Isn't that a corp just buying a license or donating money to a foundation?
this post was submitted on 09 May 2022
9 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43849 readers
780 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Isnβt that a corp just buying a license
No. What I mean is bribing courts to bypass the requirement to follow the license.
or donating money to a foundation?
No.
No. What I mean is bribing courts to bypass the requirement to follow the license.
I'd fuckin riot
In that case.. Those are called political donations.
Legal questions would have to be answered on a per-country basis, since different high courts can make different rulings.
I'm not sure people 'bribe their way through' a legal system by simply paying money, then wandering off with a good ruling. Vague laws might be swayed, but having public courts mean people can't just aske for a murder charge to be dropped.
I don't know of any unambiguous GPL violation which has been left alone. Trump's social media (truth-social or something) was found to have violataed the GPL, so they'll have to release that code.
Copyleft licenses have largely remained untested in courts. It's surprising that Oracle hasn't made a shell company, violated its own GPL license, then thrown the court case to create precedent that GPL is unenforceable.
IANAL but I think that in itself would get thrown out. I remember from my media law class that after so many jokes about Fox News on the Simpsons, they sued Fox Entertainment and the rolling in the case was essentially "You can't sue yourself"
Yep. I thought they would have done it too.
It's very depressing though; copyleft licenses could easily be overthrown. :(
when they need to they probably will.
right now who is even going to put them in the position they even need to worry about that kind of expense?
The thing I don't like about copyleft is the implication that a license is even a valid thing. I get it, in the Church of Satan kind of beat them at their own game thing... But... Shouldn't we just obsolete scarcity and publish everything public domain if we really believe in free ideas?
Yes and no. On a raw principle, yes. But what are the practical consequences of non-copyleft licenses? It's just more corporate exploitation of volunteer maintainers, as we see in the open-source ecosystem.
If a company had money to "bribe" why wouldn't they just pay off the original creators for a license change? Or make their own version of the gpl codebase?
It's not the 90s anymore, the majority of new software is released under permissive licensing. And companies are more willing to upstream their code, regardless of license.
If a company had money to βbribeβ why wouldnβt they just pay off the original creators for a license change?
That can get expensive. If the companies could systematically subvert copyleft licenses; then they wouldn't have to bribe each creator for a license change.
Itβs not the 90s anymore
OK. It's the 2020s and it's still relevant.
the majority of new software is released under permissive licensing.
- Source?
- And? Popularity doesn't reduce the relevancy of permissive or copyleft licensing.
Permissive licensing is still flawed; because it allows companies to remove the freedoms set by the license and not contribute to the original project. The Amazon-Elastisearch scandal is a modern example of abusing permissive licenses.^[Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing]^[Amazon responds to Elastic changing its open-source software license, SDTimes]
If you want a time-relevant example, Microsoft's 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' tactic preyed on noncopyleft programs by copying the standard and then adding proprietary features to lock people out of it.^[The Microsoft Monopoly, The Science Elf] Copyleft is designed to prevent this tactic from working.
And companies are more willing to upstream their code,
Open-source is an irrelevant topic here. I am debating about copyleft licenses, not open-source licenses.