who may or may not then redistribute the sources back upstream.
The project contamination happens even with the LGPL.
The subject was contaminating licenses, and why they are not appropriate in some situations. Cheers =)
GPL (ie. Copyleft) guarantees "open source" for _users_ of the software
Apache (ie. permissive) gives source code to _developers_.
One may be surprised by having faith in peoples goodwill. =)
Most of my code, being I usually just make python wrappers around C/C++ libraries I want to play with, retains whatever license the original library uses. That’s the license they want, that’s the license I follow.
The rare occasion I actually put up original code on GitHub (not really sure I’ve ever done that though, I have a bad yak shaving addiction…would have to check so “theoretically”) I just use a BSD license because I don’t care — some jurisdictions require a license, that the most free one and I’d be happy if someone used my code for whatever.
I also like the LGPL or wxWidgets licenses, as it encourages professional linux application development/ports. (Qt5 was an example of doing things wrong in my opinion.)
I agree it is a personal choice, and I like giving people more freedom to build.
The punitive culture around GPLv3 is especially unsavory. =)
I never inferred other people should choose a specific license, but rather stated the fact GPL can contaminate large bodies of work completely unrelated to community projects (mostly v3 I take issue with). The state of Steam game compatibility is a demonstration of the conflicting use-cases hobbling a platforms potential.
In my opinion LGPL is better for libraries as if you modify lib source it obligates community participation, but doesn't force your entire project into public view when a linker touches the wrong GPL lib.
We can disagree, and from each perspective believe we are correct. I'll stick with Apache 2.0, as its better suited for my projects.
Enhance your calm. =)
Nothing in the GPL/LGPL requires this, only distributing sources down to your users, who may or may not then redistribute the sources back upstream to the community.
The project contamination happens even with the LGPL.
The subject was contaminating licenses, and why they are not appropriate in some situations. Cheers =)
Sure, I was just pointing out a misconception in your understanding of these licenses. They only require distributing downstream to your users, not back to the upstream community.
I go by the lawyers consensus, not some opinion on the internet from some unknown region of the world. Note, the user-base doesn't care, they only want a program to work on their platform. Some upstream publishers on the other hand can be disrespectful at times, as some can assume the worst... it usually has nothing to do with the FOSS foundations themselves.
Thanks for your opinion though, it is good to see people still interested in community projects. Happy computing, =)
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
Some people are way more aggressive than the foundation. QED =)
I rather people have unrestricted development options, and not feel like they entered a Faustian bargain. Its a personal choice, but I have only been coding since 1993… so probably don’t know any better. lol =)
Except, there’s nothing forcing someone to take a GPL’d library and integrate it into their application.
If you don’t like the license don’t use the code and later whine about “punitive” actions taken against you.
At this point there’s no excuse for not knowing that the GPL is very restrictive and the code isn’t free-for-all. No excuse except maybe they think they won’t get caught by including some reverse-engineering clause in their TOS so people can’t find out. That worked out pretty well for these folks, no?
My point was, I personally don't want to inflict my own idealism on people 10 years from now, that will be doing something completely unpredictable. =)