Comment by themafia
1 day ago
> The virality is a byproduct to ensure the software is not stolen from their users.
If Microsoft misappropriates GPL code how exactly is that "stealing" from me, the user, of that code? I'm not deprived in any way, the author is, so I can't make sense of your premise here.
> Freedom of software means nothing.
Software is information. Does "freedom of information" mean nothing? I think you're narrowing concepts here into something not particularly useful or reflective of reality.
> Users get the freedom to enjoy the software how they like.
The freedom is to modify the code for my own purposes. This is not at all required to plainly "enjoy" the software. I instead "enjoy a particular benefit."
> Why would my software which only contains a single function not be fair use?
Because fair use implies educational, informational, or transformational outputs. Your software is none of those things.
"If Microsoft misappropriates GPL code how exactly is that "stealing" from me, the user, of that code? I'm not deprived in any way."
Yes you are. You are just deprived of something you apparently don't recognize or value, but that doesn't make it ok.
The original author was also stolen from and that doesn't rely on your understanding or perception.
The original author set some terms. Therm were not money but they are terms exactly like money. They said "you can have this, and only price is you have to make the source, and the further right to redistribute, available to any user you hand a binary to.
Well MS handed you a binary and did not also hand you the source or the right to redistribute.
That stole from both you and the original author and me who might otherwise have benefited from your own child work. The fact that you personally apparently were never going to make use of something they owe you doesn't change the fact that they owe you, and the original author and me.
It is a tale as old as time, and one which no doubt all of us repeat at some point in our lives. There are hundreds of clichéd books, hundreds of songs, and thousand of letters that echo this sentiment.
We are rarely capable of valuing the freedoms we have never been deprived of.
To be privileged is to live at the quiet centre of a never-ending cycle: between taking a freedom for granted (only to eventually lose it), and fighting for that freedom, which we by then so desperately need.
And as Thomas Paine put it: "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it."
As a user I suffer from not being able to freely use or derive my own work from Microsoft’s
This. People conflate consumer to user. A user in the sense of GPL is a programmer or technical person whom the software (including source) is intended for.
Not necessarily a “user of an app” but a user of this “suite of source code”.
Except really the whole point is it explicitly and actively makes no distinction. Every random user has 100% of the same rights as any developer or vendor.
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At this point they've contributed a reasonably-fair share of open-source code themselves.
No one benefits from locking up 99.999% of all source code, including most of Microsoft's proprietary code and all GPL code.
No one.
When it comes to AI, the only foreseeable outcome to copyright maximalism is that humans will have to waste their time writing the same old shit, over and over, forever less one day [1], because muh copyright!!!1!
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
> only foreseeable outcome to copyright maximalism
Nahh, AI companies had plenty of money to pay for access they simply chose not to.
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> If Microsoft misappropriates GPL code how exactly is that "stealing" from me, the user, of that code? I'm not deprived in any way, the author is, so I can't make sense of your premise here.
The user in this example is deprived of freedoms 1, 2, and 3 (and probably freedom 0 as well if there are terms on what machines you can run the derivative binary on).
Read more here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Whether or not the user values these freedoms is another thing entirely. As the software author, licensing your code under the GPL is making a conscious effort to ensure that your software is and always will be free (not just as in beer) software.