Hello,
I am a software developer in robotics with a lot of love for open source. Recent events have made me ponder how one could release a trained model in order to keep it really open/free and I think (but would love to be proved otherwise) that there are no licenses applicable right now, as trained weights are a very different beast from source code or executable binaries. So I tried to write one by modifying the Affero GPL license (something the FSF explicitly allows in their FAQ): I posted it here
This is actually an old subject. I saw a discussion on the debian-legal mailing list from 2009 about it. It also crops up occasionally on debian-devel, was discussed at the 2012 Debconf and was also discussed by the ffmpeg team.
Having read that and many other cases and opinions, I think it is necessary to have a new license to "open source" trained weights but it is not necessarily a difficult task. I think (thanks to the previous free software efforts) it is already 95% done, we just need to adapt an existing license but be a bit more explicit about what a model is and not try to shoehorn a license designed for compiled software into the machine learning world.
I am not formally trained in copyright law, so I'd really appreciate someone with such a background to poke holes at my proposition, but everybody's constructive criticism is welcomed!
I have heard both Socialists and Capitalists defend it.
Some Caps say that $0 is the natural market value of information without [legally enforced] barriers to access.
Some Socs say that intellectual property, especially in the way that modern corporations throttle their respective industries, cannot be justified any more than other forms of property.
Things to consider: The History of Record Labels, Youtube DMCA Abuse, Disney Copyright Extensions, Pharmaceutical Patents, Patent Trolls, Copyfraud, Linux, Digital Piracy
What do you think?
EDIT: Seems most of the replies vote Left-Wing by association rather than any explicit character of the policy.
This might need some explanation. In the software world you have different software development and distribution models. Here are examples of the three main types of software licenses that Iโm talking about.
Windows 10 is closed source and proprietary. The source code of the OS is owned by Microsoft and nothing in their software license legally obligated them to share their source code. Exclusive rights to the source code and profit motive are possible driving forces for innovation with this type of software.
Some open source software is permissively licensed. This includes license models such as MIT and BSD. The developer has made the software source code available to the public. Anyone may use the code, incorporate it into their project and maybe modify it, and choose whether to release it to the public and or to hold onto it as their property. Possible driving forces for innovation are the greater collaboration across the world on the source code plus the possibility that future modifications to the code may be held as closed source and used for commercial profit.
Restrictive licenses like the GPL dictate that if one uses the library or modifies then they must make the source code available if the software is to be distributed. This combines the collaboration of the open source model with a possible solution for the free rider problem (somebody taking open source code, using it, and not contributing it back). On the other hand, corporations may be wary of this model as it locks them out from being exclusive owners of their software source code.
What research has been done on these different software licenses and which types are most efficient at driving innovation and growth?
Recently there has been a lot of talk about companies patenting game ideas (Nemesis system, The Medium's double reality system, to name a couple). I think that in doing so, they are working against one of the core values of the game industry that I've personally grown to value so much: Innovation by Inspiration.
I want to prevent my own ideas from being taken by a company and patented in order to prevent anyone else from using it (or even trying to sue me after they secured their patent; could they even pull off something like that?). Is there any way of doing so? Is there something like a copyleft patent that protects my idea from being patented / have its usage restricted in any way?
Copyleft or ShareAlike licenses like the GNU GPL and the CC-BY-SA license are copyright licenses that serve a fairly different purpose than most copyright licenses. They allow essentially any use, with attribution requirements and the requirement that anyone elseโs derivative work is also licensed under the same license.
I feel like I could see anarchists arguing that a public domain dedication is the only ethical way to license creative work. Though they serve a different purpose, copyleft licenses are still copyright licenses, and enforcing them (through a DMCA takedown for example) is using the state to protect โintellectual property.โ
However, An Anarchist FAQ is licensed under the GNU GPL, not public domain. This is to โensure that the FAQ remains a free product, available for use by all.โ If someone were to violate the terms of this license (as propertarians have), is it problematic to enforce the license through DMCA takedown?
Does it matter who is violating the license terms? If a democratically-organized worker-owned co-op is violating such a license, is enforcement more problematic than if itโs a corporation?
Don't know much about programming, but I am a socialist and was curious about what would happen to the concept of licensing itself as it pertains to copyright law today.
We had a meeting today at work in which they "laid down the law" on software licensing. Basically, since we're a commercial enterprise, we're not permitted to use anything that would require you to open-source your entire project if you included it. They did explain that simply using a GPL project in the line of work doesn't necessarily require you to open source the code (e.g. you can write apps for Linux (GPL licensed) without them being open source). However, the issue comes into play with anything that involves source code that we're directly working with. Therefore, they suggest looking specifically for MIT licensed code (since that license is permissive). But we're not permitted to use code from anything GPL-licensed (or any other strict copyleft), even as a snippet.
It got me thinking and I dove into some aspects of licensing that I honestly haven't looked at before. One very simple example: code from StackOverflow. SO's code is licensed under CC-BY-SA; the "SA" part (share-alike) is very GPL-like, and depending on who you ask, would mean that if you copied even a single line of code from SO, you are now required to open-source your entire application - other interpretations limit that scope to the code itself, thus copy/pasting the code as-is wouldn't necessarily require open-sourcing your app (but modifying the SO code would actually possibly create a hairy situation, since you have to release changes to the code under CC-BY-SA; how would you do that if your changes are specifically to adapt the posted code to your application?).
There also seems to be ambiguity in what is meant by "using" the code. If your application does not link to the code of a GPL app, but rather acts as a frontend for a compiled version of that GPL app, do you now need to make your app open-source? (Simple way to think about it: does a frontend for a GPL app that simply composes command line invocations and interprets output for a CLI app need to be GPL licensed?)
Another point is the idea of re-implementing GPL code from the knowledge gained from it. Copyright could assert that copying the functionality of some code, even if you rewrite it from scratch. is a copyright violation (just consider the Oracle v Google case). So therefore, if I refer to SO to learn how to do something, and then re-implement it, that could technically be a violation of CC-BY-SA since I'm "copying" the functionality without obeying the license. Of course, there's situations where you literal
... keep reading on reddit โกHi reddit peoplz!
When I was a kid, Mandrake 7.2 came across and i felt into love with this Version :D I loved so much the Tux "version" of it.
Do someone know where to find a high resolution/SVG of this tux and how it is licensed? I googled already as best as i was able but have nothing found.
Thx!
https://preview.redd.it/a9ylh29j8wy51.png?width=218&format=png&auto=webp&s=eedf7ccfee55ad489f4b69dcf9cd2ff5d8c3ce24
https://preview.redd.it/a3vt909j8wy51.jpg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=12f962da05dd0ac83834afcd16b794d34a834695
Estimated reading time: about 5 minutes
background: what is copyleft
Also called a reciprocal license or share-alike , is basically a type of open source license that mandates that any modification you make to whatever is licensed must be shared with anyone using the licensed object, it has various variants like weak copyleft where you don't have to always share the modifications , e.g. MPL only requires sharing the file you modified, LGPL mandates only changes to the library must be shared, AGPL requires that anyone using your product over a network must be able to access the modifications.
why copyleft: arguments supporting it's effectiveness
the first point to make is that it works well in practice , with many great projects such as linux, wikipedia, mysql/mariadb , blender, krita ,QT , gcc, firefox, nextcloud and wordpress.
Openrisc also saw some commercial use, in fact the creators of RISC-V considered using it but decided not to due to technical reasons.
Besides the quality of the projects themselves, copyleft has also shown to be a great moneymaking/business strategy , Linus torvalds (creator of Linux) made a lot of money (at 2018 his estimated annual salary was about 988k), wikimedia (the foundation behind wikipedia) had about 100M in revenue in 2018, red hat and mysql got sold for 34 billion and 1 billion respectively .
Linus also described in a interview the GPL as "one of the defining factors in the success of Linux".
When using a non-copyleft license at some point the code could be closed (reddit is a recent example of this), and it will be easier for the closed source competitor to improve and gain market share. It gets improved monetization by being able to force people to pay for the product, and investing it's revenue in improving it even more. That makes it a lot harder for open source implementations to compete . This is why when wine had a problem with companies holding back contributions it switched to the LGPL.
you might say that some companies won't contribute to a copyleft project because they don't want to give back code, but there will be more that will contribute when they would not contribute if i
... keep reading on reddit โกHey- a friend of mine has been making and publishing music on YouTube for a while, and recently bought a subscription for one of those distributers - DistroKid I think. He's still trying to grow and is a little worried someone might use his songs without giving credit, or make money off something using his music without asking or helping out. He's happy for anyone to use them as long as they give proper credit and don't like sell them or something. Right now he's just asked people to credit if they reach out. Anyhow, I mentioned that I vaguely knew of copyleft as an option for stuff like that - a la GPL. A cursory google search turns up the FMPL v0.8 (free music public license) - but I'm a bit confused on the necessity of something like that. Googling seems to turn up that simply by publishing his music, he's somewhat protected under copyright - does that mean that others are now barred from using his music without express permission? If he gives them permission under the condition they credit him, are they now bound to do so? One final thing: using a song as background music in a video (the most common and likely thing to happen with his music) - is that a derivative work? Would they then need to include the license in their work? etc
TLDR: Wants music, which is uploaded through a paid distributer, to be used only if credit is given - but otherwise can be used as background in a video with no problem (as long as credited). What, if anything, needs to be done to be able to enforce this?
Thanks!
I just noticed that Disroot has a Gitea instance. While I still firmly believe that self-hosting with a DMCA ignored hosting provider is better, Disroot's Gitea instance would be one of the best already existing platforms for a project like this. It's probably not immune to the RIAA long-term, but based on the links below I have a feeling that both Disroot and Greenhost (Disroot's hosting provider) would be as upset as we are if they got a DMCA takedown order for an open source project and that they would probably fight it. Extra plus to Disroot for being Copyleft and having a good privacy policy. Both Disroot and Greenhost are based in the Netherlands, which is a pretty good jurisdiction where courts have stood up to the US on occasion.
Sorry for a naive question but do I need to do anything except saying that "this work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0" and provide a link to the license on the CC website? I'd naively assume that I'd have to go through some actual legal procedure. But given how many normal people are using CC licenses, I don't think they're all contacting some copyright lawyer, etc.
Hello everybody. I have an honest question and I am not trying to start a flame war. But why do a lot of people seem to hate copyleft especially lesser copyleft licenses such as the lpgl. I see a lot more successful software(im talking more like full desktop programs not services like webservers and such) that seem to get more support due to the license. I see the pros to permissive as well. But a lot of people make the argument that copyleft isnt truly free. Which I get but I dont think is fair since its trying to make it free for everyone regardless. I see pros and cons I just am trying to understand why a lot less people seem to like copyleft now.
I think that the use of copyright for copyleft purposes does not create the same problems that excessively long normal copyright does, since it does not restrict further derivative works, archival, free culture, etc. I think it is reasonable for copyleft licenses to be enforced for far longer. This would additionally be an incentive for people to use them more and would prevent corporations from continually copyrighting derivatives of the same thing. Thoughts?
Hello!!
I would like to ask you, where do you find copyleft or copyright free music to use in your contents?
Can I use for example, just the instrumental version of a copyrighted song without a strike?
I'm interested in finding out why people use non-copyleft licences for new projects. I found some ideas on when a different licence might be useful at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html but I have seen new 'independent' projects using licences which would allow others to take their work to proprietary software and screwing with the FLOSS ideas of the creators and contributors. Btw do you have examples for such practices?
