posted by
martyb
on Sunday September 03 2017, @11:51AM
from the can-you-have-copyleft-without-copyright? dept.
from the can-you-have-copyleft-without-copyright? dept.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) provides a rebuttal, the supposed decline of copyleft, to assertions from Black Duck regarding the uptake of reciprocal versus non-reciprocal licenses. In the rebuttal, the FSF works to stem a cascade of articles and blogs which have proliferated based on some initial disinformation. While there does seem to be an increase in the use of non-reciprocal licensing in general there are several possible explanations and the rebuttal goes into detail and backs each possibility with data. In short, both styles of licensing are increasing in popularity
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(Score: 2) by andersjm on Sunday September 03 2017, @01:08PM (6 children)
Where's the link to the thing that this supposedly rebuts?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @01:37PM
Apparently it started here [redmonk.com], and was parroted with commentary here [opensource.com]; those links both come from TFA.
Note that despite TFS's implication, the FSF rebuttal is this 45-minute talk [debconf.org] at debconf17, and TFA is just LWN reporting on it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @03:31PM (4 children)
> Where's the link to the thing that this supposedly rebuts?
It's not just one thing but it does spread mostly from just one company founded to create FUD about licensing and try to profit on that. A big component of the trouble has come from people that really should know better.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Sunday September 03 2017, @05:10PM
I would venture a guess that they *do* know better, and that is precisely *why* they're spreading FUD - to undermine confidence in the competition.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @08:26PM (1 child)
Black Duck is Microsofties[1] whose business model is to convince you that FOSS is insecure and that, if you're going to run it, you need their whiz-bang closed-source software.
...in contrast to the M$ infection of the month^W week^W day and the backdoors in M$ stuff that Redmond has handed over to the NSA.
(as an occult part of the settlement of the USA vs M$ court case??)
Roy Schestowitz and his crew at TechRights is constantly busting Black Duck for one scam or another.
...as well as the "journalists" who reprint Black Duck's M$-friendly/FOSS-hostile claims without vetting those.
[1] Almost said former Microsofties, but there's no such thing.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Monday September 04 2017, @03:21AM
and the backdoors in M$ stuff that Redmond has handed over to the NSA.
I remember Ballmer saying something to that effect around 16 years ago after the Bush junta had ascended to power not long after they started to turn their attention to the antitrust case against M$. There were only a one or two articles mentioning it as an aside, and quietly at that, but from what I recall he was reported to have said something to the effect that it would be his (or M$) patriotic duty to put backdoors in software if called upon to do so. About a week and a half or two weeks later, the antitrust case was basically dropped in the US.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @08:12AM
You should really not diss our eds like this! I have recently found out they cannot take a joke. Oh, and they are mostly Nazi sympathizers, and Windows users, and so of course are in favor of Copyright. I will rip one hundred DVD's in their honor. Can't say which ones, or on what torrent you can find them, but just be assured, as sure as SoylentNews is not a conduit to illegal and very bad filesharing, I am not shitting you.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday September 04 2017, @08:41AM (2 children)
Both the data supporting and rebutting the argument is flawed. Counting the number of packages doesn't really tell you anything, especially on Debian where, for example, LLVM and clang are combined in a single package but gcc is split into half a dozen (most of which are useless without the others). I'm responsible for a bunch of GPL'd packages on FreeBSD that haven't had any activity upstream for a decade, but I fixed them recently to work with newer versions of their dependencies so they're still there and would add to the GPL-is-active count here.
OpenHub is a pretty nice resource, but if I go to my profile page it lists a bunch of languages that I've never used as ones that I've contributed code in. I've traced a few of them to understand why with the help of someone who works there (they used to be pretty responsive on their issue tracker, but I realise that it's over a year since I visited the site) and found a lot of bugs in their language-detection algorithm, so I don't have much hope for their license detection.
Similarly, GitHub is likely to over-report because the model involves forking (but some features such as search are disabled if you use the fork button, so people often clone and push instead), so you end up counting things multiple times if you try to use them.
In my personal experience, I can say this: I've been paid to write permissively licensed replacements of copyleft libraries, but I've never been approached to do the converse. I've also seen a shift from some companies towards writing permissively licensed code rather than proprietary when they need a replacement for something GPL'd.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @11:00AM (1 child)
Citation needed. Here is the list of packages built from the gcc source package: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gcc-7 [debian.org] . Going through that list, I can see language-specific compilers (gcc, g++, gccgo, etc), language-specific runtimes (libstdc++, libgnat, etc), and multilib packages (lib32*, libx32*). Then there's a few binary packages that are not language-specific: libgcc (base support), libgomp, libmpx, libquadmath (high-precision math support), libitm, libatomic (threading primitives) and lib*san (runtime debugging). The way they're provided, every single language compiler can be installed without pulling in the runtimes for the other languages, and every language runtime can be installed without pulling in the entire compiler.
So which packages are useless, according to you? The Debian base install usually already includes libstdc++ and libgcc, Would you rather have Debian install 8 compilers and 3 library environments every time a package requires libgcc, for example?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday September 04 2017, @11:17AM
I'll give you gccgo, but gcc, g++, gobjc and gobjc++ are basically the same code. In contrast, there is a single clang package, which provides C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++ compilers. Oh, and the only Objective-C runtime that appears to be packaged is the (GPL3 + linking exemption) one from gcc that supports a 15-year-old dialect of the language and not the (MIT) GNUstep one that supports all of the modern language features.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by terryk30 on Monday September 04 2017, @10:19AM (1 child)
Whether or not the current discussion gets into the pros and cons, for background reading there was a good one about 3 years ago:
Playing Fast and Loose with OS Licenses [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Monday September 04 2017, @10:42AM
Yes. That one from three years ago also sources the same FUD factory refuted in the article (and debconf video): Black Duck. For that one, it even used data from M$ Ohloh.
Having been founded by and stocked by M$ staff, nothing that comes out of Black Duck is going to be even slightly favorable towards copyleft or, especially, the GPL. They've been so loud about it that back in 2012 at the green site Bruce Perens called out Black Duck on their bullshit [techrights.org]. Perens, in addition to having technical chops, has long been an expert on licensing and even went as far as to be a co-founder of the Open Source Inititative. He saw (sees?) OSS as a stepping stone to transition businesses over to Free Sofware.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.