On Sun, 29 Dec 2019, Kevin P. Neal wrote:
On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 10:11:48AM -1000, Jeff Roberson wrote:
It seems to be the prevailing theory that headers are not even really
copyrightable. This has even been tested in court a few times (bsd, java).
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0301.1/0362.html
The original definitions from this file were part of posix.1b and so it's
hard to argue they are anything but public. Coincidentally I know Greg and
Wow is Google v Oracle going to screw this up. I fully expect the US Supreme
Court to make a total hash of that case and cause havoc for the whole
software industry.
The right thing for FreeBSD to do is decrease the size of the attack surface
by getting the licenses as straight as possible. IMHO. But IANAL.
In my opinion, this has already wasted everyone's time with an irrelevant
nit-picking argument. The onus is not on Pedro to chase this down just so
Lawyers make a living nit-picking. That's why one has to be very careful
to do a preemptive nit-pick before they get involved.
I personally participated when a fortune < 100 company sent a team of
lawyers to audit the licensing terms of FreeBSD to ensure compliance in a
multi-billion dollar a year product. None of them batted an eye at this.
It is my understanding that this has taken place multiple times and once
even resulted in phk receiving an official beer from a similarly sized
company per the terms of his beerware license. Do we actually believe
that someone somewhere is going to sue the project or it's users on behalf
of myself or greg because the user is in compliance with one bsd license
and not the other? I trust the lawyer's opinions over yours.
The problem here isn't the license. It's that everyone who allegedly
thinks this is of such dire importance that they must continue spaming the
list and arguing about it hasn't thought it important enough to send a
single email to Greg Ansley so they personally can commit a
simplification. It literally would've taken less time to simply copy
Greg, ask approval, and commit a change and no one would've argued. I
would argue that we don't even need greg's approval to copy 8 standards
defined function prototypes. Richard Stallman seems to argue the same and
I guarantee he's spent more time with copyright lawyers than any of us.
I assert that the point here is not the license at all or it would've been
resolved already. I see a lot of low effort sniping on the list off and
on since my return to opensource. In most cases it is not even from
particularly active contributors. It is very discourging to donate time
and energy to the project only to be rewarded with criticism delivered
with an air of superiority. It drives people away at a time when
operating systems are all facing declining and aging developer
populations.
Jeff
--
Kevin P. Neal http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/
On the community of supercomputer fans:
"But what we lack in size we make up for in eccentricity."
from Steve Gombosi, comp.sys.super, 31 Jul 2000 11:22:43 -0600
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