On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 1:16 PM Cuvtixo D <cuvt...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Brand new to this mailing list, but I wanted to respond to a conversation > about Open source licences, and apologies to the authors, I lost track of who > said what in the following: > >>> (Speaking personally, I'd love to see *FreeDOS* re-licensed under > >>> something other than the GPL.)
> Firstly, GPL still presently has no American legal force behind it! dmccunney > (I believe) mentioned Stallman's lack of touch with reality, and, I think > this is reflected most importantly in the fact that he hasn't rallied behind > any court case against any GPL violators. American law, based on the common > law system, builds upon legal court precedent. When no one sues (admittedly > an expensive process, that someone like Stallman might have to get funding > for), it remains in legal limbo. Maybe I'm just unaware, and some company > like Red Hat has already embarked on legal proceedings. But until then, > violating GPL will only bring anger from the "open source community". The issue is that software licenses are *civil* law, not criminal, and similar to copyrights and trademarks. It is on the rights *holder* to monitor the status of stuff they have the rights to, and take legal action if the rights are violated. Fundamentally, open source licenses are a gentleman's agreement that assume everyone else is a gentleman is will play by the rules. Sometimes they aren't and don't. Whether Stallman rallies behind GPL court cases is largely irrelevant. The basic problem is that taking someone to court over civil law violations is time consuming and *expensive*. Who has the *money* to take GPL violators to court, and why would they bother? > The situation for an American violator parallels that of Chinese company > that's unafraid of violating American copyright: No legal enforcement; > minimal repercussions. Complaining about FreeDOS being GPL'd is a little > silly. If your commercial company doesn't want or need the goodwill of the > "FOSS movement", and can get a reasonable profit while violating any GPL, > they might as well do so. Some companies might be afraid of this changing in > the future, licencing is written so they might have a good case when it does, > thus compliance is higher than it might otherwise be. See above about gentleman's agreement. The problem is lack of interoperability between different open source licenses and is mostly an issue within the FOSS community among people who care about license terms and try to abide by them.. I can't think offhand of any significant amount of money to be made by ignoring the GPL and using GPLed code in a proprietary product. The stuff that gets issued as open source has reached the level of being a commodity product where it's hard to make money selling it. A high tech CEO got asked on the EETimes site while back about doing business business in mainland China where high tech firms were *very* reluctant to use new proprietary tech because once in China it wouldn't be proprietary any more. His response was "Bring suit against a Chinese company in a Chinese court, and tell be what you come back with." IE, you will get nowhere, so don't use tech in China you have IP concerns about. > PS I understand "legalese" because I earned an Associates degree in Paralegal > Studies, not because I'm a lawyer. In fact I steered away from that career > precisely because so many lawyers and law firms are jerks, and squeeze > paralegals for all they can. I don't blame you a bit. > Courts are also among the last to adopt new tech, which is why some > paralegals might be interested in adopting software like FreeDOS. > Compatibility with old apps and formats (WP 5.1 for DOS) is in demand with > paralegals (more importantly with their deep-pocketed bosses). Software becomes embedded and held onto as long as possible, because it's complex and expensive to switch.. A chap I knew years back was an Applications Engineer for a law firm. The firm made extensive use of DOS XYWrite, which was highly programmable, as their word processor. . He was looking for ways to get across to a senior partner that switching to WordPerfect (which the partner apparently heard about from a younger relative) was a non-starter, because too much of what the firm did with XYWrite simply couldn't be *done* with WP. The same reasons are why there are after market firms still supporting all manner of things, like OS/2. There is a large enough embedded market that *really* doesn't want to move off what they have now to support them. (There are folks doing Wang and Data General emulation, for example.) That market will not *grow*, but enough of it still exists to support some third party firms who service it. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
