4 ms·

You can't assume gratis usage of anything. The free software movement, creative commons, and anything surrounding copyleft is predicated on the fact that every

You can't assume gratis usage of anything. The free software movement, creative commons, and anything surrounding copyleft is predicated on the fact that everything is copyrighted at its creation. Copyleft is a 'hack' of sorts of copyright, in that the author or owner of a piece of work gives everyone else explicit permission to use it. You can't have copyleft without copyright, and everything is copyright unless it's explicitly copyleft. This isn't 'bad form'. This is copyright infringement and possibly the best teaching moment you could ever have. The idea that the author of the above post would assume gratis usage of something shows how little even technical people understand how copyright and copyleft works. I could use this as a jumping off point to the actual failures of Stallman, where instead of educating people on these issues for the last thirty years, he's spending his time rhyming Uber with Goober, i.e. https://stallman.org/uber.html https://stallman.org/uber.html, but I digress. As the author of the Hackaday piece, I'm cool with the author of the OP using the graphic, only because it's hilarious. Shout out to our resident artist, joe kim: http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/ http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/ He does awesome work.

darpa_escapee 10y ago
Everything that is 'copyleft' is inherently copyright. The protections enshrined by copyright protect 'copyleft' works.
- BuuQu9hu 10y ago
  The GPL and copyleft are not magic pixie dust. Just as proprietary software is pirated very frequently, so too do companies and individuals ignore copyleft licenses. Like the BSA spends money to enforce proprietary licenses, so to do the FSF, SFC, gplviolations.org and others have to spend money to enforce copyleft. There are also lots of violations of permissive licenses, but generally the authors of permissively licensed software do not bother to enforce their licenses.
  - ommunist 10y ago
    Yes, this is because OSS authors do not have union, which could have lawyers, which could do the job.
    - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
      The SFC functions sort of like a union, but they don't have very much funding though: https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
jancsika 10y ago
> I could use this as a jumping off point to the actual failures of Stallman, where instead of educating people on these issues for the last thirty years, he's spending his time rhyming Uber with Goober, i.e. https://stallman.org/uber.html https://stallman.org/uber.html, but I digress. What's the significance of Stallman rhyming "Uber" with "Goober"? I mean, Doug Crockford has rhymed "Gonads" with "Monads". Would you seriously argue that he failed to educate people on functional programming in Javascript because of the tone-deafness of that pun? I make the comparison because both authors have a clear, unadorned style and show great attention to detail in their arguments. The only relevant difference I see is that one writes and talks primarily on technical matters, while the other writes and talks on social and political matters. If bad puns are out of scope for the one but in scope for the other then I smell bike-shedding.

darpa_escapee 10y ago

Everything that is 'copyleft' is inherently copyright. The protections enshrined by copyright protect 'copyleft' works.

BuuQu9hu 10y ago
The GPL and copyleft are not magic pixie dust. Just as proprietary software is pirated very frequently, so too do companies and individuals ignore copyleft licenses. Like the BSA spends money to enforce proprietary licenses, so to do the FSF, SFC, gplviolations.org and others have to spend money to enforce copyleft. There are also lots of violations of permissive licenses, but generally the authors of permissively licensed software do not bother to enforce their licenses.
- ommunist 10y ago
  Yes, this is because OSS authors do not have union, which could have lawyers, which could do the job.
  - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
    The SFC functions sort of like a union, but they don't have very much funding though: https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/

jancsika 10y ago

> I could use this as a jumping off point to the actual failures of Stallman, where instead of educating people on these issues for the last thirty years, he's spending his time rhyming Uber with Goober, i.e. https://stallman.org/uber.html https://stallman.org/uber.html, but I digress. What's the significance of Stallman rhyming "Uber" with "Goober"? I mean, Doug Crockford has rhymed "Gonads" with "Monads". Would you seriously argue that he failed to educate people on functional programming in Javascript because of the tone-deafness of that pun? I make the comparison because both authors have a clear, unadorned style and show great attention to detail in their arguments. The only relevant difference I see is that one writes and talks primarily on technical matters, while the other writes and talks on social and political matters. If bad puns are out of scope for the one but in scope for the other then I smell bike-shedding.