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> The US definition of "derivative work" is quite broad, and seems to cover linking just fine.

the problem is the GPL view seems doubtful and has not only bad implications for software copyright but copyright of... well literally anything else. I mean, remember what linking actually is (especially dynamic linking), you're basically just making references to certain things.

the analogy that I can best describe is this: if you're writing a paper on something whatever, and you link to a page number of a book, that doesn't make your paper a derivative work of that thing per se.

if I say in the middle of my novel new text on foobars and fozzinators, hey "book A page 32" has instructions for how to confabulate your fozzinator or "book B page 42" has the values needed to valienate your foobaz, referring to those things in general makes no sense to consider this originally authored book a derivative of A, B, or A and B.

or for a more concrete example, saying Microsoft should be the final authority on who can interoperate with their products or saying that the people who publish research are automatically derivative works of other peoples research[1] papers or people who write articles can't even REFER to other articles in such a way.

[1]: research itself may come from derivative ideas of course, but I'm talking about the copyrightable elements here; i.e. not the facts necessarily presented within, but rather how such facts are presented and laid out. copyright does not cover facts (true or false[2]), but your presentation of such facts are.

[2]: https://thowardlaw.com/2023/04/false-facts-denoted-as-actual...


Regardless of whether companies like Microsoft should be the final authority, it is indisputable that they try to be. So MAD only has one answer.


I would dispute that pretty heavily. They're not, and obviously have never, claimed copyright over the DLL you made or whatever, nor the entire concept of linking to Windows APIs (as an example).

Mostly because that's, like the GPL, currently a way to get laughed out of court.


it's also worth bringing up some arguments made by Theodore Tso over this very issue in 1998[1]:

> Consider the following --- what defines "link"? Does an RPC call mean linking? What about shared libraries? What about making calls via the system call interface? What about running GPL'ed programs via the system() command from a commercial program? If you take things to extremes, a commercial program which uses the system() program will be interfacing with the GPL'ed /bin/bash on most systems --- is that considered "linking"?

> And if not, what is the legal distinction between what /etc/ld.so does when it maps a GPL'ed library into memory and the thread of control is temporarily tranfered from propietary code to GPL'ed library code when a library function is called, and what happens when a propietary program calls system() and the kernel maps /bin/bash into system memory, and the thread of control transfers temporarily from the propietary program to /bin/bash? You can see how things can get quite ridiculous quite quickly.

> [...]

> The FSF assertion also a very dangerous legal argument to make. If this is true, does this mean that if you write code which happens to make use of interfaces developed by Microsoft and implemented by Microsoft DLL's, that Microsoft somehow has a claim over your code which it could enforce via copyright law? What about any i386 assembly code which makes use of the Intel machine language? Does Intel now have a copyright claim on all i386 object code, and can try to prevent people from executing i386 object code on non-Intel processors? (After all, when a Pentium interprets your object code, one could argue that it is "linking" your object code with the Pentium microcode, which is copyrighted by Intel....)

> What the FSF is trying to advocate is one step down the slippery slope of interface copyrights, and we really, really don't want to go there.

i've seen arguments especially after the Google v. Oracle[2] decision and I think one in particular mentioned the sort of "reality distortion field"[3], which I found to be interesting, especially because a lot of open source projects that are GPL tend to rely on the good-naturedness of other users using their code in a way that's positively in spirit with the GPL. (which, to be fair, has probably helped open source immensely.)

but as Tso points out, therein lies a contradiction with GPL that at if its maximal interpretation to be correct, it's much much more dangerous, than if the GPL effectively is equivalent to the LGPL. but I don't think that (barring a world pre-this-case) this world is the one that is so. (no idea how the AGPL fits into this though, that sounds like a PITA.)

if I were ruler of the world, I'd say that symbol names are a matter of fact and thus should probably not be copyrightable by themselves. but then again I don't rule the world, and I'd probably have other things to change as well, even about copyright.

[1]: https://yarchive.net/comp/gpl_linking.html

[2]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404270


well and he also tried very hard to not buy it until Twitter sued in order to have the contract upheld


so the plot of WarGames?


Exactly. WarGames is very similar to a true incident that occurred in 1979, four years before the release of the film.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/david-wright/nuclear-false-alarm-950...

    In this case, it turns out that a technician mistakenly inserted into a NORAD computer a training tape that simulated a large Soviet attack on the United States. Because of the design of the warning system, that information was sent out widely through the U.S. nuclear command network.


was it even reported? i heard a bunch of stuff that seemed to be hypothetical guessing like "satya must be furious" that seemed to morph into "it was reported satya is furious"

i've seen similar with the cloud credits thing, people just pontificating whether it's even a viable strategy.


it's hilarious how much people for no reason, want to defend the honor of Sam Altman and co. i mean ffs, the guy is not your friend and will definitely backstab you if he gets the opportunity.

i'm surprised anyone can take this "oh woe is me i totally was excited about the future of humanity" crap seriously. these are SV investors here, morally equivalent to the people on Wall Street that a lot here would probably hold in contempt, but because they wore cargo shorts or something, everyone thinks that Sam is their friend and that just if the poor naysayers would understand that Sam is totally cool and uses lowercase in his messages just like mee!!!!

they don't give a shit that your product was "made with <3" or whatever

they don't give a shit about you.

they don't give a shit about your startup's customers.

they only give a shit about how many dollars they make from your product.

boo hooing over Sam getting fired is really pathetic, and I'd expect better from the Hacker News crowd (and more generally the rationalist crowd, which a lot of AI people tend to overlap with).


Yeah it’s crazy how much the tech community is defending this random CEO, considering the relatively unsympathetic response to the tech layoffs over the last year.


That seems a bit irrationally negative. I mean "[Sam] will definitely backstab you if he gets the opportunity."

I don't know him but he seems a reasonably decent / maybe average type.


we can only hope

i'm sick and tired of everyone sticking a chatbot on random crap that doesn't need it and has no reason to ever need it. it also made HN a lot less interesting to read


not the original poster but i want to chime in, the address is just poor. an IPv4 address is decent to remember and while DNS is useful, the issue sometimes is DNS, in which case you need the IP anyway.

12:141:::2315:14 or whatever is ugly and terrible syntax. firstly...

1. why colons? if you're typing in an IP address, you might also have to type in a TCP/IP port in colon format, why did IETF think overloading this was a good idea? it also makes the address scheme look ugly. the ways of getting around this by using brackets just look plain awful.

2. why do it in hexadecimal format? there are now 16 characters in each IP digit. i'd rather have (if we really need 128-bit addresses, which since we give out /64s, seems not to be the case) it be in dotted decimal. maybe even make the dotted decimals 16 bits if it's really an issue. do get rid of the myraid of other stupid ways to write IPs though, dotted decimal could easily be standardized.

3. DHCP is a good thing, why is it maligned? a central source of truth who is what is great, at the network level I can say "hey this person has the IP of X." it seems like a much better idea than SLAAC ever was.


IPv4 allocated prefixes on 8-bit boundaries, so dotted decimal made sense at the time. CIDR in 1993 made the prefix boundaries arbitrary, which required "difficult" math to convert between binary and decimal.

So the point of hexadecimal is to make CIDR easier. Consider the sequence of 1s followed by 0s:

    dec: 0 128 192 224 240 248 252 254 255
    hex: 00 80 C0 E0 F0 F8 FC FE FF
Once you've adopted hex, dots become a problem: is "1.1.1.1.1.1.beef.de" a domain name or an IP address? Perhaps they could've chosen something other than :, but I'm not sure what. Maybe require every IPv6 address to contain .. somewhere?

I don't really have strong opinions on DHCP vs SLAAC.


> an IPv4 address is decent to remember and while DNS is useful, the issue sometimes is DNS, in which case you need the IP anyway

It's like rambling about absence of crank handle on modern cars.

> why colons

Because dots are in the DNS.

> why do it in hexadecimal format

Because it's shorter than decimal and you can't nest decimal representation without some delimiter, eg 1220 -- is this 12 20 or 122 0 ? Cue in 'but why colons'

> DHCP is a good thing, why is it maligned? a central source of truth who is what is great

No, it's not. And definitely it's not source of truth. A client can ask, DHCP server can provide an address but if you don't have an address in DHCP leases that means nothing. And even if you have that doesn't mean that this is still the same device.


probably because fewer and fewer people are using a (non-web based) email client.


reminds me of this old joke

> I saw a book entitled "Die GNU Autotools" and I thought "My feelings exactly". Turns out the book was in German.

https://twitter.com/timmartin2/status/23365017839599616

gnu autotools i suppose works for some projects, but wow does it seem to be completely annoying to use.


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