Re: Does the LGPL encourage sharing of code?

Boris Buegling <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 08.04.2002, Roger Fujii created this extraordinary piece of literature, which I will thankfully quote in the following:

no smiley? ;)

> > Personally, I think the pro-GPL camp has less evidence shown for it here.  One can
> > easily come up with simple economic reasons why *GPL has problems.
> >
> In general, maybe. But the whole GCC argument of Brett is just ridiculous.

Looking through the archives, what brett said was:
  "GCC (especially at that time and still today) was not a particularly good
  compiler.
"  

I wouldn't have said "particularly good", but rather "mediocre", but the statement
is arguably correct.   

> There are commercial compilers out there (which basically suck),

other than M$VC (and even *that* I can see _some_ pros for), I don't know of any
really sucky commercial compilers still out there - unless your point is that
all compilers suck.  Care to educate me?

> GCC is not such a bad compiler and it is crucial for the Open Source community
> that there is a free (both as in beer and as in speech)

well, only if you think GPL is 'free' speech.  Personally, anything that tries to
exclude
other valid speech is hardly 'free' IMHO. 

> compiler out there, because not everyone has the money to buy one.
> Nobody who has got any brain could tell me that he thinks
> that it is bad to have such a good compiler available for free. I know Brett
> will do, but I came to the conclusion that Brett is just this script:

You are missing the _entire_ point in the argument.  It isn't the 'free as in
beer' part that is bad.  As programs are partially viewed as speech, you can't
prevent a really free version from existing.  Having said that, programs are
also "products", like cars and bicycles.  You can look in any economics book
and see what dumping  (selling for less than the cost) has on a market.
But, as I just said, you can't prevent a 'free' version - so the
natural thing to do is try to add commercial value to the 'free' version -
the primary principle being that most people won't pay for something they can
get for free.  This is how X11 is, or (to a lesser extent) how postscript and
zip works (the specification is public, but the implementation doesn't have to
be).  The problem is that GPL prevents this avenue.  So, the end result is
that you have less choices, and as with most things, the less choices you have,
the worse off you usually are.

-r



Anthony Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:
> !!!! WARNING !!!!
> Long, boring message follows.

wan't THAT long :)
 
> !!!! Warning !!!!
> Roger Fujii wrote:

HEY! :)
 
> > > The last I heard of watcom was that they were trying to opensource
> > > their product - so the GCC definitely had impact on them. 
> > > See http://www.openwatcom.org
> 
> Cool.  Thanks for the link; I've wondered what happened to them.  I
> purchased their compiler years ago, back when they had the best DOS
> extender.  I loved that little compiler...  That's where I learned C.

If you are talking DOS4G, by Rational Systems, I think the combination
of cygwin/windows did them in.  Amazingly, it is still around though.
   http://www.tenberry.com/dos4g/watcom/prices.htm

This would have been a natural for gcc, but the GPL prevents this.

 
> > I have yet to see an _economic_ arguement in favor of *GPL that has anything
> > other than wishful thinking behind it.
> 
> My "rationale" is nothing more than this: The worth of a product *to an
> economy* is not the price for which it can be sold, but the amount of
> value it contributes.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Actually, you can't look at it like this.  A simple example (in real life)
would be teachers (at least in the US).  Their value as a whole is high,
but their "price" is low.  Or even more simply, air is important to all of
us, but it has no (commerical) value.  While there is usually a relationship
between import and value, there doesn't have to be.

> As for supply and demand, I know that a vast supply of GPLd code is going
> to make it hard to become a millionaire writing software.  Big deal.  It's hard to
> become a millionaire, period, and programmers should stop expecting it.

uh, we aren't talking millionaires.  Doing the math, if you want to make $50K/year
on a product you wrote and selling for $50 (a pretty modest cost), you have to sell
1000 of them (assuming *no* other cost).  2000 if you add in the normal benefit
multiplier.
That's over 5 a day.  As stated before, the people who are most hurt by the GPL is
the ones that can't rewrite everything.  They have to release their source, thus
lowering the number they can sell.

> Consider: before Henry Ford inroduced assembly line manufacturing to the
> auto industry, very few people could afford a car.  After, a very large
> portion of the population could afford one.  Would you claim the
> economic impact of the auto went down, or up?  After all, the profit
> margin went down on the vehicle, and very few people could get rich off
> of it.  But it *did* supply work for more people, though the pay wasn't
> great.  And it created a support industry that is valued greater than
> the auto industry itself.

Actually, this is a bad example for the following reasons:
  GPL hampers economy of scale from working (you can charge less, if you sell more).
  Software doesn't 'wear out'.  So the service required for software once it works is
    not significant.
  Using Ford's weren't exclusinary.  If you use a model T to haul goods, you don't
have
    to give it up.

> Same thing with the printing press.  Just because a book doesn't cost as
> much as it did before the printing press doesn't mean the value of the
> book went down.  The real worth of a book isn't the paper and ink, but
> the words the ink forms.  And the greater the distribution of a work,
> the more its intrinsic value.

The problem with judging "worth" is that it is a very abritrary metric.  A person's
kid might be priceless to them, and worthless to others.   
 
> Here's a simple test: given the same cost, which is worth more, a copy
> of the new Jackie Collins novel, or a book of the BSD api?  (I know it
> depends on who you are.  I'm talking about the average person on this
> list.)  I'd wager that the *value* of the book bears little relationship
> to the cost.

er, not certain where you are heading here....
 
> The amount of value software contributes to society is not the amount of
> money it can extract from that society, but the amount of value it
> provides *in total* for everyone who uses it.  Just like a spanner
> provides no value until it is used, software provides no value until it
> is used.  And the more often it is used, the more value it adds to society.

yes, how how is this any different from 'air'?
 
> Supply and demand, and the law of diminishing returns, has nothing to do
> with the ultimate value of an item. They only have to do with the amount
> of money you can charge for an item, and that isn't what I'm talking about.

but unless you can make the mapping between your 'worth' and value, you are
not talking anything concrete - you might as well talk about religion.
 
> And: economics isn't the only reason to do something.  Why should there
> be an economic argument for the GPL, when the GPL isn't about economics?

It *IS* about economics, as it takes a stance on intellectual property.  
The whole notion of property is a pretty fundamental economic principle.
 
> Heh.  Good point, wrt Enron.  But how long did it take before we
> realized Enron was nothing but smoke and mirrors?

Too long? :)

> And how many other companies are out there doing the same thing?  Enron
> just happened to get caught.  How many people try to get rich "playing
> the stock market," instead of investing in companies?

It's an imperfect world.  There will always be people who break the rules.
The point is to make it such that the rules are good for the majority that
follows them.
 
> As far as the GPL not honoring intellectual property... whose
> intellectual property does it not honor?  Seems to me the people who
> wish to take GPLd code and turn it into a proprietary product are not
> honoring intellectual property.  The GPL does *not* steal code.  It
> merely requires reciprocation.  If you don't want your code to be
> available to everyone, don't use GPLd code.  There's no big stick here.

You don't seem to understand how viral it is.  Let's take the simple
example where I call a LGPLed library, which, in turn (without my knowledge)
calls another LGPLed FSF library.  All is hunky-dory for me, *UNTIL* FSF
decides for it's political reasons to GPL the library.  That doesn't effect
the LGPLed library too much, as it will cause an automatic change to GPL.
But for me, I would face either having to GPL the program, or stop selling it.
If you want reciprocation, look at MPL, which does it correctly, AFAIK.
If I change what YOU wrote, I see no problem in giving you changes.  However,
if I just USE (by calling) what you wrote, without using what you wrote, I
have great problems with you making claims on something that you didn't write.  
 
> If a software company offers a license to its code, and someone takes
> that code and makes their own proprietary software product, isn't it
> right for the software company to get upset?

Depends on the license.  Most X11 people (minus codeweavers) think this is
OK and even encourages it.

> Isn't that what "intellectual property" is all about?  Isn't it about respecting the
> wishes of the author?  So what's wrong with expecting people to respect
> the GPL licensing agreement: Never include my code in a closed product?

This is *NOT* correct.  It is "Never USE this with any NON-GPLed product".  BSD
people are affect too (if they don't want to change their license)

> Why is it all right for a company to do this, but not an individual?

I don't know of any modern license that makes the intellectual claim that the GPL
does.
Besides, I never claimed it was all right for them to do it either. 

> Also: although the idea of intellectual property has been around a long
> time, it hasn't been around long in its current form, as practiced by
> corporations world-wide, and written down in law in the United States.
>   This is something new, and it favors corporations over individuals
> (DMCA in the states, and the proposed EU copyright agreements in Europe).

The GPL doesn't help this any - by advocating "everything should be free", it only
serves to polarize the issue. 
 
> > So, why doesn't your argument work for NetBSD.  I see no difference -
> > using your criteria, NetBSD is superior.
> 
> That's not *my* criteria: it's GCCs.  To judge a work, you must first
> understand what the work intends to do.  Someone made a value judgement
> that GCC was crappy, simply because it didn't create code as efficiently
> as custom compilers.  I merely pointed out that GCC intends primarily to
> be portable.  Since that is also an important aspect of a compiler, I
> argued that effiency isn't everything.

of course, if you want portability, use java :-)

> And *yes*, NetBSD is superior to Linux.  Not because of its portability,
> either; Linux is turning out to be very portable, almost without even trying.

linux CLAIMS to be portable.  I know its ports to the SPARC isn't that good.  
Gcc doesn't even officially support SPARC64.


> There was a time when Linus said it would never run on anything
> but x86.  No, NetBSD's superiority comes from better, more-modular code.

and maybe its license? :)
 
> I don't claim the GPL is better than the X11 or BSD license; it has
> different goals.  Brett claims those goals are to destroy the software
> industry;

But this is a TRUE statement.  It is/was a stated goal of the GPL to
eliminate propriatary software. 

> I claim those goals are to keep grass-roots code out of proprietary software.

If that were the claim, the license would look more like LGPL.  

> Basically, if you only want your code to be used,
> the X11 or BSD or even public domain are better choices.  (Why use the
> BSD or X11 licenses in the first place?  Why not just place it in public
> domain?)  If you are an anti-corporate louse like me, choose the GPL.

Public domain has several problems.  One, you lose credit.  The second
(and more importantly), it doesn't remove liability.  
 
> The only flaw I see with the GPL is that it sucks up code from other
> free licenses, and doesn't give any code back.  Some coders dual-license
> their code, but that's not the same thing.  Me, I'm currently debating
> whether my sense of fairness outweighs my great dislike of corporations.
>   Since I doubt any of my code will ever end up in a corporate product,
> I'm tending to the X11 license.

The way I look at it is that X11 forms the bottom rung.  No software should
be WORSE than an X11 based product, as you could have used the X11 code, and
I *want* better reliability in the field.  

> > I agree it is portable.  But I thought the original point was that it
> > is lacking.
> 
> The original claim was that it displaced better compilers because of its
> license.  I claim it displaced more efficient compilers because it is
> portable.  Really, that's all I was driving at.
 
Not sure if I would give you that one, as most software companies don't do
multi-architecture projects.   That fact GCC runs on an ARM chip wouldn't cause
most people to use GCC.  Now, COST, on the other hand.....

-r