"amicus_curious" <[email protected]> writes: > "Alan Mackenzie" <[email protected]> wrote in message > news:[email protected]... >> >> You could make the same sort of argument about any "petty" peccadillo. >> Why bother prosecuting a fare dodger for a 2 Euro fare? Seems a bit >> disproportionate, doesn't it? >> > Do they arraign and prosecute people for this in your town?
After a number of repetitive offenses, this actually happens. Yes. I should be surprised if things are much different at your place. >> It's straightforward enough that you barely even need to consult a >> lawyer. You need to put a tarball of your source code up on your >> company's website. Half a day's work to read the GPL, understand it, >> create the tarball and put it on the site. >> >> And if, somehow, you manage to get even that wrong, you can put it >> right on receiving that dreaded letter from the SFLC, or from the >> copyright holders. >> > How big a deal is it to just ignore it? Even less work. Sure. You can also ignore the rights of a supermarket owner when visiting it, but you need not expect that either the workers or law officers find that overly amusing. Ignoring laws comes at a price. >>> They just complain to the manufacturer and maybe their needs are >>> taken care of in a subsequent release, maybe not. Who can afford to >>> learn enough about Linux or OO or any other big program to the point >>> where they can effectively make modifications? >> >> Me. David Kastrup, too. >> > Well, maybe you are that inefficient, but I think you are just > bluffing. Hm? We _are_ the "manufacturers" for a lot of free software. And yes, I have patched proprietary software (drivers, Pascal runtimes and others) in the binaries for removing bugs that were hampering my work flow. It is a nuisance to debug using only binaries. It is not a matter of efficiency: if you think you can tell somebody like Digital Research to please fix a system call from some driver DLL, you are simply deluded about your influence and their response time and response style. >>> Stallman is living in the 70s or worse. >> >> Yet, somehow, the GPL remains the most popular license, by an >> overwhelming margin. If your notions on the GPL were accurate, it >> would by now have dwindled to unimportance and been superseded by a >> BSD license, or whatever. There're no signs of that happening. >> > Linux uses it, but not the latest version, apparently the copyright > owner has some problems with that. There are several thousands copyright owners if you are talking about the kernel. You need all their agreement for a license upgrade. The FSF has its own opinion about just how smart that was. If you are talking about the user land, a lot of it is migrating to GPLv3. After all, large portions are (c) FSF anyway. > Apache has something else, I know. Ditto PHP. I'm not so sure MySQL > is even open anymore. I don't bother with it, but Sun seems to be > locking things down. Hm? I thought they were opening up the parts previously proprietary. >> Have you compared the sort of "hassle" a user might get from SDLC >> with what he might get on violating some other type of license, say a >> proprietary one from Microsoft, or Oracle, or some other major >> software maker? > > That is very hard to do, I think. Other than illegally copying the > binaries, how are you going to violate their licenses? Certainly > people have made illegal copies galore and generally get away with the > act. If they use it commercially, though, they are often found out > and prosecuted. It is hardly a hassle, it is a serious amount of money > whereas the need to post yet another copy of BusyBox is much more of a > trivial irritation, particularly when offered as part of a lawsuit. Serious amount of money when done commercially? More likely serious jail terms. It is somewhat disconcerting that copyright violations tend to get longer jail terms than manslaughter and rape. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
