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Gez said:
About GPL owning the code, the thing is that if you think you might want to use your code under a different license later on, including external contributions to it, then you should be proactive about it and dual-license it from the get-go. Or use a different license altogether, such as LGPL or BSD.

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printz said:

What, can't you relicense your own code? Do you really have to plan ahead? If you can't relicense derivatives of your own GPL code (with the original still being online), then Lyfe was right.

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DaniJ said:

Indeed, this above all else is the reason why I believe in the GPL (if not the motives of the FSF). It is the ultimate proverbial middle finger to the idiots who believe you can copyright an algorithm.

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Lyfe said:
Relicense. Upgrade. Potatoe. Potato.

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Lyfe said:

2. Well, if Linus would just license his code under a different license, maybe we'd have Linux under a BSD-style license. Oh wait, it's not his project, is it? It's owned by the GPL. Thanks for clearing that up.

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Lyfe said:

3. Yet, if it's only my code in the project, that defeats the purpose of having licensed it with the GPL, which is to get a LOT of code from a LOT of people to make the project better. Thus, the GPL owns the project. It might not own *my* original code. But it sure does own a copy of everyone's contributions (including mine) in the project. Unless everyone later agreed to 'recontribute' said code to the project under a different license.

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Lyfe said:

4. And this is the root of the issue. There are many people out there who don't agree with the GPL. Neither do we like being told what to do. After all, you don't like me telling you that the issue can also be solved by noone using the GPL for their code, thus we should all use non-copyleft licenses.

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Lyfe said:

5. Are you implying that a project like FreeBSD would somehow fold if the FreeBSD Foundation folded?

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Lyfe said:
XCode Stuff

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Lyfe said:

7. I'm sorry, I didn't know that all BSD-licensed code is closed-source. </sarcasm>

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Lyfe said:

9. Example of something with competition? I mean, between competing GPL projects.

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Lyfe said:

Again, the code you write belongs to you (short of signing it over to someone else). But the project you create isn't always solely yours.

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Lyfe said:

10. So, you don't think the fact that Novell was suing the bejesus out of everything BSD at the time when Linux became popular had anything to do with it? Please tell me at least that you are aware of the fact that every business in the world was fearful of anything related to BSD while the Novell lawsuits dragged on.

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Lyfe said:
11. I'm glad we were able to avoid these odd comments during our discussion. I think it's been an amazingly pleasant discussion between someone who believes the GPL should be everywhere, and someone who believes that the GPL should be dumped in favor of more BSD-style licenses.

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Maes said:
I forgot what the source port idea was, if there has even been one in those 200+ posts.

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Phml said:
I wish we'd still have the OP punctuating the debate with his tantrums, too.

...I'd make a terrible school teacher.

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Phml said:
but meas lol (am I cool enough to use that? Please?

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Quasar said:
We need less of this not more of it.

Use of the asininely licensed BUILD code is a cop-out. Implement these features from scratch using your own intellect or don't bother. It is an unfair and unnecessary burden on the rest of us, who take licensing seriously.

Out of everything I could consider a dislike about ZDoom, the only thing I cannot forgive is its continued insistence on following this direction and the way that it flies in the face of the spirit of sharing that pervades the rest of the port development community.

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Shamash said:
I ask you people, who gives you right to control what I do with the code that I write? I think that you forget that even developers are people and what you're asking, is limiting our freedom to use our creativity and skills to do something awesome and then decide what happens to it.

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Should for example music artist be limited so that all his/her works must follow some rules that some group of people wants to enforce? If you answered not, then why should programmers be different?

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What I do believe is that programmer's work should be protected by the copyright system as any person's other artistic work and there is nobody in the world that has right to demand them to do things like not close the source.

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Ladna said:
Words have meaning. Just because they have similar meanings in some context doesn't mean they're interchangeable in all contexts.

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Ladna said:

Assuming that by non-copyleft licenses you mean BSD, BSD licenses give the option to close the source, so no, the "issue cannot be solved" completely. Again, how do you reuse code that is closed source?

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Ladna said:

Incidentally, that's why I think Linux outpaced the BSDs, the GPL guaranteed its openness. As Quasar elegantly stated, it became an asset of the human race.

<snip>

The SCO v. Novell lawsuit involving Linux intellectual property was a big deal too. This is kind of a side road to be honest, neither of us is gonna convince the other that license was or wasn't a big component of Linux' success.

<snip>

I don't know enough about the FreeBSD Foundation or FreeBSD development. I'm assuming this is regarding Mozilla and Firefox (I think you got the number system messed up haha, I hate Doomworld forums!!!!) but that was an argument for copyleft being a feature that people care about and that has real, significant impact on the world. Linux also had such an impact for precisely that reason. FreeBSD on the other hand, not so much.

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Maes said:
I forgot what the source port idea was, if there has even been one in those 200+ posts.

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fraggle said:
Doesn't matter, the OP is banned now anyway.

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GhostlyDeath said:
B) "DON'T LICENSE YOUR CODE UNDER THE ??!" -- It is not your code, why should you have any say?

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GhostlyDeath said:
Now why/how did that happen?

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GhostlyDeath said:
I wrote my code and if I slap license XYZ on it, you can either accept it and use my code or write your own code with license ABC. Some of you keep complaining:

A) "I DON'T WANT MY OWN CODE UNDER THE ??!" -- It is your code you license it how you want.

B) "DON'T LICENSE YOUR CODE UNDER THE ??!" -- It is not your code, why should you have any say?

C) "I DON'T WANT MY MODIFICATION UNDER THE |" -- Write a new program from scratch, you cannot take someone's code and change a few lines and think you can do whatever you want.

D) "USING SOMEONE ELSES CODE UNDER THE ??! LIMITS MY RIGHTS!" -- Licenses were made to give you rights normally denied, some just don't give it all. You can always invade an island and claim it.

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Now why/how did that happen?

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GhostlyDeath said:
I wrote my code and if I slap license XYZ on it, you can either accept it and use my code or write your own code with license ABC. Some of you keep complaining:

A) "I DON'T WANT MY OWN CODE UNDER THE ??!" -- It is your code you license it how you want.

B) "DON'T LICENSE YOUR CODE UNDER THE ??!" -- It is not your code, why should you have any say?

C) "I DON'T WANT MY MODIFICATION UNDER THE |" -- Write a new program from scratch, you cannot take someone's code and change a few lines and think you can do whatever you want.

D) "USING SOMEONE ELSES CODE UNDER THE ??! LIMITS MY RIGHTS!" -- Licenses were made to give you rights normally denied, some just don't give it all. You can always invade an island and claim it.



Now why/how did that happen?

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Lyfe said:

Your argument has also proven to not be *the* scenario, just the worst-case scenario. It's also a worst-case scenario that relies on people to be at their absolute worst, as well.

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Ladna said:
To be honest, I felt the same way you do about the BSD licenses until I saw what closing ZDaemon's source did to the competitive Doom community. That's really the "real-world" basis for my argument. I think it's unacceptable that this is even possible, whether or not it requires people to be shitty or whatever is immaterial to me. In fact I think if a license allows openness to be defeated by shittiness, then the license itself is shitty.

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Ladna said:
To be honest, I felt the same way you do about the BSD licenses until I saw what closing ZDaemon's source did to the competitive Doom community. That's really the "real-world" basis for my argument.

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Ladna said:
I think it's unacceptable that this is even possible, whether or not it requires people to be shitty or whatever is immaterial to me. In fact I think if a license allows openness to be defeated by shittiness, then the license itself is shitty.

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Ladna said:
We could probably argue the merits about whether ZDaemon's community is worse/smaller than it was pre-1.07, or whether closing the source had anything to do with it

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Ladna said:
But along the Linux/FreeBSD lines, FreeBSD 2.0 (the first "unencumbered" version) was released 11/29/1994. Linux 1.0 was released 3/14/1994, but Linux 1.0 sucked balls. It wasn't until the 2.0 series it really took off, and that wasn't released until 6/9/1996. So really, I would say that just from a timing standpoint, the lawsuit couldn't have had an effect on competition for developer effort between Linux & FreeBSD. If anything, FreeBSD had a head start.

But you can go further and say that the lawsuit was a result of AT&T's shitty licensing agreement with Berkeley. If they had licensed their code to Berkeley under the GPL, that lawsuit never would have happened. You might argue back, "but then AT&T would never have invested resources into UNIX in the first place, and we wouldn't have had UNIX and therefore no BSD, Linux, GNU, and so on." I would say that's not true at all, Andrew Tenenbaum developed MINIX, Linus Torvalds developed Linux, Syllable Desktop exists, Genode OS Framework exists, etc. Programmers program, whether or not they get paid for it.

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Shamash said:
I agree 100% with you! No other than the programmer should have right to decide what happens to his code. If some person doesn't agree, then he should write himself his own code. He can't? His problem ;)

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Lyfe said:

You have a very small sample for a real-world basis. Plus, I don't think it was the closing of the source that caused - well, whatever you claim it caused - so much as the extreme reaction to that process.

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Lyfe said:
After all, if it was the closing of the source, where's all the ZDaemon 1.06 forks?

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Lyfe said:
It seems to me, that the only thing the GPL would have done would have been to chase away the existing developers on the project (who were getting tired of the issues associated with having all the sources in the wild), leaving the project to die.

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Lyfe said:
So, since we're allowed to do something 'bad' with it....

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Lyfe said:

It seems silly to me to try and enforce the morality of code-sharing (something which isn't detrimental to another person's health & well-being) by legal document.

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Lyfe said:

Like you said later in your post, programmers will write software, one way or another. Not all of them will share.

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Lyfe said:

We can't. I won't argue this point with you, because quite frankly - regardless of what the truth is - I enjoy it more. Apparently I long to have more disagreements, hence me coming on doomworld to continue a war. Obviously, the only definition of a truce to said war is acknowledging that the other party simply won't bend, and call it at that.

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Lyfe said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux - See paragraph 3. Even wikipedia cites the lawsuit (apparently from AT&T, not Novell - sorry) as stymieing BSD, with sources. Yet somehow you overlook this in favor of your "the license caused it" argument. People never forget the bad things. A lawsuit against an OS is a bad thing. It takes a long time to recover from that.
Additionally, the GPL wouldn't protect against a lawsuit, much like it had not protected against SCO's lawsuit. The shit still hits the fan.
You'd have better luck attributing Linux's success on that it written from the ground-up as an open-source OS. Which, after the debacle with AT&T and BSD, was appealing to many people.
Also see, chronology.

Really though, I never would have brought AT&T's work on UNIX into the mix, but since you did....
http://www.levenez.com/unix/
Granted, we might still have Tenenbaum, Torvalds, etc, develop OSs, but they had something to mimic. In the world we live in, this was UNIX.
Could you imagine Linux if it were based off MS-DOS?

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Gez said:

Then why were there petitions for Raven Software (among others, but Raven is the most relevant for Doomworld) to open the source from their old games? Why were the Skulltag guys harassed to open their source every time they wandered here?

I'm being a devil's advocate here because personally I am in favor of open source and I'm glad the Raven code got GPLed and Skulltag (and its successor) became open-sourced once and for all; but if something has enough of a community, and the license is deemed inconvenient, pressures are going to be exerted so as to get license changes.

Outside of Doom, a famous example would be the Qt library, back in the TrollTech days. Under pressure, it was relicensed first under a custom license (QPL), then dual-licensed with GPL v2, then triple licensed with GPL v3 too (with a long list of exceptions allowing to mix with code under various other FOSS licenses that might not otherwise be compatible with the GPL), and finally quadruple-licensed with the LGPL v2.1.

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Quasar said:

Maybe if the entirety of the ZDoom, Zandronum, etc. communities cared, they could get Ken to write off at least the portions of his code that are used in that source base to be used as BSD, or GPL, or whatever you wish. Anything that doesn't carry the no-commercial-use clause and is thus GPL-compatible would make me perfectly happy.

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Shamash said:

Just out of curiosity, about what parts of the BUILD's source code are you interested?

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