

GNU grep - A Cautionary Tale About GPLv3 - zdw
http://gdamore.blogspot.com/2012/10/gnu-grep-cautionary-tale-about-gplv3.html

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3825
If the author is required to publish the source code, guess what his second to
market competitors will have to do as well? Free software is not an
ideological exercise. It has its benefits. The author missed out on a huge
opportunity.

The author is greedy. GPL v3 successfully cut off the parasite. Good riddance.

Now, he does make a good point though. We have to think strategically. Read
gnu.org for details but here is the cinch: if there are commercial
alternatives to what you are making, make your licensing liberal (arguably
android because iOS existed and WinPoo 7 was apparently in the works). This
encourages adoption of foss. However, when foss has the market cornered, don't
let the big guys take your ball and run home. Use GPL v3.

The author is greedy. GPL v3 successfully cut off the parasite. Good riddance.

Now, this was a real soap box. Let me hop off it real quick.

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pnathan
I became an AGPL3 fan after reading many papers from the 50s->70s, before the
rise of open source & the Unix sharing habits. I believe its a crying shame
that all those wonderful tools and systems that I read about disappeared into
the void and got hidden by closed-source approaches to development and
licensing. I am _fully_ aware that this limits certain avenues of
commercialization, and I am fully OK with that. I believe that an AGPL3 world
is a better world for computer science and technology.

From my perspective as an engineer in the enterprise, we value functionality
very highly; if you sell us a GPL3-based hardware solution, we care that it
works. We're not going to copy and resell it. We have our own products to care
about and do excellent things with.

~~~
jamesaguilar
IMO, they disappeared exactly because they embraced the ideals you love. Of
course people aren't going to work on extending and polishing these systems if
they can't get paid to (at least not at the same magnitude as for the closed
solutions). At least, that is what history seems to indicate so far, except in
a relatively limited space where companies have both the technical expertise
to modify the source AND the economic incentive to avoid paying for closed
licenses.

Although that is not the situation this guy finds himself in. He seems to just
be confused.

~~~
pnathan
I might be wrong, but I don't think Honeywell, Burroughs, DEC, IBM (and the
other vendors) used the open source (as we think of it today) model.

edit: As a matter of fact, part of why Unix was able to spread was the AT&T
restrictions forcing it to be shared.

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fennecfoxen
"Because that one little "worm" - used simply to support a startup script,
could have created a situation where we would have been required to open
source our entire product."

Someone assist in my enlightenment: Under what sort of enforcement
circumstances would that _requirement_ to open-source a lot of code actually
be likely? As opposed to some enforcement action where you remove the
offending code.

~~~
mikeash
As far as I know, this can't happen. The author is being highly paranoid,
presumably due to being misinformed.

~~~
rbanffy
When a clever person is so completely misinformed about a subject that's the
very core of their business, I would rather call it FUD.

And I'd also like to point out they aren't in the business of creating value,
as an open source product offers more value than a black box: their want to
create costs.

~~~
mikeash
I think you're right about FUD, but it's probably not him. I imagine he fell
victim to the FUD, rather than intentionally creating it.

~~~
rbanffy
I always find it suspicious when someone clever falls victim of - and further
spreads - FUD that is beneficial to his/her business. Remember they sell
proprietary (actually, re-licensed) software that's not under one of those
"dangerous" and "viral" licenses.

~~~
mikeash
We're all biased towards ideas that suit us. If the FUD is beneficial to his
business then he's likely to be highly receptive to it.

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zimbatm
GPL3 is restricted to the boundaries of the executable so he would just have
to give access to the grep source code if/when requested. End of story.

~~~
jlgreco
Yeah, that is my thought too. Maybe he thinks including a call to grep that
the users shell would read/fork/exec is a type of linking? Seems like a
stretch.

------
eternalban
"But if you're a business trying to create value, this is actively harmful."

Your sense of entitlement is mind boggling.

/Someone/ wrote the code you are complaining about and /their/ idea of /value/
is that it should be open sourced under a "viral" license.

~~~
pjscott
If you read "harmful" as "harmful to my own interests", then the statement is
value-neutral. I consider this a plausible interpretation.

------
smegel
If you are building propriety products around lots of open-source components
then being mindful of the GPL is just basic common sense. Acting like it is
some hidden minefield is being disingenuous.

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jlgreco
Why should distributing GNU grep necessitate releasing the source of other
things that you distribute? It only seems obvious to me that they would then
have to distribute the source of GNU grep.

Are they linking to grep but grep doesn't have the linking exception?

~~~
cjbprime
You're correct. There is no circumstance under which he's compelled to open up
his source code.

If the hardware system he's selling has some kind of crypto (like login
passwords that you don't know!) that disallows modifications to the base
system, GPLv3 can require you to give up enough control to let the user
install their modified grep too. (That's still not giving away your source
code, but it is more than just giving out the source code to grep.)

~~~
jlgreco
Good point, you couldn't include GPLv3'd code into something like a Tivo, but
that is hardly an _unintended_ side-effect of the license. Whining about that
would be rather silly. ;)

------
zoowar
If you want the benefits of open source without the responsibility of sharing
consider a BSD licensed product.

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talsit
Seems most people didn't really read his story from beginning to end.
Specifically the part at the beginning of the post: "The product itself is not
delivered as a separate executable, but as a complete product. We don't permit
our customers to crack it open..."

If he distributes his product as a monolithic and atomic item, wouldn't he be
forced to release all parts of it if requested?

