[NTLUG:Discuss] RMS's Speach

[WILLIAM PEARSON]

Hello,

I've often wondered how much free source code is actually used in liscenced
software. Especially since the only way to find out is to go through the
source code or to reverse engineer the software, which is not only very
difficult but becoming increasingly illegal (take the DMCA for instance, or
in certain liscence agreements). Good luck getting a copy of the source
code for any peice of M$ software if your not a corporation which would
have to pay anyways, just to see if they used a slightly modified version
of your cool new audio protocol in their latest version of Media Player. Or
perhaps not even M$ at all, perhaps the Real Player people. The situations
this has and can apply to are almost infinite. Unless they document your
name somewhere, it's practically impossible to find out if they stole the
code you created. After all, if it's illegal to reverse engineer the code
how can you find out. If you do reverse engineer the code anyways and call
them upon it because they didn't give you the code they'll sue you for
breaking the liscence agreement or under any new law that restricts trying
to figure out how something you bought works.

The Open Source movement may inadvertently be fueling certain parts of the
commercial software industry. All that has to be done is to cut & past and
viola, new program that you've got to pay for, with peices of free code in
it. Nvidia a while back 'accidentally' cut and pasted some code from a free
Linux video driver for one of their GeForce drivers. Nvidia confirmed that
and fixed it, so I read on Slashdot anyways. So it has and will continue to
happen.

Will Pearson




Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2001 12:53:00 -0600
From: Steve Baker <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>
Organization: Steve at Home
To: discuss at ntlug.org
Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] RMS's Speach
Reply-To: discuss at ntlug.org

kbrannen at gte.net wrote:

> > That contrast seems crucial to me; RMS is very clearly an academic
> > scientist, and gets quite enraged when people break the rules of
> > academic credit.  Academic credit isn't so important to you and I who
> > don't live in worlds where academic credit is the main currency we
> > carry around.
>
> I can agree with him though on copyright (left, middle, whatever. :-)  In
> today's world where infomation should generally be freely available,
> copyright's major purpose is to authenticate ownership, at least IMHO.
> However, as I understand copyleft, it has requirements in it that I don't
> agree with, but with the above insight, it is easier to understand why
they
> are there.

Well, somewhat.  His 'academic' obsession with attribution and authorship
is undoubtedly as described...but I'm not sure the other requirements of
the GPL come from that.

I think RMS's aims with the GNU license were less to do with his academic
heritage than a reasoned argument to ensure that the following scenario
cannot happen:

Hypothetically:

  You write a kickass chunk of software (suppose it's a new communications
  protocol or something).  You release it as free source code.  Microsoft
  pick it up - realise it's *GREAT* - change the protocol by altering the
  order of the fields in the packet header or something equally trivial -
  then release it as a part of Windoze 2001 - WITHOUT RELEASING THE CHANGES
  TO YOUR ORIGINAL CODE BACK INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN - they don't even
  document what they changed in an Open document.

Now, your protocol becomes wildly popular - with 100,000,000 computers
around the world running it - and with your name credited in the 'About'
box (so academic attribution is maintained).

HOWEVER, you don't have the source anymore - Microsoft locked it away.
Your version of the code is now useless - both to you and to everyone
else in the world because 99% of computers use the M$ varient of your
protocol.

What was previously OpenSourced code - is now locked up commercial code.

Can't happen?  Ask the Kerberos guys about that!
(For the full story - do a Google search for "Kerberos Microsoft")

The seemingly onerous conditions applied under GPL are really designed
to prevent that from happening - either directly or by devious backdoor
means.

This is a very real situation.  Look at the various embedded devices
now running versions of the Linux Kernel - it would be VERY tempting
to the manufacturers of those devices to lock up the sources to their
heavily hacked kernels - but they can't.  That's "A Good Thing" IMHO.

I'm concerned that the Xfree license (which doesn't have those same
conditions) will result in Xfree clones appearing for which we don't
have sources. There are early signs of where that might be a problem
in (for example) the Indrema Linux-based games console in this respect.

--
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