05 Aug, 2007, Guest wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
If you ever wanted to know why the GPL is despised among many, here you go. A perfect example of how it's NOT a "free as in freedom" license.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/...

The basic jist of it if you don't want to read through all that is this:

Joomla! <–> Bridge script <–> Simple Machines Forums

Joomla! is GPL, under some sort of uber-strict no-exceptions interpretation.
The bridge script calls on the published APIs for both Joomla! and SMF, and in this case is plain vanilla GPL.
SMF is a non-GPL compatible proprietary license.

Apparently when questioned about it, the FSF insists distributing the bridge script creates a derivative work out of the combine package of all 3 and is thus illegal under the interpretation by the dev team for Joomla!.

Personally I don't see how they can come to such a twisted conclusion, and it certainly doesn't come off as "free" software to me.
04 Sep, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Sorry for the late arrival. This reminded me of a somewhat amusing play on words I heard about the GPL's notion of freedom: the GPL is free as in freedom, except that freedom is mandatory.
05 Sep, 2007, Mister wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
Well, the GPL is all about complete freedom to use the product, but restricts its distribution. If you don't want to restrict the distribution either, you can always publish your works as public domain.
05 Sep, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
You just pointed out precisely the reason why the GPL is not completely free – and why the above play on words is so a propos. It's free, except when it's not. Not that that's intrinsically bad or anything, in fact it can be quite good, it's just irritating to hear people bandy about the word "free" when they're not completely free.

There are far more options than just GPL or public domain. I think the MIT and BSD licenses are a lot better for many cases than public domain, for instance, if all you care about is maintaining your copyright notice (i.e. proof of authorship).
05 Sep, 2007, Guest wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
I'm a much bigger fan of the BSD license myself. Short, simple, gets the job done. ( that's what she said too! )

The longer the license is to read, the more rights you can except to give up. Which is ironic since the GPL was supposed to have been designed to protect rights.
07 Sep, 2007, Mister wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
<analmode>
What? Those licenses forbid the removal of the credits? Outrageous! That's not "free"!
</analmode>
07 Sep, 2007, Guest wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
I don't think anyone here was talking about removing the credits. In fact, you can be pretty sure most of us here would be quite opposed to that, regardless of whether the license allowed for it or not.

But just because I'm in an anal mood now…..
Quote
Sandbox v0.5-1.0b http://sandbox.kiasyn.com
Copyright © 2006-2007 Sam O'Connor (Kiasyn)

Additions to Sandbox after 1.0:
Copyright © 2007
Roger Libiez [Samson] http://www.iguanadons.net

This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty.
In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the
use of this software.

Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose,
including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely,
subject to the following restrictions:

1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim
that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product,
an acknowledgment in the product documentation is required.

2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be
misrepresented as being the original software.

3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.

4. You must make an effort to notify the author (Sam O'Connor) at the email
address [snipped] if you plan on publicly distributing a derivative
of this software, whether by email, download or a form of disk/disc.


I believe this is what's known as modified BSD, yes? How can you get any simpler? Basically states you can't lie about how and where you obtained the software, can't lie about derivatives being the original work, can't remove the notice itself from any source distro, and have to make an effort to notify the author before distributing derivatives.

It's also got the advantage of being compatible with Diku style licenses because it places no stupid conditions on it about being restricted by other licensing terms. It's also not viral. Code using this license doesn't then require that your entire project be licensed the same way.

If we could get ahold of all of the contributors to QSFP we'd ask them to grant permission to relicense using this instead of the legalspeak crap in the GPL.
07 Sep, 2007, Tyche wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
I think the MIT and BSD licenses are a lot better for many cases than public domain, for instance, if all you care about is maintaining your copyright notice (i.e. proof of authorship).


I'm curious as to why you describe your shared string library license as a "slightly modified BSD license", not why you chose the particular conditions. The reason is that I would think most people skimming that would assume the library is OSD and/or GPL compatible when unfortunately it's neither.
07 Sep, 2007, Scandum wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
I think I stripped a few lines of credit out of tintin of people whose code I removed. I also removed the #wizhelp command which showed some awkward credit screen, and removed the name of a previous maintainer from the login screen whose main achievement was.. arguably.. putting his name there. Of course there's still a CREDITS file that lists all contributors.

As far as I know GPL allows credit stripping which can be quite nice when you want to tidy things up. Naturally Public Domain is the only way to go, if your ego allows it.
07 Sep, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
Tyche said:
DavidHaley said:
I think the MIT and BSD licenses are a lot better for many cases than public domain, for instance, if all you care about is maintaining your copyright notice (i.e. proof of authorship).


I'm curious as to why you describe your shared string library license as a "slightly modified BSD license", not why you chose the particular conditions. The reason is that I would think most people skimming that would assume the library is OSD and/or GPL compatible when unfortunately it's neither.

Well, it is a slightly modified BSD license. I take the BSD license verbatim and add a clause about commercial products needing my permission. I don't know why somebody would assume it's GPL-compatible when I don't use the term GPL anywhere; in fact, the mere fact that I mention "modified BSD" should indicate that it's not only not the GPL, but not quite the BSD license either. It's much closer to BSD than GPL, in any case.
07 Sep, 2007, Davion wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
Tyche said:
DavidHaley said:
I think the MIT and BSD licenses are a lot better for many cases than public domain, for instance, if all you care about is maintaining your copyright notice (i.e. proof of authorship).


I'm curious as to why you describe your shared string library license as a "slightly modified BSD license", not why you chose the particular conditions. The reason is that I would think most people skimming that would assume the library is OSD and/or GPL compatible when unfortunately it's neither.

Well, it is a slightly modified BSD license. I take the BSD license verbatim and add a clause about commercial products needing my permission. I don't know why somebody would assume it's GPL-compatible when I don't use the term GPL anywhere; in fact, the mere fact that I mention "modified BSD" should indicate that it's not only not the GPL, but not quite the BSD license either. It's much closer to BSD than GPL, in any case.


I'd think it's because the BSD license is compatible with GPL and/or OSD. Your modifications make it not so.
07 Sep, 2007, Guest wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
Since when did releasing open source code deprive people of the right to control commercial use ( or any other use ) of their product? Richard Stallman and the FSF are a bunch of communists if they think we should all throw it out there with no ability to control it.
07 Sep, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
Davion said:
I'd think it's because the BSD license is compatible with GPL and/or OSD. Your modifications make it not so.

Well, what else should I call it? For anybody not intending to make commercial use of it, it is exactly the BSD license. If somebody sees "slightly modified BSD" and assumes "stock BSD" they should get their reading checked. :smile: The modifications are very clearly marked, in any case, and it'd be pretty hard to miss them if you actually look at the license. Besides, I think that the vast majority of people who bother looking at licenses in the first place are those who care enough to do more than very casually skim.
08 Sep, 2007, Davion wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
Well, what else should I call it? For anybody not intending to make commercial use of it, it is exactly the BSD license. If somebody sees "slightly modified BSD" and assumes "stock BSD" they should get their reading checked. :smile: The modifications are very clearly marked, in any case, and it'd be pretty hard to miss them if you actually look at the license. Besides, I think that the vast majority of people who bother looking at licenses in the first place are those who care enough to do more than very casually skim.


I don't think it's a problem with what you call it. The fact that if someone wanted to use said stringlib and release their source code with, say GPL, or OSD, they wouldn't be able to because of your license. It kinda restricts where it can and can't go with your stipulations.
08 Sep, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
I'm not sure what argument you are making. What "problem" are we even talking about? Is it not my right to release my source code for free us by all except for commercial projects, in which case a simple permission request is what I ask for?

I disagree with your claim that people can't use this alongside GPL licenses, but for the moment I'll not get into that because I'm trying to figure out what we're talking about and where you are seeing a problem…
08 Sep, 2007, Davion wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
I'm not sure what argument you are making. What "problem" are we even talking about? Is it not my right to release my source code for free us by all except for commercial projects, in which case a simple permission request is what I ask for?

Of course it's your right. There's nothing wrong with the way you set it up. Never said it wasn't.

DavidHaley said:
I disagree with your claim that people can't use this alongside GPL licenses, but for the moment I'll not get into that because I'm trying to figure out what we're talking about and where you are seeing a problem…


I was under the impression that if licenses weren't compatible, you couldn't release software coupled with it. (Kinda why IMC couldn't be released with Diku derivs because the diku license wasn't compatible with GPL). The GPL is all about freedom! Your modifications restrict the freedom of those wanting to use your software.
08 Sep, 2007, Guest wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
I disagree with your claim that people can't use this alongside GPL licenses, but for the moment I'll not get into that because I'm trying to figure out what we're talking about and where you are seeing a problem…


Strictly speaking, since your license imposes an additional restriction on what users can do with your program, that makes it incompatible legally with the GPL. So it doesn't fit in with Stallman's communistic approach to software distribution because *gasp* the author might want to prevent his work from being used in a certain way. The GPL is only liberating for software communists. Not the authors who write it.
08 Sep, 2007, David Haley wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
Davion said:
The GPL is all about freedom! Your modifications restrict the freedom of those wanting to use your software.

For those with commercial intent, yes; for those without, no. If there is any problem with my license and the GPL, then it seems pretty clear that the problem comes from the GPL – and then you start wondering just what exactly freedom means. The GPL wants me to be 'free' but, if you are right, punishes me quite severely if I choose to not let other people sell my code without my consent, by not letting anybody who joins the GPL party use my software.

As for this question in particular, I would like to see where specifically the GPL says that you must only use GPL compatible code. Section 5 states that if you use other code and redistribute the work, then you must license the entire distribution under the GPL. Well, fine – somebody could still release their source code minus my library and list my library as a dependency that must be separately downloaded. (In fact, that happens quite often.) So there is nothing to prevent somebody from releasing code that uses my library, unless they want to include the library in a distribution.

And finally, nothing at all prevents the original author from releasing the code to the public under the GPL, but still create a distribution that contains non-GPL libraries. I quote section 5.c from the GPL:

Quote
c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.


So how easy is this:
I hereby give myself permission to release my software alongside David Haley's non-GPL shared string library, licensing only my portion of the whole according to the GPL.

That was easy. The GPL states that it does not invalidate permission if you separately received it. If you are an author releasing your own software, this is easy. Problems come when other people would like to distribute it; the original author would have to give everybody permission to do this thus making it a modified GPL. But there is always the solution I mentioned of listing the library as a prerequisite.

I'm not sure how somebody can clamor so heavily to be a defender of freedom when they impose so many restrictions left and right. My permission restriction for commercial use is nothing by comparison. Closer to freedom are unmodified BSD or MIT licenses. True freedom is public domain. The GPL is not true freedom.

As I quoted in my comment that resurrected this thread, the GPL is about freedom, except that its version of freedom is mandatory. It's almost a contradiction in terms, which is what makes it so clever IMO. (Unfortunately, I can't remember where I heard it.)
08 Sep, 2007, Tyche wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
Well, what else should I call it? For anybody not intending to make commercial use of it, it is exactly the BSD license.


Every BSD licensed software I've encountered thus far doesn't have commercial restrictions. I've also seen "slightly modified" used in context of the BSD license and it most always refers to the names being changed from University of Berkeley changed to the author's name, or the advertising restrictions removed. Anyway it's like a personal ad for a "slightly modified" woman and discovering she/he has a penis. ;-P No, rather it is "heavily modified".
08 Sep, 2007, Darwin wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
Both "slightly" and "heavily" are opinionated adjectives to describe the extent of the modification. Obviously everyone will have their own meaning for each in the context of the licenses, so why not just agree to call it "Modified" without any adjective? … Because even a slight change may have a heavy effect over the entire license.
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