Per my understanding (but ianal, though I’ve invested quite a bit of time weighing licenses and their intercopatibility for my projects and how they relate to copyright) what that guy did was blatantly illegal in most of the world and the license doesn’t even factor in. Releasing someone’s code (to which they retain copyright unless they explicitly sign it away, assuming your jurisdiction even allows such).
If you then request he remove that code he legally has to comply. It’s still your code, you own it and all the rights to it (this is also one of the reasons many large projects require you to sign away copyright, to avoid someone throwing a tantrum and demanding all their code be removed), that and the ability to make it proprietary/cross-license without needing your consent.
Assuming your code wasn’t GPL’d (and unless you explicitly said so, it’s not), releasing it as part of a GPL application is even a GPL violation, so ironically enough the FSF would likely side with you on this one.
There’s quite a few things to be said about the GPL, but this one, yeah, not a GPL issue.
Sadly, when I was horomone addled pre-18 the picture would be me punching a monitor… That’s how my foolish youth destroyed a good CGA monitor plugged into a 286.
It will be interesting to see where the Cult of Stallman goes from here as without him they may grow a bit. Optimism and human nature are a volatile mix. Time will tell.
Agreed, but I would like to highlight one of the more successfull (although their own blogs/website is open about how they’ve lived on a tightwire for decades) ventures on this topic… Proton/Wine/CrossOver & CodeWeavers. Interestingly, the Mac community helped keep them going via CrossOver commercialism until now the Linux community had them growing due to Proton… and we have yet to see where the Vavle involvement will go. I know Valve funds it. I know a recruiter for Codeweavers called me once about a Proton experience job so they hire their own resources. Unclear of code ownership in relation to the Evil Corporation FOSS control thread of thinking. Either way, it relates less to my tangent as they all have revenue to protect their intellectual properties.
Also know as the 'Here, take it. All yours. Now leave me alone" license. Isn’t that what OpenSource should be? This thread does miss that one great success of BSD/Berekeley: MacOS is now based off it. Good? Bad? subjective I guess, but either way a functional way to let the guys on it make money doing it. Not sure if Apple has encroached, either.
Someone PMed me on this one and I went on a tanget on this topic a bit, but what I basically fear is the fact that the non-revenue generating projects are just screwed in this regard as without funding you cannot fend off the vultures. There is that Gnome imaging project that has the Gnome foundation behind it and a … GoFundMe/equivilent drive to fund the legal battle. First incursion into FOSS by the Patent Trolls. Won’t be the last. They will smell blood in the water and next time target the ‘perfect’ balance of low resource-to-high potential technical value projects. Sad and pathetic, but 'tis the jungle.
I made an analogy to us alll when kids wanting to open a Computer Store. They wanted to build and sell the new hotness; one friend went out of business fast. I bored everyone with business facts like hi/mid/low tier product offerings, margins/business plans, and service enticements. This is similiar to what’s going on in opensource now: Lots of good people who know their technical details with great ideas and motivations who can get eaten by the business sharks and technovultures if they don’t get out of their box but there really isn’t a roadmap out of the box right now for them.
We can compare licenses potentials, we can advise on busines/legel protections on project design, but the last element is not of the brain but of the wallet: getting to court. No one over a forum or a life coach is going to help with this one. A real tangible entity is needed. (FSF? Ha!)
I digress. I had something witty to end on. ADHD gets worse with age.
In my case, neither of us having resources it most likely would have ended with him saying “Make me”, then I would spend money, making him spend money. If he didn’t, what would the ill-prepared 2004 courts do to enforce? I can’t even imagine the follow up civil suit for $$ against a college kid.
I could ramble on, but the bottom line is: abstract thought is great, pulling up them bootstraps takes time, effort, and money.
I learned what I needed. Intellectual Property Protections is a now a really imprtant thing. 15 years later. As with everything in my life, too far ahead of my time. LOL
The example given by @sigxfsz is why some developers sign over their code to the GNU project. It’s copyleft so they know no one can take it, make a proprietary fork for commercial use and never contribute back. Secondly the FSF/GNU along with the SFC have the resources to fight in court if needs be. As great as FLOSS is, if you don’t have deep pockets it could be difficult to take action against abuse even if you know the law is on your side.
This example could also act as a warning to other developers - even if their code is for private or internal use it should have a license header in each source-file and the project as a whole. If this in then held in a GIT repo the chain of ownership becomes easier to prove and will deter would be rip-off merchants - regardless of copyleft or not.
Personally I don’t see GPL as better or worse than BSD / MIT style licenses. They’re tools to be used as appropriate and a developer just jumping onto which kind of license is more commonly used at the time without research could lead to regret and a problematic change of license later. Whilst I can see the GPL v3 as problematic other copyleft licenses are available (or just use GPL v2) For example a developer who releases using a non-copyleft license and then bitches when AWS forks it and doesn’t contribute anything back to the project probably should have used a copyleft license from the start. It’s just a case of selecting the right tool for the job
Back on topic good thread I like FreeBSD and it’s great to see companies doing good things with it and driving it forwards, there are often rumors of its demise and that its so far behind Linux, but IMHO its fantastic to have more choice and solid examples of how strong an OS it is (even if where I work I just get blank stares if I mention it).
Much better tools these days to protect oneself at that level, definitely. We still were trading tarballs of source in the mid-90’s when I started the work and only in the early 2000’s did the author get a CVS instance he’d even open up; but still didn’t allow merges into the code by us authorized parties.
It’s complicated by the fact the orginal authoer GPL’ed the code (8 years after my branch; signifcant differences), which the violator branched and merged my code into without my permission. I still had the copyright statements in my code, and he literally hand ported it (well… had another guy hand port it claiming to him I gave permission when he asked… he couldn’t code C)… only what he wanted and removed such copyrights.
I assume his rationalization was that the original authors code was GPL’ed 8 years after my branch so it didn’t matter; even if the code he stole clearly stated copyrights and license details contrary to his actions. The plain fact he had to take advantouge of an erroneous group permission on the backup archive after acquiring a password illegitimiately from my service provider via social engineering to access a separate backup server just to get to the code is enough to ascertain he knew what he was doing regardless of such a rationalization.
I like the idea of OS specialization in open source. FreeNAS wouldn’t be what it is without it, and the performance is phenomenal when you get it working. Enterprise drives performance and users drive accessibility. Dont think FreeBSD needs to replace Linux, just handle networking and ZFS implementations effectively across a lot of hardware and under virtualization.
I like FreeBSD and it’s great to see companies doing good things with it and driving it forwards, there are often rumors of its demise and that its so far behind Linux, but IMHO its fantastic to have more choice and solid examples of how strong an OS it is (even if where I work I just get blank stares if I mention it).