On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 09:52:30PM -0500, Richard Graziano wrote:
> Thank you so much for your kind and courteous explanation.  But I have been
> in this business a long time and if what you say about the posture of
> open-software is true, and I have no reason to doubt you, so I accept it,
> then the fact is that open software and open hardware have been around for
> as long as I can remember.  I used to teach electronics design at a
> community college and I gave my students a good deal of what I developed so
> that they could use it, learn from it and profit from it.  I had already
> profited from it myself.  I am always ready to help new engineers and
> technicians solve problems or get projects up and running.  I have never
> even considered compensation: it is a gift.  I have been doing this for
> years, only I never referred to it as open anything.

That's the concept. Except that the family of free licenses specifically
grant (and under some conditions require) the licencee permission to further
distribute that work.

>
> That being the case, and I admit that I came in late on this thread, I fail
> to see why it would be controversial.  I read the SCO letter and it made a
> great deal of sense to me because I do not believe that anyone should be
> compelled to open their software (technology).

That argument is flawed on two different fronts. Let's take the 1st paragraph
of page 2 [EMPHSIS MINE]:

"The GPL seeks to commodotize software by reducing its monetary value to
zero and making it. THE GPL IS CAREFULLY DESIGNED TO HAVE A VIRAL EFFECT,
IT "FREES" THE SOFTWARE THAT IS PROPRIETARY, LICENSABLE, AND A SOURCE OF
INCOME FROM THE COMPANIES THAT DEVELOP IT."

The above is flat inflammatory for effect. The GPL cannot be applied to
software except by its owner/authors. So there's no way for me to take your
software, slap a GPL license on it and "free" it. If it did that, then one
should be pissed off. That's what the letter wants you to think.

Now the flip side that ticks for profit software companies off is the fact
that the GPL is also designed to resist being proprietized by software
developers. That's the viral effect. I release GPL software that I have
written. By doing this I've granted you a specific list of rights. However
the one responsibility I put on you is that if you modify and redistribute,
that you extend the same rights I've given to you to whomever you distribute
to. So if I give you the source of a project under the GPL and you modify it
and sell it, you have to give your modifications to the source too.

The GPL has a price, and the currency is access. I open access to my stuff for
everyone to use. But the price is that if you add to it, you can't restrict
access to the changes. If that price is too high, then all you have to do is
rewrite it yourself, then slap any license you like on it.

> I am a staunch advocate of
> individual rights and copyright protection as well as patent protection.  I
> have some designs that I will not patent because that will put them in the
> public domain where others may be able to discover the basis of invention.

Trade secret. Works a lot of the time but provides no protection if the cat
is let out the bag.

But the GPL is a specific expression of the individual rights and copyright
protections you refer to. I as the author insist on the right to give my
code away, and to insist that if you use my (MY!) code as a basis for your
work, that you make your code just as available as mine. And I'm using
copyright to enforce the license, so if you disagree, by copyright you have
no permissions at all.

> I once was asked by Singer, et al to design a better autofocus that Kodak's.
> It was easy. I pulled their patents and decided to go a different route that
> would surpass the Kodak design. But that does not suggest that patent laws
> should be abrogated because a trade secret is viable.

Software patents are a very sticky area because they are almost always the
tangible expression of an idea, which originally patents prohibited. One
cannot patent the idea of a car, one can patent a specific car. But in software
if one patents a program, then the next developer can simply write another
program that does the same job. So software patents try to grab as much
infospace as it can i.e. (no one can implement any concept of a One Click
Shopping site because Amazon holds the patent).

But it's a smokescreen anyway designed to make you think that Open Source
advocates want to run around abridging software patents.

>
> If I am to understand you, the controversy is that ones right to publish
> freely without consequence is being infringed upon.  If someone steals the
> source code from someone else and publishes it at large, I see that as
> infringement and I cannot see any way to justify it.  According to the SCO
> letter, that is a salient part of their argument.

It is. However in almost a year since this issue first came up, SCO has not
deigned to supply one shred of evidence backing up that claim. It's gotten
so bad that IBM filed and was granted a motion compelling SCO to come up with
the goods.

Also there is a dispute as to whether or not SCO owns the disputed code at
all. Here's an article on the subject.

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/story/0,10801,88732,00.html?f=x72

> Some significant pat of
> their source code was usurped.  I do not know if this is a fact.

Good! Thanks for having an open mind about that point.

> But I am persuaded that protection against such theft is warranted.

Of course it is. And that protection is already there. It's called copyright
law.

>
> I appreciate your clarification, that open-software means anyone can give
> away their work without fear of being impugned or maligned.  But I wonder
> why that should even be a question when it has been a practice since I was a
> new physicist with a small company in Silicon Valley.   I have been laboring
> under the assumption, based upon what others have represented as their view,
> that all software should be "open."

I certainly don't subscribe to that view. My view is simple, if it's your code
do what you want with it. If it's not your code, do only what the code's
owner gives you license to do. Simple. Now as a user I can decide if I wish
to comply to the term, and if not I can look for (or write) alternatives.
Usually I will look at Open Source solutions first because I know from hard
experience that Open Source gives me the best flexibility in utilizing the
software.

>  I can only conclude that there is room
> for clarification on both sides of the issue because some are indeed
> advocating that legal protection of software rights be removed that it is a
> compelling force.

> As you have stated, however, these must be the extremists, or fringe
> elements of the idea.
>
> I wish to be sure that you accept my sincere thanks for taking the time to
> explain some things that I have misunderstood, and clarifying some thing
> which I have understood.  I will continue to research the broader context of
> the notion.
>
> Regards,
> Richard
>

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