Read the last paragraph first before starting to reply!
Rugxulo wrote:
On 8/15/10, Jonas Maebe jonas.maebe@elis.ugent.be wrote:
I'll admit that the term "public domain" has sometimes been misused, but I don't think so here. It (P4) is only like 4000+1500 lines (5500), nothing huge.
The size has nothing to do with the term "public domain". Even if it were 20 lines of non-trivial code, it would still be copyrighted. Stop inventing your own definitions of legal terms (whatever you think they should be), it only muddies the discussion.
The point was that it's nothing huge enough that they can act like it took them 20 years to write and is worth millions of dollars.
Where in copyright law does it say it needs to take them 20 years to write and be worth millions of dollars in order to have copyright?
My point, in case you're referring to this is, it might take *us* several years to write a new GPC and the result might be worth quite a bit, and they could bring it down with even a small copyright claim.
And why should I stop inventing my own thoughts?
He didn't say that. Read the quote (it's still there above). He said: "Stop inventing your own definitions of legal terms". And I would add: Stop misquoting people.
It doesn't bother them to legislate and change everything and force their ideas on us, even when it clearly wasn't thought out properly, so how is my random idea any worse?
Because lawyers and judges are not gonna follow your idea, but the law.
I also didn't know you, Jonas, were his legal representative to tell us 100% positively what the license of the compiler, RTL, etc. is (but I naively assume you're telling the truth here).
I suppose this alludes to my questioning of Pemberton's claim. But again, this is a bad example, since as Florian wrote, the statement is in the sources, whereas in the P4 source there is no such statement, as I pointed out.
So instead of building on publicly available sources, which have been available longer than I've been alive, we're supposed to let them rot "just because" somebody somewhere might arbitrarily throw a hissy fit. Wonderful.
Yes. Change the laws.
We didn't invade their house and pilfer their silverware, just attempting to use what is already available (and without any mention of license anywhere except Pemberton's claim that it's PD, which for some odd reason is horribly dubious because he's such a devious liar, naturally).
Who said he was a liar? Are you misquoting me now?
BTW, I assume you're still loyal to GPL (and maybe GNU) even if (some?) GCC devs really haven't been that helpful directly. Obviously if you were to (help) rewrite GPC, it doesn't have to be GPL anything. You could use BSD, ISC, WTFPL, or whatever.
Yes, I prefer the GPL (which hasn't much to do with what GCC developers do -- RMS hasn't worked in GCC for a long time AFAIK). Besides, as I wrote, it might reuse parts of the existing GPC (e.g., the lexer, parser and runtime interface), in which case it would need to be GPL.
I blindly assume it's not anybody at FSF or GNU proper who is suggesting that GPC needs a rewrite. So they don't care. So all your worries (as is typical for a GNU project, a la GCC or Emacs) are probably unfounded.
You mean my worries about legal issues? No, they're not unfounded. The law doesn't apply only to GNU projects.
My silly Befunge interpreter in Pascal is approx. 150 lines (or 25 if manually obfuscated and stripped of unnecessary crud). It's *extremely* trivial, IMHO, and I wrote it! It's released to "public domain"
By which you acknowledge that you had the copyright (and then actively released it). If it wasn't copyrightable (because it was so small), you couldn't have released it in the first place. :-)
You really want to tell me that copyright applies there? Oh, and yes, I did publicly publish it, with PD notice, on the Pascal newsgroups, mostly because there were no posts except spam, *grumble grumble*. But I guess I might "change my mind" and try to enforce it when I'm (31+40=) 71, esp. since "public domain" isn't even possible in some countries (muahahahaha, profit, damages, whee!!). ;-))
*You* published it *with* a PD notice. That's more than what we know about P4 so far.
If you live in a country where releasing to PD is not possible, it may be problematic. (I once heard that it might be interpreted as a release under an all-permissive license, but since I'm no lawyer, I'm not sure about this.)
I'd rather you ask FPC about whether they are (or will adapt to) GPLv3 (compatible).
Huh? What's that got to do with it? (As Jonas wrote, it is compatible, but even if it weren't, what would this mean in this context? Are you again bringing up random examples of random things?)
Damn it, Frank, give me some credit here. I'm not THAT dumb! Sheesh.
[...]
The point was that you hadn't really (openly) considered adapting FPC,
Took me a while to understand what you're apparently talking about here. Changing topics without notice doesn't make it easy to follow you. This subthread is about using P4/P5 in a new GPC, now you're talking about switching to FPC, or what? As I said before, I'm not going to do this with my code, but other users might do so.
Right. BUT if GNU and GCC are to have separate language frontends, *somebody* has to care. If not RMS, then who? Doesn't matter if he uses Pascal, he should have some say in who does what, how they help others, etc. Okay, maybe that's not his job, but it should be somebody's.
I don't need to write anything here because the answer is right there in the next quoted sentence from my last mail:
Each language frontend is developed by those who care about it.
What's not clear about this?
Well, yes, obviously, I mean, it would be easier if GPC was updated to work correctly with GCC 4.x instead of abandoning it completely.
Oh would it? Have you tried it? (Hint: We have. We haven't managed it in the last 10-20 years with our available time. That's why I started this discussion in the first place.)
But why won't they help fix the bugs? Why don't they integrate your patches? Etc. etc. It just seems dumb (to me) that they would ignore you since GPC is quite good.
Yes, it's not nice. But what can we do about it? We can whine about it, try to do it ourselves (as Waldek did for some time, but like all of us, he doesn't have unlimited available time), live with the problems, or get away from the backend. I personally prefer the latter.
Bah, then make a plugin system, a la GCC 4.5.0, and use P5 in that. ;-))
This would still put the frontend (i.e., all of our work) at risk.
How so? (Well, I was mostly joking anyways.)
If we were to use it for any important purposes, and it's later "pulled away", the program would fall apart. And if it's not used for any important purpose, why use it at all?
- Contact Steven Pemberton and ask him if he has a documented statment of its being PD
Legal papers?? From whom? Why would he?
Because he's stating that it's PD on his website and he wrote a book about it. (Not saying he's required to have such papers, but he might since he obviously spend some time of his life with it.)
You know, dare I call it a virtue, but most people don't live their life just to be legally pedantic and screw others over.
It takes only one to sue, not "most people".
Then try the second alternative. (It didn't say they were guaranteed to work, just possibilities.)
Note that this doesn't mean he's lying,
So you're arguing against yourself now? (Because noone but you talked about lying.)
What if there is (or was) no "legal" way for it to be declared PD even if the authors' intended that??
Which I suppose. Then all we could hope for is release under some free (possibly all-permissive) license. In which case PD would be legally incorrect, but for practial purposes close enough.
Which is really dumb, BTW, that an author / copyright holder can't do what they want with their own work just because some weird law disagrees.
I agree, but this is really the least problem. For practical purposes, it's basically the same as PD, and it doesn't take much more work for the author to do it.
Scott can't even get Jim Welsh to contact him about the "model implementation". Like I said, if you try and try and try REALLY hard to contact them and they don't respond, are you still a big bastard for still using it anyways??
Yes, if by that you (knowingly and unnecessarily) put your users in danger.
It's not knowingly and unnecessarily if you did your best to resolve it, is it??
- You tried to resolved it => you know about it, i.e. knowingly.
- You have alternatives (existing GPC; writing from scratch) => unnecessarily
You can lobby your lawmakers to change this (unfortunately, this would need to happen globally, due to Berne), but until we get there, as John said, just ignoring laws that we consider wrong won't help.
Please tell me how I'm such a horrible criminal
Ask the one who called you a horrible criminal (I didn't).
(IOW, you can make your wild exaggerations all day long, but they won't make your point. If you want to make a point, reply to what I or Jonas actually said.)
"Hey, I found $10, I put it in the bank for 40 years, made $10000, is it yours???" (Wonder what the reply will be.)
That's why it's better to ask before you made $10000 (i.e., before we base a big project on it), to avoid unpleasant surprises later.
Except in this case, we both get $10000. Nobody loses!
And thanks to copyright law, they get to take your $10000 as well (and leave you with lawyer and court costs).
To cut this pointless discussion short, remember that we've all long agreed that we don't like the current laws. So please stop arguing this -- we all agree, and we can't change them on this mailing list. If you want to ignore/break laws, take this somewhere else, since we've made it very clear that the project is important enough (to us and to some of its users) that we won't risk it by breaking the laws. So if you have anything more to add, please restrict it to suggestions based on existing law.
Frank