iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them

[Charlton Wilbur]

On Jul 3, 2007, at 11:34 AM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

>
> On 4 juil. 07, at 00:20, David P. Henderson wrote:
>
>> On 03 Jul 2007, at 10:29, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
>>
>>> Think Kerberos and the way it has been modified by Microsoft to  
>>> ruin the efforts of the community to have a vendor neutral protocol.
>>>
>>> Was it added value ? No, it was just distorting the original so  
>>> that nobody would use it anymore. Was that innovation ? No, it  
>>> was stealing, plain and simple.
>>>
>>> Obviously the Kerberos developers with their MIT license had not  
>>> considered the consequences of their move...
>>
>> How exactly would the GPL have stopped MS from doing this to  
>> Kerberos.
>
> Figure it out yourself...

Frankly, it wouldn't have.  As long as Microsoft made the source code  
of their changes publicly available, the terms of the GPL would have  
been satisfied.  Of course, nothing requires them to make those  
changes functional on any platform other than Windows, or to not  
rewrite Kerberos from the ground up to be something that the original  
Kerberos developers would never use.

>> There have been many complaints from the KHTML community that  
>> Apple did exactly this when it adopted KHTML for use in Web Kit.  
>> And there was absolutely nothing the KHTML creators could do to  
>> stop Apple since it followed the letter of the license.
>
> How can you know since there is no code audit possible ? Not that I  
> am suspecting Apple of wrongdoing but unless you are an insider at  
> Apple I don't see how you have access to that information.

This *is* what the KHTML people complained about Apple doing; Apple  
handed them a set of patches with very little context, and the KHTML  
maintainers made a great fuss about the level of effort required to  
integrate the patches into the KHTML code base and the way Apple was  
taking the code in a different direction.  Apple said "sorry,  
providing things in any other way requires more engineering effort  
than we can spare, and we're only required to provide you with the  
source of any change we make, not do the work of integrating them  
into the public version."

Apple complied with the letter of the GPL, but the KHTML developers  
were still fairly annoyed and accused Apple of attempting to take  
over KHTML much as you are unhappy about Microsoft doing with Kerberos.

I reiterate: there is *nothing* in the GPL that would have saved  
Kerberos from Microsoft's embrace-and-extend tactics.

>> Continuing to use phrases like "steal," "stealing," and "theft"  
>> with regard to licenses which approximate public domain make you  
>> sound like a marxist chanting, "property is theft."
>
> And you don't like chants ? Or is their a deeper meaning to that ad- 
> hominem ? And where did you see that copyright "approximates"  
> public domain ? Public domain is specifically where there is no  
> copyright.

When you're behaving stupidly, pointing out that the behavior is  
stupid is not an ad hominem attack.  In particular, your  
interlocutors are pointing out that your insistence on using words  
like "stealing" and "freedom" idiosyncratically is doing a lot to  
discredit your argument and a lot more to make you look like a loon.   
If you want your word choice to make you look like a nutter, by all  
means, carry on.

Charlton


-- 
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur at gmail.com
cwilbur at chromatico.net