somebody wrote:
> "Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
> news:4983bdac@news.povray.org...
>> somebody wrote:
>>> Don't assume. You want to release code mixed with GPL code,
> 
>> No, I don't! That's exactly what the article is talking about!
> 
> Doesn't matter, software that functions together is a block.

There's no such thing as "block" in copyright law.  Clearly, all the movies 
showing in the same movie theatre are functioning together "in a block", so 
of course they all have to come from the same movie studio, right?

> Would GM allow a car dealership to put in, say, Toyota parts into
> their cars and sell it as a whole?

They don't enforce that with copyrights.

> If a piece of software depends on another to function as a
> package, demanding that the licenses be compatible makes sense to me.

Sure. But you can't enforce that with copyrights.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Mueen Nawaz wrote:
> 	You're invoking an analogy using a *closed* model and realizing that
> what the gcc folks are doing is the same - all the while being GPL.

Good point.

There's something else I realized that's cognitively dissonant.

Software can't be free in the libre sense. "Free software" is just another 
word for "constrained people."  It's just as confusing to talk about 
software that's "free" as it is to confuse gratis with libre.

What do I mean?

Software doesn't make choices. More freedom means having more choices. 
Before the civil war, some people in this country had the freedom to own 
slaves. They could decide to own slaves, or not own slaves. After that, we 
took away their freedom to own slaves and instead gave the former slaves 
choices as to what they could do.

Software doesn't make choices. So software can't be "more free" or "less 
free". It can only affect the freedoms of people. The only way it makes 
sense to talk about "how free is this software/license" is to evaluate it 
with respect to what people actually do.

If I restrict the license to prevent you from doing certain things with the 
software I wrote, that doesn't make you more free. It makes you less free. 
It doesn't affect the software at all - the software is what it is and 
doesn't make choices. So the GPL is not as "free" as the MIT license, 
because it restricts the choices that someone other than the author can 
make. The author, of course, can make any choice he wants about his own 
original software - no argument there. But the authors who release their 
work under the GPL aren't making it "more free" than otherwise. They're 
simply saying "I'd rather not have improvements than have proprietary 
improvements, because the third level of improvements will be delayed." 
People releasing under the MIT license are saying "we hope you improve this, 
even if we decline to pay for the improvements."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Mueen Nawaz <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
> somebody wrote:
> >>> Don't assume. You want to release code mixed with GPL code,
> >
> >> No, I don't! That's exactly what the article is talking about!
> >
> > Doesn't matter, software that functions together is a block. Think of it
> > this way: Would GM allow a car dealership to put in, say, Toyota parts into
> > their cars and sell it as a whole? After all, Toyota is building their parts
> > from the ground up, not using any GM parts. In other words, packaging makes
> > a difference. If a piece of software depends on another to function as a
> > package, demanding that the licenses be compatible makes sense to me.
>
>  Perfect! Now you finally get it!
>
>  You're invoking an analogy using a *closed* model and realizing that
> what the gcc folks are doing is the same - all the while being GPL.

GPL was always a closed model of freedom.  Like someone previous analogy of it
being a country where you can spend your money in any way you like, as long as
it's spent *in* the country, not on foreign stuff.  It's the GPL playground,
where kids don't harm themselves as long as they're inside...

No one has ever stated otherwise and in any case, this closed model of freedom
is what, IMO, guarantees the continued evolution of GPL'd software at a faster
pace than leecher-friendly "more free" models.

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Mueen Nawaz wrote:
> 	You're invoking an analogy using a *closed* model and realizing that
> what the gcc folks are doing is the same - all the while being GPL.

Let me see if I can ramble about this even more...

Who does the GPL benefit?

Original author Alice writes some code, as does Xavier.

Alice releases it as GPL, Xavier as MIT.

Betty wants to improve Alice's code. Her only choice is to release her 
improvements as GPL as well.

Yvonne wants to improve Xavier's code. She can release her improvements as 
GPL, or as MIT, or as commercial software.

Say Yvonne builds some significant functionality that costs more money than 
Yvonne is willing to give away. Yvonne would like to spend one million 
dollars developing some software, then sell it for $10 each to 100,000 
people. Yvonne can do this. Betty can't.

(That's why commercial game companies, for example, don't use GPLed game 
libraries. It's cheaper to rewrite the libraries from scratch than to give 
away the game when you're done.)

Zacharia wants the functionality that Yvonne and Betty know how to create. 
Zacharia is willing to pay $10 for Yvonne's improvements, because it will 
save him $100 each month. He's not willing to spend $1M for Betty's 
improvements.

Charlie, however, is willing to forgo Yvonne's improvements because they're 
not "free" as in "libre". Charlie doesn't have the choice of getting Betty's 
improvements, because Betty never created them, because neither Betty nor 
anyone willing to hire Betty thought they were worth $1M.

Yvonne still has the choice, for any improvements she makes, of releasing 
them under GPL, MIT, or commercial licenses. Betty's choice is only to make 
the improvements that aren't so extensive that they cost her more than her 
spare time. Unless, of course, there's a company that (for example) sells 
hardware and can use the profits from selling hardware to pay for GPL 
software that provides similar functionality as other software that only 
runs on other hardware.

Who *does* the GPL benefit (compared to other free licenses)? It benefits 
not the person using the GPL software. It benefits not the person modifying 
the software. It benefits, instead, the person who gets the software after 
the second person has modified it. And it only benefits *that* person if 
they are a programmer or want a programmer to change it for them. So, in 
other words, the person best helped by the GPL is Charlie, and only if he's 
a programmer. In particular, it helps Charlie most when Charlie is also 
Alice, i.e., when the final customer of the changes to the software is the 
original author of the software. (Of course, it helps Doug when Charlie 
incorporates and improves his changes, and so on down the line, etc.)

This would seem to explain a fair amount.

It seems to explain why the best GPLed software is that which helps 
programmers create valuable for-fee services (or which has an exception 
letting you sell the results of using the software), like Linux, Apache, 
gcc, and the open source database engines.

It explains why there was no popular office suite before Sun and why there's 
still no good equivalent of SAP, TurboTax, PeachTree, and so on. These 
programs were too big to write as an open-source project just for kicks. 
They're not interesting enough to programmers to take to the level of 
completion needed to make them useful. Improvements to something like SAP 
isn't going to come back and make any programmer's life easier, so nobody 
feels the need to get others to try to contribute by making a version that 
can be GPLed.

Emacs and LaTeX is good enough for geeks, and those programs get steadily 
improved. Editing HTML by hand was good enough for "fancy" output, and it 
wasn't worth going much beyond that as an "office suite". Getting an office 
suite to the point where it would be useful to non-nerds is a large and 
significant undertaking, because you can't do it just a little bit. The 
"little bit" part is already done, in functionality like notepad, HTML, 
ispell, and so on. The big part is the boring part of putting it all 
together, making it deal with different file formats, getting it to conform 
to platform standards, writing the documentation and help screens, and all 
that other stuff the original author doesn't need.

Because, face it, if you're a nerd who also needed to do spreadsheets, you 
bought Excel or some other commercial product - it really wasn't worth 
spending a few years of your time to avoid using a commercial product. Or 
you wrote something specific to your need of the moment, which was useless 
to others.

It explains why the biggest successes - like Apache, Linux, MySql and 
PostgreSQL, gcc - are all targeted at creating and using non-GPLed software 
and services. Companies like Sun would write their own SPARC compiler of gcc 
switched to insisting all output from gcc fell under the GPL. Lots of 
companies use Apache, but few release the source to the scripts and database 
schemas their customers invoke under it. Other popular successes, like 
Firefox and Thunderbird, started out as closed-source commercial software, 
released when the companies were destroyed by competition.

I suspect large projects that aren't useful to individual programmers will 
very rarely be spontaneously developed under the GPL. There's going to be a 
large (and increasingly larger) class of programs that people want that just 
won't get developed for free, and the extent to which GPL software requires 
those programs to be given away is the extent to which GPL software won't be 
useful to the developers of those programs.

Comments welcome.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Software doesn't make choices. So software can't be "more free" or "less
> free". It can only affect the freedoms of people.

Doh!

> If I restrict the license to prevent you from doing certain things with the
> software I wrote, that doesn't make you more free. It makes you less free.

Yes, specially leechers just waiting for some free lunch for their products.

> It doesn't affect the software at all - the software is what it is and
> doesn't make choices.

But it *does* affect the software:  GPL'd software evolve at faster pace than
MIT-style software.  IBM, RedHat, Novell are all major contributors of GPL'd
Linux-related software.  How many big enterprises contribute code to the *BSDs
without fear of their good work ending up powering their competition products,
who may make it one better and not disclose the modifications?

The GPL levels the playing field, the playground where everyone are children.

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nemesis wrote:
> GPL was always a closed model of freedom.

Somehow, a "closed model of freedom" sounds like "less free" to me. :-) It 
certainly doesn't sound like "better for society" or "information wants to 
be free" sorts of slogans the FSF normally uses.

> evolution of GPL'd software at a faster
> pace than leecher-friendly "more free" models.

I believe this applies *at best* to software programmers use. Nothing 
prevents anyone from taking MIT code and releasing modifications to it as 
MIT code.  So you have free evolution *and* commercial evolution, while you 
have only free evolution with the GPL.

Mind explaining under what circumstances GPL software leads to faster 
evolution than MIT software?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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nemesis wrote:
> How many big enterprises contribute code to the *BSDs

Well, MIT, and Berkeley, for example?  Hence the name of the software and 
the name of the license?

All the stuff like OpenAL, Apache, etc that don't use the GPL?

> without fear of their good work ending up powering their competition products,

Why is that bad? The software is still getting improved.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
> > GPL was always a closed model of freedom.
>
> Somehow, a "closed model of freedom" sounds like "less free" to me. :-)

It's free for other free software.  Which is good enough in my book.

> certainly doesn't sound like "better for society" or "information wants to
> be free" sorts of slogans the FSF normally uses.

They are consistent in that they are pro free software, anti closed software and
they think free software is better for society.

> Mind explaining under what circumstances GPL software leads to faster
> evolution than MIT software?

Sure, you clipped it away from my previous post, so here you go again:

IBM, RedHat, Novell are all major contributors of GPL'd
Linux-related software.  How many big enterprises contribute code to the *BSDs
without fear of their good work ending up powering their competition products,
who may make it one better and not disclose the modifications?

The GPL levels the playing field, the playground where everyone are children.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
> > How many big enterprises contribute code to the *BSDs
>
> Well, MIT, and Berkeley, for example?  Hence the name of the software and
> the name of the license?

Those are academia.  What about industry players?

> All the stuff like OpenAL, Apache, etc that don't use the GPL?

Yes, Apache and its wealth of web and java tools are popular too.  Even
Microsoft is contributing to them, as well as Sun and IBM.  Web tools are of
immediate usefulness to everyone, not just Linux or GNU.  And, as I understand
it, it powers many proprietary tools of those companies (so far, not from
Microsoft).

> > without fear of their good work ending up powering their competition products,
>
> Why is that bad? The software is still getting improved.

That's true when it's GPL'd and truly getting improved for everyone, not when
it's released under some promiscuous licensing, some competitor picks it up,
makes it better and power their product with the superior modification and
pisses and laughs on your face.

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On Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:09:17 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> Betty wants to improve Alice's code. Her only choice is to release her
> improvements as GPL as well.

Minor nit, but Betty doesn't have to release her improvements at all.  
She can improve the code for her personal use and not release anything.

Jim

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