GNU grep - A Cautionary Tale About GPLv3 | Hacker News Reader

GNU grep - A Cautionary Tale About GPLv3

gdamore.blogspot.com

16 pointszdw35 comments

If the author is required to publish the source code, guess what his second to market competitors will have to do as well? Free software is not an ideological exercise. It has its benefits. The author missed out on a huge opportunity.

The author is greedy. GPL v3 successfully cut off the parasite. Good riddance.

Now, he does make a good point though. We have to think strategically. Read gnu.org for details but here is the cinch: if there are commercial alternatives to what you are making, make your licensing liberal (arguably android because iOS existed and WinPoo 7 was apparently in the works). This encourages adoption of foss. However, when foss has the market cornered, don't let the big guys take your ball and run home. Use GPL v3.

The author is greedy. GPL v3 successfully cut off the parasite. Good riddance.

Now, this was a real soap box. Let me hop off it real quick.

I became an AGPL3 fan after reading many papers from the 50s->70s, before the rise of open source & the Unix sharing habits. I believe its a crying shame that all those wonderful tools and systems that I read about disappeared into the void and got hidden by closed-source approaches to development and licensing. I am fully aware that this limits certain avenues of commercialization, and I am fully OK with that. I believe that an AGPL3 world is a better world for computer science and technology.

From my perspective as an engineer in the enterprise, we value functionality very highly; if you sell us a GPL3-based hardware solution, we care that it works. We're not going to copy and resell it. We have our own products to care about and do excellent things with.

IMO, they disappeared exactly because they embraced the ideals you love. Of course people aren't going to work on extending and polishing these systems if they can't get paid to (at least not at the same magnitude as for the closed solutions). At least, that is what history seems to indicate so far, except in a relatively limited space where companies have both the technical expertise to modify the source AND the economic incentive to avoid paying for closed licenses.

Although that is not the situation this guy finds himself in. He seems to just be confused.

I might be wrong, but I don't think Honeywell, Burroughs, DEC, IBM (and the other vendors) used the open source (as we think of it today) model.

edit: As a matter of fact, part of why Unix was able to spread was the AT&T restrictions forcing it to be shared.

"Because that one little "worm" - used simply to support a startup script, could have created a situation where we would have been required to open source our entire product."

Someone assist in my enlightenment: Under what sort of enforcement circumstances would that requirement to open-source a lot of code actually be likely? As opposed to some enforcement action where you remove the offending code.

As far as I know, this can't happen. The author is being highly paranoid, presumably due to being misinformed.

Yeah. This company was about to distribute GNU grep, meaning that they would be obligated to provide source for that version of grep, and likewise for any modifications to grep they've made. Yawn.

When a clever person is so completely misinformed about a subject that's the very core of their business, I would rather call it FUD.

And I'd also like to point out they aren't in the business of creating value, as an open source product offers more value than a black box: their want to create costs.

I think you're right about FUD, but it's probably not him. I imagine he fell victim to the FUD, rather than intentionally creating it.

I always find it suspicious when someone clever falls victim of - and further spreads - FUD that is beneficial to his/her business. Remember they sell proprietary (actually, re-licensed) software that's not under one of those "dangerous" and "viral" licenses.

We're all biased towards ideas that suit us. If the FUD is beneficial to his business then he's likely to be highly receptive to it.

It can't happen. However, the plaintiff may offer to forgo monetary damages in exchange for you open-sourcing. So it becomes pay money, or open-source.

> A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate. (GPLv3)

Using GNU grep, as GNU grep, and merely aggregating it with the whole, would seem, from the quote above, to not cause the whole to be GPLv3 covered.

The only slightly questionable part is the "combined with it such as to form a larger program" portion of GPLv3. Is using grep, to "grep", sufficient to say that grep is "combined ... to form a larger program"? If the answer is no, then yes, the author is simply misinformed.

GPL3 is restricted to the boundaries of the executable so he would just have to give access to the grep source code if/when requested. End of story.

Yeah, that is my thought too. Maybe he thinks including a call to grep that the users shell would read/fork/exec is a type of linking? Seems like a stretch.

"But if you're a business trying to create value, this is actively harmful."

Your sense of entitlement is mind boggling.

/Someone/ wrote the code you are complaining about and /their/ idea of /value/ is that it should be open sourced under a "viral" license.

I don't believe he is stating the point at all. He is not arguing the source code for GNU grep.

If you read "harmful" as "harmful to my own interests", then the statement is value-neutral. I consider this a plausible interpretation.

If you are building propriety products around lots of open-source components then being mindful of the GPL is just basic common sense. Acting like it is some hidden minefield is being disingenuous.

Why should distributing GNU grep necessitate releasing the source of other things that you distribute? It only seems obvious to me that they would then have to distribute the source of GNU grep.

Are they linking to grep but grep doesn't have the linking exception?

You're correct. There is no circumstance under which he's compelled to open up his source code.

If the hardware system he's selling has some kind of crypto (like login passwords that you don't know!) that disallows modifications to the base system, GPLv3 can require you to give up enough control to let the user install their modified grep too. (That's still not giving away your source code, but it is more than just giving out the source code to grep.)

Good point, you couldn't include GPLv3'd code into something like a Tivo, but that is hardly an unintended side-effect of the license. Whining about that would be rather silly. ;)

If you want the benefits of open source without the responsibility of sharing consider a BSD licensed product.

Seems most people didn't really read his story from beginning to end. Specifically the part at the beginning of the post: "The product itself is not delivered as a separate executable, but as a complete product. We don't permit our customers to crack it open..."

If he distributes his product as a monolithic and atomic item, wouldn't he be forced to release all parts of it if requested?

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