Seems like demanding attribution could backfire on me.
If I release code with a license granting freedom in all of the points you mention above but then demand attribution then it could happen that some mangled, broken, buggy, inefficient version of my code, with my name on it, that makes me look like a total idiot, ends up floating around forever. Great.
Of course in my case any code I show the world normally starts out broken, buggy, and inefficient so I would not have to worry about that:)
There's something organic about software isn't it? In the sense that it _has_ to grow from its crude beginning to something starting to approach what you had in mind before you started writing..
My post really boiled down to one statement from the company lawyer, but I forgot to write that out:
"The word 'use' ONLY gives you the right to use as in 'run the program', however many 'any purpose' kind of attributes are added to it. Specifically, 'use' does not give you any rights to modify, sell, distribute, not even copy. You only get the right to 'use' the software, not all those other things."
Those 'other things' are essentially all those things that we actually could imagine we would wish to do with the software. The lawyer said that was a common problem when companies hired contractors to do work for them, the companies would write up something saying that they've got the right to 'use the software for all purposes' and ended up with no rights at all (except running the unmodified software in-house).
The subtleties of language. I immediately thought why not simply replace "use" with "do with". Given that running, copying, selling, licencing are all things one might "do with" the software. But then I might also have to say "do to" to cover modification. Do I then need "do on" in case I want to let people dance on it, "do in" in case it's an immersive 3d environment, "do at" in case I want to allow for target practice:) and so on.
There must be a mathematical way to specify all of this given that a file of software source code can be thought of as just a big number, something like:
Let X(0) be the smallest number that can uniquely represent the software.
Let F(n) be any arbitrary function on a number n
Let R(n,i) be any arbirary function on two numbers
Copying : X(n) <= X(n - 1)
For all n > 1.
Allowed.
Modification: X(n) <= F (X(0))
For any function F all n > 1
Allowed.
Running: O <= R(X(n), I)
For any function R together with input I, produces output O.
Allowed.
An so on. For transfer of ownership, sale, licensing etc we could use notation from set theory.
Of course any court would probably void such a license spec as not being in the language of jurisdiction or some such.
It looks like a case of being picky about defining the breadth of each word for legal purposes. Then every time there is another claim they end up defining it a little narrower and add more words to the definition list ... and all the lawyers have to get up speed pronto ... and on it goes, adding more words and definitions.
Users of the number could not sue you for any damage caused by using said number. After all it's just a number right.
That would be the executable wouldn't it? Damn, so nobody can be liable for any damages from any binaries. Excellent. We can halve the number of lawyers right there.
And of course that means all the code that will ever be written is public domain, with the small matter of knowing the right number... and of course, expressing that as a number too? Madness! Love it!
Fine.... Go with the blanket MIT license policy.... Give all your rights away. You are the ones that will suffer, not the people that don't contribute.
In any code I post here of any significant length, I add the MIT license boilerplate (if I remember to do so). So far, I have not suffered because of it. On the contrary, such postings have tended to add value to my portfolio, and that has paid off. If someone wants to take what I've posted and run with it, great! It does not diminish the value to me of what I've posted in any way.
I've been reading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (excellent novel, BTW). In it, he chronicles the westward diaspora of tenant farmers escaping the injustices meted upon them (and upon the land) by bankers and absentee landowners. At the end of Chapter 14, he speaks to the bankers and landowners thus: "... For the quality of owning freezes you forever into 'I', and cuts you off forever from the 'we.'"
In the same paragraph, Steinbeck mentions such luminaries as Paine, Marx, Jefferson, and Lenin. So I suppose Bruce would reflexively label such an attitude as "communistic", as if attaching the word as a pejorative to something automatically makes the thing bad. I would submit -- at least in the context of this forum and the spirit of sharing pervading it -- that it does not. And, in a way, I feel sad for those who resist being part of the "we."
If you are trying to imply that I do not believe in sharing, that would be untrue. I believe the MIT license is a wonderful license, if you want to make a portion of your code freely available to others. I just don't believe it should be a blanket policy for the forum.
I have not done much serious programming with Spin, but any serious programming, that I consider non-proprietary, I have offered it with an MIT license attached.
Frankly, I'm not sure that MIT licensing should be a formal requirement of submission here. The forum has survived for years under what I believe to be a tacit understanding that things posted here are meant for sharing. And I believe that, by needing to attach more restrictive terms to his code, even Bill implicitly acknowledged that general understanding. To my knowledge, there have been no cases where an author of posted code has cried foul because someone else has decided to use it. (I have, however, in at least one situation, reminded someone about the conditions of the MIT boilerplate attached to one of my submissions.) Basically, I agree with Chip: if it's proprietary, just don't post it here. If you want help with proprietary code and want it to remain proprietary, hire a private paid consultant under an NDA.
No. That would not make any sense. I was talking about putting source code in the public domain. That source code is generally a file on my computer
containing bytes which I can publish as a huge number. I could publish that number in hexadecimal. Perhaps decimal world be better so as not to
confuse judges and lawyers:)
Anyone can do what they please with a number, including turning it into a copy of my original file, editing it with their IDE and compiling into an
executable.
And of course that means all the code that will ever be written is public domain...
Not exactly. You see a program published as a normal ASCII or Unicode or otherwise common human readable and editable format will automatically aquire copyright, as we have discussed at length. However that same file published as a long string of HEX or decimal digits as a single number surely is in the public domain. It's just a number.
Now, the flaw in my plan is of course that commercial software developers distribute their code as huge binary numbers. The result of compiling and building their executables and such. Some how they managed to convince the powers that be that such numbers were copyrightable. I seem to remember that when the PC revolution started that idea was still open to debate.
However my numbers are different. They are not usable, executable ("performable" in copyright lngo) works. They are not human readable either. They are derived from my source which is not ever published. If you like they are just "the number" or ID of that piece of source.
If any of that makes any difference to band of ravenous lawyers is another matter.
... but there is more than one variant of "we" also, there is those that just take with no giving back.
True, but you have to remember that, in the end, this is Parallax's forum, the ultimate goal of which is to promote the use of Parallax's products. To that end, even those who take without giving back help to serve that objective.
On a personal level, I agreee with the spirit of the GPL. But I do not believe that it serves Parallax's bottom line in the context of trying to sell microcontrollers.
Frankly, I'm not sure that MIT licensing should be a formal requirement of submission here. The forum has survived for years under what I believe to be a tacit understanding that things posted here are meant for sharing. And I believe that, by needing to attach more restrictive terms to his code, even Bill implicitly acknowledged that general understanding. To my knowledge, there have been no cases where an author of posted code has cried foul because someone else has decided to use it. (I have, however, in at least one situation, reminded someone about the conditions of the MIT boilerplate attached to one of my submissions.) Basically, I agree with Chip: if it's proprietary, just don't post it here. If you want help with proprietary code and want it to remain proprietary, hire a private paid consultant under an NDA.
-Phil
Phil,
The idea is to just formalize that the things discussed here are for sharing.
The issue as it stands is that we basically have a place where someone can farm the forum for general ideas, formalize them, and then post them to the forum under a more restrictive license.
To me that amounts to using ones fellow forum members as fools.
Phil did you just copy my post from that other thread. Looks awfully similar
Not intentionally, of course, but it's possible that reading one of your posts crystalized something in my mind which I saw fit to emphasize. If so, please take it as a compliment.
To me that amounts to using ones fellow forum members as fools.
I suppose, if I thought any of my submissions were so very precious, I'd lose sleep over that eventuality. But I don't. Regardless of the formalities, collateral damage will occur. That those who occasion such damage suffer scorn and public condemnation should be enough of a deterrent.
This thread is just ugly. Bill made a simple mistake and was publicly beat down by Parallax's guru posse. There was no reason to escalate this into a public flogging when a simple and polite private discussion could prevented all of this.
Even now, anyone who disagrees with them gets a mild scorching.
This thread is just ugly. Bill made a simple mistake and was publicly beat down by Parallax's guru posse. There was no reason to escalate this into a public flogging when a simple and polite private discussion could prevented all of this.
Even now, anyone who disagrees with them gets a mild scorching.
I don't see anyone getting a public flogging and I'm not sure there is a "guru posse" running around, in fact I think we are trying to prevent having such a thing.
My intent is to try to not see the P2 be dead before arrival.
The situation as I see it is that the scenario has been set due to the lack of existing app notes for the P2 and the release of FPGA code that people may follow Bill's lead and start planting flags in the ground.
This isn't a simple case of "just give Bill attribution" and be done with it.
In the first place is Bill's demand (he used the word "require") for attribution and the use of his license terms valid for the general case of using the CLUT as an instruction look up table, is it even valid for the specific case if you never looked at his code?
What if someone else comes alongs and does the same with new counter features, with the updated video generator, with the very flexible features built into the pins?
What if each of these people chooses a license that isn't compatible with the others?
Do you see the negative affect this could have on the P2?
And that is exactly what happened with Intel and their i860 processor in a story I recounted here recently.
They arrived at the situation that getting peak flops performance out of their chip in an important application became the intellectual property of some other company.
I have no idea if or how that was resolved except to note that the i860 never really took off.
I was just wondering how other sites and forums handle this. Well, for example stackoverflow for example happens to use the same license on all it's user contribution as the applied to the snippet that started all this off. cc-wiki with attribution required.
which seems to be a disaster because:
1) It requires attribution, which means, well you know...
2) It allows commercial use but "If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one."
Which means by the time you have worked an answer from stackoverflow into your commercial product you have to release your product under the same license!
3) As far as I can tell stackoverflow is claiming copyright on everything their contributors put in: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/
I do hope we can avoid this forum going down that kind of road.
This thread is just ugly. Bill made a simple mistake and was publicly beat down by Parallax's guru posse. There was no reason to escalate this into a public flogging when a simple and polite private discussion could prevented all of this.
If we all agree that this is a simple mistake, Bill can fix this by changing the license to an MIT license. If he is currently under contract with Parallax he should assign the copyright to Parallax and show himself as the author of the code.
This brings up an interesting case, and one that is very pertent to this discussion.
When the dvd css code was first written, many organizations (including mpaa, sony and philips) were claiming it was illegal to copy the code, because it was protected by all kinds of patents, copyrights, and the like. Some enterprising soul took the css code, and encoded it as an elf executable, but rigged the program in such a way that it conformed with an extremely large prime number. (one of those prime numbers pgp uses for encryption/decryption) As a result, he proved that the css code could not be copyrighted, pattented, or anything of the like.
I'm not sure the mpaa or sony agreeed with him, but nonetheless, it's out there, and there's not much any of them can do about it, though I'm sure they still try.
There's a web page that shows multiple prime numbers using varying algorithms. It makes for interesting discussions. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/Stego/illegal-primes.html
I was on the mailing list where the first of these illegal prime numbers was initially posted, oddly enough, it didn't spark much discussion at the time.
Comments
-Tor
Seems like demanding attribution could backfire on me.
If I release code with a license granting freedom in all of the points you mention above but then demand attribution then it could happen that some mangled, broken, buggy, inefficient version of my code, with my name on it, that makes me look like a total idiot, ends up floating around forever. Great.
Of course in my case any code I show the world normally starts out broken, buggy, and inefficient so I would not have to worry about that:)
There's something organic about software isn't it? In the sense that it _has_ to grow from its crude beginning to something starting to approach what you had in mind before you started writing..
My post really boiled down to one statement from the company lawyer, but I forgot to write that out:
"The word 'use' ONLY gives you the right to use as in 'run the program', however many 'any purpose' kind of attributes are added to it. Specifically, 'use' does not give you any rights to modify, sell, distribute, not even copy. You only get the right to 'use' the software, not all those other things."
Those 'other things' are essentially all those things that we actually could imagine we would wish to do with the software. The lawyer said that was a common problem when companies hired contractors to do work for them, the companies would write up something saying that they've got the right to 'use the software for all purposes' and ended up with no rights at all (except running the unmodified software in-house).
-Tor
The subtleties of language. I immediately thought why not simply replace "use" with "do with". Given that running, copying, selling, licencing are all things one might "do with" the software. But then I might also have to say "do to" to cover modification. Do I then need "do on" in case I want to let people dance on it, "do in" in case it's an immersive 3d environment, "do at" in case I want to allow for target practice:) and so on.
There must be a mathematical way to specify all of this given that a file of software source code can be thought of as just a big number, something like:
Let X(0) be the smallest number that can uniquely represent the software.
Let F(n) be any arbitrary function on a number n
Let R(n,i) be any arbirary function on two numbers
Copying : X(n) <= X(n - 1) For all n > 1. Allowed. Modification: X(n) <= F (X(0)) For any function F all n > 1 Allowed. Running: O <= R(X(n), I) For any function R together with input I, produces output O. Allowed.An so on. For transfer of ownership, sale, licensing etc we could use notation from set theory.Of course any court would probably void such a license spec as not being in the language of jurisdiction or some such.
The definition of "public domain" includes such things as numbers (as far as I understand). You can't claim copyright on a number.
So, if you publish your source code as a giant number, say in hexadecimal, then you cannot claim copyright on it. It is in the public domain.
Users of the number could not sue you for any damage caused by using said number. After all it's just a number right.
And of course that means all the code that will ever be written is public domain, with the small matter of knowing the right number... and of course, expressing that as a number too? Madness! Love it!
I've been reading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (excellent novel, BTW). In it, he chronicles the westward diaspora of tenant farmers escaping the injustices meted upon them (and upon the land) by bankers and absentee landowners. At the end of Chapter 14, he speaks to the bankers and landowners thus: "... For the quality of owning freezes you forever into 'I', and cuts you off forever from the 'we.'"
In the same paragraph, Steinbeck mentions such luminaries as Paine, Marx, Jefferson, and Lenin. So I suppose Bruce would reflexively label such an attitude as "communistic", as if attaching the word as a pejorative to something automatically makes the thing bad. I would submit -- at least in the context of this forum and the spirit of sharing pervading it -- that it does not. And, in a way, I feel sad for those who resist being part of the "we."
-Phil
If you are trying to imply that I do not believe in sharing, that would be untrue. I believe the MIT license is a wonderful license, if you want to make a portion of your code freely available to others. I just don't believe it should be a blanket policy for the forum.
I have not done much serious programming with Spin, but any serious programming, that I consider non-proprietary, I have offered it with an MIT license attached.
I didn't appreciate the pinko reference either ... but there is more than one variant of "we" also, there is those that just take with no giving back.
When that becomes commercial it can do harm. The GPL attempts to limit that harm with a slightly narrower interpretation of we.
-Phil
On a personal level, I agreee with the spirit of the GPL. But I do not believe that it serves Parallax's bottom line in the context of trying to sell microcontrollers.
-Phil
Phil,
The idea is to just formalize that the things discussed here are for sharing.
The issue as it stands is that we basically have a place where someone can farm the forum for general ideas, formalize them, and then post them to the forum under a more restrictive license.
To me that amounts to using ones fellow forum members as fools.
C.W.
-Phil
-Phil
Let's try some forum healing now before someone decides it's a complete waste of resources among other things.
Even now, anyone who disagrees with them gets a mild scorching.
I don't see anyone getting a public flogging and I'm not sure there is a "guru posse" running around, in fact I think we are trying to prevent having such a thing.
My intent is to try to not see the P2 be dead before arrival.
The situation as I see it is that the scenario has been set due to the lack of existing app notes for the P2 and the release of FPGA code that people may follow Bill's lead and start planting flags in the ground.
This isn't a simple case of "just give Bill attribution" and be done with it.
In the first place is Bill's demand (he used the word "require") for attribution and the use of his license terms valid for the general case of using the CLUT as an instruction look up table, is it even valid for the specific case if you never looked at his code?
What if someone else comes alongs and does the same with new counter features, with the updated video generator, with the very flexible features built into the pins?
What if each of these people chooses a license that isn't compatible with the others?
Do you see the negative affect this could have on the P2?
C.W.
They arrived at the situation that getting peak flops performance out of their chip in an important application became the intellectual property of some other company.
I have no idea if or how that was resolved except to note that the i860 never really took off.
This thread isn't about Bill, his P2BEE post just pointed out the issue, so it is obviously a topic of discussion.
That is why I didn't specifically point out Bill's P2BEE when I started this thread.
I'm not sure how having the novel features of the prop surrounded by a minefield of 3rd party fiefdoms enforcing licensing isn't going to harm the P2.
One normally expects the purchase of a component to cover the IP relating to its basic features.
C.W.
-Phil
I was just wondering how other sites and forums handle this. Well, for example stackoverflow for example happens to use the same license on all it's user contribution as the applied to the snippet that started all this off. cc-wiki with attribution required.
which seems to be a disaster because:
1) It requires attribution, which means, well you know...
2) It allows commercial use but "If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one."
Which means by the time you have worked an answer from stackoverflow into your commercial product you have to release your product under the same license!
3) As far as I can tell stackoverflow is claiming copyright on everything their contributors put in: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/
I do hope we can avoid this forum going down that kind of road.
When the dvd css code was first written, many organizations (including mpaa, sony and philips) were claiming it was illegal to copy the code, because it was protected by all kinds of patents, copyrights, and the like. Some enterprising soul took the css code, and encoded it as an elf executable, but rigged the program in such a way that it conformed with an extremely large prime number. (one of those prime numbers pgp uses for encryption/decryption) As a result, he proved that the css code could not be copyrighted, pattented, or anything of the like.
I'm not sure the mpaa or sony agreeed with him, but nonetheless, it's out there, and there's not much any of them can do about it, though I'm sure they still try.
There's a web page that shows multiple prime numbers using varying algorithms. It makes for interesting discussions.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/Stego/illegal-primes.html
I was on the mailing list where the first of these illegal prime numbers was initially posted, oddly enough, it didn't spark much discussion at the time.
now that seems to be some strange form of a (mathematical?) law where numbers are considered illegal. LOL
One thing I don't understand
Many Programs we PAY for have in theirs Help screen Contributions list of ALL people that worked/contributed to build that program:
So why some of members have that big problem to recognize that on forum?