gnu-misc-discuss
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Copyright Misuse Doctrine in Apple v. Psystar


From: amicus_curious
Subject: Re: Copyright Misuse Doctrine in Apple v. Psystar
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:41:04 -0500


"Alan Mackenzie" <acm@muc.de> wrote in message news:go1jud$ths$1@colin2.muc.de...
In gnu.misc.discuss amicus_curious <ACDC@sti.net> wrote:

"Alan Mackenzie" <acm@muc.de> wrote in message
news:go0t2l$12pe$1@colin2.muc.de...
In gnu.misc.discuss amicus_curious <ACDC@sti.net> wrote:

"Alan Mackenzie" <acm@muc.de> wrote in message
news:gnv0cu$28je$1@colin2.muc.de...
In gnu.misc.discuss amicus_curious <ACDC@sti.net> wrote:

Just as an analogy.  Tax swindlers (whether legal or not) take without
giving, a bit like "code swindlers", who take open source code without
giving their bit back.

Well, that is hardly equivalent.  Someone cheating on taxes is working
with money which has a common valuation and some rather strict laws
with clear metrics.  Someone using a GPL program is in no way obliged
to do anything in return and 99.99% or more do not, if you consider,
say, how many people have actually contributed anything to Linux versus
how many use it directly.

No, the two aren't equivalent, they're analogous.  Anyone may use a GPL
program; what she may not do is make enhancements and distribute them as
her own.  That's the principle, grounded in practical experience, that
allows free software to exist and flourish.

When they take commonly owned source code, built by the labour of
thousands, yet aren't prepared to give their bit back?  People like that
have never been much loved.  Imagine a village festival where everybody
brings their produce in for a massive feast.  Now some people won't have
anything to give, but they'll be there with their neighbours.  Fair
enough. But a prosperous farmer who is too mean to contribute, yet comes
to the feast anyway won't be liked, will spoil the occasion, and might
even be excluded.  This is analogous to the person who adds his bit onto
free code, presumably to make money, but won't contribute it back to the
project.

There is a big distinction, I believe, in terms of the value of that source which you want "given back". If someone has merely fixed a few defects in
the original, it is reasonable to do that and the person is most likely
motivated to do so.

There's nothing "mere" about fixing defects.  It's a highly laborious,
highly skilled task, as well as often being mind-numbingly tedious.  If
it were "mere", Microsoft would have fixed nearly all of its bugs.

Boring? Yes. Highly skilled? No more so that what it might have taken to create the code in the first place. As to fixing all bugs, some are better left alone and as far as Microsoft bugs go, do you know of any that are really showstoppers? I don't believe that there are any such.

If someone invents a truly useful functional addition, which they would
have to do in order to make any idea commercially viable in the first
place, that is more in line with a new work rather than a logical
extension of the original regardless of the way that the original might
have been incorporated into the new work.

Not really.  That's not the way software development works.  You don't
get brilliant artists effortlessly putting the magic icing on the humdrum
cake laboriously put together by dull drudges.  That's an
over-romanticised picture, which might have been true, a bit, in the
1980s but certainly isn't now.

Well, I said "if" someone had a flash of brilliance, which is somewhat rare, I would agree. But significant improvements are periodically made in things. Possibly does not happen in FOSS, but it could.

Software development is pure drudge work, with a tiny amount of
brilliance in the mix.  It takes far more creativity to produce the cake
than the icing.

Your analogy suffers, too, in that the FOSS festival is advertised as
"bring a dish if you want to share, but come one, come all for the
feast!"  Perhaps the prosperous farmer only wants a dab of mashed
potatoes to put on his own plate of prime rib that he brought for
himself, and, as soon as he does, everyone demands a piece of his meat.

Possibly so.  That farmer, by participating, will earn far more in status
and goodwill than his cost in meat.

That does seem to be all that the FOSS users are willing to part with mostly but you cannot stick a fork in it.

I don't really see much danger in any of that happening, as I have said
elsewhere, but I think the philosophy of the GPL is wrong at its core.
If FOSS were about sharing, that is something that can be supported,
but it has become about donating and with the court actions it is
coming closer to the taxation of which you speak.

I'm not sure what you mean by "wrong" here.  The GPL works.  It persuades
tens of thousands of people, including me, to contribute software which
is generally useful.  Licences like BSD don't.  Not much.

Are you saying that, absent the threat of a GPL violation suit, you would not make your contribution? Why do the freeBSD and Apache and MIT license lovers do what they do? Do you think them foolish?

No, actually, OS/X isn't dependent on Apple's hardware.  It will run
happily on a Psystar box.

But not legitimately, I understand.

That's under contention in an American court at the moment.  Should it
be legitimate for a software manufacturer to dictate what sort of
hardware his software package may be run on?  I don't think it should
be.

It is a simple matter of contracts.  You are not allowed to use a $17
DVD to show a video picture in a theater and charge admission, for
example, or are not allowed to use a 99 cent track from Apple and
broadcast it on a commercial radio station.  If Apple wants to restrict
the use of their product to specific circumstances, they have that
right to do so.  The GPL has the same right, of course, and it is only
a matter of what civil action might be taken in the case of a
violation.  With Apple, they can show that they lose a certain amount
of trade in their own hardware and that has a value to be assessed
against Psystar.  With the GPL, it is much harder to show that any
damage has actually accrued to the copyright owners.  We get into the
arena of hurt feelings and some loss of prominence rather than any
financial impact, which is the traditional way of assessing damages and
compensation.

It's anything but simple.  If I buy a DVD, I can play it on whatever DVD
machine I like - I'm not forced to buy the movie company's super delux
offering.  Yet with OS/X, when I buy a license for a single copy, I'm
required to buy a super delux Apple machine to run it.

It's all in the fine print. And you cannot play the DVD on a movie theater's equipment either.

With the GPL, the damage is clear - without credible enforcement of the
GPL, hackers won't create free software, so allowing companies to violate
it will lead to a loss of value in that body of software.

Gee, I thought they did it because they were benevolent. You say they will just stick out their lower lip and refuse to work?

For Apple, the damage isn't clear.  Yes, they'll sell fewer Apple Macs,
but on the other hand, they'll sell more software licenses.  And, of
course, some of those using OS/X on a cheap PC clone will later "upgrade"
to a snazzy Mac.

You could argue that.  It is up to the jury.

Then again, how is it "damage" to Apple?  The fact that they've got to
compete with their hardware as such, rather than tying it to their
software?

I am sure that they look at it as a product package just like Sun looked at their servers with a proprietary version of Unix installed. One complements the other. Think of the inexpensive Winmodems that only worked with Windows versions or some HP printers in the Win98 era.

There's no reason why FreeBSD couldn't be packaged up in a box and sold,
with installation support, for 70 Euros the way GNU/Linux is (or was
until recently).  Red Hat and SuSE have done this profitably for 15
years. Or even why you can't buy FreeBSD, with full support, for several
hundred dollars per box.  Maybe you can, but I've not heard of it.

If you could do it at a profit, you should do it, but that is the crux of
the problem.  There would be a need to establish a market for the package
and that would cost a lot of time, effort, and money to establish.

Yet it was done for GNU/Linux, several times.

I don't agree. Windows is selling hundreds of millions of copies per year. Linux is still less than 1% of that total. Revenue wise they are trailing Windows, conventional Unix, IBM's mainframe products, and are down with Netware in terms of absolute revenues. That is not much of a showing after so many years.

Then, without any sort of protection for your product's code, many
others could duplicate the package and offer it at a lower cost since
they would not have to recoup the costs of educating the consumers.

This strategy was tried by Oracle about a year ago.  They took Red Hat's
stuff and offered it to the market at about half Red Hat's price.  It
didn't work.  What Red Hat's customers buy isn't the code itself, but
the quality of the service and support behind it.

And I think you mean "restriction" here, not "protection".  The product's
code wouldn't be in any danger, being adequately backed up, hence
wouldn't need any protection.

OK. The meaning was protection in terms of making it difficult for a competitor to replace you.

But how do you differentiate Linux, or freeBSD for that matter?  Answer:
price.

Not really.  By the support deal offered with it.  Or by the target
market - Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian and Gentoo are all aiming their versions
at different sorts of customers.

You are misinterpreting my words. I mean differentiate Desktop Linux vs Windows or server Linux vs Unix or Windows server versions.

Now many people are price conscious and it is becoming more and more
of a concern in many places, but low-price suffers a lot because almost
everyone has an inherent belief that "you get what you pay for" and
paying less means getting less.

I doubt that is true any more.  People download illicit music and film
at zero cost, and it's often of a higher quality that the legitimate
equivalents, because it's not encumbered with digital restrictions.
People, presumably, are using zero-cost web based software from Google.
And, of course, the quality of high priced software (e.g. from Microsoft)
is legendary.  ;-)

I know that the Linux fans like to comfort themselves with that notion. It is what makes them so cute and so ineffective at the same time. But you have to look at the situation through the eyes of the consumer that your are aiming to sell to. Microsoft targets customers that comprise a lot less of the population, I suspect, than the 90+ % that they are actually selling to. Windows is not ideal for many people, but there is nothing else to choose from, or so they think. I am sure that many of these dissatisfied users might actually avail themselves of Linux, but they don't know where to start. Fortunately for Microsoft, the Linux advocates don't know either.

When it comes to a luxury good or even what is termed a "shopping
good", price is a lousy differentiator.  In a commodity situation, it
might be more useful, but computers have not moved to that class yet.
So the public image of Linux, where there even is one, is that it is
a low-end substitute for Windows.

That is changing.  Slowly, but surely.  For example, Munich and Vienna
administrations are converting (or have converted) to Linux.  My nephew
(aged 20) sent me an email out of the blue saying how he'd installed
Ubuntu without problems and it was great.

It may be changing but so slowly that it is not possible to really tell. I periodically install Linux of one flavor or another and I know that it works pretty well. I think there are some rough edges that make things harder than they might otherwise be. One thing I think is silly is Ubuntu's dislike for non-FOSS drivers, even though written for Linux, on the video card that is in the machine that I use for this experiment. It is an HP slimline machine with a builtin wireless and an nVidia chipset that the OSS driver seems to only allow for 640 x 480 256 color mode. Once you get it all installed, which is a thrill because many of the install screens have controls that you have to guess at since they are off the screen, you can use the built-in Ubuntu software to find and install the commercial driver and you get 32 bit color at full resolution. But they won't include it as part of the install and offer up a limp sort of notice that the good stuff is not FOSS and so beware of the intellectual pollution or something that can cause.

They should get the profits from providing high quality products to
appreciative customers.  You don't have to misappropriate common
property to achieve this.  Again, gen up on the history.  It will help
you understand the GPL.

They didn't misappropriate anything.  They added their own work product
to what already existed and charged a little extra for its use.

OK, "misappropriate" needs quote marks here.  They broke the gentlemen's
understanding that surrounded the code base, namely that the code base is commonly "owned"[*] and each has an obligation to maintain and enhance it. As a result of this breach, some coding ended up having to be done twice,
a stupid waste of productive capacity.

[*] The copyright was actually held by MIT.

The GPL was a remedy for this problem, making what used to be a
"gentlemens's understanding" into a firm legal obligation.

That is one way of looking at it.  Another is that the GPL prevents an
entrepreneur from offering a superior product at a fair value and so
stifles creativity.

You don't get much more entrepreneurial than Richard Stallman, and it
was the GPL which unleashed a veritable torrent of creativity.

Do we have the same definition for entrepreneur? Stallman doesn't fit my picture at all.

If I have something better than the free version, I cannot sell
it, the GPL says, rather I have to offer the improvements to anyone and
everyone.  In exchange for not having to expend a little "productive
capacity" to replicate some existing, free to the world to use, code, I
have to offer my unique innovation for no return.

Yes.  Except, as described above, that's a falsely romanticised picture
of software creation.  There aren't really any "unique innovations" in
software.  Maybe one or two per generation (i.e. 25 - 30 years).  And
even then, they tend to be steady developments of ideas rather than
sudden innovations.  The GUI WIMP interface was such a development.  The
LISP language a generation earlier.  diff and patch, perhaps.  Don't know
what's around now which is strikingly innovative.

The point is, free software doesn't work without the principle of
reciprocity.  Otherwise BSD style licenses would have become prevalent.

Other than Linux, I think that PHP and Apache are the most significant OSS packages available. Neither has "copyleft" and both have their own BSD style licenses, do they not?

Someone has to be smart enough to see an improvement and talented
enough to implement it and dedicated enough to promote it.  They
deserve the reward.

Who's arguing?  But if they've put in 0.1% of the effort, they deserve
0.1% of the reward.  They tend to keep all of it, though.

Things are worth what people value them at.  If I add something to
Linux that is worth $100, do I not deserve the whole hundred?

I suppose that's fair enough. If the system with your addition brings in
revenues of $100,000, and your bit is 0.1% of the system, then it's fair
for you to keep $100 and forward the other $99,900 to the other
developers. But outrageously cumbersome and impractical. Instead you're expected to contribute your code, so that everybody can take advantage of
it, just as you took advantage of theirs, and you keep the entire
$100,000.

That might work for a system situation where the customization effort
provides the product value and that is perhaps the best chance that
FOSS has in the world since any individual set of changes is only used
once.  If it looks like a product situation, though, where the change
will be used in many separate instances, the cost of using the FOSS
original is vastly overshadowed by the value of the improvement.

Then build it on a BSD infrastructure, or on a proprietary
infrastructure.  It's hardly as though GPL software has a monopoly on
many application domain.  Where's the problem?

In any case, I am willing to concede that there are original works that
are open source and always have been.  But the steak is sold by the
sizzle and all of the sizzle these days seems relatively proprietary.
And then it is followed by an open source effort to duplicate the
feature, function, and look and feel.

You might be right, there.  But the solid, basic, durable programs are
mainly FOSS.

Practically anything decent to do with software development originated
as free stuff, or if older, from the Unix tradition.

I like .NET and Visual Studio, of course, and if they originated with
Unix, they have come a long way since.

I said anything _decent_.  ;-)

Well, be that way, but, when you get a chance, download the free, as in
beer, Visual Studio Express C# version and MS SQL Server 2008 Express, and build yourself a highly secure client/server system in a couple of hours to
see where it can take you.

I doubt I'd be able to run them, because they'd be built for MS systems
and they'd be lacking the source code.  But can you really build
something highly secure on Microsoft infrastructure?

Good enough for me and you certainly.

Another thing, I'm not really much interested in Yet Another C-like
language.  C++ and Java are such bad languages (I do have specialist
experience here) and C is 35 years old, and all of them are painful to
use.

What is so painful about Java?  C# is virtually the same sort of syntax.



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]