4 ms·

Are curl and wget copyrighted? I thought they were free software under a copyleft-style license.

by ihuman 10y ago

Sylos 10y ago
He mixed up copyright and trademark, as far as I can tell. And trademarking is then no problem with copylefted software. For example, Linux is trademarked by Linus Torvalds and Firefox is trademarked by Mozilla. And at least in the case of Firefox, it's actually pretty important to have, as otherwise someone could bundle malware with Firefox and offer that for download as "Firefox", with nothing that Mozilla could do about it.
wyldfire 10y ago
Yes, their source code is protected by copyright. What does this mean? It means that the people have granted the author of that code a limited-term monopoly on making copies of that source code. In turn, as you said, the author has made it available under a restrictive license requiring redistribution of source. What did Microsoft do? Well, apparently they created aliases that mimicked some subset of the curl/wget behavior for PowerShell. This might allow simple *nix shell scripts to work with little or no porting to PowerShell. The names of the executables are not protected by copyright. Although -- who knows, if APIs can be considered protected by copyright maybe the names of the binaries themselves are a shell-style API. It seems like a case you'd be unlikely to win. :/
Kihashi 10y ago
That doesn't mean that they aren't copyrighted. It just means that you can freely use them under the terms of their copyright license. If the code for them were not copyrighted (usually referred to as Public Domain), then you could do whatever you wanted with them-- things like making derivative works and using a commercial license.
- Lennie 10y ago
  Let's be very clear here. This is not true: No copyright notice == Public Domain. Everything You make gets Your copyright by default. This means the default is: nobody can use what You make. You can put other copyright terms on your works by adding a copyright notice. You can put something in the Public Domain by adding a notice to your work. Things can also become Public Domain automatically after a certain amount of time. But that time has been extended several times in the US to something unreasonable: like 75 years after the death of the author. You can thank Disney/Mickey Mouse for that.
salicideblock 10y ago
They are copyrighted. They are free software. curl's is distributed under a MIT/X [1]. It is not copyleft. wget is distributed under the GPLv3 [2]. It is a copyleft license. Both licenses' legal basis is copyright law, and the copyrights held by the tool's authors. All of this probably does not apply to shell aliases anyway... [1] https://curl.haxx.se/docs/copyright.html https://curl.haxx.se/docs/copyright.html [2] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/wget.git/tree/README http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/wget.git/tree/README

Are curl and wget copyrighted? I thought they were free software under a copyleft-style license.

by ihuman 10y ago

Are curl and wget copyrighted? I thought they were free software under a copyleft-style license.

Sylos 10y ago

He mixed up copyright and trademark, as far as I can tell. And trademarking is then no problem with copylefted software. For example, Linux is trademarked by Linus Torvalds and Firefox is trademarked by Mozilla. And at least in the case of Firefox, it's actually pretty important to have, as otherwise someone could bundle malware with Firefox and offer that for download as "Firefox", with nothing that Mozilla could do about it.

wyldfire 10y ago

Yes, their source code is protected by copyright. What does this mean? It means that the people have granted the author of that code a limited-term monopoly on making copies of that source code. In turn, as you said, the author has made it available under a restrictive license requiring redistribution of source. What did Microsoft do? Well, apparently they created aliases that mimicked some subset of the curl/wget behavior for PowerShell. This might allow simple *nix shell scripts to work with little or no porting to PowerShell. The names of the executables are not protected by copyright. Although -- who knows, if APIs can be considered protected by copyright maybe the names of the binaries themselves are a shell-style API. It seems like a case you'd be unlikely to win. :/

Kihashi 10y ago

That doesn't mean that they aren't copyrighted. It just means that you can freely use them under the terms of their copyright license. If the code for them were not copyrighted (usually referred to as Public Domain), then you could do whatever you wanted with them-- things like making derivative works and using a commercial license.

Lennie 10y ago
Let's be very clear here. This is not true: No copyright notice == Public Domain. Everything You make gets Your copyright by default. This means the default is: nobody can use what You make. You can put other copyright terms on your works by adding a copyright notice. You can put something in the Public Domain by adding a notice to your work. Things can also become Public Domain automatically after a certain amount of time. But that time has been extended several times in the US to something unreasonable: like 75 years after the death of the author. You can thank Disney/Mickey Mouse for that.

salicideblock 10y ago

They are copyrighted. They are free software. curl's is distributed under a MIT/X [1]. It is not copyleft. wget is distributed under the GPLv3 [2]. It is a copyleft license. Both licenses' legal basis is copyright law, and the copyrights held by the tool's authors. All of this probably does not apply to shell aliases anyway... [1] https://curl.haxx.se/docs/copyright.html https://curl.haxx.se/docs/copyright.html [2] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/wget.git/tree/README http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/wget.git/tree/README