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Comment by tspiteri | Hacker News Reader

I don't like how you brand Denis-Courmont a zealot or bad apple for not letting others break the license terms of his code. He licensed his code under the GPL for a reason, and if someone doesn't like his license, they shouldn't expect him to waive his rights on his code. (I don't know about the case, I'm basing this on your comment alone.)

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Having the legal right to do a thing does not mean that you are invincible to criticism for exercising that right. You have the right to freedom of speech, but the things you actually say may be foolish or wrong; contrarily, cheating on your spouse is not a crime, but doing so still makes you a worse person. You have the right to keep all your money instead of giving a penny to charity, but being charitable is better. "Legal" and "good" are not the same thing.

Denis-Courmont may have licensed his code under GPL for a reason, but it can very well be a bad, zealous reason. Indeed, I would expect that almost every person who truly is a zealot and a bad apple would choose to license their code under GPL. The GPL is a license that demands total obedience to a particular ideology of software distribution, and requiring that other people obey your ideology in every detail is the defining characteristic of a zealot.

Calling him a zealot just for using the GPL seems a bit unnecessary to me, but whatever. It does not matter what his reasons are for it, he is allowing people to use the code he wrote under a certain set of conditions, which some people have not been honouring. I don't believe there is anything wrong with him calling them on that; why should he just sit there quietly while other people violate his license and profit off his work?

>why should he just sit there quietly while other people violate his license and profit off his work?

Gee, I don't know. Maybe for the good of the hundreds of thousands of users of iOS/VLC? Maybe because the other contributors had agreed to this and didn't care for the technical violation, especially since both the code was available and the app was free? Maybe because also working for Nokia seems like a huge conflict of interest?

Maybe Apple and Microsoft should release all their software under a permissive license for the good of hundreds of millions of users. Is that what you are suggesting? I do not have any problem with people/corporations releasing/selling their code as they see fit, but I do take issue at people feeling entitled to set the terms for other people's code. If the other contributors do not mind the violation, they are free to remove his code and release their code as they see fit.

Using the GPL is not really comparable to saying something foolish or wrong, and is certainly not comparable to cheating on a spouse. Such arguments reek of anti-GPL zealotry.

The license terms were only broken in the most unimportant of ways. Apple did nothing to make VLC less free, did not have a custom version that needed source sharing, etc. It was a stupid technicality. Denis-Courmont did no-one good.

Honest question since I'm not really familiar with the case and might be completely mistaken: One of the fundamental principles behind the GPL is that a user can modify the program and run the modified program. Was this freedom preserved? Because if it was, my posts in this thread might be completely misguided.

That is going to depend on who you talk to. The GPLv3 has "anti-tivoization" text that keeps the device maker from locking down the device to approved programs. As far as the GPLv2 is concerned you only need to be able to modify and compile the code, and no particular device has to run it.

In this particular case, anyone that was already capable of running code they compiled on an iphone (read: people with a developer license) was also capable of making and using modified versions of VLC.

I don't happen to believe that what is legal is also moral.

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