Re: "Licences Wars"

On Sunday 23 November 2008, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: [hackers-il] "Licences 
Wars"":
> > Furthermore, I don't think the FOSS world is under any threat from
> > proprietary software vendors, that can be prevnted if I GPLed all my
> > code. Can you cite any possible substantial threat?
>
> Thinking of future threats is hard (in the banking business, this is a
> whole profession, and as you can see lately, the haven't been doing a very
> good job. But as they say, "Hindsight is always 20:20", and it's easier to
> look at the past.
>
> And the experience of the last 20 years indeed shown that proprietary
> software vendor's use of BSD has been a problem to free software. Not a
> huge problem, certainly nothing that could ever kill free software, but a
> problem nontheless.
>
> Let me give you just a few examples.
>
> In the second half of the 90s, X-Windows was quite popular - a department
> (in universities, companies, etc.) would have strong Unix workstations
> (from Sun, DEC, SGI, HP and other vendors) and people would have cheaper
> machines showing the output from the strong machine using X-Windows. As
> MS-Windows grew popular, people wanted to use their PC running Windows to
> display X-Windows sessions. But unfortunately, the only X server available
> for Windows was commercial software (Exceed), which could happen because X
> was BSD-licensed and not GPL. Users (at the time, most had corporate or
> university funds - they weren't home users) bit the bullet and paid. It
> took literarly years before a free X server for Windows became available.

I agree this is a problem. However, if X-Windows were GPLed, then the people 
who made Exceed and wanted to sell it, would not have made it in the first 
place, because they had to make it GPLed. So either they would have 
implemented it from scratch or not at all. It is possible that a different 
group would have created a free X server for Windows, but it is possible that 
no free X server would have been available at all. And if a different group 
could have created a free X server for Windows without Exceed, they could 
have certainly created it with it.

>
> Another example - Mosix. Mosix (if you're familiar with it) was written
> over a *proprietary* BSD variant called BSDI. Because the BSD licence
> allowed BSDI to make it proprietary, and Mosix made the error in judgement
> (or, more accurately, at the time of the judgement there weren't many
> alternatives) of using it, for many years Mosix itself could not be made
> free software, even though the people in the Hebrew University who
> developed it wanted to do so.

Well, the same problem could have been present if Mosix had chosen to use a 
System V-based UNIX (or a different proprietary OS altogether) that never 
originated from BSD-style code (although it did incorporate some code from 
BSD). This is a problem on the judgement of the Mosix developers, not on the 
availability of BSDI by itself.

>
> Another less clear-cut example is the massive Unix diversity of the 90s.
> A dozen companies, like Sun, HP, DEC, SGI, AT&T, SCO, BSDI, all created
> their own variants of Unix and spent thousands of man-years on their
> development. On the positive side, the Unix world was thriving because of
> this diversity, but on the negative side, none of these thousands of man
> years went into free software, and Richard Stallman and his friends had
> to spend nearly a decade to replicate all this work. Is it surprising,
> then, that Richard Stallman wanted to invent the copyleft license?



>
> > > >  If they pose a threat (which I don't think they do), then
> > > > no amount of keeping my code GPLed will prevent that threat.
>
> The GPL is not trying to prevent free software from being destroyed, but
> rather to "force" people and companies into spending their work into free
> software, rather than proprietary software. And I think you can't deny it's
> succeeding. The Linux kernel is the most obvious example - after decades
> where every company created their own kernel or took a BSD-licensed kernel
> and "appropriated" it, in the last decade there is a huge push for all
> comapnies to work together on the open Linux kernel, and all these
> companies are "forced" to contribute their work back to free software.

This is true.

>
> > For example, someone integrated my Freecell Solver library in a shareware
> > (without source) game he wrote titled Freecell 3D:
> >
> > http://www.ambermango.com/php/am/f3d/index.php
> >
> > He sells ths game online. It did not do any damage, because there are
> > plenty of Freecell implementations around. I on my part am pretty happy
> > with the open-source PySolFC.
>
> Let's imagine that you wrote a great freecell solver library, but you suck
> at UI and failed to create a graphical game based on that library, and wish
> that someone created a UI on top of your library. 

That's a lot of if's. When I started working on Freecell Solver, there were 
already plenty of graphical Freecell games, possibly with support for other 
variants of Solitaire. And there were also several open-source ones, 
including some very polished ones.

As a result, I could have easily integrated my solver into one of them. So 
your thought experiment is not very realistic, although it may be valid in 
the general case.

> If your library is BSD, 
> someone could create this UI but make it commercial and not even you can
> use it. If your library is GPL, this person is forced to either make his
> code public (so you and your friends can use it) or pay you for a new
> license. 

He could also:

1. Develop his own Freecell solving library from scratch. That will probably 
be less work than developing a graphical Freecell game.

2. Write a command line executable that uses the library call it, and process 
its output. This strategy was taken by the PySolFC developers out of 
convenience using my existing "fc-solve" executable.

3. Write a GPLed server for solving Freecell that the graphical game would 
communicate with using TCP/IP or a different IPC mechanism.

4. Decide that developing a graphical game only to later release it as free 
software won't be worth his time, and as a result not develop it at all.

In all of these cases, we won't have a graphical game as FOSS.

> Which of those scenarios will make you happier? I can't see how 
> the GPL isn't better in this scenario.

I'd rather have a proprietary derived work than no work at all, or instead 
someone duplicating my effort in creating a BSD or a proprietary replacement 
for my work.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Interview with Ben Collins-Sussman - http://xrl.us/bjn8s

Shlomi, so what are you working on? Working on a new wiki about unit testing 
fortunes in freecell? -- Ran Eilam

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