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Not relicensing at all, just simply adhering to a spec, as the GNU tools do. Can we get down from the soap box now on rewrites? People are free to reimplement a

Not relicensing at all, just simply adhering to a spec, as the GNU tools do. Can we get down from the soap box now on rewrites? People are free to reimplement anything if there’s a spec and no law against it. Derivative works only works when there is no public record of a specification prior to an IP introducing it. A copyright. IANAL but I’m pretty sure that’s how that works. If you can prove they copied code, sure, it’s derivative. If you can prove they started from a fork, maybe you have a case. Starting from scratch is about as this is new as it gets.

NamlchakKhandro 1y ago
Not sure this person is claiming code is being copied, but instead claiming there's a bad legal footgun happening. History has shown that the original tools used the correct license, these new ones are like optimistic clones leaving vault 13.
- ummonk 1y ago
  Do you have examples of undesirable situations arising that would not have been prevented by selecting the GPL instead of a permissive license?
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    FreeBSD and Sony's PlayStation, Nintendo's Switch and Apple's macOS/iOS. Compare this to Steam's SteamOS, Proton, etc, all of which are built on top of copyleft software, and everyone benefits from it. I'm not a Steam customer or SteamOS user, but Steam's changes to Wine help me out everyday. Similarly, Steam's use of Linux on their Steam Deck has lead to kernel changes that benefit all Linux users with AMD hardware. Meanwhile, you can't even use modern WiFi or Bluetooth on FreeBSD despite platforms built on top of it all having solved that problem a decade, or more, ago
    - reactordev 1y ago
      Don’t bash FreeBSD, it’s not their fault. It’s entirely the fault of the corporations that decided not to trunk their changes upstream for the betterment of the community. Their bespoke flavor of BSD dies with them.
      - ummonk 1y ago
        GP’s point is that the corporations would have been forced to open source their changes (thus allowing FreeBSD to incorporate them) if FreeBSD had been GPL-licensed. I disagree of course, as FreeBSD has benefited significantly from corporate adoption —- especially Apple’s porting of FreeBSD userland —- and that corporate adoption would never have occurred had FreeBSD not distinguished itself from Linux by being permissive licensed.
      - heavyset_go 1y ago
        I agree with both of your points. My point is that you can't rely on the goodwill of corporations when you're building the commons. They will happily wall off the commons you and others cultivated for themselves. They need to be incentivized into being good citizens instead of just mooching. Maybe if companies were incentivized to give back to FreeBSD, it could be a viable competitor to Linux when it comes to hardware and standards we've taken for granted for the last two decades. That's a world I'd rather live in.
o11c 1y ago
Counterpoint: usually there is no spec, and you have to look at the actual tool to figure out what's going on. For closed-source binaries there's a clear escalation between "run the tool and see what it seems to do" and "disassemble the code to really know" (which is supposed to ), but with open-source, the source code is just there to steal. We known open-source theft (in the non-ironic sense) is common. And we know at least one of the Rust repos had to have its history rewritten due to a license violation of some sort. It isn't a major jump to assume there's GPL-violation in the tool-rewrites too.
- aw1621107 1y ago
  > And we know at least one of the Rust repos had to have its history rewritten due to a license violation of some sort. Which repo(s), for those of us who may have been out of the loop?
  - o11c 1y ago
    Sorry, I don't remember any details, just the pain of trying to update forks (and I was only peripherally involved in the ecosystem then, and not at all now).
    - aw1621107 1y ago
      Ah, no worries. Does sound like a bit of a pain to deal with.
amiga386 1y ago
> People are free to reimplement anything if there’s a spec and no law against it. Yeah, but if they rewrite GPL tools to corpo-friendly licenses, I'm going to call them corporate bootlickers. Or useful idiots. Corporations are looking to capture the value of your voluntary labour and sell/rent access to your work for their exclusive profit. You offer software with no requirement to share changes and nobody shares changes, it's just corpos asking you code for them for free *surprised pikachu face*
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

NamlchakKhandro 1y ago

Not sure this person is claiming code is being copied, but instead claiming there's a bad legal footgun happening. History has shown that the original tools used the correct license, these new ones are like optimistic clones leaving vault 13.

ummonk 1y ago
Do you have examples of undesirable situations arising that would not have been prevented by selecting the GPL instead of a permissive license?
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  FreeBSD and Sony's PlayStation, Nintendo's Switch and Apple's macOS/iOS. Compare this to Steam's SteamOS, Proton, etc, all of which are built on top of copyleft software, and everyone benefits from it. I'm not a Steam customer or SteamOS user, but Steam's changes to Wine help me out everyday. Similarly, Steam's use of Linux on their Steam Deck has lead to kernel changes that benefit all Linux users with AMD hardware. Meanwhile, you can't even use modern WiFi or Bluetooth on FreeBSD despite platforms built on top of it all having solved that problem a decade, or more, ago
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Don’t bash FreeBSD, it’s not their fault. It’s entirely the fault of the corporations that decided not to trunk their changes upstream for the betterment of the community. Their bespoke flavor of BSD dies with them.
    - ummonk 1y ago
      GP’s point is that the corporations would have been forced to open source their changes (thus allowing FreeBSD to incorporate them) if FreeBSD had been GPL-licensed. I disagree of course, as FreeBSD has benefited significantly from corporate adoption —- especially Apple’s porting of FreeBSD userland —- and that corporate adoption would never have occurred had FreeBSD not distinguished itself from Linux by being permissive licensed.
    - heavyset_go 1y ago
      I agree with both of your points. My point is that you can't rely on the goodwill of corporations when you're building the commons. They will happily wall off the commons you and others cultivated for themselves. They need to be incentivized into being good citizens instead of just mooching. Maybe if companies were incentivized to give back to FreeBSD, it could be a viable competitor to Linux when it comes to hardware and standards we've taken for granted for the last two decades. That's a world I'd rather live in.

o11c 1y ago

Counterpoint: usually there is no spec, and you have to look at the actual tool to figure out what's going on. For closed-source binaries there's a clear escalation between "run the tool and see what it seems to do" and "disassemble the code to really know" (which is supposed to ), but with open-source, the source code is just there to steal. We known open-source theft (in the non-ironic sense) is common. And we know at least one of the Rust repos had to have its history rewritten due to a license violation of some sort. It isn't a major jump to assume there's GPL-violation in the tool-rewrites too.

aw1621107 1y ago
> And we know at least one of the Rust repos had to have its history rewritten due to a license violation of some sort. Which repo(s), for those of us who may have been out of the loop?
- o11c 1y ago
  Sorry, I don't remember any details, just the pain of trying to update forks (and I was only peripherally involved in the ecosystem then, and not at all now).
  - aw1621107 1y ago
    Ah, no worries. Does sound like a bit of a pain to deal with.

amiga386 1y ago

> People are free to reimplement anything if there’s a spec and no law against it. Yeah, but if they rewrite GPL tools to corpo-friendly licenses, I'm going to call them corporate bootlickers. Or useful idiots. Corporations are looking to capture the value of your voluntary labour and sell/rent access to your work for their exclusive profit. You offer software with no requirement to share changes and nobody shares changes, it's just corpos asking you code for them for free *surprised pikachu face*

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]