16 Nov
2011
16 Nov
'11
9:33 a.m.
On Wednesday, November 16, 2011 03:13:06 AM Louigi Verona did opine:
Hey guys!
I'd like to chime in here.
No disrespect meant to anyone and to anyone's work, but the phrase along
the lines of "there are a lot of people around who think it's perfectly
ok to make money by using work of others without paying them" seems to
be missing the point of GPL. The way I see it, the phrase instead
should be something like: "there are a lot of people who want to take
code, created with respect to other people's freedom, and turn it into
proprietary." Money is irrelevant in this regard.
No it isn't, its the root cause of the disagreement here regardless of what
you are smoking. The turkeys Fons is fussing about are looking at THEIR
bottom line, and when they found they couldn't 'borrow' it for free, they
may have decided to just borrow it anyway. Time will, if Harald Waite
takes it on, tell that tale, and if true the courts generally are agreeable
to a fee sufficiently punitive as to discourage that sort of behavior in
the future.
Not for the goal of being controversial, I would also
like to add that I
do think it is okay to make money by using work of others without
paying them as long as the work is released to the public and not
offered to you as work for hire.
This is also generally true.
This is why I see any licenses that limit distribution
and usage of
creative work as undesirable and unfounded. Even things like GPL and CC
seem to me like just lesser evil, as it still assumes that the author of
the work can be considered an owner of his ideas and thus assumes that
ideas can be property. This raises many-many problems, one of which is
giving the author too much power over society.
The bottom line here, for this paragraph, is that if you don't like the
license terms, you are perfectly free to write your own version of the
wheel, just do it in a clean room, you cannot have ever seen a copy of that
source code. If, OTOH, you are not capable of doing that, and the only way
to get the job done is to use something that has a license that is
distasteful to you, then you should retrain your taste buds and comply with
the terms. The license & copyright notices the author chooses to put on
his output ARE what he/she puts on it and you have zero rights to decide
otherwise.
Cheers, Gene
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene>
To be or not to be, that is the bottom line.