Differences between version 11 and predecessor to the previous major change of SoftwareLicensing.
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| Newer page: | version 11 | Last edited on Wednesday, July 6, 2005 9:32:59 am | by DanielLawson | Revert |
| Older page: | version 10 | Last edited on Tuesday, July 5, 2005 8:46:55 pm | by zcat(1) | Revert |
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I buy a GPL car (from Richard, or from someone who used Richard's plans to build it) and I still own the car. I can do all the same things that I could do with the Toyota. Richard still owns the copyright, but he's granted a licence for anyone to build their own car using (or based in part on) his plans. The only restriction is that if you sell or give your car to someone else they get a copy of the plans and the same permission.
I go see Bill. He won't sell me the car but I can rent it for life for about the same amount of money. The physical car is parked in my garage, but I'm not allowed to take the car apart and find out how it works because it's not mine. I'm only allowed four passengers at most, and the next time I need an oil change Bill reserves the right to add GPS tracking and a remote engine dissabler if he decides that's necessary. Bill still owns both the copyright and the car itself.
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+''There is nothing stopping car manufacturers doing the same thing. Except for the fact that cars wear down with age, so they don't gain a hell of a lot. Consider instead renting a house. You don't own the house - you only rent it. You can live in it. You can use it in certain ways, but you cannot knock walls out for example. You could buy a house instead. Outright, if you can afford the price, or you can get a mortgage on it. The mortgage will possibly even cost you only slightly more than the rental you were paying, but the difference is you're actually buying the house now.''
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+''Purchasing a 'copy' of Windows isn't really like either of these. You pay a one off cost for the life of the product, so it's not like rentals because you don't keep paying every term. It is closer to a rental however, in that you don't have the right to do absolutely whatever you want with the item, because the actual owner of the item has decided that you can't do this. ''
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+''To go back to your analogy, leasing a car would be closer to the current situation for windows. You pay a certain amount to lease the car for a period of time, at the end of which you upgrade to a newer car, and pay a new lease sum. This seems almost exactly like what happens with most commercial software. You don't own it, so you can't have it modified - without the owners permission anyway. You can't onsell it - because you don't own it. You have conditions on what you can do with the car, such as the number of passengers and the speeds your allowed to drive it at, and the leasing firm handles maintenance - and the right to install alarms, gps tracking devices and remote engine disablers. It's __their__ car, after all''
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+''As far as licences go, the GPL is actually exactly the same in this respect. It has restrictions on what you can and can't do with the software, and if you truly owned the software outright you wouldn't have those restrictions. If you owned it, you could mix it with your commercial code, or modify it and keep the changes to yourself. But you can't. The fact that the GPL offers you the freedom to knock down walls and renovate your house, to keep using that analogy, just means it's a more liberal form of licence. It's considered by some to be less liberal than the BSD licence, which incidentally still doesn't grant ownership to the end user. If you ever truly owned software, you could do anything at all that you wanted with it, including changing the license conditions. ''
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+''So the upshot of this is - if you want total and absolute freedom over your software, write it yourself. Or purchase it totally. But don't expect to buy the source code for an office suite for under a million dollars. And no, downloading the source code to abiword and gnumeric or OOo doesn't count. You still don't *own* the software. The fact is, basically all the software you 'own', you actually don't. You have permission to use, either by virtue of paying a fee to some nasty world-dominating megalithic corporation, or even to some other form of proprietary software selling company, if they exist; or by using OSS software. This is your choice.
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+''Incidentally, none of this covers public domain software. I think the main difference here is that either noone, or everyone is considered to own the software, and there are no restrictions on its use.''
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+'' -- DanielLawson''
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