Switching to the OSL License, in a dual way.

After recently reading Mr. Stallman's online *BLURB*
at www.stallman.org, specifically the diary entry on June 28th 2003, I am disturbed, I would like to work on helping you people move to a OSL licence, work out copyright owners and add the OSL option to each individual file one by one.

I am willing to pay to track down unfindable people.

This license does not lose you any additional freedoms,
in fact it is more legally secure so it gains you legal security, as well as the traditional GNU freedoms which RMS is jeopordising with a disgusting set of *IDEALS*.

In cases where members have died I will pay to track down their copyright "bequethers".

I will build up a copyright list for each file using BK and the CHANGELIST/SET files, as well as listed file copyright holders in that file.

---
Cheers, Dean McEwan.
One of 4 members of the board of DM. TECH.

Need a new email address that people can remember Check out the new EudoraMail at
http://www.eudoramail.com

Hmmm, if I read that page, I see nothing dated `June 28th' that's related to linux, or indeed to software at all.

-Miles

Is it true that nothing can be known?  If so how do we know this?  -Woody Allen

Yeah the bit about "Nasal Sex with Dead Plants" just makes one wonder, is a rose just a rose? (note to self, don't read RMS's diary again)

Has anyone ever asked why it is okay for RMS to suggest it is okay to invalidate another person/company license (BitKeeper is the example) yet become offended when their own license is to desired to be invalidated?

Why is it that nothing but gpl can exist with gpl?

Why is that a superior option to license under which follows the original spirit of GPL but goes further to promote the ideas of open source is frowned upon?

Maybe it has something to do with self pollenation.

Cheers,

Andre Hedrick
LAD Storage Consulting Group

Hmm... are you trolling?

I case you are not, AFAIK RMS accepts any free software
license but prefers, in that order, the GNU GPL, the GNU LGPL, any GNU GPL-compatible copyleft, any GNU GPL compatile license, any copyleft, any free software. I don't quite understand what do you mean by invalidate, but BitKeeper is not even free software, and no one is arguing it is.

BTW, RMS never gave that list of preferred licenses' ordering,
I am just extrapolating from his writings. Anyone who knows better, please tell so.

Not true. Anything that doesn't *add* restrictions to those
of the GNU GPL can coexist.

Does it go further? Exactly how?

BTW, I for myself frown upon the license proliferation.
Hopefully the OSL will serve to reduce the number of different licenses by consolidating all the GNU-hating camp.

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http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=105855801706434&w=2

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List:     linux-kernel
Subject:  Bitkeeper
From:     Richard Stallman <rms () gnu ! org>
Date:     2003-07-18 19:51:36

[Download message RAW]

I think it would be appropriate at this point to write a free client that talks with Bitkeeper, and for Linux developers to start switching to that from Bitkeeper. At that point, McVoy will face a hard choice:
if he carries out these threats, he risks alienating the community that he hopes will market Bitkeeper for him.
-

For those who can not (will not) read, clearly the suggestion for somebody to take up the cause to develop a "Bitkeeper" clone. Know the details of the license it was issued to the community to use.

All know the response and the history of not threats but action by the FSF to defend their license and works.

I am tired of this game.

Later

Andre Hedrick
The Linux X-IDE guy, second.

You didn't need to copy all that, this is well known. But you
were talking a quite different story, about invalidating licenses and such. I fail to see the relation, as the original message from Stallman was about a proprietary lock-in game threat.

I can't quite see your point... what's the problem with a
clone? It certainly isn't immoral or illegal. An EULA tastes no better comming from McVoy than coming from Gates. Cloning of Unix, BTW, was performed by a young Finnish student some years ago, and now there's a nasty US company going after people who helped him... certainly this is proof cloning is bad?

So what's the problem exactly?

Which game?

BTW, can you answer what's so fantastic about the OSL apart
from allying with ESR instead of RMS? Are you trying to take sides in an ego clash, or do you have arguments supporting one or another in a rational conversation?

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A clone is illegal because you'd have to reverse engineer to do the clone and reverse engineering is allowed for the purpose of interoperability, not for the purpose of making a clone. I suspect that the reverse engineering exceptions were put in place to make sure that vendors couldn't lockin their customers with no recourse for the customers. In other words, your data is your data no matter where you store it. Perfectly reasonable sentiment.

BK already provides more than enough in the way of interoperability, both on the way in and on the way out. It's trivial to get your data out of BK as well as your metadata. It's a small perl script to get all the info out and plop it into some other system, we're much better about that than any free or commercial system.

In other words, reverse engineering is ok if the product doesn't provide access to your data, we do that already, poof, no reverse engineering allowed. So it's illegal to reverse engineer BK.

Given that, you can see why some people are disgusted that RMS would suggest it is OK to clone BK. At that point, it becomes a statement of "it's OK to do illegal stuff if you are making GPLed software".

Hardly the sort of thing you want on record in a public forum from a free software leader when people are starting to question whether or not the free software they have is actually legal.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

First, you are too US-centric.

Second, if this is only what is allowed, then we are living in
a kind of a surreptitious world police state. Not a free world by any means. In this circumstances, I will consider any clone attempt a honourable act of civil disobedience necessary for the long-term survival of humankind, barring the Second Coming.

Now, your interpretations of others' words are certainly
self-serving. If I define a clone as a workalike, one has to do no reverse engineering. It would suffice to do the same tasks, and use your own interoperability stuff to get data back and forth.

Not only self-serving, but libellous. With each word you
expose even more the evil.

Even if I can't agree him on political or moral subjects, in
this instance RMS acted exactly as I expected, and I praise him for it. I hope he's proud for it, but not proud enough as to damage his philosophy even more.

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And MS Word allows to export data in plain text or html. But it's
still allowed to reverse MS Word to make a .doc import/export plugin for OpenOffice or Abiword.

This is exactly the same. As long as there is a data format or a protocol involved, European laws allow users to reverse engineer it, to be able to create another program using the same format and protocols.

All data formats and protocol should be publically available. This is absolute required for a full inter-operability, and to give to users the freedom of choice. If they are not, then European laws guarantee us that we are free to try to find out by ourselves. And I'm glad this law exists.

Gael Le Mignot "Kilobug" - [email protected] - http://kilobug.free.fr
GSM         : 06.71.47.18.22 (in France)   ICQ UIN   : 7299959
Fingerprint : 1F2C 9804 7505 79DF 95E6 7323 B66B F67B 7103 C5DA

Member of HurdFr: http://hurdfr.org - The GNU Hurd: http://hurd.gnu.org

Which is a lossy export. Of course reverse engineering of Word is allowed, you didn't get all your data. You can get *all* of your data out of BK, by definition. BK can start with the data it exports and rebuild the revision history. So can you. So you are needlessly arguing.

Really? Show me that law please.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

IANAL, but check the "German Gesetz über Urheberrecht und verwandte Schutzrechte" (Urheberrechtsgesetz/UrhG for short), §§ 69c, 69d, 69e.
http://bundesrecht.juris.de/bundesrecht/urhg/index.html

It concerns itself with "interoperability" of independently developed programs with an existing one that you may use, (not with clones though, the law formulates this differently); decompilation is allowed, unless information needed to obtain interoperability is available, and there are other restrictions. License or contract clauses that attempt to run counter to §69d 2,3 (backup copies to ensure future use) or §69e (decompilation) are void.

Anyone interested should check out the exact words of the law though, and in particular he should not rely on my translation.

I've looked into this and I think if you dig into you'll find that this stuff is all claused in "if they don't provide the API's to interoperate".

It's a moot point anyway because by the time anyone has come anywhere near to reverse engineering what we do today we'll be years beyond that. In some ways, that's fine, either we keep moving or die. I can live with that. On the other hand, I'm not about to hand our IP out on a silver platter. Be legal or be in court...

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

On Thursday 24 July 2003 16:57, Larry McVoy wrote:
[snip

Nonesense. If the business no longer has the licence to use BK (for whatever reason) then it no longer has access to the data. Now to get access to the data you must reverse engineer BK...

Even though the data is still ASCII, the interrelationships between the parts of the data is still "data". And extracting/viewing that would require the reverse enginnering.

Oh, I see, you violate our license, your license is revoked, and now you have the write to reverse engineer BK? Show me the law which says that is true.

BK has a command that will take a BK tree and produce pure SCCS files, there is even a GNU SCCS clone so tell me again you need to go poking around in BK?

This whole thread is nuts. First of all, there is no need to do so other than to try and piss us off. Second of all, it's completely unrealistic to think you can reverse engineer it and keep up with our advancements.

And those relationships are available from the command line, using BK commands. In other words, you're just trying to yank my chain. Give it a rest or join the rest of the wankers in my procmailrc. Think about that, one day you may need something from me and I'll never see your request, it will be languishing in /dev/null with the rest of wankers.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

I was working on a project during my free time using BK, and then I get employed by a company contributing to Subversion. My license is then void, but I want to be able to still use the files and servers I used before. Reverse is allowed, and moral, in this case.

Without any lose of data and meta-data ?
And still, my license being void, how could I do that ?

(of course, I am not in this case - I'll never be crazy enough to use a non-free software to store my data).

Gael Le Mignot "Kilobug" - [email protected] - http://kilobug.free.fr
GSM         : 06.71.47.18.22 (in France)   ICQ UIN   : 7299959
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Ever heard of "Peoplesoft"? Some IT types converted a business database(s) to Peoplesoft. The license expired. The company was out of business until it was reinstated. The fee to reinstate the expired license was like extortion. Never again. You don't want to __ever__ convert your company databases to some proprietary format that must be unlocked with a license key that can expire. If you run a business, you need to have access to your database even if the company that produced the software goes out of business so you can't renew your license. If a software company won't provide such a license, then you set yourself up for a stockholders revolt and suit. You need to get a perpetual license. If the software company doesn't provide one, go to the competition.

There are software databases and development environments that need to be reviewed to make sure they don't expire. Rational Software is an example. We use Rational for some of our stuff. Can I extract my source-code from their proprietary VOBs if they go out of business? Actually, yes. So, even if we have expiring licenses, we can still get access to our intellectual property. These things are important, but alas... off-topic..

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.20 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.

This is a good point to remember, especially since you contradict it later on in your own mail.

Making a program to extract data from a bitkeeper repository is fine. It is covered by this interoperability clause.

What is arguably (not) fine is making a program that does everything bitkeeper does and does it in the same way, ie. creating a bitkeeper clone.

However, that has nothing to do with a program that can extract data from a bitkeeper repository but quite clearly isn't a bitkeeper clone...

Great minds drink alike.

I can't tell if we are in agreement or not. As far as I've been able to tell disallowing reverse engineering is not allowed in some countries if and only if the application does not provide documented ways to interoperate with the application. People have tried to claim otherwise but every time we've dug into we've found the laws to be pretty reasonable and balanced. They tend to have the view "if you are being a jerk and locking people into your application with no way to get at their data, then of course reverse engineering is allowed, how else are people to get at their data? On the other hand, if you are being nice and you provide documented ways for people to get at their data then reverse engineering is not allowed". Which seems to make sense, right? If corporations aren't trying to lock you into their products then they ought to be able to enjoy some fruits from their labors without people coping their work. On the other hand, if corporations are abusing their position then that protection goes away.

So far, nobody has come forward with a substantable claim that in their country you can reverse engineer anything you want for any reason you want with impunity.

Maybe there is one but I haven't seen it yet.

Furthermore, this is all a moot point. We're constantly evolving the product -- for technical reasons -- and any clone is just going to be stuck in a catchup game, much like clones of Word are stuck. If a bunch of people think they can do better than us, more power to them, as long as they do it legally. I know that if I were on the other side of the fence, I'd look at the problems BK was solving and try very hard to not look at how BK is solving them - in fact, this is exactly what we do with our competitors. We compete primarily with ClearCase and I have never run ClearCase, not even once. There is too much of a chance that they have a patent on something, or a patent coming, and we don't want to take the same path they did so we are more likely to avoid the patent problems.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

I find quite amusing your notion of reason and balance. Or
rather sad...

No. Reverse engineering is first a way of learning, then a
safeguard... if you need to learn (for there are no docs) and if you need a safeguard (for you can't trust the vendor), then you need the possibility of cloning. Both of these conditions are much more likely present in non-free software. If both of them are fulfilled, it is also very likely one will need to create a clone, but not necessarily so.

That you get so jumpy at the mere mention of reverse
engineering should have rang bells everywhere long time ago, not only at the FSF proverbial HQ.

I assume you meant copying.

No one is threatening to copy your source code. People only want to
create a clone, not a copy: something that interoperates with the same data structures, perhaps with the same user interfaces.

Perhaps you are claiming the definition of protocols and data
structures as protected by copyright. Perhaps, but it doesn't make cloning less moral. Laws and morals unfortunately are splitting farther and farther.

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It's not clear to me that you have the right to learn how something works if the producer of that something doesn't want you to learn it. You seem to think differently, the laws don't seem to agree with you.

Perhaps that is because people who share your opinions can't seem to understand that reverse engineering / copying is much easier than creating in the first place and the people who spent the money on the creation need to recoup that investment and make some profit so they can create again.

Maybe the warning bells should be ringing because your statements are all about your "right" copying other people's work (I think it is called plagerizing in some fields) rather than about creating new work. If you spent less time copying and more time creating then we would be following you rather then you attempting to (illegally) follow us. Food for thought, dinner is served, eat up.

---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

Hell Larry ,

Hmmmpphh , Try & stop me from reverse engineering your new invention , The lever !
I or Anyone may recreate something as long as I do not sell it OR re-/distibute to others . at least in the US I sure can .
JimL

       +------------------------------------------------------------------+
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       | Network        Engineer |     P.O. Box 854     |  Give me Linux  |
       | [email protected] | Coudersport PA 16915 |   only  on  AXP |
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I am not aware that reverse engeneering is forbidden in germany.

Hell, I can go to a restaurant, eat there and cook the same at home.

Greetings
Bernd

eckes privat - http://www.eckes.org/
Project Freefire - http://www.freefire.org/

Yes, that entry is disgusting. Furthermore, I think one can
has good philosophical reasons to totally reject these views. But I have to praise RMS for keeping them fairly separate of his FSF & GNU work, to the point of using a separate domain. Many other activists don't do the same, mixing free software with antiglobalisation and other divisive opinions.

I fail to see the connection between licensing and RMS'
personal political opinions. Or do you suggest a Thought Police should be nominated to investigate ESR opinions before accepting the OSL? I fear it won't be much better... perhaps they might not offend you but sure will offend other people.

This is a worthy goal.

What do you mean? As I understand it OPL has no specific
advantages over the GNU GPL apart from dissociation from the GNU Project. All I heard up to now were subjective stuff like "it's simpler", "I can understand it" or "more strict lawyerspeak", all of which seems contracditory to me. I am still awaiting a good comparision and a case for it. Google helped me nothing here.

On the other hand the real soft belly of the kernel as I
understand it is the lack of copyright assignments. Assuming you can track all copyright owners, which I doubt one possibly can now, getting the agreement from all of them would be roughly the same as having their assignments, without the same juridical safety effect. And you may open a Pandora box, as I haven't seen any thourough study on the possible effects of adding or substituting OSL for the GNU GPL.

Can you be more specific?

How can one have freedom without ideals? This looks like just
another road to serfdom to me... see where anglo-saxon pragmatism has lead us: WIPO, DMCA, eternal copyrights...

What's DM TECH?

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[email protected] (Leandro Guimar+es Faria Corsetti Dutra) wrote on 24.07.03 in <[email protected]>:

I don't think there are solid philosophical reasons to reject them. I do think, however, that it is impractical to implement all of them.

It's not that he's completely wrong (though there are certainly details there that aren't quite right), it's that many of the preconditions that would make these things not particularly nice, but tolerable, are next to impossible to ascertain - and thus, if these things are just plain allowed, it's hard to prove that a particular occurrence really did (or did not) follow the rules.

And as the ones *not* following the rules are stuff we particularly want to prevent ... well, in practice this meens some of the stuff that *does* follow those rules must necessarily also be banned.

Which means that absolute statements here are not really very helpful. (Then again, rms is rather famous for making unhelpful public statements.) It's much more interesting to look at current borderline stuff and ask if the line should be moved a bit, and in what direction.

But then, it seems traditional in the US that only absolute statements can be made about anything involving sexual ethics, and that "compromise" isn't part of anybody's vocabulary.

MfG Kai

<quote>
Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it. Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.

Linus Torvalds
</quote>

Which makes FSF, let alone personal views of RMS, deeply irrelevant as far as Linux kernel is concerned.

FWIW, I'm not particulary fond of GPL, but I will *not* accomodate the kooks with agenda. IOW, you are politely advised to take your crusade and shove it up the place where both your and RMS's heads are wedged in. I can't speak for anybody else, but I neither need nor welcome "help" from ideologists of any persuasion.