Hacker News Reader

Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

Nicely put, however, according to GNU.org:

> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).

I actually can't do that with GPL code - not because my employer tells me not to but because I know that could get my employer into trouble.

With MIT/BSD you run the risk of someone taking the code and never contributing back. With GPL you run the risk of excluding people from the ability to participate.

There is no license that encompasses all rights and freedoms because it's probably impossible to create a set of rules that would encompass everyone. Our freedoms are strangely mutually exclusive in some ways. I think forrestthewoods issue with GPL is that it is toted at 'the' way to preserve freedom - where the truth is that it's the way to preserve one form of freedom. That's why I never, ever, say "freedom" when talking about GPL and rather always say "free as in beer."

View on HN

> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).

>>I actually can't do that with GPL code - not because my employer tells me >>not to but because I know that could get my employer into trouble.

This is extremely loose and deceptive talk. That freedom is genuine and valuable. You are talking about something completely different, that has no bearing whatever on freedom 1.

The company I work for modifies and revises GPL'd code all the time. It causes us no problems whatsoever, because we don't release or distribute it. Instead we just use it internally for our own purposes. Nothing in the GPL restricts your use, abuse or modification of the code. It only restricts how you can go about sharing and distributing it.

> It only restricts how you can go about sharing and distributing it.

Let me clarify this: the GPL allows you to redistribute your modified version. It only mandates you give your users the same rights you were given, so that they too can study and modify and share their work.

You get to stand on the shoulders of giants (for free!), but you have no right to prevent others from doing the same.

"but you have no right to prevent others from doing the same"

That's not quite right. It's not you have no right to prevent others from doing the same. Neither GPL nor MIT let you stop other people from standing on the same shoulders you stood on. The difference is whether you must let people stand on your shoulders. GPL forces you to open your shoulders. MIT lets you choose to share your shoulders or not.

Or rather than shoulders, how about ladders?

If you use a GPL ladder to get up, you are mandated to leave it in place so that others can do the same. With a MIT ladder you are free to pull it up behind you.

Now the latter may be more free in the absolutist sense, but it is a very antisocial kind of free. But then the corporate world has proven again and again that it will be very antisocial if it gets them a pound of flesh...

No. That's not right. At all.

If you use a GPL ladder to get up and then climb even higher then you are mandated to not just leave the ladder but to extend as you continue to climb.

If you use an MIT ladder to get up then climb even higher then you have the choice to extend the ladder as you go or not. Or partially extend it in some places but not all. But there is literally nothing you can do to the original ladder. It's there for anyone else to use exactly as you used it and there's nothing you can do to stop them.

Fair point. You get the right to stand on the shoulders of giants, but you have no right to prevent others from standing on your shoulders as long as you are on the shoulders of giants.

Your use of "rights" is a little unclear. We all stand on the shoulders of giants in all things. Yet I most certainly have the right to prevent people from standing on my shoulders. I write proprietary code for video game entertainment so I regularly take advantage of that right.

The GPL license has the right to limit what freedoms I have as a developer if I choose to use code it covers. It limits the freedom of some people (developers) to protect the freedom of other people (consumers). I similarly have the right to choose a different license that prioritizes my freedoms of a developer over the freedoms of consumers.

And all of these things are possible due to the restriction of freedom over all of us as governed by copyright law.

You only have the right to prevent people from standing on your shoulders as long as the giants you are standing upon did not dictate the terms under which you get to enjoy the view. If they say that being generous is a condition to stand on their shoulders, those are the conditions.

The GPL limits your freedom of limiting the freedoms of others given by those who wrote the software your software depends upon. If you want to limit the freedoms of your users, you don't have the right to use software explicitly licensed to preserve those rights to limit them. If you want to do that, you either use software that was not made to preserve user freedoms, such as software licensed under BSD, Apache, or you write your own.

> And all of these things are possible due to the restriction of freedom over all of us as governed by copyright law.

Yes! And isn't it the Most Brilliant Hack Ever?

Absolutely.

> With GPL you run the risk of excluding people from the ability to participate.

Prohibiting actions and thus excluding people is the point of GPL and most licenses. GPL is a cause. I'll keep reiterating that point. To some people, "freedom" means a WTFPL license. To many GPL users, WTFPL would be antithetical to their pursuit of freedom. Freedom is abstract. Many people feel they must perpetuate certain underlying principles to embody any semblance of freedom. Paraphrasing the views of Free computing advocates: in a world where oppression is normal -- in this case, speaking of any inherent oppression in non-transparent boxes that comprise most of software and hardware today -- one tactic to break the cycle of abuse is by harnessing any available tools of the system (e.g. copyright law). There are various voluntary, peaceful strategies to promote freedom. That's one.

Freedom means many things to many people, understandably. To me, GPL does speak to a 'freedom' I want to increase. Personal freedoms of developers and companies [to do whatever they please] is only a secondary concern. Your employer is a secondary concern. Perpetuating transparency in computing is the primary concern.

But you only risk getting your employer into trouble because they're committed to releasing proprietary software. The FSF considers proprietary software evil; the GPL inconveniencing developers of such software is a central goal, not collateral damage.

Now, if the concern is that you can't modify a GPLed text editor or compiler or browser or other such tool at your workplace, that shouldn't be an issue. Unless you're releasing modified binaries from GPL code, you are under no obligation to distribute your changes to the source.

> Now, if the concern is that you can't modify a GPLed text editor [...]

That is indeed the issue. The concept is that I might read some algorithm or solution as a whole while working with the GPL code. This solution, even if not directly copied, might end up in the code of the proprietary (and patented) product.

If prosecuted in America, where the court is interpretive on new issues, this could result in trouble for my employer. Having no previous rulings to go by, there is no way to approximate the outcome of a case such as this and hence looking at GPL code could constitute a risk.

A good "inverted" example of this is when Oracle went after Google/Android for supposedly having copied a hashing function. The obvious question and defense is: common data structures have obvious hashing functions and there is a good likelihood of coming with identical or near-identical code, i.e. serendipity.[1] Even though there is no proof that the code was copied, the court ruled in favor of Oracle on the grounds of "structure, sequence and organization of an API is copyrightable."

How this applies to GPL code, from my situation, is uncertain. GPL has patent clauses, so it's really risky.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,....

In that case you can't possibly read any code whatsoever.

Yet again the GPL does not restrict your freedoms. It just adds to them if you're in the pro-user freedom camp of software development and leaves you no worse off if you don't.

> In that case you can't possibly read any code whatsoever.

Hyperbole isn't really called for. I can read MIT/BSD because that has patent allowances.

I'm not saying that GPL is bad, I am saying that GPL serves different freedoms to MIT/BSD which in turn serves different freedoms to proprietary (which does have freedoms, e.g. liability).

There is no one size fits all solution to licensing and there will never be.

Without reading the code, how do you know you're not inadvertently reimplementing something the same way a GPL program does?

If you are truly concerned about this, the best way to avoid copyright complaints is to be aware of what's out there already and deliberately build a different implementation. I would argue that it is more beneficial -- from your point of view -- to read as much GPL code as possible.

Let's stipulate that this hashing scenario (I don't know much about it) is an example of a common algorithm that is the best way to solve a specific problem... it probably is. The only way in the US to defend that premise legally is to go to court. If the court decides against you, you have to lobby the legislature. Is the process convoluted and costly to the point of being broken? Probably, but this is how the the law comes to grips with changes in society, and there's really no alternative if you want to live and work in the light of day.

> This solution, even if not directly copied, might end up in the code of the proprietary (and patented) product.

I and many others are deeply opposed to proprietary and patented software. I (of course) understand you need resources to build software, but I think there are other ways to acquire those resources. The vast majority of software that people use is open source, free software (Firefox, Chrome, Nginx, Apache, Java, PHP, .NET, Linux, Android, MySQL), and this has been amazingly great for society (admittedly mostly rich, western society though). Can you imagine the cost of a browser if everyone had to license it and all the technologies contained therein? PNG, JPEG, GIF, SVG, SSL, JSON, XML, 2D rendering, font rendering and layout, hardware accelerated rendering, JavaScript, JavaScript interpretation & JIT, DOM processing, CSS application, user interface toolkits, video codecs, audio codecs, network protocol licenses, memory management algorithms, blah blah blah. By the time you were done, Firefox would cost $60 a copy - if you were lucky.

> Without reading the code, how do you know you're not inadvertently reimplementing something the same way a GPL program does?

Fair point. At the end of the day it's complex so I go for the simplest solution: avoid GPL code in any way possible.

> I and many others are deeply opposed to proprietary and patented software.

I'm starting to understand that from the responses, now. Although I work in proprietary, I try to look at software licensing from a more neutral standpoint - which might not be popular around here.

Please cite a single court case in which a engineers reading of source code has been used as proof of intentional infringement of a patent or copyright.

I hope you do not read newspapers, HN or other places which publish information about new technology. Newspapers seems much more dangerous than source code, as they often publish news about patented technology. Think of the risk that you inflict your company, as a single miss clicked link can cause ruin in a future patent case. Better to cut down on any contact with the outside world.

> Please cite a single court case in which a engineers reading of source code has been used as proof of intentional infringement of a patent or copyright.

It might help if you read the entire comment, instead of patronizing it after reading a single sentence. I did actually address that.

> Better to cut down on any contact with the outside world.

Great constructive discussion.

>> there is no way to approximate the outcome of a case such as this and hence looking at GPL code could constitute a risk.

contact with the outside world also constitute a risk, and there is no way to approximate the risk. Beware!

The Oracle vs Google case is not about google employees reading source code. They copied header files, which neither party denies. The case resolve around the question: Does copying header files constitute copyright infringement. Talking about reading source code in this context is FUD, likely from someone who has an agenda.

> likely from someone who has an agenda.

Now we have conspiracy theories. We're done here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com