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Re: [PLUG] OT: Suspected hacker attack - Can anyone advise?
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On Tue, May 23, 2000 at 09:36:28AM -0400, Michael W. Ryan wrote:
> On Mon, 22 May 2000, Brent R. Matzelle wrote:
>
> > For everyone's information PHP 4.0 (Zend) was just released. It has
> > been licensed by the QPL (the same as KDE). I assume that this means
> > that PHP 4.0 will not be placed on a Debian Apache/PHP installation in
> > the future. I really hate it when developers have to mess around with
> > an excellent tool like that. They did improve the perfomance in many
> > ways, but at the cost of the GPL. It doesn't seem worth it to me. Does
> > anyone have any info or comments on this subject?
>
> Just like people should have freedom of choice in choosing which
> application to use, developers should have freedom of choice on how to
> license their software, whether it's GPL, QPL, BSD license, or completely
> proprietary. Anyone who allows the licensing of a good product to prevent
> them from using it, as long the license doesn't exclude their intended
> use, is an idiot.
(For a theoretical treatment of the below, please see
<http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/philosophy.html>. There's a reprint
from the February 1997 issue of CACM at
<http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html> that considers a
(currently fictional) extreme of apparently harmless licenses that can
cause problems. UCITA would make this much less far-fetched.)
The question is whether one is foolish or ill-advised in the long run
to use software with proprietary or even non-free licenses over one
that provides full freedom, such as GPL. I will argue from anecdote
that the answer is yes, even if in the short run the answer appears to
be no.
I used to use a contact manager that was proprietary. The license
didn't prevent me from doing what I wanted (keeping track of contact
and calendar info). The app was better than any other I have found
before or since.
The company that made it went out of business. The intellectual
property (source code) was sold from one company to another, but never
resurrected as working code. When I got a Pilot, I found that there
was no working sync software for my contact db, just a buggy
first-draft sync thing that worked once in a while.
Now, if it had been open source, I could have (in principle) fixed
this. At least I would have had the choice.
As it happened, I had to move to another contact manager that I liked
less. Switching was a pain. I lost some features I liked. I hope I
didn't lose any data: I spent a lot of time being sure of this.
If my PIM had been open source, I maybe could have continued to use
it. If it had had a GPL-like license, someone (statistically) would
probably already have fixed it. With a few of the more restrictive
open source licenses, that's less likely, since people couldn't
publish their changes, only mail them back to the owner.
I, personally, don't sit quite as far to the left as RMS, as I used,
for example, NN 4.5.1 to check those URL's above instead of M16 or
lynx. I still haven't found a GPL'd word processor I really
like. Etc. But data is important to me. I don't want to risk losing my
data to corporate whim again.
(Another example: my copy of Photoshop stopped working last year when
I bought a new computer. Do I really want to pay several hundred
dollars more for a new copy of Photoshop? Ad infinitum, worst
case. This isn't an acceptable trade-off for me.)
OK, end of anecdotes. I agree with MWR's initial assertion that
developers should be free to choose their licenses. But I strongly
believe that a wise consumer should care enormously about licensing
terms unless the software in question is used transiently and leaves
no data behind.
--
Jeff Abrahamson
610/270-4845
abrahj01@molbio.sbphrd.com
(home email is jeff_abrahamson@purple.com)
<http://www.purple.com/jeff/>
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