Richard Stallman is responsible for the shrinking economy

- no it is not. - what class teaches trolls ? - mix pseudo-economics, vague industrial trends and philosophic opinions in a smelly sauce of over-simplifications and questionable shortcuts : the result is yet another useless Usenet "thread". We are not near a Godwin award, but this simply shows the quality of the posters.

yg

The licensing software/hardware carries no benefit to legal customers, and sometimes causes problems that otherwise would not exist.

Actually, I have heard from several software vendors that licensing problems are a significant support load (half of the cases, for one of them).

Therefore, licensing software/hardware has no positives and some negatives for the legal customer, and some positives and some negatives for the vendor. Why should customers like it?

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I conclude that you, when you pick up the daily newspaper, ignore the highly restrictive licence that requires you to deposit a suitable amount of money.

That only applies when the GPL use remains within your organization. However, in most cases the originators of good FOSS have enough pride to correct bugs and failures. You only need to report the problem to see what the response is. FOSS response to bug reports is orders of magnitude better than that of firms such as Microsoft.

Notice his well disguised attempts to encourage ignoring the license terms of all free software.

Wouldn't that be a sweet spot to be in?!!! I would love to be the guy who developed the software that everyone is using to beat other companies making commercial software. Just think of the consulting fees you could charge!$$$

I guess technically, they could claim ownership of the software. But what is the value of being the owner of open source software??? Once it has been shipped to anyone, you can't restrict it beyond the GPL. They are free to share it with anyone they want per the GPL terms it was written under. Ownership does not defeat the GPL.

The devil is in the details. There are many particulars that have to be examined for a company to claim ownership of something you developed.

How does it help anyone to let open source be used in conflict of the license terms? The GPL has a purpose, to promote the sharing of code. This is not unlike patents, although it may seem like a contradiction at first. But the purpose of a patent is to make the invention publicly available to all in exchange for a short term monopoly on financial gain.

Yeah, pretty much, also over the companies whose staff writes open source in their work time.

Rick

est

I just got an email from my FPGA vendor saying that they had extended my term of license to DEC 2010. Meanwhile my software is reminding me that my license expires in under 30 days!!! I guess I have to get new license files. What a PITA!!! I remember when I worked for a company who had license servers, they were always screwing up so that we had a person dedicated to keeping them running. Yeah, like we prefer it this way!

Rick

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However it does give extra rights. The owner can license to anyone, under any conditions that are mutually acceptable. In particular he can release the system under GPL (and the side restrictions thus implied), and still have the capability of licensing to someone else under entirely different conditions. These may trade the responsibility of releasing using software for money.

My hashlib.zip package is an example. It is released under GPC, but I will consider other offers. See:

Oh, come on. Any compiler, open source or not, can have Ken Thompson's trojan code (described in

The point is that besides that particular vulnerability, the closed source compilers and other software can and do have zillions of other vulnerabilites and back doors, and they are visible to no one but the vendor who may chose to just sit on them, or may have introduced them in the first place as Borland did with their database backdoor that got discovered when they open-sourced their code few years ago.

By the way, for a more practical version of a totally invisible hack, I would turn your attention to all the recent reports on virtual machine- based hacks (Blue Pill, etc).

However... It would put the company you work for out of business. I suppose if you have no loyalty of conscience it is OK

They can sue for damages.

Yes it does if they claim it was not yours to put into GPL.. As I say a real mees that will only make the lawyers rich. The argument would be that prior ownership means it was not yours to place into GPL and that the GPL on it would be void.

So all the users would need to work to what ever licence the owner put on it.

Yes but the principal is the same. As I say the lawyers would get rich on it.

They don't care. It is FREE software and that is it.

They are not interested other than it gives them a lower cost for their product and they won't release the code of their products. Most companies using Open Source are not playing the game.

So it is sounds like suicide. All it does is put programmers out of work. Eventually the majority left will be those who use Open source but put nothing back.

OK so not"universal" but a couple of people you know. Not the same thing at all. I know 100's who do not mind.

They have no effect what so ever for the majority who miss use the software.

Not according to FAST and the Law but t6hat is just a legal definition,.

You can make up your own definitions if you like but FAST and the cases they have taken to court would show that in reality you are wrong.

It is the logic the far east uses for stealing SW including Open Source

Not that I am aware of. All have done it for free so far.

In message , snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

And you are not?

Not at all.

Nope. Wrong again.

Never done that. I am in favour of people respecting licenses. I have pointed out that GPL licenses are being ignored and on a large scale.

It defeats the whole point of Open Source and the fact that the majority of the users of FOSS are not playing the game as the producers would hope.

The point that you keep ignoring is that many FOSS authors may find that their work is actually owned by their employers and therefore the employers may be able to say it is not FOSS. But you seemed to be advocating breaking the law.

Thanks I won

Would you say that for many commercial RTOS's and compiler libraries, the standard prices include the right to modify and re-compile the source code and distribute it (subject to the same royalties and restrictions as using the unmodified supplied binaries, of course)?

Outside of these niches (this thread is about software in general), it's a different matter. For some commercial software you can get to view the source if you are big enough or rich enough, but you can't do anything with the code. In fact, if you have access to the code and you later write software yourself, you stand a good chance of being sued for copying the code (whether you did or not). Microsoft Windows is the best-known example of this, but it's not the only one.

In the population at large, most people simply look at the cost price for a piece of software and "free" means "gratis". But this is a technical newsgroup, and the people here have a better understanding of prices, licenses, and the different sorts of software. I don't think many people here would have trouble distinguishing between "free" software such as:

KiCad - free and open source

ExpressPCB - free cost, but restricted to ordering PCB's from the makers

Eagle Light Edition - free but limited version of the full package, for non-commercial use

Eagle and ExpressPCB are closed-source commercial programs that happen to have a zero purchase cost price, while KiCad is a free and open source program. I don't think many people in this thread or similar discussions have a problem with that - certainly not the FOSS supporters, nor the pragmatists (best tool for the job, and different licenses for different purposes), and not even the "open source is killing innovation" or "the GPL is a communist/viral/terrorist plot" crowd (not that I've seen such extreme fanaticism here yet).

If you genuinely have difficulty understanding this concept, let me know and I (or others here) will happily explain it to you in more detail. Until you *do* understand the difference, you can't contribute much useful information in discussions like this.

That's not setting a high target! The response from many suppliers of proprietary software is excellent. Responsiveness is a function of the attitude of the team, not of the distribution licence.

Stephen

The thread seems to have turned into a bad pirates, good dongle men argument, and says not much of Stallman and the shrinking economy. The usual arguments of pirate software feeding Osama Bin Lardin's online gambling account abound.

So now if Stallman isn't responsable, then who is?

Is it general mustard in the kitchen with the leg of lamb?

Is it the financial services industry?

Is it jesus from heaven getting his revenge on the temple money men?

Is it the wanna be land owners, who turned out not to have enough cash? (surprise surprise)

cheers jacko

To quote another of your posts

Chris H wrote: > In message , John Devereux > writes >> Walter Banks writes: >>> Source licenses are available for our tools and generally are available >>> from those we compete against. >> Really? The sources for the compiler itself? >

Are you trying to say that commercial compiler companies will provide their tools' source code (for the right money and licenses, of course), or are you trying to say that they will *not* provide such source code? Or are you trying to subtly say that you don't actually know, but won't let that stop you stating your opinion as though it were indisputable fact?

As it is, I know of one commercial compiler company that could not give out its source code, and I now know of another that *does* give it its source code - so the answer is it depends very much on the compiler company and the tools in question.

There are a great many tools available which mix open source software and closed source software, for many reasons. For example, the msp430 port of gcc is often distributed with a proxy for debugging - everything is open source (under various licenses) except parts of the proxy, which are closed because of NDA's signed with TI. There is as much open source as possible in the package. You can also find toolchains that use gcc for the compiler, but have closed source debuggers, or libraries, or IDEs. And lots of basically closed source packages use open source tools - Altera's tools, for example, include closed source FPGA development tools, open source tools for their closed-source soft-processor, and open source utilities (like cygwin, perl and tcl/tk) to hold it all together.

Everyone else knows what it means in this context.