Proprietary forks and threat models
cwbrenn wrote:
As long as the GNU and other licenses in a Linux distro remain enforceable, you can't have a company like IBM or Microsoft bury the software.
I'm not sure you've thought this through, thoroughly: As we say in the security field, have you considered what's the threat model? What do you feel that threat model is? You didn't specify.
It sounds like you're saying the obligation to release source changes (when people distribute modified binaries) might prove legally unenforceable. If so, then the only consequence would be that people could lawfully distribute proprietary forks.
Wow, that's what killed FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, right?
Oops.
If a law like the DMCA suddenly makes the GPL illegal....
OK, the Anti-Commie-Pinko Statute of 2003 comes into force, providing that mandatory source-code disclosure provisions are unenforceable and that those who attempt to use them are to be publicly impaled. People who have been producing GPLed codebases fork their own codebases, issuing new instances under two-clause BSD licences. Curse their devilish cleverness!
The Anti-Commie-Pinko Statute of 2004 follows that, stating that all software licences that don't require payment of money are unenforceable. The aforementioned malefactors continue to distribute their software anyway, and just don't seek to enforce their terms.
The Anti-Commie-Pinko Statute of 2005 comes last, and bans copyright law's applicability to software that is distributed without an obligation to pay money for it. The aforementioned malefactors declare their works to be in the public domain.
We could go on, I suppose.
As I was saying to Todd, the essential characteristic of open-source software isn't any specific licence, but rather the right to fork. You're going to have a difficult time concocting a credible dystopia where that's barred by law.
...Thus, newbies will be seen as "freeloaders" by parts of the Linux community, and ranks of the nutjob elite will swell.
Again, and the consequence is...?
The Linux coder community has been self-sustaining for a decade. And they're really, really good at filtering out noise. Increase the irrelevant noise by a factor of ten, and they'll still filter it out.
Experiment: Join LKML (the Linux kernel mailing list), and start deliberately posting random crap about how Linux distributions aren't friendly enough and that developers need to add binary handlers for VBA, and things like that. Attempt to do that for a week.
It'll come as no surprise that you'd be pretty much universally killfiled, right? However, it might surprise you that you'd be silently removed from the subscriber roster in fairly short order, and find that pretty much all subsequent subscription attempts would mysteriously fail.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
