Posted on 02/23/2006 7:31:29 AM PST by N3WBI3
Who could be upset by a scheme that allows free use of software? Well, Gervase Markham has found one Trading Standards officer who is
Who could possibly be upset with the Mozilla Foundation for giving away its Firefox browser?
One of my roles at the Mozilla Foundation relates to copyright licensing. I'm responsible for making sure that the software we distribute respects the conditions of the free software licences of the underlying code. I'm also the first point of contact for licensing questions.
Most of the time, this job involves helping people who want to use our code in their own products understand the terms, or advising project members who want to integrate code from another project into our codebase. Occasionally, however, something a little more unusual comes along.
A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them. * Click here to find out more!
I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).
Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:
"I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?" she asked.
"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted."
I felt somewhat unnerved at being held responsible for the disintegration of the UK anti-piracy system. Who would have thought giving away software could cause such difficulties?
However, given that the free software movement is unlikely collectively to decide to go proprietary in order to make her life easier, I had another go, using examples like Linux and the OpenOffice office suite to show that it's not just Firefox which is throwing a spanner in the works.
She then asked me to identify myself, so that she could confirm that I was authorised to speak for the Mozilla Foundation on this matter. I wondered if she was imagining nefarious copyright-infringing street traders taking a few moments off from shouting about the price of bananas to pop into an internet cafe, crack a router and intercept her e-mail.
However, the more I thought about it, providing a sensible reply to that question is somewhat difficult. How could I prove I was authorised to speak for the Foundation? We're a virtual organisation – we have three employees, one in Vancouver, one in Virginia and one in leafy North London, with no office or registered trading address in the UK. As far as the Mozilla part of my life goes, my entire existence is electronic.
In the end, I just had to say that the fact that I am capable of receiving and replying to e-mail addressed to licensing@mozilla.org would have to be sufficient. She would just have to take it on trust that I was not a router-cracking banana merchant. She must have done so, as I never heard from her again.
While the identity verification aspect of this incident is amusing, what is more serious is the set of assumptions her e-mails implied. It demonstrates how the free software model disrupts the old proprietary way of doing things, where copying was theft and you were guilty until proven innocent.
In a world where both types of software exist, greater discernment is required on the part of the enforcers. I hope this is the beginning of the end of any automatic assumption that sharing software with your neighbour must be a crime.
Gervase Markham says that he works for the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the internet. Of course, he may just be a banana seller. His blog is Hacking For Christ
LOL, thanks for confirming you don't even know how they get the numbers you sourced...
Not at all. (Although that does in fact work in many cases). Many programmers get paid to work on open source projects, by companies selling support or services based on them.
Over time, however, the desire for stability within a company's code base, coupled with divergence from Open Source as companies modify Open Source for their own needs, ends up killing the model.
Not necessarily. Companies will often prefer to contribute their changes back to the main source tree, so they don't have to keep maintaining their patches.
Eventually, somebody simply grabs the Open Source, locks it down as a baseline, and starts selling their own modifications to all comers.
And if the license permits it, that's fine. Apple uses lots of BSD code in OS X, but BSD continues to exist. Choice is good.
That's a quick way to get the Google "death sentence," where they reset your rank to zero. They've even done it to a lot of high-profile companies.
But they have no problem with simply paying to have your rank improved. I have a couple of pages that have been up for well over a year with specific and unique text. I submitted them to google, but they never show up in searches. It isn't important to me, but it aroused my curiosity about how they search.
Y'all will notice that the wanker doesn't even try to dispute her trollish behavior.
Forrester Research and SourceForge are certainly reliable sources for the fact that 70+ percent of open source is based on "Stallman's rabid anti-capitalistic license. If you think you can disprove it, go ahead, but why would you, since you're so devoted to open source just as it is? You do constantly post all these links and articles praising that "rabid anti-capitalistc license", or are you goinh to deny that now too?
As expected, immediate name calling and no response whatsoever to the facts posted.
It absolutely is. When you give a Christmas gift the gift never stops being private property.
Don't distort the facts, open source is given to the proverbial "community" for free, meaning anyone who wants it. Why can't any of you debate honestly, or do you really just not iunderstand what "free software welfare for the world" really means??
Yup its just you against all of us commie freepers...
No it's not, and there's not that many of you either. Your type is easy to pick out too, with names like shadowman, newbi3, and anti-Republican or similar. Whatever happened to Red Neck and Red Zone? Haven't seen them much lately.
I've heard up to 80%. However, a quick search through SourceForge (the most popular repository for OSS, where most of the software is GPL) will show you that a vast majority of those projects are nothing, most not even out of the beta stage. There are about four times as many projects that have not progressed to production/stable/mature as have.
Let's look at software that matters: Linux, gcc, Apache web server, Firefox, Thunderbird, Tomcat, Python, Perl, SpamAssassin, MySQL, PostgresSQL, PHP, FreeBSD, CVS, X-Windows, Solaris, Darwin (OS X core). I can't think of any other open source software off the top of my head right now, can you?
Four of those are under the GPL, and MySQL has an alternate commercial license. The rest are under other licenses.
Openoffice.org uses the LGPL.
More like if you could ever prove your invented ties.
Venezuela's commie president probably wears cotton. Cotton must be communist! It is the choice of communists!
Whats x.org using?
Mono, Wine, Yast, Gimp, Hurd, and how could you forget Open Office? It's GPL isn't it?
Most are Gpl because it has a sneaky little clause the Free Software Foundation lawyers use to confiscate code from others.
So you're ready to condem Stallman and his GPL licenses and recommend these other licenses like CDDL instead? Sure you are.
What's paid for is conspicuously separated from the search results.
I submitted them to google, but they never show up in searches.
How many other sites link to yours? That's extremely important to your rank.
Each IP owner should choose the license that works best for them..
I don't know, maybe the owner of this site you're posting on? I'm sure for him it's not an ideological thing, but like the rest of us "commies" here sees OSS as a good business choice.
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