So by combining code from two different "free" projects the developer would be restricting his users' freedom? Alright. So the developer can't give users that sort of code. The user has to do it himself, that is freedom after all. But doing that, the poor user essentially becomes a developer, and so he cannot distribute his thing to other users. That would be restricting the other users' freedoms. Right?
Or how about this: imagine for a moment I'm not a programmer. I'm just a poor user, and I take some code under GPLv2, fetching it into /tmp as I usually do. Maybe the code doesn't work straight out of the box, so I search a little and find a hack to fix the code (but I'm still not programming it, just applying random advice from the net). Cool, I get the code working, install it into ~/home/ or /usr/local, whatever. After some days a friend finds out I've got this cool software running and he's not so savvy with the computer but he wants that software.
Sharing is caring alright, so I zip up the binary & associated data files and send them his way.
Whoops, I just violated the license.
The license has a death clause that ends my rights when I violate it.
I'm just a poor user, and now the freedoms granted to me are gone. Or did I really have freedom to begin with?
EDIT: Actually, I'm pretty sure I've violated the GPL this way, more than once. Years ago I ran Gentoo as my main OS, and many of my acquaintances did too. Every once in a while the OS kinda pooped itself and friends asked friends to hand them a copy of a working libwhatever.so.whatever or somesuch. Some of these were patched by Gentoo, some of these might've been altered by me too. Sometimes we shared other binaries that had nothing to do with Gentoo per se.
In any case I never gave these people a written notice saying how to get the source, nor did I host the source for three years, nor did I share the source when I copied that binary to a place where a friend could grab it. I was just sharing. The code is free, right?
Now I know better. I no longer redistribute GPL-anything, because screw all these restrictions. It is not free.
> Now I know better. I no longer redistribute GPL-anything, because screw all these restrictions. It is not free.
I prefer BSD licenses, to be honest, and anything I write from scratch these days is under those licenses. But there are cases where projects are forked and it is not really possible to change the license.
Or how about this: imagine for a moment I'm not a programmer. I'm just a poor user, and I take some code under GPLv2, fetching it into /tmp as I usually do. Maybe the code doesn't work straight out of the box, so I search a little and find a hack to fix the code (but I'm still not programming it, just applying random advice from the net). Cool, I get the code working, install it into ~/home/ or /usr/local, whatever. After some days a friend finds out I've got this cool software running and he's not so savvy with the computer but he wants that software.
Sharing is caring alright, so I zip up the binary & associated data files and send them his way.
Whoops, I just violated the license.
The license has a death clause that ends my rights when I violate it.
I'm just a poor user, and now the freedoms granted to me are gone. Or did I really have freedom to begin with?
EDIT: Actually, I'm pretty sure I've violated the GPL this way, more than once. Years ago I ran Gentoo as my main OS, and many of my acquaintances did too. Every once in a while the OS kinda pooped itself and friends asked friends to hand them a copy of a working libwhatever.so.whatever or somesuch. Some of these were patched by Gentoo, some of these might've been altered by me too. Sometimes we shared other binaries that had nothing to do with Gentoo per se.
In any case I never gave these people a written notice saying how to get the source, nor did I host the source for three years, nor did I share the source when I copied that binary to a place where a friend could grab it. I was just sharing. The code is free, right?
Now I know better. I no longer redistribute GPL-anything, because screw all these restrictions. It is not free.