Hi,
On 8/17/10, Frank Heckenbach ih8mj@fjf.gnu.de wrote:
Read the last paragraph first before starting to reply!
Done. But ...
I don't WANT to ignore or break laws, only some REALLY shouldn't or else CAN'T be obeyed without making someone's life 10 x more difficult for NO benefit. I am not a pirate or anarchist, but I do hate legalese! You think ISO 7185 or BP have holes and bugs? The legal system has a billion times more!
Keep in mind that all of this really centers around P4 (and P5), which Pemberton explicitly says is P.D., and the files themselves say nothing more restrictive (or at all). In fact, from what I can tell, Nageli is somehow involved as author in "pint.p", but he isn't listed in there. So even that is an omission that nobody felt important to include.
BTW, *I know you dislike unrelated comparisons but* Oberon download page on ETH suggests a BSD license for their current works, if that gives you any idea what they think nowadays. So if even their latest / greatest is freely available, what makes you think they want to restrict something older / less useful?? I know that's not proof, but I think it's a valid clue.
"based on existing law" ... for what, U.S. or Germany or ... ?
Unless you can prove that Pemberton is lying, I think it's safe to say that P4 is "public domain" (of some sort or similar)! Obviously nobody wants to use it, fine! Just stop pretending it's so illegal! "Murky" is even not the word I would use here, and that's (at worst) what the situation is!
Rugxulo wrote:
The point was that it's nothing huge enough that they can act like it took them 20 years to write and is worth millions of dollars.
Where in copyright law does it say it needs to take them 20 years to write and be worth millions of dollars in order to have copyright?
Where do you draw the line???? Atari saying the yellow dot from Adventure is trademarked????
Obviously P4/P5 aren't the easiest things to write, but they surely can't be the hardest either! The whole point was to avoid duplication of effort. But, again, brilliant that these laws are, they don't care, they only want to protect that which even the authors probably don't care about!!!
My point, in case you're referring to this is, it might take *us* several years to write a new GPC and the result might be worth quite a bit, and they could bring it down with even a small copyright claim.
Or patents. What are you going to do about that? Nothing, just stick your head in the sand, esp. 'cause you (EU) don't care. Of course, I don't either, but if you really WANT to worry incessantly ....
It doesn't bother them to legislate and change everything and force their ideas on us, even when it clearly wasn't thought out properly, so how is my random idea any worse?
Because lawyers and judges are not gonna follow your idea, but the law.
And they couldn't stretch the current law beyond its limits?? They'd somehow have to be all nice and moral and perfect "just because" they stick to the law? You think the law can't screw you? Where there's a will, there's a way! (Should fit right up your pessimistic attitude.)
I suppose this alludes to my questioning of Pemberton's claim. But again, this is a bad example, since as Florian wrote, the statement is in the sources, whereas in the P4 source there is no such statement, as I pointed out.
FPC clearly didn't make it very obvious what exact GPL they were using, probably because nobody cared!! To most people, free software / open source / GPL is probably "good enough" (all sounds the same).
We didn't invade their house and pilfer their silverware, just attempting to use what is already available (and without any mention of license anywhere except Pemberton's claim that it's PD, which for some odd reason is horribly dubious because he's such a devious liar, naturally).
Who said he was a liar? Are you misquoting me now?
If you don't think it's legally usable, then you are saying "it's not P.D.", which means you either thinks he's heavily incorrect or a liar.
<sarcasm> Are you saying I misquoted you? Because I didn't, you liar! <sarcasm>
Besides, as I wrote, it might reuse parts of the existing GPC (e.g., the lexer, parser and runtime interface), in which case it would need to be GPL.
... As a whole, not for every single piece. *BSD clearly uses GPLv2 reluctantly in rare cases, but they don't approve at all.
I blindly assume it's not anybody at FSF or GNU proper who is suggesting that GPC needs a rewrite. So they don't care. So all your worries (as is typical for a GNU project, a la GCC or Emacs) are probably unfounded.
You mean my worries about legal issues? No, they're not unfounded. The law doesn't apply only to GNU projects.
But only GNU projects seem to have a cow if they can't get impossibly airtight legal proof in written legal form.
By which you acknowledge that you had the copyright (and then actively released it). If it wasn't copyrightable (because it was so small), you couldn't have released it in the first place. :-)
I only WISH it wasn't copyrightable. And yes, I'm aware that some dummy somewhere decided (for us!) that every little trivial thing is copyrightable. So I explicitly say, "I don't care", in case some jackass whines later. I could've used GPL, but some people hate that. And the GPL license text is (much) bigger than the program, so I would rather not bloat up the .ZIP just for legalese (ugh). GNU Emacs, due to goofy legal paranoia, includes COPYING x 10 (or maybe more, I forget).
*You* published it *with* a PD notice. That's more than what we know about P4 so far.
We know (from PUG newsletters) that P4 was heavily spread around. There was a cost, but it was apparently from shipping and tape expenses. There was no mention about licenses. They seemed to want to spread Pascal as far as possible (and did!), which is easy when there aren't any arbitrary hurdles to overcome.
If you live in a country where releasing to PD is not possible, it may be problematic. (I once heard that it might be interpreted as a release under an all-permissive license, but since I'm no lawyer, I'm not sure about this.)
Why anybody (and I mean ANYBODY) would complain about P.D. software is beyond me.
This subthread is about using P4/P5 in a new GPC, now you're talking about switching to FPC, or what? As I said before, I'm not going to do this with my code, but other users might do so.
No, not users "porting" GPC -> FPC Pascal code, but GPC somehow sharing / integrating / rewriting for the FPC suite as a new dialect option (e.g. -extended), if you think writing a Pascal compiler in Pascal is important.
Each language frontend is developed by those who care about it.
What's not clear about this?
So who is it that doesn't care? Why is GPC 4.x so bugged? Why is it so hard? Why would a rewrite be reasonable at all then? What changed between 2007 (or 2005 or whatever) and now? Back in 2005, rumor was that GPC would be integrated fully, but that never happened. (GCC 4.x also came out around then.) Why??
But why won't they help fix the bugs? Why don't they integrate your patches? Etc. etc. It just seems dumb (to me) that they would ignore you since GPC is quite good.
Yes, it's not nice. But what can we do about it? We can whine about it, try to do it ourselves (as Waldek did for some time, but like all of us, he doesn't have unlimited available time), live with the problems, or get away from the backend. I personally prefer the latter.
Yes, if they aren't responsive or helpful, get away from them. Easier to change your own mind, control your own destiny than make someone else do anything. But it still seems dumb to have to do that for no inherently unavoidable reason.
You know, dare I call it a virtue, but most people don't live their life just to be legally pedantic and screw others over.
It takes only one to sue, not "most people".
They can sue anyways! Why do you think Novell etc. signed patent agreements? SCO sued IBM over Linux. Did you abandon Linux when that happened? No.
Which is really dumb, BTW, that an author / copyright holder can't do what they want with their own work just because some weird law disagrees.
I agree, but this is really the least problem. For practical purposes, it's basically the same as PD, and it doesn't take much more work for the author to do it.
Yeah, but finding people from 40 years ago is hard!! I can't even (easily) find people I know! Good luck hunting down Nori, Jacobi, Ummann, Jensen, Nageli, Wirth, Pemberton, etc. (Still no email response from him. No surprise there.)
Yes, if by that you (knowingly and unnecessarily) put your users in danger.
It's not knowingly and unnecessarily if you did your best to resolve it, is it??
You tried to resolved it => you know about it, i.e. knowingly.
You have alternatives (existing GPC; writing from scratch) => unnecessarily
Fear and 1% chance of being incorrect aren't the same as willful negligence.
"Hey, I found $10, I put it in the bank for 40 years, made $10000, is it yours???" (Wonder what the reply will be.)
That's why it's better to ask before you made $10000 (i.e., before we base a big project on it), to avoid unpleasant surprises later.
Except in this case, we both get $10000. Nobody loses!
And thanks to copyright law, they get to take your $10000 as well (and leave you with lawyer and court costs).
Which is a waste of their own time and money, meaning very unlikely!
To cut this pointless discussion short, remember that we've all long agreed that we don't like the current laws.
Not really, you seemed to defend the law more than anybody.
So please stop arguing this -- we all agree, and we can't change them on this mailing list.
Clearly we don't all agree.
But you all seem to have no problem with inertia (doing nothing, accepting every bad decision). The only smart thing is to go your own way, which this whole topic is about. Unless you let yourself get railroaded by imaginary enemies (windmills).
If you want to ignore/break laws, take this somewhere else
No no no, why would I ignore or break a perfectly wonderful law that changes every time I turn around? That's the definition of perfect ("finished")!
we've made it very clear that the project is important enough (to us
... And to GCC and RMS, obviously! <evil grin>
and to some of its users)
Thought you didn't think it had any??
that we won't risk it by breaking the laws.
Which have served you oh so well over the years. (not)
Oh wait, copyright is the only legal hold GPL has over anybody. So yeah, all hallowed be that law, even if it is way too long a duration. But then if copyright disappeared too soon, the GPL would too, which would be bad for "free software", no? And you don't want that, apparently.
So if you have anything more to add, please restrict it to suggestions based on existing law.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Wind, Sand and Stars
(OMG, a copyrighted quotation! Oops, heheheh, except French version in Canada, haha! So insane, these stupid stupid laws.)