Hacker News Reader

Comment by oddevan | Hacker News Reader

> The only freedom the GPL does not provide is the freedom to take these freedoms away from future users.

And that's the crux there. It's not always malicious (I want to make a proprietary extension and sell it), sometimes it's a fact of the environment (I have to link this against a proprietary library in order to deploy to this hardware). Some will say "find a new environment that isn't developer-hostile", and others will say "find code that doesn't impose those restrictions." It's not black-and-white.

I have the greatest respect for RMS and the FSF. I compromise on my freedom as a developer all the time; I know that. But thanks to the ideals that RMS puts forth, I know that I'm compromising. I know what the risks are to using BSD instead of GPL, and so I weigh those risks.

View on HN

> not always malicious (I want to make a proprietary extension and sell it

You say its not malicious, but then I see the misery and harm proprietary copyright licenses do. People use it to sue 7-year old girls, send people to jail for years, and put others into debt for millions, all for the simple act of someone helping an other fellow human.

We could make a copyright license which only condition is that you can not sue someone, or that you can only sue companies and not people, or some other from of harm reduction. I doubt companies would prefer it, as without the threat and punishment from copyright lawsuits many argue that you can not earn money on making software. They argue that you must have the malicious aspects, or its not free enough to be useful.

You say its not malicious, but then I see the misery and harm proprietary copyright licenses do.

Abuse of a tool is not an argument against the non-abusive uses of a tool. I was going to say more here, but this really distills everything down.

People are going to find a way to be bastards to each other, and the FSF pipe dream of everything being Free does not change that.

This does not, however, oblige us to hand these people sticks, particularly the ones they have already shown great fondness for abusing.

Repeated and egregious abuse of a tool - the thing being discussed in the comment you are replying to - is in fact an argument against the tool.

A proprietary copyright license is a explicit statement of intent, in which you state that you are going to sue those who share the program. It is a government supported threat of violence directed to the public, and each new law that is passed seems to want to increase the number of years in prison.

Can you give an example how such threat can be non-abusive?

>A proprietary copyright license is a explicit statement of intent

Considering that copyright applies to your work automatically unless you take positive action otherwise, it is no such thing. Someone's work belongs to them, under whatever terms they wish, until they wish to modify those terms.

The term "proprietary license" is that kind of written license which company adds to their products which explicit state what users can and can not do, often with a explicit threat to underline it.

Works that do not have a license is normally refereed as orphan works. While you could call it proprietary, it is by definition not proprietary licensed.

> Works that do not have a license is normally refereed as orphan works.

No, that's just a copyrighted work with no published license (e.g., most dead tree books), for which you must contact the copyright holder if you want any kind of license.

An orphan work is a copyrighted work for which the rightsholders are unknown are uncontactable, and which it is therefore impossible to even attempt to negotiate a license.

It is kind of hard to contact the copyright holder if there is no copyright license with a notice in it which says who the author is.

Technically possible, unlikely in practice, and I doubt anyone could find a proprietary product being sold in a store that does not have a license. For all practical purposes, where would you find proprietary work used in a proprietary setting but without a proprietary license?

You're changing the subject a bit. First you were talking about "works that do not have a license" and now you're talking about specifically proprietary works.

As an example, there are any number of projects on github without any explicit license. That does not make them orphaned, nor make them freely available for use. We've come across a couple that we wanted to use and our first step was to work with the authors to get them licensed under some clear terms.

Just because it's "hard to contact the copyright holder" doesn't make it legal (or in my opinion, moral) to take their work and use it however you judge best.

Who said anything about "freely available for use"? The whole discussion here has been about proprietary licensed works. Karunamon said that proprietary licenses did not exist, because works are automatically copyrighted and I disagreed.

A project on github without a license is not proprietary licensed, but they are copyrighted. If such work ends up in the hand of someone which is not the author, then one would have to ask under what permission (license) that happened.

> A project on github without a license is not proprietary licensed, but they are copyrighted.

The content of a project on Github that is publicly viewable arguably also is minimally licensed as required by the Github terms of service, to wit, the Github project owner "agrees to allow others to view and fork" the project repository (see Github Terms of Service [0], F.3).

[0] https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/

>Karunamon said that proprietary licenses did not exist, because works are automatically copyrighted and I disagreed.

Karunamon said no such thing (at least that I could find). I believe you're disagreeing with something they never said.

I think you are confusing a copyright notice, with a copyright license.

For an example of a copyright protected work that is usually distributed with a copyright notice but no license, consider most hardcopy books.

Hardcopy books would fall under the implied license doctrine.

It's clear from the conduct of the parties to the transaction that a limited license for reading is intended, and the parties just never bothered to make an explicit license to memorialize that agreement.

> Hardcopy books would fall under the implied license doctrine.

One might be able to craft a colorable argument that an implied license to some right that is exclusive under copyright is created in the usual sale of a hardcopy book -- but you certainly haven't yet done so.

> It's clear from the conduct of the parties to the transaction that a limited license for reading is intended,

"Reading" isn't -- in the US, at any rate -- an exclusive right under copyright [0], so no license is necessary.

[0] See 17 USC Sec. 106: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106

> A proprietary copyright license is a explicit statement of intent, in which you state that you are going to sue those who share the program.

No, its not.

A proprietary copyright license is a explicit statement of intent, sure, just as a free software license is -- but any license, proprietary or free, is an explicit statement of intent not to prevent certain uses. It may also be an implicit statement of intent to take action, including lawsuits, against those who make use not permitted by the license to the extent that is within the licensors right -- and, again, this is just as true of free software licenses as proprietary licenses.

"We could make a copyright license which only condition is that you can not sue someone, or that you can only sue companies and not people, or some other from of harm reduction."

Every company in the world will get around this.

"We could make a copyright license which only condition is that you can not sue someone"

So what would you do in the case of a copyright violation? If you can't sue to enforce the license, what's to stop anyone from violating it? And that includes the GPL and its provision on opening the source of things using it.

" They argue that you must have the malicious aspects, or its not free enough to be useful."

There needs to be some way of enforcing the contract. And that's how contracts are usually enforced: In the court system.

The author is never bound by the license, and it would basically become a eye-for-a-eye license. If you sue, you get sued.

It would of course not provide the benefits of GPL which has requirements on distributors to provide source code. It would be a completely different license, and if I made it, likely based on MIT just so it would be the least company friendly permissive license ever. I only bring it up as an example of a license requirement whose intent would align with many who uses GPL in order to prevent copyright abuse.

Contrubutions would be quite messy however.

Even RMS has been saying that not all proprietary software is malware and it used to be less common for it to be so. Being unethical doesn't make it otherwise malicious, but the power it gives is today often abused and thus is indeed malicious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com