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If use of GPL code causes more risk to the business than the costs/risks of developing in-house, then the corporation should choose such path. Nobody is forcing

by alok-g 12y ago

If use of GPL code causes more risk to the business than the costs/risks of developing in-house, then the corporation should choose such path. Nobody is forcing them one way or the other. If they use GPL, they have used a benefit that open-source community has provided them which they do in exchange for backward contributions that are intended to help other people/corporations using the same GPL code-base as well. I like to believe that corporations would generally agree to the above, though some employees may accidentally violate open source licenses or other forms of IP without realizing (and thereby potentially putting the company's business or own IP at risk). Making employees aware of the licensing issues would help. Interestingly though also, people go through such corporate IP training treating it as bureaucracy. Elsewhere too, I see people copying things from the Internet (e.g., images, music) without adhering to copyright laws. People click on "I agree" without reading, sign employment agreements without having slightest idea of what they says, and so on. I have myself tried to educate people about these several times on Hacker News. Not to defend VMWare here by any means, fixing/mitigating the bigger problem would require increasing general awareness of IP issues at forums like HN and elsewhere, such that the corporations can sanely honor the IP licensing without high costs of employee training and maintaining a sizeable legal department. It also seems to me that lawyers at big corporations can also help by making the legal processes easier. They are often so risk averse (to save their own back, not necessarily for the benefit of or on behalf of the organization) that they won't approve even reasonable IP requests sent their way.

EvanAnderson 12y ago
I'd argue that business entities that realize revenue from restrictively licensing intellectual "property" (like VMware does) should bear the burden of the "high costs of employee training and maintaining a sizeable legal department." I would argue that if they don't want those expenses then, perhaps, they should seek revenue from another business model, and just release their software under Libre license terms.
- alok-g 12y ago
  While I agree, there is no harm in helping corporations reduce their burden under the assumption that the issue is happening without their consent. If a corporation is doing this on purpose or refusing to cooperate like sounds to be the case for VMWare here, I have little sympathies for them.
joshyeager 12y ago
The problem is that no one really knows what constitutes "safe" use of GPL code. Even in a highly-technical OSS-friendly community like HN, there are many different interpretations of what the GPL's restrictions actually mean. You can see this in action in these VMware threads, where there are strong arguments on both sides about whether VMware is violating the GPL. That uncertainty plus the viral nature of the GPL means that there's no way to know for sure that you won't be forced to open your whole codebase at some point in the future. That's more risk than a proprietary software company is willing to take. The only way to resolve this problem is to get legal decisions like this one. One way or the other, this decision will clarify the picture slightly. If we add enough other decisions, maybe someday we'll have clarity. Until then, my company is solidly in the "Absolutely no GPL" camp.
- kuschku 12y ago
  LGPL might be the best solution then (I personally would say LGPL should be used for everything, but that’s a personal opionion), because LGPL only goes viral through actual forking, but does not consider linking.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    I'd actually recommend MPL instead, because it enforces copyleft on the source file level rather than the library level. This makes it unambiguously applicable to just about anything other than Smalltalk, whereas the LGPL's terminology is slanted towards C/++ semantics.
  - halostatue 12y ago
    This is not quite correct. The “link wall” matters mostly in compiled languages, but consider a proprietary program Quux that links to the GNU LGPLed libhoge. When the owner of Quux distributes it, they must also (on request) provide recipients the source to libhoge and the ability for Quux to be relinked against a modified version of libhoge. They either have to be using libhoge.so or provide the object files and tools to link against a modified libhoge.a. Simply providing the source of libhoge is not sufficient, and most people do not understand that about the GNU LGPL.
shiggerino 12y ago
A good start would be to stop talking about "IP". Clumping together widely separate areas of law like copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secrets and casting it as something related to physical property is great if you want to deceive people, but very bad if your intent is to educate and help people understand the aforementioned areas of law.
- oldmanjay 12y ago
  I get that Stallman preached and so it must be, but I've never understood why I should care. It's just a hamfisted attempted for the pro-GPL crowd to define terms the way they want, so that the debate can be framed in a friendly manner.
  - wnoise 12y ago
    Reasons are listed in the comment you replied to: they're different areas of law, with different mechanics. Details matter. Yes, it also helps the pro-GPL crowd. That's not an argument against it (nor for it). An argument against would be to argue how some similarity among them makes it relevant to consider them all together.
  - shiggerino 12y ago
    But you are failing miserably to frame the debate in any way whatsoever. If you genuinely want to help your developers understand copyright law as this subthread suggests we do, why needlessly confuse things? Why not frame it as what it is, a debate about copyright law? A lot of developers I work with have a really hard time seeing where one area of law begins and where another one ends, and this isn't helping. This is not just bad for the idealist in me, this is also bad for the entrepreneur in me, who has a harder time running a efficient and profitable organization as a result. And there's no need to make it an us-vs-them issue. Nobody is defining terms to fit their agenda, criticism of IP is simply pointing to differences that are already codified in law. So if you don't like it, take it up with your legislators. You don't have to be either for or against copyleft to want say the big scary copy-r-word to your developers. Even the most ardent copyleft haters and copyright abolitionism idealists are shooting themselves in the foot when they make snide remarks toward lawyers about their "legalese", before they know it reality will catch up with them and they'll be hit with overly broad patent suits or some jerk will infringe on their trademarks.
belorn 12y ago
I wonder what will happen now that several game engines are given out for "free". Will employees start to accidentally violate those license agreement, forgetting to send the 5% revenue which the license require, and a few years in the future we get a major lawsuit where unreal has to sue a future minecraft or candy crush? In one way, this seem to be suggested. How can we expect employee of software development companies to understand software licensing, copyright, or that downloading stuff from the internet doesn't automatically make it free-for-fall. On the other hand, the software industry seems to be very aware of piracy, that downloading stuff from the pirate bay is copyright infringement, and that its not free just because its on the internet. I am thus torn to the suggestion that this is a education problem.

by alok-g 12y ago

EvanAnderson 12y ago

I'd argue that business entities that realize revenue from restrictively licensing intellectual "property" (like VMware does) should bear the burden of the "high costs of employee training and maintaining a sizeable legal department." I would argue that if they don't want those expenses then, perhaps, they should seek revenue from another business model, and just release their software under Libre license terms.

alok-g 12y ago
While I agree, there is no harm in helping corporations reduce their burden under the assumption that the issue is happening without their consent. If a corporation is doing this on purpose or refusing to cooperate like sounds to be the case for VMWare here, I have little sympathies for them.

joshyeager 12y ago

The problem is that no one really knows what constitutes "safe" use of GPL code. Even in a highly-technical OSS-friendly community like HN, there are many different interpretations of what the GPL's restrictions actually mean. You can see this in action in these VMware threads, where there are strong arguments on both sides about whether VMware is violating the GPL. That uncertainty plus the viral nature of the GPL means that there's no way to know for sure that you won't be forced to open your whole codebase at some point in the future. That's more risk than a proprietary software company is willing to take. The only way to resolve this problem is to get legal decisions like this one. One way or the other, this decision will clarify the picture slightly. If we add enough other decisions, maybe someday we'll have clarity. Until then, my company is solidly in the "Absolutely no GPL" camp.

kuschku 12y ago
LGPL might be the best solution then (I personally would say LGPL should be used for everything, but that’s a personal opionion), because LGPL only goes viral through actual forking, but does not consider linking.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  I'd actually recommend MPL instead, because it enforces copyleft on the source file level rather than the library level. This makes it unambiguously applicable to just about anything other than Smalltalk, whereas the LGPL's terminology is slanted towards C/++ semantics.
- halostatue 12y ago
  This is not quite correct. The “link wall” matters mostly in compiled languages, but consider a proprietary program Quux that links to the GNU LGPLed libhoge. When the owner of Quux distributes it, they must also (on request) provide recipients the source to libhoge and the ability for Quux to be relinked against a modified version of libhoge. They either have to be using libhoge.so or provide the object files and tools to link against a modified libhoge.a. Simply providing the source of libhoge is not sufficient, and most people do not understand that about the GNU LGPL.

shiggerino 12y ago

A good start would be to stop talking about "IP". Clumping together widely separate areas of law like copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secrets and casting it as something related to physical property is great if you want to deceive people, but very bad if your intent is to educate and help people understand the aforementioned areas of law.

oldmanjay 12y ago
I get that Stallman preached and so it must be, but I've never understood why I should care. It's just a hamfisted attempted for the pro-GPL crowd to define terms the way they want, so that the debate can be framed in a friendly manner.
- wnoise 12y ago
  Reasons are listed in the comment you replied to: they're different areas of law, with different mechanics. Details matter. Yes, it also helps the pro-GPL crowd. That's not an argument against it (nor for it). An argument against would be to argue how some similarity among them makes it relevant to consider them all together.
- shiggerino 12y ago
  But you are failing miserably to frame the debate in any way whatsoever. If you genuinely want to help your developers understand copyright law as this subthread suggests we do, why needlessly confuse things? Why not frame it as what it is, a debate about copyright law? A lot of developers I work with have a really hard time seeing where one area of law begins and where another one ends, and this isn't helping. This is not just bad for the idealist in me, this is also bad for the entrepreneur in me, who has a harder time running a efficient and profitable organization as a result. And there's no need to make it an us-vs-them issue. Nobody is defining terms to fit their agenda, criticism of IP is simply pointing to differences that are already codified in law. So if you don't like it, take it up with your legislators. You don't have to be either for or against copyleft to want say the big scary copy-r-word to your developers. Even the most ardent copyleft haters and copyright abolitionism idealists are shooting themselves in the foot when they make snide remarks toward lawyers about their "legalese", before they know it reality will catch up with them and they'll be hit with overly broad patent suits or some jerk will infringe on their trademarks.

belorn 12y ago

I wonder what will happen now that several game engines are given out for "free". Will employees start to accidentally violate those license agreement, forgetting to send the 5% revenue which the license require, and a few years in the future we get a major lawsuit where unreal has to sue a future minecraft or candy crush? In one way, this seem to be suggested. How can we expect employee of software development companies to understand software licensing, copyright, or that downloading stuff from the internet doesn't automatically make it free-for-fall. On the other hand, the software industry seems to be very aware of piracy, that downloading stuff from the pirate bay is copyright infringement, and that its not free just because its on the internet. I am thus torn to the suggestion that this is a education problem.