On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 4:30 AM Adam Nielsen via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > I do dare to ask a dumb question, after reading several post about FSF. > > > > Can anyone explain what is FSF, i'm just a simple tech guy! > > One thing they also do - perhaps the most important in my opinion - is > that they keep companies who make use of free software honest. They > will commence legal action against companies that take advantage of > open source software by using it without complying with the licence.
They do not do that generally. They are concerned solely with code licensed under the GPL. The GPL requires that you make source available for code you license under it. (And it's more complicated. because you can't just point to your repository as the place to get if. It must be the specific *version* of the code used to build the executable you are distributing. The person who gets the code must be able to reproduce the build environment and produce an exact duplicate on their own system of the executable they distributed. Just pointing at HEAD in the repository will get code changed from what they built from, unlikely to reproduce the executable they distributed.) If you want to get GPLed code and make a closed source fork, you *can*, but you must negotiate an agreement with the copyright holder of the code permitting you to do so. And whether the FSF gets involved will depend on the product in question. They *can't* sue on behalf of everybody.. One open source product under the GPL I made extensive use of back when was Plucker. Plucker was designed to scrape websites, and convert the HTML pages it got to a form viewable on a Palm OS device using a Plucker PalmOS viewer product. Plucker worked fine converting locally stored HTML as well as stuff scraped from website. A good chunk of the programs I dealt with as a Unix admin had documentation in HTML form. I could convert the docs to things viewable by Plucker and carry a documentation library in my pocket. (It was a hop, skip, and jump to converting other things, and I have about 4,000 converted HTML Plucker documents in an archive.) The Plucker folks had problems with a vendor who grabbed the code and made a closed source fork without getting a license. *Bringing* suit was beyond the means of the Plucker devs, and it wasn't a big or important enough product that the FSF would take a hand. The Plucker devs bit their tongues and put up with it. Open source licenses are gentlemen's agreements that assume all concerned *are* gentlefolk and will comply. Sometimes that's not the case. The bigger problem with the GPL is that it's *viral.* The GPL states that code *linked against* GPLed code *becomes* GPLed, even if that is not the license *it* was issued under. That bit is a breaker for *many* people, and the source of license incompatibilities I complained about elsewhere. Google, for example, creates and uses enormous amounts of open source code. Nothing with the GPL may be incorporated. (I follow an Android development project that must reinvent the wheel and recreate stuff available under the GPL. That situation *existing* is a source of profound irony.) > Adam. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
