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List:       busybox
Subject:    Re: [PATCH] fdisk.c: major whitespace/style cleanup
From:       Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd () firmix ! at>
Date:       2006-02-27 9:19:01
Message-ID: 1141031941.17954.27.camel () tara ! firmix ! at
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On Sun, 2006-02-26 at 20:48 -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Sunday 26 February 2006 6:58 pm, Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
> > > In theory, if I as the author of a program build it with a compiler I
> > > don't release, and GPL the source code, you have no recourse against me
> > > because as the copyright holder my rights to distribute the work do not
> > > derive from the license, so I can't violate my own license and infringe
> > > on my own rights.
> >
> > For you yes. But when I get the source (under the GPL) what is my
> > position?
> 
> Who would you take action against?
> 
> 1) You can't take action against me the author, because I own the copyright 
> and thus don't _need_ the license to exercise my own rights.  They weren't 
> delegated to me by the license in the first place.  I don't need it, it's a 
> permission statement that derives its authority _from_ me (and my copyright).

Of course you/the author can release his work under any
license/conditions s/he wants.
In this theoretical discussion I would have downloaded it under GPL.

> 2) You don't have standing to take action against people redistributing my 
> work.  It's not your work.  You can't press charges against somebody else for 
> stealing my stuff.

Of course.

> 3) You still haven't got standing to take action against people distributing 
> modified versions of the work unless you're one of the contributors.  You'd 
> have to make a modified work and then take action against the people 
> distributing your modified work.

And it is probably harder if everything is released an redistributed
under the GPL since with the GPL I/we gave already explicit permission
to all of these.

> 4) If the author of the code uses this kind of nitpick to take action against 
> redistributors of the author's own code under the author's own license, 
> that's pretty clearly acting in bad faith and the fault doesn't lie with the 
> redistributor but with the _author_ in the first place.  ("I'm suing you 
> because I did something wrong" isn't a very effective legal strategy.)  
> Besides, as the author you have the darn tool and the person you're suing 
> doesn't and you look darn silly and yes that sort of thing matters.

What I meant was:
I download software under the GPL. One needs secret/propriatory tools to
actually build that software.
I modify it and redistribute it (under the GPL - there is no other way).
Other people download it under the GPL.
IMHO this won't work out
Personally I don't think RMS doesn't agree here with you.

> Now there is one special case in which your interpretation might be valid.  If 
> you author a tool in C, and somebody ports it to Visual Basic, you can object 
> that your copyright is being violated.  You can't reproduce their binaries, 
> it's not your fault, and you have standing because they created a derived 
> work of your code.

But if my work is GPLed, IMHO I can't say anything serious against a
fork or rewrite or translation in any other programming language.

> This would still be kind of weak.  They'd have to acknowledge your copyright 
> in their visual basic version, and claim that a transform that drastic wasn't 
> a complete rewrite.  (You could probably win on that one.)  They could also 
> point to Visual Basic as a documented standard and say that the absence of an 
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If the programming language is documented (and the documentation is 99%
complete and correct), then I see no problem.

> open source implementation for your platform isn't their problem, and if you 
> want a visual basic compiler so much you should write one.  (You'd probably 
> lose on that one.)

Yup.

> Copyright isn't patent.  There's nothing to stop somebody from studying your 

And this is good that way (and corporations - both software and content
providing ones - push in the direction to "make everything under the sun
patentable". And this clearly implies (at least) literature, music,
drawings and ideas).

> The point of the GPL is disclosure, not convenience.

ACK.

> I don't owe you a "how to program in C" book, either.

Yes, as long as there are such books out there.

> > Both are obviously true (and/or I could write a PPC emulator).
> 
> This is actually a real-world problem right now with 802.11g hardware.  The 
> firmware for these suckers is based on a processor with an undocumented 
> instruction set, and nobody can GET a description of the instruction set 
> without signing an NDA.
> 
> To get around the binary-only driver problem "tainting" kernels, people have 
> written GPL drivers that have the firmware as a big char[] array with lots of 
> numbers.  The argument there is the "preferred format for modifying" clause.  
> (Certainly not the form it was written in, it was probably assembly with 
> mnemonics.)
> 
> But in trying to enforce this (the source code is the mnemonics version, this 
> is output generated from that), could we legally get them to violate their 
> NDA?  Of course not.  All we could hope do is get them to admit it can't be 

No. The question is if these people are violating themselves the GPL
with not publishing the source.
The NDA (and lots of other contracts) these people have or might have
are not interesting to me and actually don't bother me.
Actually this is the very trivial workaround to kill the GPL: I modify
GPL software and refise to give anything out with "I have an NDA"
excuse. Won't probably work out that way.

> made compliant and yank the noncompliant driver, and how's that an 
> improvement over simply refusing to merge it?

None.
And as a consequence one simply can't release such software as "GPL" (or
"open source" for marketing, sales and law people) since one can't
comply to the license/contract/rules.

> And "hope to do" is not the same as "do", since if they wrote a file of source 
> code that doesn't include Linux source, and they could have learned to do so 
> by reading Jonathan Corbet's books and articles on how to write Linux 
> drivers, how is their source code a derived work of the Linux kernel's 
> copyright?  Binary-only device drivers might be a bit grey, but it's pretty 

>From the copyright? Nothing.
Must it be GPL? IMHO "yes" if it is "derived work".

> clear who owns the source code in this case.  So we're back to trying to 
> enforce license terms against the owner of the copyright, which doesn't 
> fly...

It flies IMHO if the author doesn't release the software under the GPL
since then he doesn't fail to comply with "his/her" license.
Otherwise one can trivially undermine the GPL.

> These are, alas, complicated issues...

ACK.
	Bernd
-- 
Firmix Software GmbH                   http://www.firmix.at/
mobil: +43 664 4416156                 fax: +43 1 7890849-55
          Embedded Linux Development and Services

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