On Mon, 2011-11-14 at 10:11 +0000, Harry van Haaren wrote: If you want to use it but the license is a problem, I can be convinced to change it to LGPL3+. I simply default to GPL (as IMO everyone should) in the absence of specific arguments why that is not best in a given scenario. It never hurts to ask ;) Why thank you :) (Raul does have some dusty corners, though) -dr

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Iain Duncan <iainduncanlists(a)gmail.com> wrote: just to be clear, CSound went LGPL *from* the ridiculous "MIT educational license". that was a license that made its source code all but unusable (and at the very least, extremely unclear as to its usability).

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 4:38 PM, David Robillard <d(a)drobilla.net> wrote: Yes I suppose your right. I'll note though, that I'd concider myself hesitant to request an author of GPL software to re-license as LGPL. Its basically asking "mind if *I* earn money from *your* work?", and that's not something that I'd like to promote. On the other hand, a LGPL library that would allow easy usage of threads, ringbuffers, etc would definatly benefit the project I'm doing. Somewhere on the GNU site I read a pretty good paragraph on "choosing the right license", and basically it comes down to this: if there's a commercial version of library X available, and an LGPL alternative of X appears, it will promote the use of open libraries, and hopefully the use of the library will improve it. If an GPL version appears, it will be used in open-source software, but most likely never be used in commercial / closed software solutions, and hence its "publicity" and user-base will be smaller... (Overcame my dose of laziness: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html) End of the day, I think respect for the authors work is the most important thing, and I'd personally be slightly agitated if somebody emailed "Hey can I take your efforts and make money without promising anything back?" as it would imply that they don't want to respect the license that I'd chosen for the efforts I'd done. Rant over I think :) -Harry

2011/11/14 Harry van Haaren <harryhaaren(a)gmail.com>om>: FYI, you're well within your rights to "earn money" from GPL software, see: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html Best, Tristan

On Tuesday, November 15, 2011 11:14:21 AM Harry van Haaren did opine: The GPL still has teeth. However if this reseller is using the profits to fund improvements and/or bug fixing, AND those patches are being contributed back, then I have no huge moral problems with it. It may resemble a wine vs crossover thing, if you want the latest, buy crossover. If wine will run your app, that is ok too. 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> You can't go home again, unless you set $HOME.

On Tuesday, November 15, 2011 04:24:46 PM Fons Adriaensen did opine: That, to be polite, sucks, Fons. And I certainly would get in touch with Harold Waite at the FSF, relating every instance of your interchanges with them. I get the impression that the EU courts have been more friendly to the GPL folks than ours have been. It may be that the FSF can force discovery since something so simple could be found in just the complete makefile tree of their product. I've no idea there, but here, a search warrant seems easy enough to get, and that alone often triggers a settlement and compliance. Good luck. 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> The trouble with heart disease is that the first symptom is often hard to deal with: death. -- Michael Phelps

2011/11/16 Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: Thanks for pointing that out. My earlier comment was just to highlight that when you ask authors to relicense their code from GPL to LGPL, the main thing you're asking is not, "Can I make money off of something you made?", but rather, "Can I potentially link something you've made against something non-(L)GPL?" These are separate issues. In any case, I certainly didn't mean to sound like I was advocating the Blender rebranding scam ;) Best, Tristan

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011 03:13:06 AM Louigi Verona did opine: 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. This is also generally true. 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.

On 11/16/2011 09:53 AM, Louigi Verona wrote: The concept of property just is artificial in general. It wouldn't be "necessary" if humans wouldn't have this tendency to be selfish and greedy. As things are, the purpose is protection of investment of time and effort and scarce resources. Respecting property is part of an agreement to avoid chaos and war. Everything that can be expressed digitally is not scarce, once copied and distributed. But the know-how, time and effort required to producing it, is, and that's what's to be respected and protected. In a capitalistic society, it should be possible to earn money by investing your time and effort in producing things people need/want. People being paid for their time and effort directly may be preferable. There's still a need/use for copyright to protect the outcome, to allow the investment to be made beforehand. This way, payment can depend on the quality of the outcome. Oh, and in a funny twist, the GPL and similar licenses provide a reason for copyright on immaterial goods, as they have well founded objectives and copyright is the legal mechanism they rely on to be enforceable. -- Thorsten Wilms thorwil's design for free software: http://thorwil.wordpress.com/

On 11/16/2011 10:57 AM, Louigi Verona wrote: That's not what I said, as I did not say anything about motivation, for one. You cannot separate culture from money in any money-using society. As long as people have to earn money for a living, combined with the tendency to require a huge amount of time at that, the question is then if people being able to invest a majority of their time, effort and skill in creative endeavors is desirable. I'm not a fan of capitalism and even less so of long work-days, but it's hard to even think of a better system that takes human nature into account, to not even speak of establishing one. -- Thorsten Wilms thorwil's design for free software: http://thorwil.wordpress.com/

On Wednesday 16 November 2011, at 10.57.47, Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I don't know about other people here, but I've only got 24 hours a day, some of which are lost to sleep and other activities, and I've most likely got only a few decades left to live. Time is a very scarce resource indeed. Unfortunately, I've "wasted" most of my life so far on programming, music and various other things that are hard enough to make a living off of regardless of laws and other tools. Selling anything is really just "suggesting" that people pay for it, as only a few percent of the consumers will anyway. That part is not really a problem, though! The *actual* market is only those few percent anyway, the rest concisting mostly of people that would just not bother if they couldn't get it for free. More importantly, that last group gives you free distribution and marketing! So, from that point of view, copyright law is pretty much useless anyway. It's fighting a hopeless battle against the very nature of these things, and trying to enforce it is anything from pointless through devastatingly counterproductive. So, it could definitely be argued that copyright law is irrelevant in this context. However, if just any business was legally allowed take anyone's "intellectual property" and make money off of it, paying no royalties or anything, that would be a problem. How would one prevent that without copyright law or similar tools? Never releasing any source code? Never releasing anything at all? (No significant difference in this context. Comments are mostly garbage anyway, and machine code is just another language.) As to motivation, well sure, there will always be people doing all sorts of stuff just for fun, self-education etc - or because they just need it to get some job done. Unfortunately, in the case of music, video games and various other things, the interesting part of making a polished, thoroughly enjoyable and/or useful product is generally only some 10% of the work. The rest is just hard, boring, frustrating work that will rarely ever get done without some other motivation than the work itself. It's not the kind of work that attracts contributors to a Free/Open Source project either, in cases where that is even applicable. One could argue that "entertainment products" aren't really necessary anyway, so it wouldn't matter if people stopped making them. By that logic however, if you don't need the products, you don't need to pay for them either, so where's the problem...? (Personally, I'll never rely on a proprietary, closed source engine or development tool ever again if I can help it, but that's a different situation altogether.) -- //David Olofson - Consultant, Developer, Artist, Open Source Advocate .--- Games, examples, libraries, scripting, sound, music, graphics ---. | http://consulting.olofson.net http://olofsonarcade.com | '---------------------------------------------------------------------'

On Wednesday 16 November 2011, at 14.32.23, Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The problem with that is that they're potentially stealing my customers. Where they sell, I don't. This becomes even more of a problem due to the fact that developers need to spend most of their time creating products, while the others can work full time on making a profit form the work of these developers. This leads to a situation where effectively business is everything, and development is just something you do if you don't value your own time. Exactly. Games in general pretty much have to be proprietary, or most of them just won't happen. The section of "players" and "motivated, skilled contributors" seems to be next to non-existent, so Free/Open Source *games* don't really work. Engines and tools are different matters though. High end 3D engines are just too complex and short-lived (need to be mostly rewritten every other year or so to keep up), but there is plenty of Free/Open Source physics, scripting and whatnot going on in games these days. Well, the difference with music at least, is that you can make one song, and you have something to show. Make half an engine and one level of a game and you have... nothing? Also, in my experience, the whole process of creating music is a lot more rewarding and less frustrating than (other parts of) game development. Even so, I never really get around to do it these days. The main reason I'm going beyond just playing around with synths and stuff now, is that I've decided to do *everything* on my first commercial game, music included. Basically, no matter how much I enjoy creating music, games or whatever, I just haven't been able to find enough time and energy to do it "properly" without any chance of doing that instead of building web sites, programming embedded systems or whatever. Maybe I'm just burned out, or not passionate enough about it; I don't know... But if I'm going to take things from the "fun amatuer stuff" to a professional quality level, I don't want to spend what little spare time I have left after "real" work just doing that. To some extent, maybe, as that's one way of actually providing some extra value. Valve's Steam is another example of that; providing actual value and services to paying customers. Plain DRM that's a general PITA to deal with and threatens to damage your operating system is not "extra value", although some companies still believe it actually works... One of those that recently declared "DRM works!" is down to 10% (!) in PC sales AND piracy, and still don't get the message. That's just plain neurotic if you ask me! There is actually data showing that sales scale up with piracy. It might seem like nothing but a problem to a company spending millions on TV commercials and whatnot, but I'm not sure about that... To independent developers with practically zero marketing budget, it can be an invaluable marketing tool! Of course, you actually need to have a good product that "sells itself" for that to work out, and looking at many of the AAA titels, you can see how that can be a problem for the "big guys"; If the game is great, some "pirates" will convert into customers. (Other statistics show that the kind of people that pirate anything that's released also buy a lot of games. They basically just want uncrippled "demos" to make informed decisions. $50+ price tags probably amplify this, as that's just too much for taking chances.) However, if the game sucks, widely available cracks warns would-be buyers, rendering devious strategies like refusing to provide demos, threatening review sites and whatnot, ineffective. -- //David Olofson - Consultant, Developer, Artist, Open Source Advocate .--- Games, examples, libraries, scripting, sound, music, graphics ---. | http://consulting.olofson.net http://olofsonarcade.com | '---------------------------------------------------------------------'

"One of the principal problem with capitalism is that the goal is the economy itself. So, in practice, the society doesn't have any goal and our work doesn't have any meaning, at the exception of archiving a goal that is not a goal but a tool." Actually, this is something I can relate to. I don't know if you can say it is about religion, but it is about looking at life from other than a purely financial point of view. If we do reach a point in conversation where the need to touch upon such issues will arrive, I think it might be worth doing it. -- Louigi Verona http://www.louigiverona.ru/

Hey fellas! Since we turned this topic into an IP debate, maybe we should rename the conversation? The original poster had to open another topic dedicated actually to Raul itself, not IP ))) -- Louigi Verona http://www.louigiverona.ru/

In Canada, at least, the above is not quite true. I don't know about elsewhere, but we are fortunate to still have protections for educational use, so I definitely can learn from other peoples code, regardless of license, and then re-implement it myself. Where the line is between copying and re-implementing based on education is for the courts to decide, but just thought i should point out that 'never having seen the source code' would only be an issue IFF the infringement was already judged to be copying. Iain

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 09:15:31AM +0300, Louigi Verona wrote: No it isn't. The reason for turning something into proprietary is money. Ciao, -- FA Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal, die Sonne scheint - ein Glitzerstrahl.

"That's not what I said, as I did not say anything about motivation, for one." I would be sincerely interested to know what you meant in greater detail then. "You cannot separate culture from money in any money-using society." In my view, you can. Money-using is just one aspect of our lives. I do not agree that anything I do in my life is connected to economics. I do know of views that say just that though. Also, I am not saying you should separate culture from economics, I am just saying you cannot limit cultural life to economical interaction within the society. "As long as people have to earn money for a living, combined with the tendency to require a huge amount of time at that, the question is then if people being able to invest a majority of their time, effort and skill in creative endeavors is desirable." True. Let us return to discuss this point a little bit later though, so that we do not get confused. The above points are enough for now, I think! -- Louigi Verona http://www.louigiverona.ru/

Hey Fons! I agree with the fact that your code took lots of time, effort and knowledge to write. I would however question the obligation of other people to pay you unless before making your work available to them you have made a contract with them, in which case this is just work for hire. If, I argue, you have made your work public, then nobody made a contract with you. Simply speaking, nobody asked you to do the work you did. But once it is available publicly, I do not see on what grounds you can demand payment. Notice the words "obligation" and "demands" there. I am not at all saying one should not be grateful and/or not be able to pay you willingly. So my message is that if the work is made public, then nobody should be obliged to pay for using that work. What copyright law does is create a default contract between anyone doing the work and the whole public. That contract is enforced on the public. They did not ask for it, nor do they have a chance to negotiate it. And in this light GPL and CC licenses are really *a license on top of a license* - basically, things which take the default public contract which is the copyright law and scratch out several lines out of it. This is why I cal GPL and CC a lesser evil. It is a good thing, because it is a battle for freedom, but it is evil because it "accepts" the framework of the enforced contract, which is the copyright law. It does not accept it willingly, so GPL and CC are doing good things in this world, but I do not believe that GPL and CC are an ideal towards which we should go. I believe that the better situation would be the absence of copyright law. -- Louigi Verona http://www.louigiverona.ru/

"It is available publicly *under some conditions* which are expressed by the GPL in this case." Correct. Which is only possible because we are bound by copyright law, a meta-contract, if you wish. "Go to whatever shop. Everything displayed there is 'available' and was made before any particular customer asked for it. That doesn't mean you are allowed to take it away for free, not even if you could do that very easily." Absolutely correct line of reasoning when it comes to physical scarce objects. Now, imagine that all of those things can be copied at no cost whatsoever and that they are available everywhere, even outside the shop. Would you agree that in such a case the situation is different and deserves a different line of reasoning? -- Louigi Verona http://www.louigiverona.ru/

"This is true even of many physical goods." No, this is not true with physical goods. I know of no physical good that has same properties as ideas. A comparison to a car is not appropriate. A car is a scarce resource. "Even if the cost of making a copy is trivial, someone still needs to make the original first and that may not be trivial." Now this is a valid argument. It is the same as the one I said people always make - that without some sort of law, giving you monopoly over your product, you will not be able to create it. Call it motivation, enabler or whatever. I think that your example invalidates such a claim though. You did do complex, very complex code (as you yourself pointed out) without a monopoly on your work, which you eliminated by using a GPL license. If your argument is not about motivation at all, but about morality, that it is immoral to use someone else's labour without paying them, then this is a separate question altogether and it has little connection to copyright, actually. It can be discussed in general terms. --- Just to give you fellas a framework within which I work out copyright questions, do watch this video by Stephan Kinsella. The talk lasts for about 25 minutes, the rest is Q&A. If you listen carefully through all of it, you will see where I am standing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZgLJkj6m0A -- Louigi Verona http://www.louigiverona.ru/