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Journal Otter's Journal: How can people talk so much about the GPL...? 11

Journal by Otter
...and not have the slightest idea of what it says or requires? It just baffles me how people have sufficient interest to fly into a rage over alleged "GPL violations" and to argue infinitely about them, but not sufficient interest to read and understand the damn thing.

Honestly, I'd point that out as a potential liability for companies considering a GPL/LGPL product. The real legal issues are half of it -- then you have to deal with all the halfwits from "the community" demanding anything that comes into their heads, license terms or no. I'd strongly recommend using similar non-GNU licenses, if only to avoid all the cultural baggage that gets dragged along with the GPL.

(In a similar vein, we have the people who can rant and rave forever about the DMCA without the slightest idea of what it does and doesn't restrict...)

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How can people talk so much about the GPL...? More

How can people talk so much about the GPL...?

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  • The same can be said for anything discussed frequently online.

    *Sigh* Welcome to the internet.

    • *grin* I think Otter has a point. Many people do not fully understand the GPL. Many people get upset because someone is *gasp* charging actual money for it instead of providing it for download gratis. And there are numerous other errors people make.

      It grates on me just as much as all the people who have no understanding of quantum cryptography or computing coming out of the woodwork and making incredibly stupid comments.

      I often wish there were a '-1 counterfactual' rating. But I suspect it would

  • I've had reviewers in the journal _peer review_ process chide me for building a graphical user interface on top of Matlab. The reviewer lamented that I did not use some crappy free product, such as scilab.

    Of course, the part of the code that handles the novel and important stuff (not the stupid GUI) is released under the GPL, but noooo he didn't mention that.

    It seems like people make these decisions based more on idealogies (GPL good, other bad) rather than rationally thinking about the positives and nega

    • Actually, I'd complain too. Your GUI requires me to use non-free software in order to use it. And non-free software inherently requires complete trust and faith in the implementor of the software. Therefore, you are requiring me to place my trust and faith in the people who write Matlab and let it use my hardware to run in order for me to use your GUI.

      • Actually, you're wrong. Matlab's functions are all in M-files, which are just text so you can read them and understand how they work.

        And, for any large open source project with many lines of code, there is ALWAYS a inherent trust that the developer did not put anything nasty or incorrect in the code. You may think that someone will eventually find it, but there's no gaurentee..even if the code is all there.

        As an example, have you ever read through the all of the code for Firefox? Do you know anyone who ha

        • It's not that somebody has, it's that somebody could. And if there's some secret trojan in Firefox, some random developer might come across it at some point in time. Or some truly independent third party may actually do a n actual security audit of it and release the results. That can't happen with closed source software. It has happened more than once with free software.

          As for Matlabs functions being in M-files... Do you get to see the source for the interpreter of those functions?

          I refuse to use Wi

          • Yeah, because it's impossible to determine whether the interpeter is correctly parsing 2 + 2.

            I think you need to see and use Matlab before you judge it.

            I think that goes for any software which you refuse to use.

            Not all software is equal.
    • I've had reviewers in the journal _peer review_ process chide me for building a graphical user interface on top of Matlab. The reviewer lamented that I did not use some crappy free product, such as scilab.

      I'd certainly prefer a product to be independent where practical, and using freely available products if not. There's a big difference between saying "to run Foo v2 you need to download a copy of Bar 1.2 or later from bar.sf.net" and "to run Foo v2 you have to go and cough up another $1000 for a copy of

      • Is it usable without the GUI? If not, I'd say making the core GPLed is almost irrelevant.

        Yes, it is. The input file to the simulation code is a file format that is completely open and has APIs in 9+ languages. The GUI is written in Matlab because it's easy to write GUI's in Matlab. The research is not in the GUI. It's in the simulation code. Any extra time spent on the GUI is pure waste.

        I use Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, Red Hat/Suse, and Sunbird because they are free _and_ superior products (ok, maybe
        • Yes, it is. The input file to the simulation code is a file format that is completely open and has APIs in 9+ languages. The GUI is written in Matlab because it's easy to write GUI's in Matlab. The research is not in the GUI. It's in the simulation code. Any extra time spent on the GUI is pure waste.

          Ah, fair enough. I'm not a fan of that approach in general, but if Matlab's the best choice it's the only sensible way to operate.

          I use Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, Red Hat/Suse, and Sunbird because they a

  • The GPL has this ingenous idea of "copyleft", which on the surface does allow the user a fair amount of freedom to do with the software what they will. However, it also delegates much of the power of the GPL to judges and caselaw to pick through the murky issues of software copyright issues.

    Stallman/FSF of course didn't want to give up the power of determining what is allowed, so they have been spreading extra-legal interpretations of What We Really Meant for years. And the GNUites have basically lapped th

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