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  From: Alan Kennington <ak1.linuxsa@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 13:09:28 +0930

Re: Re: bsd- easier than you think

On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 12:23:32PM +0930, Mark Newton wrote:
> 
> You can hardly call it philanthorpy when you're saying, "Sure, use
> this, but if you carry out certain behaviours you'll be obligated
> to give some of your stuff back to me."
> 


Mark,

Just to agressively agree with you, here's a quote from Tom Christiansen
in Slashdot on 10 December 1999:

--------------------------------------------------
Some people prefer to install poison-pills in their licences. Usually, this
poison pill is about using the software to make money with. Sleepycat Software
has that, the GPL has that, and so do lots of others. I suppose some selfish
people have good reasons for this, but let's not be pretending that software
with a poison-pill in it is somehow "free", or that it does the most good. It
doesn't. A selfish poison pill tries to make sure that the original authors'
socio-economic-political dogma gets spread through the world at the cost of
helping fewer people. "Use" licences like this hamper code reuse and hurt
programmers. A gift, on the other hand, comes without a price tag on it.

Every author has to make up their own mind here. I personally prefer software
freely given away--without restrictions, without legislated morality, without
poison pills, without any agenda beyond trying to help to make the world a
better place. The AL seems to do a good job at that.

Try, please, to remember what the greatest gift of all is. If you know what it
is and why, then you'll understand. If you do not, then I'm not sure I can
convince you. But the answer is charity.

--tom
---------------------------------------------------


But just on a related topic, can you tell me how to choose a licence
which gives the best _artistic_ protection?
I have in mind a documentary I once saw about coffee farmers in Papua
New Guinea who talked not so much about the money to be earned, but
rather about "raising up their name". In other words, they wanted the fame
of their success to spread throughout PNG so that they would have a good name.

Here are two real-life examples which demonstrate the problem.

-------------
Example 1:
One guy in a company wrote an excellent manual on how to do software
version control. Another guy (higher up in the tree) made a couple of
trivial modifications to this excellent document, including replacement
of the original author's name with his own. Then the second author 
"raised up his name" within the company and got a promotion etc.
The first author felt aggrieved and was demoted and eventually left the
company in disgust.

Example 2:
An Apache module author makes a module available on the net (with
Artistic licence) and someone in a different country makes a trivial
modification to make it compile with Apache 2.x and contributes it
to Mandrake as a package. But the module doesn't work at all any more because
the "contributor" didn't bother to test it. But the original author's
name is left on it and is then considered to have written flakey software
even though it worked perfectly when not altered.
--------------

How on earth do you protect your own name against these two possibilities?
If you insist on getting credit for derived works (just moral credit,
not money), then you can end up getting _blame_, not credit.
But if you say: Rename any derived work and don't leave my name on it
if you make any modification, then some scoundrel can just change the
author's name on it, and claim that they wrote it - and even harrass the
original author for using the usurper's intellectual "property".

What I would like is a licence which says: You must keep my name on
this software if you modify it and it continues to work as well or better.
But if it is made worse in any way, I want my name removed from it.

As a perpetual coward, I instinctively prefer to say: Take it, do what
you like with it, but just don't blame me for anything that goes wrong.
But then how will I feel if I spend 6-12 months on a gift to the world
and it doesn't even "raise up my name" because someone else puts
a nice GUI on it and takes all the credit?

Somehow I suspect that there is no solution.
Whether we talk about moral credit or financial rewards, software
doesn't have the same ownership properties as a cow, say, where you
either get the whole cow or nothing. Because of its infinitely cheap
copying properties, software is much more like an artistic work,
like an architectural _design_ rather than a building.

Perhaps ultimately the best artistic protection some from the public record.
If one's work is out there in public, with some evidence for the date
or publication, then the credit or blame for software can always be
traced back through the archives.
Maybe the Artistic Licence, and to some extent BSD, does achieve this,
although the BSD licence doesn't require a change of name if
the software work is modified.

The difference with the GPL is that it is concerned not so much with
artistic credit, but rather with preventing charity going to
companies which don't really need it. I guess this is a kind of means test.
But it always was the rms vision that a complete unix would be created
without the alienation of the means of production from the proletariat.
This seems to have turned into a kind of "Animal Farm" though

Anwyay, I'd better do some work for a change...

Cheers,
Alan the Not So Bold.

-- 
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