concernedfoss...@teknik.io schreef op 01-06-2016 23:57:
To my knowledge, the intention of most of those who license their work
out under the GPL is essentially to recieve a different form of
payment:
Maybe that is a subverted reason now. I don't think that was so in the
past. This is a rather ill scheme regardless.
Rather than demanding a monetary reward upfront, the hope, and the
license is the written vehicle for the possible fulfillment of that
hope, is that the reward will be payed in labour.
There is no guarantee that anyone will work on your product. You seem to
assume that the advancement of the product is the only reason to do
anything; ie. the only reward for the work you do, is getting more work
done. That is like planting apple trees in the hopes of having more of
them, but not actually for having apples.
Maybe you say this is only the reason for the license, not for the work
itself. Regardless, why should anyone be compelled to work for you?
This reeks of free labour all the same. Free as in beer.
Which is my common conception of how "volunteers" or "contributors" are
treated in the Linux domain. They are treated as expendable, free
labour. The expectation seems to be that they have already received
their payment in the form of being able to use the product, but why
then, work for it?
This makes giving away the product in itself a disingenuous and
insincere thing. From the viewpoint of someone else, Linux is free.
There is no need for payment and you can do whatever you want with it.
Including work on it. But, you do so out of your own volition, not to
pay people you have never known and who never spoke to you, and who may
never have treated you well.
/Freedom/ is the reason to work on Linux for most, but many may be
subverted by this new ideology. They don't work because they want to,
but because they feel they have to (they are in debt).
I don't know if you have ever seen cartoon images or alike of debtors.
They are depicted with a ball around their foot; in chains.
If debt is the reason to do anything, it is not a good reason. It does
not speak of personal intentions, personal desire, personal wish, and
personal creativity.
You are basically saying that everyone is in debt when they use Linux.
IE: Rights holder puts this work out free, under the expectation than
any furthur work done on it will come back to him.
I hope someone once told you that having expectations of people is not a
very good thing. Expectations is what kills every loving relationship,
and every time does.
Every relationship starts out well until expectations pop up. Then
people feel they have to make true on them (those of the other) and they
start losing themselves, and they end up two people who our now both
less than what they were before, instead of both more.
This scheme you have here makes lesser people out of everyone, because
they are no longer doing stuff they really want in any moment that they
want it. They are not doing it /because/ they want to do it.
It is very unfair for a licensee to then take pains to ensure that the
additional labour, the work, never is returned to the original
licensor.
What makes you think it is fair to unilaterally, on your own, start out
with an agreement with innumerable other people, who don't have a say in
it?
You think they have to agree with anything you want, even though they
might not agree with it at all?
So this whole "agreement" is not voluntary in the first place, and every
time you (or someone else trying to do it) (or doing it) is trying to
enforce that "agreement" through some license term. Based on copyright,
a system which these people at the same time despise.
This is no honest form of doing business in the first place. It is
dishonesty at its heart. And then you speak of fairness. This is no way
to treat people in the first place: you ask them what they want, before
you start out with an agreement with them.
In the linux world, I recall clearly, this was very much the stated
/reason/ to use the GPL over the BSD license.
That could be so. Still this is license talk. That doesn't mean it forms
the basis of having any kind of license at all. When you are already
talking licenses (technical terms) you have already left the realm of
ideology; because, this license is going to be a platform depending on
societal structures, and as such, it has to be amended to what can work
given existing law. Then, it is always a lesser version of that you had
in mind, because in your ideal world, you may not need, or have needed,
to do so.
We see how the FSF (apparently) gives very technical reasons for saying
something is a derivative work, and when it is not. That law professor
(I think) of the article you cited (or posted) clearly revealed how such
technical terms have no merit to a court and how they subvert logical
reasoning around derivative works. Boundaries of process space clearly
do not delimit what can be derivative and what can not.
That means the technicalities of it takes away from the essence of it.
And since GPL is a copyright instrument, and we all agree that copyright
might not always be the best thing, you cannot assume that the actual
condensation of the license in this technical terms, still fully
expresses the ideology behind it.
And if you then use copyright to understand the ideology, you will have
a subverted version.
You must start out with what you really want, not with what the GPL says
you must do. This they usually call the spirit of the law, but mostly in
general the lawmakers have more freedom in this than the writers of the
GPL did have. Regular law does not have to be embodied in a legislation
that it disagrees with, because usually the lawmakers that write the
law, also made, or could make, the legislation it was a part of.
That's why with GPL you must look a step further, and wonder what is the
truest intent, or could be the truest intent, even when this intent is
not possible to be realized in actual form through copyright
legislation.
So the first spirit of GPL is for something to work with copyright. But
the second spirit, the real spirit, is beyond that.
I don't think it is fair to expect payment of people you have never
spoken to, and who may never agree with your stated reasons.
Wholly, it also means that your licensees fall into two broad categories
of which one does not exist: you have developers and users, only
developers can really "pay you back" and hence users are really
irrelevant in this methodology, which explains my own experiences with
how people are getting treated.
This explains the arrogance and sense of superiority people have towards
users. They are lesser kind, lesser people. They cannot do what "we" can
do. They also cannot pay for the software, so they do not deserve any
attention whatsoever, apart from being used as a source of
gratification, in a sense.
This is the business model you just explained, I am not making that up.
I think most of us here would perhaps realize how a company like Google
does not really have customer support, or at least no user support,
because its customers are actually advertizers; advertizers get the
support, but users don't. Users are just happy if anything good happens
for them, but they have no say in it.
We say in Dutch, and elsewhere "Customer is King". Customer is king
indeed. In the Linux world, that might then mean that the developer who
contributes and whose contribution is accepted, is king. No one else is.
No one else makes any form of payment.
You consider that "fair", I am just describing it.
If you think this is a good business model, by all means go ahead and
stick with it.
I am just saying it offends people and makes business in a real sense
impossible. Unless you are one of those suppliers that can make it like
e.g. Red Hat does, delivering mostly on business contracts. For a
corporation, "free access" to e.g. Linux has no real merit; they already
have it. So the revenue is in added services. This is also because the
product itself is rather poor, and needs a great amount of expertise to
work with. The expertise is expensive, it is expensive to attain
(requires a lot of time and effort) and expensive to obtain, in that
sense. But what if the product was so good that expertise is hardly
required? Do you think those companies could still do the business they
are doing today? They depend on a sense of poorness in the user
interface.
You must not make it so easy that anyone can do it.
When I was in touch with a friend in Amsterdam, a friend of his
approached me and asked from me a form of support. He wanted support for
Ubuntu. He wanted to make the step from Windows to Linux, and did not
dare do it without a person to back him. I did not want to do that
online, and Amsterdam was for me too far, so it never materialized, but
it goes to show what the reason is people ask for support (or support
contracts): it is the difficulty of the platform, and the fact that they
don't know how to depend on it on their own without a great deal of
knowledge.
Typical Linux people treat ME as a scumbag without knowledge. I know
more about Linux than I know about my own cock, and that goes to show
something about it :p.
So the whole Idea that you can Monetize Linux comes down in great part
to the ability to be able to provide support from something that really
needs it.
Were you to make something excellent in user interface that never
required support at all (some will say that is impossible, but I
disagree) (and even if so, it is going to be a matter of degree, not
absolute) then how could you monetize on support? It's just logic this.
Selling an actual product does require proprietariness in a certain
sense, especially if the product is very good.
spend more time on development = spend less time on support = cannot
make money on support
spend less time on development = spend more time on support = cannot
make money on development.
That thing you spend all your effort into, is going to be the thing you
will need to make money with. In real life, people still need to eat,
you know.
So people who actually want to make an actual great quality product MUST
try to sell the product itself.
They cannot sell the product if:
a) it is being distributed in source anyway
b) everyone has a compiler
c) everyone is allowed to copy it it anyone else.
I have been using Windows since 1995 or before (different system). I
have on and off been using Linux since about 1996. The level of
expertise that Windows has asked of me is about 10% that of Linux.
Probably less.
When I was younger I have never ever purchased a copy of Windows. I had
no money and only bought stuff like Delphi 4, or a student's license of
Microsoft Visio that I never used :p.
I also did not ever need support from Microsoft. Any problem there was I
could always solve myself. There were plenty of internet resources, it
was easy, and the knowledge was not hard. Until about 2014 I have never
been in touch with Microsoft ever. Not even on their forums, I don't
know if they existed.
As a moderately proficient computer user you simply do not need support
from Microsoft. I don't know anyone who has ever told me that they ever
contacted Microsoft for anything. Of course people depended on me in the
first place. And many friends had the same level of expertise, or close
to it. We did not buy Windows, but we also did not need to buy it.
We, or at least I, considered it like a public road. You don't have to
pay taxes before you can use the road. The road is free for you to walk
on, at least as a kid. Microsoft was the road that the cars
(applications) drive on.
I considered it inefficient and stupid if everyone needed to obtain a
license for the road, before they could go outside.
My own house is on the roof of a shopping street. It is said by some
that the roof is owned by the shops. We are illegally using that roof,
even though we cannot get anywhere without it. But it is tolerated of
us.
It Dutch they call it "gedogen" it is the same thing as our soft drugs
policy. You are really not allowed to do it, but okay, you can.
But I am still basically illegally using my roof when I step outside of
the house. It is not my roof to walk on. I am really in violation of the
law.
Perfect idiocy from my perspective. Now suddenly I need to be grateful
that I am even allowed to get on to the street. By permission. I am
allowed to. Walk outside. Because. I am actually. Not entitled to do
that by itself.
Only to illustrate that Windows does not need a company behind it for
you to use it; you only need the product.
So the question returns to: what do you want?
You want something, but you are not stating it.
I think you want stuff for free.
I think you just want to gain access to his work, even though you are no
kernel developer in essence, or someone part of that core group,
probably.
That is the trade off is no payment upfront, but payment in kind
later. Here Brad Spengler is taking from the original licensor, but
has decided now that the other side of the deal he will not uphold.
He is not taking from anyone. That original licensor has given it away
to begin with, it is on every street corner, if you throw two pebbles
into the air a download of Linux comes down with it.
How can you seriously consider something "taking" when you have already
given it away for free?
If you didn't want to give it away for free, you should have considered
forms of payments in advance that actually relate to the product, not to
any work or modifications on it.
The thing you give away is your product. If you want a form of payment
for that, then relate it to the receiving of the product. Or possibly
even the using of it. But not the modifying of it.
And if you do give something away with the hope of getting something
from it, you do so without expectations. You assume that you cannot
decide what another is going to do. And you are doing it with the best
hopes, but no guarantees. Such is life. You will have to depend on the
goodness of life.
If I give my neighbour's dog a banana, I am not doing so with the intent
of having that neighbour like me more.
And even if I did hope that, I could not expect it of her.
I cannot later go to her and say "Yeah I gave your dog a banana, but now
you still don't like it, what's that about?" I know many men treat women
that way.
They expect returns on something the woman never wanted to have.
She never wanted that sucking up to begin with.
And now they become bitter because they do not get what they thought
they deserved, and now they go and sue Bradley Spengler.
So I think the unfairness is very much there now. Spengler is now
actually getting something for nothing, where before he was not, and
the whole intention of many of the contributors to linux has been
subverted.
Untrue. There was no before. Linux was already available to him. It was
given away for free.
You are making the weird distinction between using the Linux (kernel)
for regular use, and using it for further development.
Most manufacturers that embed the kernel in some device, never pay a
dime for it. Their modifications, even if they do make them, are
probably irrelevant too. Who is really using e.g. Synology's many
modifications to the kernel?
Actual businesses that use the kernel in a device usually do not much
modify it; with the exception of Android perhaps. But since Android is
not really sold as a product, it does not really apply here. You don't
have to buy android in that sense. So there is a lot of commercial use
already and they never pay a dime for it.
So actual usage is free, but modification is not. In that sense that you
cannot hold on to your modifications. Which basically means you cannot
monetize your work, unless of course you sell it as part of something
else, as does e.g. that Synology I happen to use.
These are hardware vendors, all of them are. They make money selling
hardware, not software.
What about software vendors? Spender is a software vendor.
I don't get why you can be so greedy. You are like "It's MINE!!!" like
some 3 year old child that doesn't want to share her toy with her
brother.
How can you be so pissed, and so bitter? Have you been doing something
you didn't like doing in the first place? And now you want other people
to suffer to make up for your work that you did not like, since you now
want a sacrifice in return?
Maybe stop making sacrifices.
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