GPL and BSD

Apache
Under both copyright and contract law something is either proprietary or public domain. It is impossible to license free software because free is a dissimilar term for public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_licence uses "permissive" as a dissimilar term for proprietor permission. Apache isn't in the public domain but a restriction licensed by the licensor to licensees, with such restriction not applying to the licensor.

Commercial usage isn't defined in the context of code designated opensource under copyright law. Any implementation of any idea is either under some form of IP law or public domain. Any type of contract, license, patent or trademark resorts under the rubric of intellectual ownership, with the only alternative public domain. The FSF refers to their GPL3 restriction as free software, which is like North Korea calling itself "democratic", its a newspeaky redefinition of language.

This confusion about what is supposed to be an elementary legal concept as established by thousands of cases, is demonstrated by Eric Raymond who refers to opensource as the antonym of closed source. What constitutes as closed, commercial, free and open is a muddled confusion of how fairness is appropriated. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html usage of "free" is a red herring.

What we consider fair or not is secondary to what is legal or not. Any idea, commodity, invention, artifact has either an owner or is in the public domain, for some reason the entire Internet is bent on making this as clear as mud. It is the root cause of the inability to understand how GPL3 was used by Larry Summers global deregulation to prevent the United States from being reduced to penury in the inevitable race to the bottom if everything were to be public domain. Public domain on all ideas will result in currency, labor and entitlements arbitrage between countries with weak and strong institutions. A US manufacturing plant cannot compete against a Nigerian one, the currency differences and policy certainties are to extreme. Nearly a fifth of GDP is spent on health care, without GPL3 and patent trade barriers the US can't compete.

Apple is a trillion dollar company due to its patents, without patents cheap clones would proliferate. Stallman want's to use GPL and Apache which resorts under copyright law to dictate behavior under patent law. This can only be done via contract law, a contract that any licensee would have to sign with the licensors.

Commercial has with it pejorative connotations and involves value judgments viewed from how fairness is appropriated, it is legally undefined as any commercial venture resorting under copyright, contract and patent law will involve ideas in the public domain. The concept of commercial like opensource spans the width of copyright,patent and how contract law is applied with such.

''There are over sixty "opensource" software and hardware licenses. Not a single one demands that the licensor is subject to any of the restrictions imposed on the licensees.'' For example the restriction that the licensees reveal all their derivative works under GPL3 is not something the licensor has to do.

Eclipse license
https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/ "... Recipient institutes patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Program itself (excluding combinations of the Program with other software or hardware) infringes such Recipient's patent(s), then such Recipient's rights granted under Section 2(b) shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed...."

Same type of Apache clause, but more deceptive. In terms of copyright law you only have an owner. GPL, apache, BSD etc. are licenses defined in terms of contract law. Each country has its own type of contract law, dealing with how proprietors, owners of IP can license their ownership to licensees or relinquish it to the public domain. Copyright law has no jurisdiction over patent law,both vest proprietorship unto legal entities such as Stallman's GPL or Appel's patents. Contract law allows a proprietor to license usage of his IP. Each country, as signatory to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention interprets how copyright is bestowed on proprietors and how such proprietors can license their proprietorship via contract law.

There is a merging of contract law and copyright law for example, where University of California with its Caffe berkeley vision annexes the copyright of anyone filing a pull request on Github, allowing them to sell exemption to companies from their copyright licensing terms for lots of money, a right the pull requester loses.

Brittain has strong copyright protection on artifacts that can't be patented, to such an extent that it emulates a patent. South Africa in contrast allows a copyright on an artifact such as a chair to be invalid if its copy differs from the original by one millimeter for example. Apache, BSD and Eclipse etc. all have the postfix "license", but such a license can only be under contract law because the "license" can and does reference patent law or anything else for that matter.

This is deceit on the part of Stallman's Fsf foundation, legally and technically it should be GPL, BSD and Apache contract. They are using "license" as a dissimilar term for "contract".

"...The Agreement Steward reserves the right to publish new versions (including revisions) of this Agreement from time to time. No one other than the Agreement Steward has the right to modify this Agreement. The Eclipse Foundation is the initial Agreement Steward...."

"Contributor" and "Recipient" are effectively the licensees with the the Eclipse foundation becoming the proprietor, owner or master under the rubric of Agreement Steward. In terms of copyright law, the proprietor has exclusive rights, ownership over his IP. The Eclipse license is a contract, whereby the licensees assign their effective copyright over to the Eclipse foundation. It is the same type of deceit as with GPL3: the obligation to publish code isn't on the owners(Agreement steward or whatever they call themselves), it only applies to the licensees.

They like the owners of Caffe berkeley vision software can demand to be paid millions by companies for not publishing their derivative works.

Patents are opensource
The idea is documented but its implementation restricted in a forthright legally well understood manner. This restriction can only be waved under contract law, not copyright law. Opensource as used under copyrighted GPL3, Apache etc. enacts restrictions on licensees, not enforceable on licensors, via indirection and semantic fraud. It emulates the effect of a patent by indirection. ''BSD comes the closest to emulating public domain. ''

Reading the posts below it seems Google gets access to a licensee's patents but not reciprocate using copyright law, instead of contract law which is legally ambiguous. Any licensee can contribute code to Tensorflow, but does not become a joint licensor(Section 1) copyright holder with Google, hence the restrictions under Apache2 don't apply to Google who remains the sole copyright holder of the entire edifice Tensorflow, the proprietor, an owner, a licensor, imposing terms and conditions on licensees. Licensee contributors only have copyright on their contributions.

See https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0. The license defines "You" as a dissimilar term for licensee. It ambiguously refers to three entities: contributors, licensor(singular) and "You"(licensee). Apache2 usage of the singular 'licensor' makes it clear that a single legal entity is the sole copyright holder of the entire code base. This avoids the situation with VLC as original GPL3 project, where every single copyright holder had to give permission for it to be relicensed as LGPL, else it would never have been able to be used in Android.


 * 1. "Licensor" shall mean the copyright owner or entity authorized by the copyright owner that is granting the License.


 * " 3. Grant of Patent License .Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed..."

The contributor isn't the licensor but other licensees. Section three doesn't use the term "licensor" as defined in section one, thus each licensee grants to all other licensees and the licensor a patent exemption via copyright law, which is impossible because copyright law doesn't apply to patent law. But the licensor is under no such obligation of patent exemption to anybody because section 3 makes no explicit mention of the licensor. Apache2 conforms thus to all other GPL, BSD style licenses in that the licensor is under no legal obligation towards the licensees not to release a different license which would include the contributions by the licensees if they signed over copyright to the licensor. This means that the licensor hasn't exempted anyone from its patents, only that the licensees have amongst themselves and the licensor. Trying to clarify this in the US courts will cost millions of dollars. Oracle, IBM and Facebook won't sue each other on this basis, not risking legal clarification via the courts, they will use this ambiguity to ruin anyone they view as a threat.


 * If You(licensee not licensor) institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed..."


 * "....then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed..."

As determined by who? It can only be the licensor as he gains effective control over all patents assigned to him by the licensees under contract law and specifically not copyright law should he so desire. Apache thus mangles patent, copyright and contract law by using semantic fraud(You instead of licensee). It effectively turns any code shard it touches into a software patent. This allows the powerful Google, IBM, Facebook alliance to practice selective communism.

Apache doesn't specify that the licensees can terminate patent licenses of anybody. As the licensor, he cannot be forced to terminate any rights patent licensees have in terms of such licensees contribution to the source code under copyright law. It means that should two licensees instigate patent claims against each other the licensor can terminate only one parties patent protection at his sole discretion should the licensor so desire.

It allows Google to license Tensorflow to other entities under a different license than Apache2 and provide them with patent immunity from the licensees under the Apache2 license because Google as the sole licensor copyright holder has the right to do this, licensees don't.


 * 5. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions. Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed with Licensor regarding such Contributions.

This means that a licensee can contribute code and be exempted by the licensor from any implications should the licensee file a patent suit against any other licensee as per section 3 in a contract that no other entities has to be informed about.

Apache clarifies the copyright status of licensees and the licensor, as opposed to BSD, LGPL and GPL where if code was accepted by the project it was a coin toss to figure out who had effective copyright. Drupal for example has every single contributor as copyright holder, meaning everyone would have to provide permission to fork Drupal to a different license and the same with Linux GPL2. Only if the licensees to GPL, BSD sign a contract relinquishing their copyright does the original copyright holder remain the sole copyright holder. All code acceptance by FSF is done on this basis, but they deceitfully don't make this clear to other GPL3 projects.

Google violates GPL2 with Android because not all code is released, if enough GPL2 copyright holders gang up on Google they could sue Google to release the entire Android code base. In addition Google would only be allowed to reuse Linux if all the copyright holders(hundreds employed by Red Hat etc.) give their permission. Once a cease and desist order has been obtained by any fraction of copyright holders, it can only be lifted if all copyright holders provide permission, this threat is negated by employing the Linux kernel copyright holders across the IT spectrum and having intra corporate agreements between Red hat, IBM, Oracle etc. It also is probably why Google has developed Fuschia, its own operating system.

GPL3 robocops don't exist, there is no automatic hunting down of any violators, it can only be done on the instigation of gpl3 copyright holders. Usually large corporations shutting down competitors. Pixhawk(BSD) is simply violating the GPL3 license of Diydrones arducopter because they are backed by large corporations and there is nothing Tridge can do about it.


 * https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html "...However, the Apache 2.0 license is better for substantial programs, since it prevents patent treachery..."

Not at all, the licensor is under no obligation to license any patents as copyright law has no jurisdiction over patent law and the relevant contract law between a patent licensor and licensee. Also should a licensee file a counter patent claim if he was sued first by either a licensee or the Apache2 licensor he loses any patent usage rights he might have had by signing over copyright to the licensor with any previous code contribution to the apache licensed project.

Apache2 is a deception, as Google will be able to enforce any patents it has on Tensorflow that licensees in self driving cars(Udacity ?)use, by pointing out that no patent license was given to the licensees(users) of Tensorflow as this would involve both contract law and patent law, not copyright law. Apache2, BSD, GPL etc. are restrictions from the copyright holder extended over the licensees under copyright law, with such restrictions not applying to the licensor. Patents resort under patent law not copyright law. The licensing of patents to licensees resorts under contract law and isn't as reasonably standardized like copyright law is, it differs from location to location. Apache2 creates deliberate legal ambiguity, allowing powerful corporations to tie up any competitor in years of financially destructive litigation. Apache2 is an emulation of GPL3 by large corporations who hold the effective licensor copyright on GPL3 code.

Google gets free labor from thousands of licensees under copyright, it takes their code and builds a self-driving car under Google's patents covered by patent law licenseable only under contract law: they will crush anyone using Tensorflow in a commercial product that threatens their business model using patent law and not copyright law. The licensees using Tensorflow under copyright law exempt Google from any patents they might have under patent law, which is legally ambiguous. Patents don't resort under copyright law. But such exemption isn't reciprocated by Google on their patents to the licensees because copyright law cannot be used to do this. It doesn't matter what Google licenses under copyright law, it excludes patents(patent law). Only if Google signs a contract with the licensees lawyers concerning the patents it holds on code in Tensorflow, would the licensee have any form of legal basis to use Tensorflow in projects that might infringe on patents. It isn't legally binding for a patent holder to exempt anyone from his patents using copyright law under GPL, BSD, Apache etc, as it can only be done with a contract which any licensee would have to sign with his lawyers.

Google will destroy any competition by arguing this point in court for years. Apache2 creates legal ambiguity, it allows powerful corporations to employ slave labor and use their ideas in such a way they wouldn't be able to do.

Supporting Tensorflow over Caffe berkeley vision which uses BSD means that algorithmic abstractions are just like GPL3 absorbed into powerful corporations and taken effectively away from the best Equality source emulation of the public domain, preventing upstarts from using neural nets in a commercial manner.


 * https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-different-between-Apache-v2-0-and-MIT-license
 * http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2017-April/112302.html The Clang compiler is an Apple initiative licensed under Apache2. Facebook, Google are also joint copyright holders. Their licenses are in their respective folders in the code, this allows Google and Facebook to gangup and destroy any would be competitor by flooring him under a morass of bankrupting lawsuits.
 * http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/apache2 "...the licensee does not use any trademarks that belong to the licensor Furthermore, the grant of patent rights specifically is withdrawn if: ...."
 * "...However, with the release of the GPL v3, this incompatibility is no longer insurmountable. The GPL v3 allows for the addition of a patent retaliation clause whose effect is to allow code from a GPL v3-licensed project to be combined with code from an Apache 2-licensed project. So, a major milestone has been acheived and the two licences are no longer incompatible...."

Well this implies that Apache2 is a GPL3 by legal stealth because BSD and GPL3 isn't compatible, yet the claim is that Apache2 is an extension of BSD, merely making it explicit that patent litigation against the licensor won't be allowed.

https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html "....In addition, the clause about the patent license is problematic because a patent license cannot be granted under Copyright law, but only under contract law, which drags the whole license into the domain of contract law. But while Copyright law is somewhat standardized by international agreements, contract law differs wildly among jurisdictions. So what the license means in different jurisdictions may vary and is hard to predict. ..."

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/263227/why-are-apache-2-0-works-excluded-from-openbsd "... Reading the Apache 2.0 license, it demands notices to be placed in any modified versions that you distribute. BAAD! It even have the gall to demand that if you "prepare Derivative Works", "to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files". Including original copyright notices and stuff. This is truly evil.  Besides being so nasty it's a really easy to read license for any layman. Guess they figured that if anyone can read and understand it they will stay away from Apache. To cap it off, unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted, will follow the same license! So now others in their turn also have to include notices and so on. This is a truly unfriendly license..."

http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/openbsd/2004-02/thread.html#1415

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2008/09/29/quanta-case-preserved-distinction-between-patent-law-and-contract-law/ patent law and contract law.


 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617881 Theo Raath
 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3402450 The Apache License 2.0 mixes copyright law with patent law. Its patent related claims are not acceptable to OpenBSD for example. This site gives a good overview: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/apache2.xml .IMO, you may just as well use GPLv3, ALv2 source is almost as risky in commercial products.

GPL and BSD
GPL and BSD - Restrictions such as copyright and patents (patent royalties) leads to unintended consequences because powerful actors corrupt the good intentions. The GPL restriction from the copyright holder is being used to emulate the effect of patents.(GPL_and_BSD). Employing the Linux GPL copyright holders allows Google, Oracle and Redhat to practice selective communism: communism is the centralization of ideas and the regulation of their implementation. Large corporations have gained effective control through their employees over GPL copyrighted code because the employees have the copyright and will not enforce the terms of the GPl against their own employer. The terms of the GPL license only applies to the licensees(slaves), not the licensors(masters). Copyright holders can exempt people from the GPL license and need not inform any about such. Which is why all code acceptance by Stallman's FSF is only done if they obtain effective copyright control. The US military for example is secretly exempted by the FSF from revealing their GPL derived code.

Stallman's position is that GPL3 forces licensees to contribute code back to the copyright holder so that they don't take all his hard work and build the next space station with it. This is deception, as the real reason for GPL3 is so that the copyright holder can exempt the licensee from the GPL3 copyright restriction after being paid money by the licensee. Facebook isn't interested in your code, only that you don't become them.

This allows FSF to exempt Google for example from publishing their Android code and also enables binary iso code only release of the NSA's http://www.mofolinux.com. As effective copyright holder off linux and agreements with Red Hat, Google control linux in such a way that they can demand any company they see as a threat to release all their code, because they would have infringed on some GPL code shard held by IBM, Red Hat, Google somehow. Thus like with the pigs in Animal farm, some are more free than others. Stallman insists that GPL guarantees our "freedom" by forcing those who use GPL to reveal their derived works: but such obligation cannot be wrought from Google.

Socialism is the centralization of the means of production, there is overlap between this and communism, they are not as dichotomous in the information age transition from the industrial age. Larry Summers pointed out a danger with everything being public domain and not copyright a few years ago: a race to the bottom. It would become eventually impossible for strong currency countries to have viable corporations, because they can always be undercut by lower wage locales. They must obtain effective control over algorithms through indirection, patents etc. This race to the bottom is the situation the Chinese find themselves in, they are doing all the hard work building Ipads while the US corporations in cahoots with the FSF hold key algorithms either under GPL copyright or patents. For $50,000 you can become a "corporate sponsor" of the FSF, buying yourself immunity from GPL enforcement on GPL code held in copyright by them. Asian countries were not skilled in English enough to understand newspeak from Stallman's "freedom" chant. They isolated themselves and missed the opportunity to lock down algorithmic abstractions such as Red hat's "mount" command by not developing Linux. IBM, Oracle, Red hat, Google solidifies their effective control over key algorithms by intra corporate agreements. How much money for example is Elon Musk and Larry Page paying to Red Hat's CEO panama offshore company to use their "mount" command?

The NSA is the "enforcer", they know about all the tax evasion schemes and if any GPL copyright holder decides not to play ball, an IRS audit can always be organized. All those bitcoin donations to Stallman from GPL fans, well they were actually undercover NSA agents.

Circumventing patents in South-Africa: A constitutional court ruling in South Africa forbids the criminal prosecution and incarceration of people for civil debt. This is a significant loophole to exploit for the purpose of implementing patented ideas because patent infringement is a civil issue and not criminal. The only criminal aspect could be that a court order is ignored directing a company to cease production. This in turn is circumvented by using decentralized manufacturing and fronting companies, if one company or premise is shutdown, then start another one. Use this method to skirt the patents that Makerbot has filed on designs published under an opensource license.

repetition to be fixed
The free market isn't free because ideas can't be freely implemented due to lack of UnlimitedBandwidth, patents, copyright and the GPL restriction from Stallman's Free software foundation(Restricted software foundation). What CNN refers to as the 'free market' is the 'rigged market', large corporations bribe the senate and congress to make copyright and patent laws forbidding the free market.

HackPatents the designs on Wind energy, communications etc. and sell using a fronting company, one can't go to jail for civil debt in South-Africa as per a constitutional court ruling. Since the empowerment partner as the CEO of the fronting company has no assets to begin with, he has nothing to lose. This is a significant loophole to exploit in South-Africa to bypass patents. Corporations is being equivocated with capitalism. Large corporations use their monopoly powers to prevent the free market from operating with HackPatents. Through deception by NBC (controlled by corporate GE) the corporatism is equated with capitalism, much like Richard Stallman(RMS) Newspeaks a restriction(GPL) into a freedom(BSD). GE owns the patents on Wind energy, enabling them to sell wind turbines at any price, by deceiving the public to vote for the Democrats to solve a problem that doesn't exist Global warming, BatteryTech, they legislate their own laws to benefit corporate GE.

Restrictions such as copyright and patents (patent royalties) leads to unintended consequences because powerful actors corrupt the good intentions. Companies are paying their own shell companies which they own through indirection "royalties" and deducting this from tax. The GPL restriction from the copyright holder is being used to emulate the effect of patents.(GPL_and_BSD). Employing the Linux GPL copyright holders allows Google, Oracle and Redhat to practice selective communism: communism is the centralization of ideas and the regulation of their implementation. (SCO unix couldn't figure this out.) http://www.fsf.org communist RMS wants to worlds governments to sign over all copyright to him personally so he can live out his atheist fantasy of telling everybody what to do. RMS, Torvalds and Eric Raymond have deceived coders to hand sign over the copyright on key algorithmic abstractions such as 'Mount' to Redhat. Because they wanted to promote themselves, they lied about the fact that open source is not public domain nor Equality source. Key linux copyright holders were given pre-IPO stock options and became employees of Redhat etc.

The GPL license on the gcc compiler applies only to the licensees(slaves) and not to Richard Stallman himself. With Equality source the public domain is emulated. Linus Torvalds assures us his GPL licensing as a copyright holder is based on exchange: you release your code, and Torvalds in exchange will give more code back. But this is not an obligation on his part as licensor, many GPL copyright holders license their code in closed source projects for remuneration without anybody knowing about it. Google, Redhat and IBM's editorial shills on wikipedia are twisting the legally defined dichotomy between public domain(free) and copyright(proprietary) as determined by the courts by refusing that this factual information be included in their "open source" and "Free software" articles. All information is either proprietary or public domain: only a copyright holder can license code as GPL, BSD, Microsoft EULA or coo-coo-clock license.

Redhat emulates the effect of being sole copyright holder of Linux GPL because they employ the copyright holding coders. In addition under copyright law Redhat and its employees are considered a single entity. The extension of the Unix operating system must be done on an Equality source basis, the same way English language is public domain. It is the ecosystem that allows commercial and non-commercial ideas to be implemented, preventing wannabee atheist dictators such as RMS telling everybody what to do and think. IBM, Redhat, Google and other "corporate sponsors" of the Linux kernel programmers(Cox, Torvalds), employ these very same programmers and copyright holders. Google's Android system uses Linux code without releasing back such modifications(GPL_and_BSD). These companies are employing the copyright holders to Linux GPL as an assault weapon to attack their competitors, it isn't being used to expand the code base primarily. US constitutional restrictions preventing spying by domestic agencies on citizens are circumvented by contracting the spying on Google accounts to the UK spy agencies, any restriction or forced behavior can be subverted by indirection.

The Creative commons license non-commercial is but another means of emulating the effect of a patent, in addition nobody knows what exactly defines 'commmercial'.

Confused? You should be, SCO Unix couldn't figure it out. They correctly asserted that you can't make money by giving everything away for free. What they could not grasp is that by using Churches thesis the illusion that Equality source is created under GPL by the effective copyright holders IBM, Google, Redhat, RMS and Torvalds employing the copyright holders who have commit rights to the Linux kernel tree. Instead if SCO had been advised by the same smart lawyers(Eben Moglen who explained to IBM and Google how to harness the enthusiasm of millions of GPL'd deceived using the weasel terms like "open source", they might have been a Redhat themselves.

Proprietary

 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software "....Proprietary software or closed source software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder with the intent that the licensee is given the right to use the software only under certain conditions, and restricted from other uses, such as modification, sharing, studying, redistribution, or reverse engineering.[1][2] Usually the source code of proprietary software is not made available.

Complementary terms include free software,[2][3] licensed by the owner under more permissive terms, and public domain software, which is not subject to copyright and can be used for any purpose. Proponents of free and open source software use proprietary or non-free to describe software that is not free or open source.[4][5]  ..."

GPL and BSD thought experiment
Imagine as a thought experiment that all the source code in the world is handed over to Google as sole copyright proprietor under the BSD license. This means that everybody has access to the same code under the BSD license, with the exception of Google who as copyright holder can license such code under a different license(fruitcake license for example) to other parties without having to even make this public. Now imagine the same the code is instead vested in Stallman under the GPL license as sole copyright holder: what power would this give an atheist to enforce his will on the world? Communism is the centralization of ideas, this is not bad of course if you happen to be the person on whom it is centralized. It's the freemarket for IBM, Redhat, Google employing the GPL copyright holders and communism for the rest of us.

Gpl newspeak, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html all code contributors to FSF are obliged to sign over their copyright to RMS. Imagine the implication if Richard Stallman could have all copyright of everything assigned to him personally. He would then be able to target Christians and Israel by discouraging manufacturers from providing them with hardware that of necessity will use such copyrighted code. It is a false premise that some fair dispenser of GPL justice by a Robocop walks around enforcing the terms of the GPL on an equality basis: GPL enforcement is arbitrary by the copyright holder, and such license does not apply to the copyright holder such as FSF.

The Linux (GPL) copyright holders employed by Google, IBM and Redhat allows these employers to dictate the behavior of those that don't employ the majority of them such as Nvidia and the hacker brewing the next Facebook in his garage. By employing the Linux copyright holders Google was able to create the Android operating system and not release back the code modifications because the GPL restriction only applies to the licensees and not the copyright masters, whom Google effectively control by their monthly pay check. Therefore the Linux code base can only be implemented in such a way as dictated by the Linux copyright employers, such as Redhat litigating against a hacker for incorporating the Linux "mount"(GPL2) command in order to destroy his business, yet allow another party to use "mount" in closed source projects after paying Redhat lots of money because the GPL restriction in MySQL, Mount etc. does not apply to Oracle and Redhat the copyright holders. GPL allows Oracle, Google and Redhat to use highly motivated slave labor who are confusing their access to the source with Equality source like *implementation* of the source. Having merely access to the source code is like somebody who thinks that having access to Solar energy patents is the same as implementing the ideas.

There is no company listed on an exchange that could possibly be a commercial viability if they were to publish all their ideas. Of necessity a start-up or hacker will incorporate GPL code to facilitate his products or business without publishing everything. GPL allows copyright holders such as Google and Redhat to practice selective communism. Communism is the centralization of ideas and the regulation of their implementation. Socialism is the centralization of the means of production. The distinction between these two concepts is fuzzy today because we are in the information age, it differs from its more dichotomous meaning during the times of Lenin and Stalin. Today with advances in robotics anything can be produced decentralized, this is being prevented with copyright emulating the effect of [[patents] and outright patents of course. Centralizing ideas in the hands of copyright holders such as Redhat, Google and IBM enables them to use indirection and prevent decentralized manufacturing.

Using Microsoft as a lightning rod for hacker discontent, Eben Moglen and RMS have deceived coders to sterilize vast swaths of algorithmic abstractions such as mount, ping, tracert, ncurses into copyright holders, which in turn are employed by Google, IBM, Redhat, Oracle etc. allowing them to prevent the implementation of unsanctioned code by competitors to these monopolies using Churches thesis. Prof.Moglen is on the same level as a trade unionist socialist wanting "job creation" - http://lwn.net/Articles/434318/. There are over 67 software licenses and thousands of "job creators", fabricating different incantations of copyright restrictions on the populace - the legal profession creating jobs for themselves. BSD Equality source limits the scope for money making litigation by the legal profession.

GPL imposes restrictions on what you can and can't do with code, in such a way that the restriction only applies to the non-copyright holders and not for example Oracle, the copyright holder of MySql. This enables Google, IBM, Redhat to 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' any would be competitor by either incorporating him as their indentured servant working for a monthly salary for them or ruining him financially with bogus copyright lawsuits.


 * By employing the coders who locked up algorithmic abstractions in the Linux GPL code base, as influenced by Linus Torvalds, RMS and Eric Raymond, Google, IBM, Redhat are emulating the effect of a software patent because they have gained effective control of the algorithms using indirection.

Redhat's employment of the Linux copyright holders allows them to litigate against any company or garage hacker making money out of Linux by forcing them to reveal all their code, while not imposing such litigated restriction on those who pay them lots of money to them or become their indentured servant.


 * https://web.archive.org/web/20040302071009/http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT4739816141.html
 * http://www.itpro.co.uk/605847/strip-mining-of-open-source
 * http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html#GPL-ADVANTAGES
 * http://slashdot.org/story/99/06/23/1313224/FeatureGPL-vs-BSD
 * http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/open-source/gpl-bsd-and-suckerism/
 * http://www.freebsdnews.net/2008/07/18/bsd-license-vs-gpl-license/
 * http://slashdot.org/~Chemisor/journal/143017
 * http://news.slashdot.org/story/08/07/08/1832255/Linguistic-Problems-of-GPL-Advocacy
 * http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-hackers/19991003.freebsd-hackers
 * http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5935 Explains how BSD allows ideas to remain free.
 * http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/open-source/gpl-bsd-and-suckerism/ Arguments as why BSD must be used and not GPL

GPL adovates have missed one of the key points that makes the BSD license do so much good for the world. The BSD license, by allowing people to use its code in commerical products, promotes commercial products following open standards.

The classic example is TCP/IP. There are a lot of commercial products out there using the Berkeley TCP/IP stack, and one of the big reasons for that is that it's cheaper than developing their own protocol stack or even buying one. The value we see from this is the network effect; that a device communicates using the Berkeley TCP/IP stack rather than Novell's IPX stack or Microsoft's networking stack benefits all of us, because we can much more easily communicate with it (even, perhaps, in ways that the author did not intend). Open standards are even more important to freedom for computer users than open source. (Having source code and patents documenting an idea is nice, but it's not much good if it doesn't permit you to inter operate with other platforms out there or implement the idea itself. Linux is popular because it talks to other computers.) Therefore, I'd say that the Berkeley license has done more than any other license to bring us to the state today where we have a lot of freedom in our computing choices. Freedom means the freedom not to share an idea based on derivative ideas. A company is free to tweak the TCP/IP protocol in a commercial product without having to release the derived code, with GPL they would be forced to release any derivation.

The VLC project copyright holders relicensed their GPL code as LGPL, in order to allow the widespread adoption of VLC by companies who are not going to release their code as GPL or BSD etc. But because the copyright was not vested in a single or few authors but in *everybody* who contributed code, each of them had to be contacted and had to give permission. In the http://www.fsf.org incessant cult-like repetition of 'free software' they don't point out to programmers to be careful as to who will eventually own the copyright. This is deliberate because once to many programmers have copyright under say GPL3 or GPL then just one or a few copyright holders could prevent the majority from relicensing to something more sensible such as BSD or LGPL.

There is not a single idea held by anyone that isn't somehow a derivative of another idea by somebody else. GPL advocates expect to be recognized for 'their' ideas, ideas which are most probably somebody else's who didn't seek recognition. GPL doesn't allow a user the freedom to do with the code whatever he wishes, but like copyright and patents restricts its usage. A restriction isn't freedom, restricting the implementation of ideas leads to Unintended_consequences, such as the inability to commercialize an idea.

If the TCP/IP was released under GPL it would have prevented Microsoft from adopting it. Forcing Microsoft to use their proprietary protocol by forbidding them to use TCP/IP out of spitefulness could have established the Microsoft networking stack as a de-facto standard like their Office suite is a standard, with catastrophic consequences for society as a whole. Many GPL advocates are over-estimating their own importance and the importance of the code they contribute. They have an undue desire for recognition on trivialities - Parkinson's Law of Triviality, also known as bikeshedding or the bicycle shed example. GPL is a restriction placed on the licensee by the copyright holder, with such restriction not applying to the licensor. Freedom means that a person has the right not to share his derived ideas, with GPL thousands of developers are forced to share their ideas with the copyright holder like http://www.fsf.org, who in turn get corrupted by "corporate sponsors" to only enforce the GPL restriction against the competitors of powerful companies who have carved up the economy between themselves. Linux Torvalds for example recently received a "reward" by fronting organization for these corporate sponsors, a bribe for somebody who presents himself as a messianic figure handing out his autograph, to encourage Torvalds to do as they please(this needs citations, Torvalds prevents Stallman from forcing GPL3 on the Linux kernel because GPL suites corporations who employ the Linux kernel developers, thus buying themselves immunity from GPL enforcement, while corrupting the FSF to engage in arbitrary GPL enforcement against their competitors.)

GPL license is like the restriction on derived ideas we have with HackPatents, patents documents the idea, but doesn't allow its implementation without permission.

Open source or Equality source ?
"Open source" and RMS "free software" are not public domain. http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/1999062802310NWSM Nowhere does Raymond make the distinction between public domain and proprietary code. BSD, MSFT closed, GPL, GPL3 etc. is defined as proprietary code by copyright law. There is no such thing as "open source" or "free software" in terms of copyright law, these terms are weasel-worded lies. The proprietors are free to call their master/slave relationship anything they want such as "I am little teapot licence", "free softwware licence" or "open source license", because copyright law allows them to do such. Any code acceptance by the FSF to their GCC compiler is done by the contributor signing over his copyright to the FSF. FSF remains the sole copyright holder. The copyright holders(there can be any number) of code under say GPL3 can licence such code in closed source(meaningless term?) projects without anybody knowing about it. Oracle for example are using the MySQL code base in their commercial products because they bought the copyright and do not have to publish their code as dictated by the GPL license, because the GPL license only applies to the licensees and not to Oracle, the sole copyright holder.

All code in terms of copyright law is either proprietary or public domain, a fact that Eben Moglen from http://www.fsf.org tries his best to conceal as he creates the Industrial Software Law complex. Only proprietary code can be licensed as GPL, BSD and Microsoft closed license or any other license by a proprietary copyright holder: GPL code is defined as proprietary code by copyright law, RMS is legally and factually incorrect to assert the converse. BSD clause-3 is an attempt by a proprietor to emulate public domain while avoiding liability for code implementation and prevent public domain code winding up as GPL code.

RMS makes the distinction between "custom software" and "proprietory software" which is meaningless. Copyright law only defines something as public domain or proprietory.

Copyrigh on gcc compiler
http://www.fsf.org as the copyright holder of gcc must practice their freedom speech: why don't the fsf.org make lets say 10,000 coders fellow copyright holders?

The GPL license on the gcc compiler applies only to the licensees(slaves) and not to Richard Stallman himself or Linus Torvalds(masters). Eric s. Raymond regrets his initial support for GPL(this needs citations). Torvalds and RMS views open source code as philosophy, or pragmatic methodology where they as copyright holders of such open source code licenses(GPL) the code too thousands of code restrictees who must provide back their innovations to them, innovations they in turn can license in closed source projects but not allowing the restricted licensees to have the same rights as they have, since the GPL licensees working for free aren't the copyright holders. Using Newspeak they have deceived GPL coders into mistaking open source with Equality source: the terms under which the open source code is made open doesn't apply to the copyright holder, with Equality source the public domain is emulated. Linus Torvalds assures us his GPL licensing as a copyright holder is based on exchange: you release your code, and Torvalds in exchange will give more code back. But this is not an obligation on his part as licensor, many GPL copyright holders license their code in closed source projects for remuneration without anybody knowing about it.

The wikipedia commercial software, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source obfuscations attempts to twist the legally defined dichotomy between public domain(free) and copyright(proprietary) as laid down by the courts. Every shred of information is either proprietary(restricted) or public domain(free, Equality source), which the Wikipedia articles don't make clear.

Redhat as single legal entity
Redhat is sole copyright holder of their distribution because they employ coders with such coders not becoming associate copyright holders because under copyright law Redhat and its employees are considered a single entity. The Linux kernel itself has thousands of copyright holders, while Redhat figured out a scheme whereby the can leverage GPL code but still maintain copyright (not sure about this, it needs further research). IBM, Redhat, Google and other "corporate sponsors" of the Linux kernel programmers, employ these very same programmers and copyright holders. They have come to an agreement that between them no GPL enforcement will take place, Google's Android system uses Linux code without releasing back such modifications.

Confused? You should be, SCO Unix couldn't figure it out. They correctly asserted that you can't make money by giving everything away for free. What they could not grasp is that by using Churches thesis the illusion that Equality source is created under GPL.

RMS wishes that if only the governments of the world would copyright the alphabet and sign over the copyright to him, then he as global idea atheist dictator will show us how communism is really supposed to work.

RMS ,Torvalds and FSF have deceived both GPL and BSD proponents. For some reason even http://www.freebsd.org seems either unable or unwilling to clarify the difference between copyright and public domain. MSFT bought the TCP/IP stack from the BSD copyright holders for $10mil. They did this to avoid having to give credit to the copyright holders as specified in the BSD license. If they used the TCP/IP stack as dictated by the license, then no payment to the owners of the BSD copyright would have been needed. The same type of exemption could have been made if TCP/IP was under GPL by the copyright holders. Both BSD and GPL proponents don't understand this legal fact in terms of copyright law.(Must all the copyright holders give permission?)

GPL is proprietary software
GPL is a copyright proprietary license; without an author who owns the copyright it is meaningless. An owner of the copyright must be established in order to make the copyright enforceable and license under which he licenses the code. The only alternative to this under copyright law is the public domain which is emulated with Equality source and not open source. All licensing such as GPL, BSD etc. is subject to copyright law. Proprietary is the characteristic of a proprietor, by having the exclusive legal right, or exclusive title to something, an owner. Proprietary software is owned software, the owner of the code can license his master/slave relationship under the following terms: Whether the licensing terms are meaninful or meaningless is irrelevent because copyright law allows the master to license as he wishes.
 * I'm a little teapot license
 * GPL
 * BSD
 * coo-coo-clock license

The FSF owns gcc through their copyright on the gcc compiler, they have retained exclusive legal rights to gcc. Red Hat is the copyright holder of Gluster and Oracle bought the copyright to MySql. Red Hat, Oracle and FSF as licensors of their proprietary software licensed their code to the licensee under the GPL license, the GPL restrictions only apply to the licensees and not the copyright holder. GPL regulates the behavior of software in a master/slave relationship, much like Microsoft regulates their users. Richard Stallman, FSF and Linux Torvalds in presenting themselves as messianic figures, have deceived GPL coders into believing that they are not in a master/slave licensor/licensee relationship with the copyright holder.

As proprietors of MySql, Gluster and GCC they can initiate arbitrary legal action against companies while not targeting others. All derived code that the licensees provide back to Oracle(licensor) can be used by Oracle in closed source projects. FSF as copyright holder of gcc revoked the GPL license for the more restrictive GPL3, forcing BSD unix forks to adopt the Clang compiler and get rid of all GPL code.

In a semantic smoke and mirrors exercise FSF have convinced the public that if code is under the GPL license then the licensor and licensee can use the code under the same terms. GPL only places an obligation on the licensee, not the licensor. Thus Red hat will litigate against anyone using its Gluster code in violation of the GPL as it sees fit while releasing closed source code to anyone as it sees fit. FSF and RSM usage of proprietary and free confuses this point. There are basically only two concepts: Proprietary and Public domain. The omission in the GPL propagandizing at http://www.gnu.org and http://www.fsf.org on the utilization of GCC as opposed to the Clang compiler is that FSF retains the copyright, which establishes them in a dominant position over the users(GPL licensees). This is not what freedom and equality means.

BSD license was created to prevent liability litigation over code released to the public domain(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_software). Most countries are subject to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention which defines that something is either proprietary or in the public domain. Only proprietary code can be released under a license such as BSD and GPL. This allowed for example the Pixhawk code licensed under BSD to relicensed under LGPL when they merged with the http://www.diydrones.com project. RMS can't redefine the legal concept of Proprietary as the opposite of Public domain by using the terms free(GPL) and permissively free(BSD): something is either proprietary or public domain(free). What Stallman refers to as freedom under GPL is actually dictated behavior of the licensee by the licensor - http://onlamp.com/onlamp/2005/06/30/esr_interview.html
 * (Pending: BSD clause-3 seems to release copyright to public domain and thus once BSD it can't be relicensed to some other code ...don't know will get back to this...)


 * ...Linux Format UK - December 2012 ..p.61.... the code is effectively held in common.....  All are free to read, study and share it. As such, it's impossible for workers to be locked in by those above them in the class system, since at any time they can choose to put the means of production, the code to use for their own ends....

The code is held in common by which licensor and how many copyright(licensors) holders are there? Copyright law doesn't restrict the number of copyright holders. In the quote the "...held in common ..." it isn't made clear as to who these "commoners" are: they are the copyright holders, establishing a master/slave relationship with licensees using GPL, which by definition means they are above the licensees of GPL. Companies can't as the licensee of Red hat's Gluster(GPL) produce a product under their own terms, while Red hat can use their derived code under any terms such as releasing derived code under a closed product and not releasing the derived ideas back to the company again.

Redhat code acceptance policy
I am not sure, but as I understand it if the Redhat GPL proprietor(owner) accepts code into their project by a person that is not an employee, then that person automatically obtains copyright. Redhat and it's employees are considered a single legal entity under copyright law. Redhat will never allow therefore a non-employee to contribute code or only under a contract of not obtain shared copyright. Thus you have to become a paid slave of them,not able to run your business in order to commit back improvements. This is an important omission that RMS and Linus Torvalds makes when handing out their autographs. Therefore the entire code sharing experience that is supposed to take place in theory under GPL on an Equality source footing can by the copyright holder be dictated to be in a master/slave relationship.

Copyright law allows the licensor to license the code under any number of licenses and to instigate arbitrary legal action or no legal action against any licensee: this is not what "freedom" is supposed to be. Freedom is only works released under the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_software. Only a copyright holder can release something as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft and revoke such license. Copyleft is a form of licensing that is used to maintain copyright conditions for the licensor while delegating reduced rights to the licensee while making the licensee believe he has the same rights, much like the pigs in Animal Farm thought they had equal rights.

(Pending: Socialism is the centralized means of production, Communism is the centralization of ideas or allowed behavior/ideas. Redhat would ideally want to have all copyright on all of Linux, this would enable them to use slave labor working for free while under the delusion that as licensees of GPL they are on an equal standing with the licensor. )


 * http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html .... ...Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. With these freedoms, the users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them....

Redhat on Linux in the Firescount UAV
Redhat stated p.53 Linux format magazine Dec.2012: ".....It's kind of funny to see people say ".Ooh, Linux is in the Firescout". It's going to force cataclysmic changes in the GPL No! It's not a cataclysmic event, it's a contract...."

The "contract" he refers is the contract that copyright holders of Linux made with the US government. While the licensees of GPLm, not being copyright holders of Linux are in no position to do this. (...this section needs more citations and alternative views.....). It should be obvious that the military can't release their detailed software designs on the Firescout as the GPL dictates, but because the GPL doesn't apply to the Linux copyright holders(licensors) they made an exemption after being paid lots of money. The unfairness in this is that the GPL users of Linux Busybox can't pull the same stunt: where is their freedom to use Linux in violation of GPL. Why is the US government exempted but not Sony by the Busybox copyright holders? Vast swaths of the Linux kernel developers are employed by major companies such as Redhat and Google. As employees who have to eat at the end of the month, those Linux copyright holders not providing their permission to have GPL violated by strong actors have a very good incentive not to deny it either. Therefore by employing the copyright holders of Linux or paying their Linus Torvalds salary as an independent maintainer of Linux, Redhat is able to leverage Linux code in closed systems such as government military software, where the derivative work can't for obvious reasons be made public.

Church's Thesis
This process of subverting the original ideals of RMS that everybody will be 'free' and have equal terms access is known as Church's Thesis(http://www.softpanorama.org/Copyright/License_archive/gpl.shtml#GPL%20and%20Corba). RMS and the RIAA are on opposite sides of the freedom debate, but they do share one common enemy "Church's Thesis" http://cs.fit.edu/~ryan/glossary.html.


 * A direct result of Church's Thesis is that no matter what you're trying to do, there's always a way to do it with one more level of indirection, or one more after that, or one more after that, or .... There's always a way to cheat *any* system you have in place, so unless you're willing to take draconian measures that will make a lot of legitamate uses illegal, you'll just have to accept it.

An example of Church's thesis are pyramid investment schemes indirection by selling nutritional products as a cover for financial fraud. The actual goods themselves could have been purchased much cheaper or are purchased not because the consumer actually wants the product but because more people will be recruted into the scheme.

Redhat provides the US government with Linux services as the copyright holder(master), in a way that you as GPL(slave) licensee can't. They use legal tricks as the copyright holder to prevent the GPL deceived from providing the same services, they are an example of Church's Thesis: leverage the work of GPL licensees to make money in closed products, while making the licensee think(using the incessant chanting of 'freedom') they are on the same equality standing as the licensor.

Alphabet under public domain not copyright
Pending: alphabet is under public domain. Ideally RMS and the FSF would like the letter @e@ to be under copyright held by the FSF. IF the FSF holds the copyright to the gcc compiler then why not give them the copyright on the entire alphatbet? Then literally everything we do and say could be involved in FSF "platinum member corporate sponsored" litigation. It would allow the FSF to become a global idea superpower, able to target those their "corporate sponsors want targeted".

GPL and cloud computing
http://www.softpanorama.org/Copyright/License_archive/gpl.shtml#GPL%20and%20Fair%20use The GPL does NOT prevent corporate interests from exploiting your work with no remuneration to you. For example, if I can arrange my money-making scheme so that all your GPL'ed code is running on my server somewhere, and the clients are just accessing it over the web, guess what? I'm making money from your code, and I don't have to give it to anyone.

Clint/server approaches can take a lot of the bite out of GPL. Look at TiVo. They are certainly benefiting greatly from Linux, but the guts of their stuff runs as an application, and so does not have to be GPL'ed. They take the regular Linux kernel, make a few mods (which they GPL), and then use it to run their proprietary application. And then there is component-based computing: COM on the Windows side, and CORBA everywhere else. GPL, which is fundamentally based on a dying model of how computer programs work, provides basically no protection then.

RMS
Stallman uses the oxymoron "free software license" with rote repetition. Its an oxymoron because by definition the public domain cannot be licensed.

His FSF holds the copyright on the GCC compiler. The GPL doesn't change the ownership of a snippet of code. It only changes the terms under which others can use that code. The original author still retains the copyright to do whatever the he wants with his code. The original author, who is the copy(right|left holder, can do whatever he pleases, including putting it into a proprietary system. Nobody ELSE can do that unless provided permission by the GPL proprietor. Oracle bought the mysql copyright, this allows them to take all GPL forks of mysql and release the innovations under their own proprietary databases.

Google is openly violating the GPL clause of Linux with its Android system by not releasing code back. If an injunction is obtained against Google, the only way they would be allowed to re-use Linux once they comply is all the hundreds of copyright holders on Linux give their permission: they will never all give such permission.

Stallman as GCC copyright holder wants the licensees to engage in a certain behavior. If such behavior meets his moral code he calls it freedom. Coders should only have the 'freedom' to engage in behavior as sanctioned by Stallman. Thus he Newspeaks 'restriction' into 'freedom'.

Both patents and copyright allows the licensor to license an idea to the licensee with specific terms that lays down the "behaviour" of the licensee. Under GPL which applies only to the licensee the behavior required of the licensee is to release all derivative works back to the licensor.

PENDING: Nobody can legally define what a derivative work is to begin with.

Since my behavior is outlined by the licensor I do not have the freedom to behave in a manner outside the terms of the copyright holder of GCC or a patent holder. RMS pulled an Orwellian Jedi doublethink mind trick by restricting my behavior to his moral code and deceived the wider Linux community to say that behaving in the manner he wants is Freedom.

RMS deceived coders to say: Restriction is freedom! Much like the animals in animal farm chanted Slavery is freedom!. He pandered to communist resentment and people's desire to eliminate all class differences.

Lets be very clear about this: A restriction isn't a freedom. If there is any restriction about how one is allowed to develop an idea then it is George Orwell Newspeak to call such restriction a freedom.

GPL allows people with resentments to ensnare the rest of the world with it. They resent Steve Job's and Bill Gates being billionares. In this state of resentment they want to use the GPL for assured mutual destruction, like is happening with with environmental destruction of forests because 2000 idea restricting HackPatents are making patented commercial StirlingEngines unavailable to Africans.

Ogg Vorbis and theora under BSD in an attempt to get Microsoft to adopt the standard so that windows and linux can play the same files. Instead we have the defacto mp3 and Mpeg-4 standard under license restrictions. GPL proponents don't understand that if Linux can't communicate with Windows at all, then Linux will become utterly irrelevant. GPL prevents microsoft from adopting Linux code, thus preventing communication between them, establishing Windows as a de facto standard for applications.

Opensource newspeak
Opensource is a form of newspeak to obfuscate that it actually mirrors the effect of a patent: access to the source code is provided by the copyright holder such as Redhat, but one is restricted in how it can be implemented - HackPatents. Redhat implements the code released back by the licensees in their own closed solutions. It is deceitful to call a restriction on the licensee a freedom. GPL advocates must sort out their terminology and use properly defined terms to reflect what they mean as defined in dictionary's. A licensor / licensee relationship isn't "freedom", it is a master/slave relationship.


 * (Pending: If the US government releases GPL code then nobody can implement closed solutions of it? What scheme is Redhat upto for them to leverage government code in closed solutions, while nobody else can)


 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses. The original license was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system after which it is named.

GPL is labeled free software while BSD is labeled permissive free which is Orwell Newspeak obfuscation. Something isn't eiher free or permissively free it is either restricted or free.


 * .... wishing to publish BSD-licensed software which relies upon separate programs using the more-restrictive GNU GPL....

Note the more-restrictive(GPL) from the article as opposed to permissive free. GPL is uses free and more-restrictive interchangeably. Restrictions leads to unintended consequences. Ideally there should be no restrictions on any idea whatsoever, no copyright ect. We would now have had a cheap cure for cancer available had it not been for the unintended consequences of idea restricting patents, GPL and copyright. Microsoft, Apple and GE are working the system, what has to change is the law. BSD developers and Stallman(GPL) agree that all copyright and patents must be disbanded. Since this isn't going to happen BSD takes the pragmatic view by realizing that commercial companies will provide code back since it is in their commercial interest to have a global pool of developer knowledge by people. GPL communism tries to take out its frustrations with the legal system on Microsoft, leading to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences
 * More recently, the law of unintended consequences has come to be used as an adage or idiomatic warning that an intervention in a complex system tends to create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.[7][8][9][10] Akin to Murphy's law, it is commonly used as a wry or humorous warning against the hubristic belief that humans can fully control the world around them.

Communists tried to regulate every facet of human interaction, restricting the freedoms of people and ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZemhXvN2stE&NR=1&feature=endscreen states that Stallman started the free software movement, this is incorrect as the MIT BSD like license was available before his GPL restriction as an answer to copyright restriction. GPL forces users to provide code back to a government agency who released it as GPL, without the government agency having to release code back to the developers but still able to use the code internally and derive benefits from extending the code, since government agencies and corporations are considered a single legal entity or person by law. This defeats the whole expectation of GPL coders that entities would be forced to release modifications back to them or they wouldn't be able to use their ideas.

Theo
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070901041657
 * GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope—the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get it back.

Thingiverse.com
You can give users the right to use the work under CC. However when you upload anything to thingverse you also licence it to them under this license:


 * http://www.thingiverse.com/legal "3.2 License. You hereby grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Company and its affiliates and partners, an irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free and fully paid, worldwide license to reproduce, distribute, publicly display and perform, prepare derivative works of, incorporate into other works, and otherwise use your User Content, and to grant sublicenses of the foregoing, solely for the purposes of including your User Content in the Site and Services. You agree to irrevocably waive (and cause to be waived) any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to your User Content."

This means that Thingiverse can allow others to use your ideas under a different license then the one you thought you gave, because Thingiverse becomes joint copyright holder over your ideas. The uploaders to thingiverse are under the illusion that they are the sole copyright holders. The FSF newspeaky 'opensource' makes this distinction difficult to discern.

products
Ironport, isilon, ncircle, netapp, netscaler, juniper, sandvine, pallisade, avid, nokia, vxworks, thomson, panasas, symmetricon

GPL and Google: the fine print
Many GPL advocates are actually communists with the view that there shouldn't be any class differences and that nobody must make money of their ideas without them getting a cut.

Google is using GPL code internally, generating wealth with it and not releasing their code modifications. A communist using the GPL to fight the corprotism(which he confuses with the free market) don't understand that he is in anycase not deriving direct financial benefit. Many communists have spent months of their lives behind GPL code, which was then used by Google, without Google paying them a cent.

Thus rather use the BSD license and at least formalize what is taking place in reality. GPL is a form of communism that will not allow any idea to be commercialized. As a commercial company there must be derived ideas that Google can't release to the public domain. One can't expect a company to invest Billions of dollars in hardware to release a product and release detailed exact descriptions of what they did. Imagine that all commercial companies be forced to release their internal trade secrets and suppliers, it would prevent people from investing in the first place. http://www.stallman.org/ logic is that Sasol must provide a DVD containing detailed blueprints on its implementation of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process petrol production process. Since this isn't going to happen like it isn't going to happen that Vodacom will suddenly allow free access to its 900Mhz spectrum we need to be realistic and rather implement the BSD pragmatic approach - http://sasecurity.wikia.com/wiki/GPL_and_BSD#Help_Vodacom_rather

BSD encourages but doesn't force companies to release back their derived ideas. Apple has done many code releases back to http://www.freebsd.org and many of the core BSD developers work for Apple. GPL advocates and anybody else were free to buy Apple stock and share in the companies wealth. Yahoo releases back code to the postgresql BSD, keeping their in-house modifications current with the main SQL fork, allowing them to employ postgreSQL developers for proprietary coding. For Yahoo, Google, Sasol etc. to have a business case they must be able to use algorithmic abstractions documented by others, without publishing such modifications.

GPL thus penalizes those trying to sell electronic products using such GPL code, while Sasol uses GPL code internally to sell petrol, but Sasol can't be sued for selling an end product. In both cases an end product is being sold, in both cases GPL code is used to provide such product, yet only the electronic product is actually able to be targeted in litigation.

Telecom firms I explained under Crime and Bandwidth solution are legal firms with an antenna on their roof engaging in Rent seeking, recycling math algorithms on FpGa devices. GPL,Copyright and HackPatents holders and coders also are rent seekers, expecting money each time their ideas are used. This has resulted in an Aristocracy lording over indentured slaves, who don't have the money like Apple, IBM to patent ideas and aren't being allowed to setup their own businesses using patentend ideas.

This has partially resulted in 25% of world GDP being concentrated in the hands of 200 companies. This is not a failure of capitalism or the freemarket but Newspeak obfuscation by the powerful mind control entities CNN, Fox news. etc. who don't want the public to understand this. The solution to this isn't more restrictions on ideas and their implementation, which is what the GPL license is.

GPL fragmented the Unix base
GPL splintered the BSD freebsd Unix base(Ubuntu, Red hat etc), thousands of sharp minds are wasting their time building a better bike-shed, not able to incorporate the superior file management system under BSD(nuclear power plant). Red Hat used clever legal tricks to in effect leverage the work done by developers under GPL but not release back these innovations. They have made it clear to their paying clients that there will be some form of retribution if they release code to others. Red Hat worked out a scheme whereby they are making money of GPL code but not giving back some of these modifications. (this need citations, I have lost the article and will cite it once found again)

http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html provides a list of Nvidia driver issues. The complexity of Linux is scaling out of control due to a fragmented developer base and design flaws. BSD is more centralized.


 * Problems stemming from the vast number of Linux distributions: No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This creates confusion for users.


 * Due to unstable Linux and constantly changing kernel APIs/ABIs Linux is ineffective for companies which cannot push their drivers upstream into the kernel for various reasons like their closedness (NVIDIA, ATI, Broadcom, etc.), or inability to control development or co-develop (VirtualBox/Oracle, VMWare/Workstation, etc.), or licensing issues (4Front Technologies/OSS).


 * "...There should be no reason why you can't take the last release that AMD made for that HD3200 and have it run perfectly on the latest distro and the fact that you stand here and admit that it doesn't work just shows what is wrong with linux in a nutshell...."

Too many devs tinkering with drivers, kernel and low level internals with not thinking through the effect this has on backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility is required, because most software companies aren't going to pay a team of devs to constantly rebuild their products to cope with fragmented changes.

Shuttleworth could have done like Google did with Android and fork the thing away from the devs so that real stability and BSD style central management could be brought to bare instead of the cat herding we have now, but it was not to be.

Linux has beautiful UIs, and tons of software, but retailers won't touch the product if installing it on a system and 6 months later its broken its own drivers because decentralized dev's changed low level system files and disabled the retailer's customer WiFi or sound Pulse.

Gluster New speak
http://community.gluster.org/q/why-did-gluster-choose-gnu-gpl-agpl-instead-of-bsd-license/
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

''...BSD license allows proprietary derivatives and forks of Gluster software. GNU GPL and AGPL defends software freedom better than BSD license. We would like to ensure enhancements to Gluster software to be contributed back to the community....''

Gluster not allowing their ideas to be used elsewhere without documenting such derived ideas is a restriction and specifically not a freedom. They are owned by Red-hat. Redhat is a corporate entity that retains the copyright on Gluster, there is no community held copyright on Gluster.

Copyright holder forks Tcpreplay into GPL
Aaron Turner the copyright proprietor of Tcpreplay was the only person with the legal power to make a GPL license in addition to his existing BSD license. Only the copyright holder can do this, but this did not allow him to revoke the BSD, he merely forked the development away from the BSD branch, which could still continue to be used by developers. In his http://synfin.net/sock_stream/technology/code/tcpreplay/why-tcpreplay-went-gpl article the usual point of how this will guarantee our freedoms under equality terms is given. What he did not mention is that the GPL restriction can be revoked for those using his GPL fork after paying him lots of money, because the GPL restriction does not apply to the proprietor. If something has a proprietor, then in terms of copyright law it isn't free(public domain).

What is the premise?
http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Marginal-Cost-Society-Collaborative/product-reviews/1137278463/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
 * ".....JR cackles with Leninist glee (@8-9) as he describes how the significance of the Internet dawned on neoclassical economists Larry Summers and Brad DeLong. They suggested in a 2001 article that when you can make new copies of "information goods" for next-to-nothing (near-zero MPC), you can't make a profit in perfect competition -- so maybe monopolies are necessary to encourage innovation. Don't you see the irony? The capitalists base their theory on perfect competition, but now they're backtracking! DeLong and Summers "are hopelessly trapped" (@8). But it gets worse, because according to the capitalists' own neoclassical theory, "A near zero marginal cost society is the optimally efficient state for promoting the general welfare and represents the ultimate triumph of capitalism. Its moment of triumph, however, also marks its inescapable passage from the world stage." (@9) Mmmuwahahahaha, in a manner of speaking. (Why Leninist? because Marx thought a commodity-based economy occurred only in capitalism, but the Bolsheviks based their economy on commodities; see the Socialist Party of Great Britain's online article by Richard Montague, "Marx and Lenin's views contrasted.")..."

...They suggested in a 2001 article that when you can make new copies of "information goods" for next-to-nothing (near-zero MPC), you can't make a profit in perfect competition -- so maybe monopolies are necessary to encourage innovation..... By using http://sasecurity.wikia.com/wiki/GPL_and_BSD#Church.27s_Thesis a de facto monopoly over algorithms was established by employing the GPL copyright license holders of Linux by Google, Apple, IBM, Red hat etc.

later
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

Apple issues
Steve Jobs stated ....... Apples makes the best notebooks on the planet .... Which is true, but what he failed to mention is that this is because Apple patented key technologies that doesn't allow other hardware vendors to reproduce similar products. The solution is to disband HackPatents and copyright, not add additional patent like restrictions with the GPL license. We must not fight restrictions like HackPatents with an incantation of the same restriction - GPL.

k
section on SSL allowing windows and linux to talk to one another.

Help Vodacom rather
The cell companies are running a rent seeking scam. There are various responses to this:

1) Distributed denial of service attack by sprinkling thousands of FpGa devices with the 3G protocol stack in peoples gardens. This could lead to a severe backlash and is a resentful, angry option like GPL allows angry communists to live out their classless society fantasy, leading to unintended consequences. Any large scale uncontrollable attack on the cell masts could lead to cell companies paying enough bribes to both the ANC and DA to change the constitution to provide Icasa with real powers and completely shut down all wireless networks.

2) The pragmatic option, grasping the reality of the situation and adapting to it. Try and see the situation from Vodacom's perspective and reduce their cost of doing business by allowing them to install for free mini-cell towers(femto cells) on your roof and even interlinking them using the opensource Ronja FreeSpaceOptics.

By reducing Vodacom's cost of doing business and forming a partnership between communities everybody benefits, enabling Vodacom to reduce their prices and still make a profit and not enabling them to demonize freedom loving people who will use the spectrum on 700,600,400Mhz etc. Since their business is so entrenched in 900Mhz no unauthorized usage of this spectrum must take place: we will not extend the same principle to 400Mhz - Unlimited bandwidth

GPL newspeak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software


 * "...Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and that can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients have the same rights under which it was obtained and that manufacturers of consumer products incorporating free software provide the software as source code...."

In this context 'free software' is not the same thing as public domain, because what is labeled as 'free' has still a copyright holder, who so wishes to describe his licensing regime as 'free', which doesn't make it free or public domain. Note that the obligation by licensees to share derived code can be arbitrarily waived by the copyright holder.

https://companycheck.co.uk/company/09012603/THE-OPENFOAM-FOUNDATION-LIMITED/companies-house-data, https://openfoam.org/licence/enforcing-gpl/ "... The Foundation will act swiftly on any report it receives of a potential licence infringement. For example, in November 2016, we received a report concerning CFD Support S.R.O, from the Czech Republic, who were distributing OpenFOAM in modified form. Our audit of the software they distributed found that the original copyright and licence notices had been removed, in breach of clause 4 of the GPL...."

But if the Czech's paid lots of money to the directors Christopher Greenshields then he could have refused to enforce the GPL against them.

BTS
http://wush.net/trac/rangepublic enBTS is distributed in two forms:

1. The public ("P") release. The public release is distributed under AGPLv3 with copyrights assigned to the  Free Software Foundation. The public release is a subset of the commercial release intended for experimentation, education, evaluation and proof-of-concept projects.

2. The commercial ("C") release. The commercial release is installed in Range Networks products under a mix of GPL and non-GPL licenses. Range Networks also offers a customer portal for commercial customers where source code is available for the GPL components of the OpenBTS installation. The "C" release provides additional features for security, scalability, expanded capacity and the operation of multi-BTS networks. The "C" release is intended for users
 * who need to provide cellular service in industrial, government or commercial applications,
 * whose intellectual property policies or business models are incompatible with A/GPLv3 or
 * who require commercial support, network monitoring or other professional services.

See how clever this is by the copyright holder BTS? They make FSF a joint copyright holder who will hunt down and destroy anybody who "violates" AGPLv3. Meaning you can only like an employee of GE work on BTS but not make money off it and unlike the employee of GE not even get paid. On the other hand if you pay lots of money to copyright holder BTS you can develop and use the code as dictated by BTS without anybody even having to know about it. The same of course for AGPLv3, after paying Moglen some big bucks he can allow you to take the free labor of others and use it in your own commercial products without anybody even knowing about it. Because the obligation to release derived works as dictated by the GPL can arbitrarily waved for people who pay the copyright holder lots of money. The restrictions of the GPL does not apply to the copyright holder.

Wikipedia newspeak

 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28software_development%29 "...In proprietary software, the copyright is usually held by the employing entity, not by the individual software developers. Proprietary code is thus more commonly forked when the owner needs to develop two or more versions, such as a windowed version and a command line version, or versions for differing operating systems, such as a word processor for IBM PC compatible machines and Macintosh computers. Generally, such internal forks will concentrate on having the same look, feel, data format, and behavior between platforms so that a user familiar with one can also be productive or share documents generated on the other. This is almost always an economic decision to generate a greater market share and thus pay back the associated extra development costs created by the fork. ..."

This weaselworded newspeak gains clarity from the premise that the courts have defined proprietary as the negation of public domain. Wikipedia should have written: ".....In proprietary software, the copyright is usually vested only in the employer, not in the employees. Proprietary code can be forked any manner under any number of licenses by the proprietor either for internal use or external use by the public. These separate license, to which the copyright holder is not subject to, could be for example a windowed version(Gpl2) and a command line version(Fruitcake license), or versions for differing operating systems, such as a word processor for IBM PC compatible machines and Macintosh computers. Generally, such internal forks will concentrate on whatever the copyright holder wishes allowing behavior between platforms so that a user familiar with one can also be productive or share documents generated on the other. This is almost always an economic decision to generate a greater market share by having a fragmented licensing scheme and thus pay back the associated extra development costs created by the fork. ..."

Mark Tarver

 * https://web.archive.org/web/20070409201211/http://www.lysanderspooner.org/intellect/contents.htm
 * https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/qilang/mVSJIyp-OhM/MQ5HxfVcCRAJ

ancell posted: The idea of relicensing under a 'compatible license' is something that the FSF introduced, but it is a fiction unless you actually can assert copyright over the work you are licensing. You cannot add extra conditions to a license without copyright and you get that by writing the work yourself or else by seeking permission from the author. This is exactly what Theo was fighting for. If you modify the code (as I do with the CL port to optimise performance) and put it in a seperate file then providing the changes are substantial - that code is yours.... My understanding of copyright law as it's done in the US, especially in the context of translations of foreign media into English, is that such a file would still be a derivative work. You own your contributions, the original rights holder loses nothing. If the latter wants to use your work, they need your permission, and similarly you can't legally distribute your work without the rights holders' permission. BSD licensing makes this simple and mechanical, and I personally would never touch an in-file license notice, I'd only add my own as needed. BTW, I strongly advise making the Shen site GPL free, or cleanly segregating any GPL material and allowing no non-permissive licensed code in the standard library. For the same reason as changing the Shen license to BSD: the less someone has to think about legal issues before using any of the Shen ecosystem, the better for its adaption. Any viral license deliberately and intentionally imposes additional conditions in an otherwise permissive license environment. E.g. at best, use GPL for a complete stand-alone work like an editor. But please, especially given the small size of the Shen community, permissively license anything that others might want to use, like code to interact with a GUI. It's good we're having this discussion and it's worth OS programmers taking it in. I'll look at the FSF stuff, but really if you read Stallman in the long thread I supplied you'll see exactly what I mean about corrupt. I encourage Shenturians to read it - it is fascinating. Let me interject why I can speak authoritatively about RMS and what became the FSF (and why, for entirely non-legal reasons, my favorite license is the "MIT" (X Consortium) license :-): I showed up at MIT as a freshman when the wire wrapping of the backplane of (CADR) Lisp Machine #9 was be checked by another Lisp Machine. Lisp Machines were obviously the hottest thing at the time (enough so that the director of the rival Lab for Computer Science was claiming them as a LCS project during tours he gave until the famous nameplate on top was generated to stop that), and after finances forced me into a sordid life of programming I eventually ended up at Lisp Machines Inc., the competitor of Symbolics, in the 1982-3 period. Before then RMS was a member of my social group, and we were on OK terms. At LMI we were allies, in that he was doing his best to implement the most important new features in the MIT/LMI fork of the code. I was also one of the few people left willing to break bread with him; if you've read the end of Steven Levy's Hackers which not entirely inaccurately portrays RMS as the last hacker left at the MIT AI Lab, well, one of his beefs was just that, almost all his colleagues off at Symbolics and able to politely avoid him. We both gave up on Lisp Machines at about the same time, summer of 1983, and were in fact roommates when he launched the GNU project (the FSF came a couple of years later). That didn't last too long for obvious reasons, and in due course, starting in 1985, I worked for UniPress, a company that published UNIX™ software. Back then the most important thing was to have access to one of every type of UNIX™ out there, and combined with that their general model is what is called "closed gate open source" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gated_community ), you got binaries and source, but you couldn't redistribute either. This was true for there most important product at the time, an obscure bit of software called Gosling Emacs™, an editor with a byte code compiler that was written by none other than the obscure James Gosling of eventual Java/JVM fame. About half of my professional work in the '80s was on various versions of EMACS, I got tapped to finish the MS-DOS port, and moved to New Jersey for a while where it was located. RMS outright stole Gosling Emacs™ to start the GNU version of it; the owners of UniPress acknowledged this and asked him not to do it. The were old hands in the field and knew nothing good would come from legal action, and that RMS's version would, at least for a while, increase the general market for EMACS, back in a time where it was hard to afford the hardware to run it (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping was a legit criticism through the mid-90s). We were labeled "Software Hoarders" (and named our LaserWriter that :-), accused of burning down his apartment building (seriously, and it did happen, that was where we had been roommates, a not so nice part of Cambridge, MA, USA, the culprits were "a couple of kids" "playing" with matches and kerosine), etc. etc. E.g. our publishing and serious work in improving and bug fixing an version of EMACS that we shipped with source code was a worse crime than stealing that same code (RMS claimed he had received an email from Gosling that gave him permission, but never was able to produce a copy of such a vital document, and Gosling denied it). And I knew the low level C source at an intimate level, GNU Emacs was most definitely legally a derived work, it was most unwise to do this, for UniPress could have nailed him to the wall and severely damaged the GNU project in its cradle. His stewardship of GNU/FSF software projects is really that bad (and there's lots, lots more about GNU Emacs going forward, e.g. look into the Lucid fork. GCC also once forked, and the other GNU/FSF marque project, the infamous Hurd operation system, is 29 years in the making and pretty obviously never going make it). Anyway, enough of that, I'll close with two bits of humor; first a Not Necessarily Safe For Your Sanity (but really not that bad) mock advertisement of "GNU, a new fragrance by RMS" http://i.imgur.com/88Jgz.jpg and a very funny XKCD cartoon: http://xkcd.com/225/ (note Eric S. Raymond is (in)famously a gun owner). - Harold --

http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/Real-men-don-t-attack-straw-men-tt55042.html#none Stallman wrote "....I don't think so -- that is too much to ask.  In any area, the meaning of freedom involves filling in details which are not obvious in advance. It seems simple while you stay at the abstract level; it becomes hard when you address the details...."

Stallman starts thread: "....It looks like some people are having a discussion in which they construct views they would find outrageous, attribute them to me, and then try to blame me for them. For such purposes, knowledge of my actual views might be superfluous, even inconvenient. However, if anyone wants to know what I do think, I've stated it in various articles in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/. In particular, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html. One question particularly relevant for this list is why I don't recommend OpenBSD.  It is not about what the system allows.  (Any general purpose system allows doing anything at all.)  It is about what the system suggests to the user.

Since I consider non-free software to be unethical and antisocial, I think it would be wrong for me to recommend it to others. Therefore, if a collection of software contains (or suggests installation of) some non-free program, I do not recommend it. The systems I recommend are therefore those that do not contain (or suggest installation of) non-free software. From what I have heard, OpenBSD does not contain non-free software (though I am not sure whether it contains any non-free firmware blobs). However, its ports system does suggest non-free programs, or at least so I was told when I looked for some BSD variant that I could recommend. I therefore exercise my freedom of speech by not including OpenBSD in the list of systems that I recommend to the public. I could recommend OpenBSD privately with a clear conscience to someone I know will not install those non-free programs, but it is rare that I am asked for such recommendations, and I know of no practical reason to prefer OpenBSD to gNewSense. The fact that OpenBSD is not a variant of GNU is not ethically important. If OpenBSD did not suggest non-free programs, I would recommend it along with the free GNU/Linux distros. ...." ---

On Jan 8, 2008 8:07 PM, Richard Stallman <[hidden email]> wrote: >   This may be *your* "usual interpretation of the revised BSD license" > > Eben Moglen says that it is nearly universal among lawyers. > As this is a legal issue, I have confidence in him. >

Jan 8 2008, Terekhov wrote: Yeah, yeah. You have confidence in Eben Moglen[1]. But let's examine for example http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html "Licenses are not contracts" says self-proclaimed "world's leading experts on copyright law as applied to software" Eben Moglen about the GPL.

Now, apart from governmental permits (not contracts indeed) licenses like driver licenses, fishing licenses from local municipalities, gun dealership, public lottery permits, etc. to do something regulated by government (may I just note that neither GNU.ORG nor FSF.OGR is a governmental entity) and in the context of "intellectual property"[2] licenses, consider (starting with United States Supreme Court):

"Whether this [act] constitutes a gratuitous license, or one for a reasonable compensation, must, of course, depend upon the circumstances; but the relation between the parties thereafter in respect of any suit brought must be held to be contractual, and not an unlawful invasion of the rights of the owner." De Forest Radio Tel. & Tel. Co. v. United States, 273 U.S. 236, (1927)

"Whether express or implied, a license is a contract 'governed by ordinary principles of state contract law.'" McCoy v. Mitsuboshi Cutlery, Inc., 67. F.3d 917, (Fed. Cir. 1995)

"Normal rules of contract construction are generally applied in construing copyright agreements. Nimmer on Copyright sec. 10.08. Under Wisconsin law, contracts are to be construed as they are written. When the language is plain and unambiguous, a reviewing court must construe the contract as it stands. In construing the contract, terms are to be given their plain and ordinary meaning." (citations omitted). Kennedy v. Nat'l Juvenile Det. Ass'n, 187 F.3d 690, (7th Cir. 1999)

"Although the United States Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. '' 101-1332, grants exclusive jurisdiction for infringement claims to the federal courts, those courts construe copyrights as contracts and turn to the relevant state law to interpret them." Automation by Design, Inc. v. Raybestos Products Co., 463 F3d 749, (7th Cir. 2006)

"However, implicit in a nonexclusive license is the promise not to sue for copyright infringement. See In re CFLC, Inc., 89 F.3d 673, 677 (9th Cir. 1996), citing De Forest Radio Telephone Co. v. United States, 273 U.S. 236, 242 (1927) (finding that a nonexclusive license is, in essence, a mere waiver of the right to sue the licensee for infringement); see also Effects Associates, Inc. v. Cohen, 908 F.2d 555, 558 (9th Cir. 1990) (holding that the granting of a nonexclusive license may be oral or by conduct and a such a license creates a waiver of the right to sue in copyright, but not the right to sue for breach of contract)." Jacobsen v. Katzer, No. 3:06-cv-01905, (N.D. Cal. 2007)

BTW, the last one is about Artistic License being a contract (just like any other copyright license).

Heck, and as for the GPL itself: http://www.jbb.de/judgment_dc_frankfurt_gpl.pdf "On behalf of the people JUDGMENT ... The GPL grants anyone who enters into such contract... contractual relationship between the authors and Defendant ... incorporated into the contract by virtue of the preamble of the GPL ... Plaintiff, or the licensors from whom Plaintiff derives his right, have not violated any contractual obligations themselves ... Defendant, who violated contractual obligations"

http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/MySQLcounterclaim.pdf MySQL's counter-complaint asserting breach of GPL license contract ("COUNT VIII Breach of Contract (GPL License)") and asking for declaratory (court to declare GPL terminated) and injunctive (court to preliminary and permanently enjoin Progress/NuSphere from "copying, modifying, sublicensing, or distributing the MySQL(TM) Program") relief (plus damages, of course).

IBM's SIXTH COUNTERCLAIM (Breach of the GNU General Public License) against SCO... "SCO accepted the terms of the GPL... IBM is entitled to a declaration that SCO's rights under the GPL terminated, an injunction prohibiting SCO from its continuing and threatened breaches of the GPL and an award of damages in an amount to be determined at trial" (Pretty much the same as MySQL's claim above), BTW. From IBM's memorandum:

"SCO's GPL violations entitle IBM to at least nominal damages on the Sixth Counterclaim for breach of the GPL. See Bair v. Axiom Design LLC 20 P.3d 388, 392 (Utah 2001) (explaining that it is "well settled" that nominal damages are recoverable upon breach of contract); Kronos, Inc. v. AVX Corp., 612 N.E.2d 289, 292 (N.Y. 1993) ("Nominal damages are always available in breach of contract action".). "

Also worth noting (from IBM's brief regarding the GPL contract breach): "the Court need not reach the choice of law issue because Utah law and New York law are in accord on the issues that must be reached to address SCO's sole argument on this motion, namely, that SCO did not breach the GPL. Throughout this brief, IBM cites to both Utah law and New York law."

Do you still have confidence in Eben Moglen?

[1] http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/04/08/intellectual_property_is_so_last_ye ar.php (Intellectual Property Is So Last Year)

[2] http://lysanderspooner.org/intellect/contents.htm (THE LAW OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY; OR AN ESSAY ON THE RIGHT OF AUTHORS AND INVENTORS TO A PERPETUAL PROPERTY IN THEIR IDEAS. VOL. I. BY LYSANDER SPOONER. BOSTON: PUBLISHED BY BELA MARSH, 15 FRANKLIN STREET. 1855.)

See also

http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/gpl/gpl.pdf (Why Not Use the GPL? Thoughts on Free and Open-Source Software)

Hth.

regards,

Links
http://www.itworld.com/storage/295325/red-hats-new-patent-troll-weapon-gpl-violation


 * Red Hat has taken a unique step in defending itself from a patent infringement claim from Twin Peaks Software: a counterclaim that Twin Peaks is in copyright violation on mount, the file management app that is licensed under the GPLv2. Not only is Red Hat seeking GPL compliance, it's also going after Twin Peaks for damages and is seeking an injunction on Twin Peaks' own roduct sales. mount, the document goes on to emphasize is licensed under the GPLv2, and can be freely used and distributed as long as the terms of the GPL are met - specifically, if you make a change to mount's code and distribute those changes, you have to make those changes freely available under the GPL so others can take advantage of the innovation. Red Hat has been the copyright holder of Mount - 2.10m beginning in May 2000 and of Mount 2.12a since March of 2004.

Having copyright on mount is like having copyright on the alphabet, the tools of our language should not be under any restrictions. Redhat can also use their defensive weapon offensively by extorting concessions out of others not targeting them in patent trolling for sole purpose of shutting down a competitor, thus emulating the effect of a patent. This is not what GPL proponents had in mind, their restriction was being used in unintended ways as per Church's thesis. Private here is a dissimilar term for proprietary, Moglen inverts logic.
 * Bitlaw us an euro patent treaties
 * Jeremy Rifkin
 * BSD mailing list
 * Nvidia linux drivers
 * Eben Moglen
 * http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/3FA34DA6-CD7A-44C1-9D8A-4AB90106BB4D.html tcp in bsd
 * http://fsfe.org/campaigns/gplv3/barcelona-rms-transcript#q11-banning-bad-use Tivoisation
 * http://slashdot.org/story/01/06/20/1249203/Bill-Gates-Says-GPL-Is-Like-Pac-Man  pack-man
 * http://news.slashdot.org/story/00/05/01/1052216/thus-spake-stallman
 * https://fitnessfortheoccasion.wordpress.com/2007/06/07/anti-gpl-crowd-doesnt-get-it/
 * http://compgroups.net/comp.os.linux.misc/licensing-question-public-domain-to-gpl/575077
 * http://archive09.linux.com/feature/30273
 * https://cyberpolitics.wordpress.com/category/lecture-notes/
 * http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/why-free-software-is-more-important-now-than-ever-before/ Stallman on freedom, does not say a word about the copyright holder and makes and legally meaningless distinction between proprietary and commercial. Something is either proprietary or public domain.
 * http://www.bcgreen.com/comments/2005/communism.html Communism issue. The author failed to note that by employing GPL copyright holders Red Hat becomes the de-facto copyright holder.
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFMMXRoSxnA interview with stalmann on rtnews  7min extreme capitalism . Stallman confuses corprotism with free market.
 * http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html
 * http://archive09.linux.com/feature/4029 The phrase "Free Software license" is an oxymoron, anything in the public domain(free) can by definition not be licensed. A license is defined as a set or restrictions or terms under which actions can be performed by the licensee. Mogelen wrote:".."The GPL isn't greedy, just protective of the work of programmers," he says. "If you devote time and energy to working on a programming project and want to be sure that no subsequent modifier can ever 'take the program private' by making whizzbang improvements or necessary repairs and only releasing that work on proprietary terms, you need the GPL."..."
 * http://news.softpedia.com/news/grsecurity-forced-by-multi-billion-dollar-company-to-release-patches-only-to-sponsors-490330.shtml "...They do so by following the GPL license, and they have to make available any modifications they bring. It turns out that the good work done by Grsecurity is also being used by multi-billion dollar companies that are selling devices powered by the Linux kernel, but they are not respecting the license, and they are using the old and discontinued kernels..." What Grsecurity is really after is money, they are not interested in derived code from these companies but in the money they will pay them to absolve them from litigation. For some reason these types of articles always present the remedy as complying with the license, they never state that for renumeration the copyright holder will wave the GPL terms.