GRsecurity is preventing others from redistributing source code

[Xen]

concernedfossdev at teknik.io schreef op 02-06-2016 0:22:
> June 1 2016 4:27 PM, "Xen" <list at xenhideout.nl> wrote:
>> concernedfossdev at teknik.io schreef op 01-06-2016 16:15:
>> 
>>> He has frustrated the purpose of the agreement (the grant) he had 
>>> with
>>> the original licensor, and thus
>>> the grant fails. In other words: he has violated the license.
>> 
>> So what do you want? For him to go out of business?
>> 
>> Do you want free access to his work? Which is it?
> 
> It doesn't matter what I want, but I ask:

You clearly want something. Your actions do not come out of their own.

Pure ideology is no reason to do anything, there has to be a reward in 
it for you too.

General "being offended" by something is no reason to attack it; there 
has to be a reason that will actually yield you something in person, 
whether that is a better ecosystem, a more attuned lifestyle, being in 
agreement with your own self, or actual rewards in the world directly.

> He had open access to a much greater work, why does it bother you if
> those whom he took the larger work from might want access to whatever
> changes he had made to their work and has distributed to others; or
> simply that the others to whom the changes have been distributed be
> able to contribute it back to they whom have originated the original
> work in the first place.

Because they never asked for payment or set any conditions for access to 
their work.

If a book is in my hands, a vendor no longer has the ability to direct 
what I should be able to do with it. This is just common sense. You 
cannot have license terms for a hammer that sense I cannot hammer nails 
with it only sold by a certain vendor, or not sold by others.

If you want something in return, be honest up front. Don't shackle 
people with demands that they cannot do certain things with it after you 
have given them it for free. It doesn't work, and it is not human style. 
It doesn't agree with humans. Humans want freedom. You want something 
that cannot be.

It is really the same as those licenses by softwarevendors alike, in the 
commercial world. I don't care what they say, and I don't care what you 
say. You consider it acting in bad faith. I consider it grievous assault 
to require me to read a license agreement that is clearly not meant to 
be read in the first place.

Perhaps you know the book the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is 
something of the same. The protagonist Arthur Dent is told his house is 
going to get destroyed, and the plans for it have been available in the 
city hall for months. He had been able to object to it if he wanted. 
When he goes to find it, he discovers that they are buried in a basement 
with a lock that doesn't really open.

Writing licenses in ALL CAPS with relevant terms that are actually 
buried inside a load of nonsense that usually does not apply to anyone.

So I don't care what you say, but according to you, I would have been 
acting in "bad faith" all my life. I only deal with humans, not 
computers that require a press of a button to install, regardless 
whether I have read anything or not. Just the presenting of some 
document to me, but allowing me to install it regardless of whether I 
agree or not, is not a form of statement on my part, but it is a form of 
statement on your part that it is free for me to install.

"By using this software you have agreed to the terms you can find if you 
dig really deep." No I did not.

It requires a lawyer to understand those terms, hence, a user cannot 
even be expected to know how to deal with it.

If you wrote it in plain language, you might have a case. But I am not 
listening to "screaming people" that don't know how to write in a normal 
way.

Today a vendor is trying to make me pay basically six months of rent 
they had said in advance would be free. They will find it in front of a 
court that will dismiss it. Guaranteed.

These days many vendors try to force you to read it (you have to scroll 
down to the bottom): you think that actually works?

If something is dysfunctional to begin with, then why do you do it?

Google these days now describes in plain language what has actually 
changed, now it has some merit.

"It is in the small print". Yeah. But courts still hold you to a 
standard of reasonability and something that could be considered "just 
requirement" (it would translate to "onredelijk bezwarend" -- that is 
the term they use here to say that something could not have been 
required of something). If something is onredelijk bezwarend, you did 
not need to do it because the other party made it too hard for you.

Sure I will hold that, as I do myself, that if you intend to make money 
on it, or really distribute something as a way to have it be attributed 
to you, you will read those terms. But for general use, you don't. No 
one does.

So of course mr. Spender knows the terms, and knows them really well, 
probably.

But you already gave away the kernel for free and you gave it away for 
free to millions of people.

No distinction. No discrimination of whatever kind.

Acting in bad faith, sure. It is acting in bad faith if you think you 
can install those terms on anyone. You have a certain faith, and it is 
bad, because it never comes to be true.

That is like acting with the faith that if you jump out of a spaceship, 
miraculously another one will come to pick you up. That is acting in bad 
faith.

It happened to Arthur Dent, it worked for them.

Will it happen for you? It could, but I doubt it. And I certainly 
wouldn't depend on it.

Actually they did not jump out of a ship. They were forced out. By the 
Vogons that wanted to destroy Earth. To make room for a interspatial 
bypass. For which the plans, including the destruction of Earth, had 
been available in some related starsystem for months. People could have 
objected, if they wanted to.


> It seems very strange that you seem to object to this.
> It is only fair.

You never did that work with me in mind. I could not have even existed. 
You depend on nothing from me, and you deserve nothing from me, if I do 
not want to give it.

If you did not want to give your work to people, you should not have 
done so. Don't blame me for it now.

You have no claim on me whatsoever, except insofar as that my work may 
be a copy of yours. If it is just a patch, meaning my own work, you have 
no claim on me whatsoever and I do feel I am going to be victorious in 
this in court myself, if it ever comes down to it (and I am sure it 
might, but not at all sure it will).


I will repeat again: the primary right is the right to make a 
difference. You want to take that right away from me, because if my work 
is automatically transferred to you (pretty much) and you integrate it 
in whatever way you like, throw it away, diss it, criticise it, publicly 
humiliate me, whatever. Then my difference will have become neglectable 
as so not even to exist.

It is just a way to marginalize people and to automatically transfer 
their owner rights to you.

It is like click and bait: you set out a honey pot, and even people are 
tempted enough to use your software, and it becomes important enough, 
then the real good work other people do on it, will be yours.

There is much more to software than just basic structure. A mundane 
system like the kernel could possibly be, but we are also talking about 
other stuff, does not have a lot of market value. The value is really 
added by adding the detail, which usually takes the most amount of work, 
the fine tuning. Most Linux "vendors" do not do that thing.

The "polish" is apparently seen as an ungrateful thing to do. So it can 
actually be likened to writing a book that says "this is a story and 
stuff happens to people in it." And then someone else fills in the 
narrative, and then you claim copyright on that narrative, because you 
have founded the structure for it.

When you make mundane stuff available, it becomes common infrastructure. 
In the Netherlands there has been a case of law between a manufacturer 
of what we now call "scooters". And someone using their brandname in 
their own product or advertizing? The brand name had become so generic 
as to be identical to the general name of the kind of device it was. The 
manufacturer could no longer really claim trademark on the name.

The same applied to "walkman" by Sony I think.

(I think it was Puch, I cannot find it in the list[1] but it is a long 
time ago.)

So the more generic your infrastructure is going to be (and the more it 
is going to be infrastructure in the first place) the less you may be 
able to appeal to "copyright" as a form of protecting that against 
something that actually *does* add value.



> Spengler could have written his own kernel from scratch, or hired a
> team, like those before him did.

He could have? You really think so? Did he have the money? Who are those 
before him? Oh, you mean Linus who has been working on it for almost as 
long as I have had pubic hair.

I don't think there is any antecedent of another person or team who has 
hired a team or done himself, or herself, the creating of a new kernel 
from scratch, just for the purpose of adding additional features to it, 
all the while trying to market it to the installed base of existing 
users.

Unless you mean Apple, but again, even though they consider themselves a 
Software company, they are really a Hardware Vendor.

And, apple's kernel is open source, but its higher level features are 
not. In line with this idea: structural things can be opensourced, but 
value added things cannot. It does not work and never has.

Or if you do open source it, at least make it proprietary.

This thing you cite here, this idea, would be considered by a court, 
likely, I think, "onredelijk bezwarend", and also pretty ludicrous. It 
is not realistic to assume that he could have, you are just talking 
nonsense here.

You cannot write a new kernel from scratch with the sole purposes of 
adding security features to Linux.

That defeats the entire idea to begin with, I think.


So in line with that: seeing as that the Linux kernel is deeply 
structural and virtually omnipresent. So as to have become a base 
default of pretty much anything related to anything that even wants to 
use the Linux ecosystem, it has made itself indispensable. And though 
you would still be able to copyright Microsoft Windows, you cannot force 
any application developer to comply to a certain license, and the courts 
have often verdicted against Microsoft when it tried to install 
anti-competitive measures, no matter how little it did for real people.

Yes, Microsoft employed strategies such as hidden APIs that were only 
available to Microsoft programs.

It has been considered unfair behaviour.

Today Windows asks you what browser you want, to the point of ludicracy, 
I think.

Something like that in any case. But so as to conclude:


1. The kernel is structural, omnipresent, and unavoidable
2. That doesn't make it a good component for strong copyright, or any 
idea that adding to it, will hinder its success
3. It is a rudimentary core system of millions of devices. It is 
completely or almost completely available at no cost, and with no 
requirement (almost)

4. The only claim the copyright holder might have, is when actions done 
by others actually impede it, or hinder its success, or damage its 
reputations. This may be the case today.

5. As such the authors could have a say in how it is getting used.

And that's about all there is to it.



> Instead he forked a GPL'd work, and the developers did infact choose
> the GPL and not the BSD license, and for a reason.

That reason is irrelevant to a court if it does not agree with regular 
business practices and recognised real interests of any party involved. 
You can invent all kinds of reasons you want, that doesn't make them 
realistic, or even legal.

And he did not fork the work, he added to it; I believe he only 
distributes patches and not the full thing? I don't know, but it would 
not make much of a difference to such a person.

LibreOffice is a fork and you are apparently perfectly okay with them 
stealing from what was then the OpenOffice team (or owner, no matter how 
irrelevant that really was).

I mean screw Oracle for the largest part, I think, I don't even like 
what they do to Java. I wish it was still with Sun. But still.

I mean see the incredulous court proceedings against Google today. 
Copyrighting the Java APIs. That you never even designed yourself. When 
the whole intent for java was to become omnipresent.

So what those developers may want, may be irrelevant. Unless it is 
something real and realistic and really threatens business interests, or 
personal interests, or interests of actual real human beings, that you 
need to identify (those interests).

Just a breach of "license terms" is just not going to be enough.

Seeing the amount of money he apparently makes ; maybe it is too much ; 
but he will be able to defend himself ;-).


You must still describe the outcome you want, but you just did. You want 
free access to his work.

"It's about the money, money, money....".

You know, it shouldn't be about the money, but for you it is.




[1] 
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_merknamen_die_als_soortnaam_worden_gebruikt