Sun's Schwartz Attacks GPL 625
jskelly writes "Sun Micro President Jonathan Schwartz
attacked the GPL at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco yesterday.Other than the same old arguments (you can't make it proprietary later)
he adds that it imposes on developing nations
"a rather predatory
obligation to disgorge all their IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world" -- but fails to mention that the converse is also true: the wealthiest nation in the world is similarly, under the GPL, forced to "disgorge all its IP back to the developing nations" as well. Duh!"
In one ear and out the other. (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow this guy really needs help from the cluestick.
they're just trying to maintain the fascade (Score:2, Interesting)
Relevance? (Score:2, Interesting)
Asymmetry (Score:5, Interesting)
The owner of the copyright is free to license it however they like. In particular they can do the standard dual-licensing trick that is done by people like sleepycat, with a GPLd version which is free as well as a more liberal one, which you pay for. Other people are not free to do this.
Most code will (initially, anyway) originate in the developed world. People in the developing world are poor, and will therefore very likely use it under the GPL, and therefore contribute changes back to the developed world (and to the developing world of course). Users in the developed world, who are generally richer, can avoid doing this by paying for a liberal version.
This would not happen with a BSD-style license, for instance.
Obrigado (Score:5, Interesting)
Ignorance of development economics (Score:3, Interesting)
People in developing countries who use GPL have priced-in the potential costs of loss of their IP rights versus the potential savings from using GPL products or advantages to using GPL products.
Of course, in many developing countries, the concept of IP rights may not even exist...which can be part of the reason they are still "developing".
how much ip is created in developing countries (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, would you rather see this developing country with low budget try spending money to buy enough tech infrastructure to start to compete with the big guys? How does sucking that much money out of a developing country help them?
If anything, GPL levels out the baseline for developing countries saying
Re:smart people being stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I don't think they do sound stupid at all. I think, very frequently, they sound pretty smart.
I've seen so many comments on Slashdot and in other places which seem to indicate by their content that the commenter believes greed is limited to only the United States. I mean, I've seen several comments here which point out that the flow of IP under the GPL is bidirectional. The poster says "Duh!".
Personally, I don't think that the engineers in developing nations are so stupid that they fail to recognize this fact and need our help to remind them. I do think, however, that many engineering companies management teams will seriously pause at the idea of giving up their research under the GPL, for the same reasons as any management team which sees a value in proprietary knowledge.
The U.S. didn't invent greed, no, we just worked out a system that allowed greed to be more than just a motivator.
Plato says, in Phaedrus: "... you must determine which kind of speech is appropriate to each kind of soul ... offer a complex and elaborate speech to a complex soul and a simple speech to a simple one." I believe this is all that is happening here with Schwartz. He has tailored his speech and he knows, exactly, who he is speaking to. We shouldn't assume that people like him are stupid simply because we don't like to the language he speaks.
Re:Nothing wrong with hating the GPL... (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate to say this, but if you can't see the value in developing software for free, you're probably not a very talented developer.
This may be a misguided conclusion, but I've noticed that brilliant programmers are much more likely to contribute their software to open source, rather than try to develop it commercially.
Wanting stuff for free so you can sell it (Score:5, Interesting)
His crying for the third-world is doubly laughable hogwash since it ignores completely that the GPL works in two directions and in the same way for each. Then it ignores that it is the insanely expensive nature of western software that makes much of our vaunted technology inaccessible to them to begin with.
Finally, as we've done at my company, if you really want to use GPLed code why don't you try purchasing a different license from its developer. They might not be interested, of course, or it might not be possible due to multiple copyright owners, but a number of interesting open source projects do dual-license. It's a nice arrangement: developer gets a nice wad of cash and continues to own their code and work on it and the company gets its product done faster and consequently they get to the market faster.
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
India, China, et. all, are growing today because of fruits of IP protections in the first world nations -- they aren't developing their technology and infrastructure based upon nothing, and much of that technology/infrastructure would never have been invented if someone at one point couldn't reasonably protect their ability to recoup their R&D.
It's interesting to look historically at nations with few IP protections as a great case study (not in the fawning dream-world that many Slashdotters present) - China and the former Soviet Union: Both of them had a terrible history of innovation in the modern era (yeah China and the USSR constituents both had extraordinary periods far back, but I'm talking in the communist era), and contributed virtually nothing to the global knowledgebase. Instead they both put all of their efforts into sabotage to try to rip off the latest US designs.
There are indications that China is still heavily involved with this, sending patriotic citizens to work for Western companies and send home IP, where suddenly some cheap knock-off will appear. I'm not being xenophobic, but this has been detected both by US intelligence and by Canada's CSIS.
Re:Christ Schwartz has some balls (Score:3, Interesting)
Before the end of 2005, Sun will very largely _not_ be a proprietary software vendor. OpenSolaris in Q2, OpenOffice.org is already here, and they're already dropping hints about an OSS database and open sourcing their entire JES stack.
People try so very hard to paint Sun in an evil light, but it just doesn't work.
Re:All about maintining the Status Quo (Score:3, Interesting)
Its a not so clever ploy to try and reframe the topic into one of 'nationalism'. Previously we have seen people tell us that Open Source could be used by terrorists. [slashdot.org] and that OS is bad for national security [ohio-state.edu]
As it is obvious to the choir I am preaching to, this is BS. Its an attempt to get people scared. Because the IP that Sun has donest belong to 'the wealthiest nation' or 'a nation' or even the the state or city Sun has its HQ. Its owned by Sun. If it does belong to a nation or government then I want my share of Sun's profits, as the govt of the US is supposed to be working, in theory, for the people. (But this isnt a political science post.
Re:GPL is not always appropriate for all uses (Score:3, Interesting)
So your employer thinks that they need to take more care to avoid accidentially incorporating GPL licensed code than code with any other type of license?
Manager1: it is especially bad if we accidentially incorporate some GPL code. But it is not so bad if we accidentially incorporate some of Microsofts stolen code that Joe found on a P2P network.
Manager2: yeah, that GPL is a viral license. But the code that Joe downloaded using P2P was "free", it didn't have any license terms that said we would have to redistribute our code under the same license. Therefore, non-viral.
If code is obtained from any source, it must require approval at the highest levels to be incorporated into your own code. The GPL should not be singled out in any particular way. Even source code from a website that seems "freely" posted in the example code section, or code from a magazine could be a potential problem. Any code that you use, if you don't own the copyright, you must use under some form of license (or you are infringing a copyright). That license better have acceptable terms -- and this is determined at higher levels than the software developer.
If the GPL is being singled out for special treatment, it means the FUD must be working.
it's usage just needs to be carefully evaluated before using in a project where you wish to keep all/portions of code closed.
I think what you mean to say is where you wish to keep Copyright ownership of all portions of the code.
Keeping the code closed is merely one of the options that you can choose to exercise as a result of owning the entire copyright.
The license itself shouldn't be attacked but education of it's requirements (which the FAQ does pretty well) must be understood if thinking of using GPL source.
This is the wrong kind of education. The right kind of education is not about the GPL specifically, but about using any outside code that you did not write yourself. If that code comes from outside, then someone else owns the copyright on it. Your employer no longer has complete copyright ownership. That non-owned code can only be used under some kind of license. (Which may be fine, btw, such as licensing a third party library that you use under a license you find acceptable.)
The education that the company is giving to developers should be about the basic concepts of Copyright and Licenses. What is a copyright. What is a license. Why do you need a license. Who approves the use of outside software licenses? (Obviously, if a developer goes out and orders a $295 third party royalty free library that they incorporate into their product, the legal department should still be reviewing the license. What if the license said "all your code are belong to us!" ?)
I realize I'll get a bit of hate on this
Maybe that is because your employer seems to be so misinformed. Or maybe just misguided.
Re:GPL is not always appropriate for all uses (Score:4, Interesting)
After all, I was just watching a repeat of The Dave Chappelle Show last night on which there was a bit called "PopCopy" about a Kinko's-like copy store and how to be uncooperative to customers. In the bit, he mentions BSD, right? Oh, wait, no...he says Linux. Why? Because Linux is mainstream and it wouldn't have gotten where it is today without the GPL.
I think saying the GPL hurts open source is ridiculous. On a case-by-case basis, you might be able to effectively demonstrate where another license would be better and thankfully, there are other licenses available in those instances. But the GPL is a vital part of the success of Open Source software.
What harms Open Source is Microsoft embedding the BSD TCP/IP stack but how many end users ever heard of BSD? And Apple half-assing their cooperation with Open Source to make OS X. How many end users running OS X ever heard of BSD even though their very OS is based upon it? But the chances they've heard of Linux is much higher. Appple, Microsoft, and the BSD license they've taken advantage of to take other people's work without compensation has arguably harmed Open Source. But, hey, the people who put that stuff out there under the BSD license did that of their own free will and more power to them. If it weren't for that, we might not have a standardized TCP/IP stack today...God knows if Microsoft had to write their own they'd have probably fucked it up entirely.
(imho)
Re:Want to understand this story? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:stupid CEO, don't like it? don't use it (Score:3, Interesting)
I demand compensation thusly: If you use my code, then your code is no less free than mine.
You don't see Schwatz jumping all over the BSD license, because he CAN take anything he wants from that. That is a pure gift. The GPL isn't a gift, it's a license. You can't take from it unless you also let others take from your derived work. (Notice how quickly things are starting to get complicated...and I'm still FAR into over-simplification.)
He knows what he's doing, and he knows what he's saying. Pretending he doesn't understand is:
a) Giving him too much credit for decencency and honor
b) Misunderstanding what he's trying to accomplish. (I may know what it is, but I know certain things it isn't.)
I seem to remember that Sun did something nice recently, perhaps he's just trying to adjust the balence.
Re:Poor baby. (Score:3, Interesting)