[Tfug] GPL Worthless?

[John Hubbard]

On 9/8/2012 12:51 PM, Bexley Hall wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> --- On Sat, 9/8/12, John Hubbard <ender8282 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>> How many different tablets are on the market?  What percentage of
>>> them have an underlying GPL'd kernel?  How many of *those* have
>>> made their sources available?  Before you answer, do some research.
>>> I would be *thrilled* if you come up with *any* (hint:  I've been
>>> doing this, recently)
>> The kindle source is available to download [1]. The Nook
>> Color is also available [2].  I'm not sure what percent
>> of the market those two account for, but they are likely the
>> most heavily modified beyond the plain andriod source
>> available from Google [3].  Are there people out there
>> who sell tablets but doesn't distribute the source? Yes
>> there surely are.  Do they account for large swaths of
>> the market? I doubt it.  The bigger vendors are likely
>> following the letter (even if not the spirit) of the law
>> because their legal department told them to.  The small
>> vendors are probably flaunting the rules because most people
>> have better things to do with their time than go after
>> vendors only selling a few thousand tablets.
>> Bexley: Which tablet(s) that uses a GPL kernel are you
>> unable to find the source for?
>>
>> [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200203720
>> [2] http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/Terms-of-Service-NOOK-Color/379003278
>> [3] http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/Terms-of-Service-NOOK-Color/379003278
> Just because something *claims* to be "available" doesn't
> mean that it truly is, in practical terms.
>
> E.g., I chased down the first link at the first link that you
> posted -- the most recent source for the kindle fire
> (Kindle_src_6.3.1_user_4107720.tar.gz).  In the tarball, I found
> ~150 images for which the sources are not available.

By images to you mean compiled binaries?  If so could you be more 
specific.  On a cursory search I found hundreds of compiled binaries:
e.g. ./tools/busybox/init/mesg.o: ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable, ARM, 
version 1 (SYSV), not stripped
but all of the ones that I bothered to look at had a corresponding ".c" 
file.  I certainly didn't check them all but the handful that I did 
seemed OK.

> Nor the
> (proprietary) tools that one would use to build those sources.

They don't have to distribute their build infrastructure.  All that they 
have to distribute is the source.  Look at Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 
CentOS/Scientific Linux build the rhel source, but I don't believe that 
it is as simple as doing
wget rhel6.3-src.tgz
tar -xzv rhel6.3-src.tgz
cd rhel6.3
make
it takes them a while to get things building after a new major release 
goes up.  I doubt that RH wants it to be too easy since they are making 
money selling RHEL (or is their product support).

It isn't in the big companies interest to make it too easy for anyone to 
reproduce their work.  They are trying to SELL something and don't want 
to give away more than they have to.  That doesn't stop CentOS/SL from 
building the RHEL source, and giving away the binaries.

I'm sorry if the big companies only goal isn't to make your life easy.  
They are trying to sell a product.  For the vast majority of the 
population that product (software or software+hardware) is a black box.  
For a few people, the insides of the box can be examined.  In some cases 
even modified.  Be happy that you can even look inside of the box.  
Thank the GPL for that.  The fact that you are even discussing the 
ability to view/modify source is a result of the GPL being used for the 
Linux Kernel, and the original GNU tools and countless other projects.

> [How many of those are specific to *just* the Kindle Fire is unknown
> as there is nothing that tells me what the Fire uses -- I'm not
> going to wade through a hierarchy of Makefiles just to see]
>
> How do I reap the benefits the GPL intends for me if it *legally*
> allows this much functionality to be locked away from me?  That
> I can neither inspect, repair or enhance??

Not true.  You can write makes files, and/or create your own proprietary 
build system.  Additionally you can take all of the GPL code, and 
install it on different hardware and write your own firmware to replace 
that provided.  You still have all of the benefits that the GPL 
provides.  You might wish that the GPL made them give you something that 
you could trivially tweak and bend to your will but it doesn't.  It 
encourages that, but it doesn't require that.  OTOH upstream shouldn't 
have much trouble comparing their derived source with the original and 
incorporating it if they so choose.

>
> E.g., I designed a slot machine some years ago in which I used
> several "cheap" processors to implement subsystems that allowed
> me to offload the main processor of some of the more mundane
> chores.  One of those tasks was driving a graphic "ticket printer".
> The exact hardware and software protocols that the printer required
> were embedded in that microcontroller.  I could publish the
> source for the application yet, if I withheld the sources for that
> *firmware*, you could never substitute a different printer.  Nor
> change certain aspects of the "printouts".
>
> Yet, I could publish the design under the GPL/LGPL even relying on
> other libraries and subsystems that I may have dragged into the
> project under similar terms.

That is true any license.  If the hardware (or hw+fw) implement a 
feature, you can deliver the code but the hardware and or firmware might 
not be update able  If I wrote an operating system that only ran on the 
buggy Intel P5 it wouldn't do floating point math correctly and there is 
nothing that anyone can do about it.  I fail to see how that is a short 
coming of the GPL.  The GPL also doesn't cure cancer or solve world 
hunger.  The GPL doesn't do everything, but it does more than many other 
FOSS licenses (e.g. BSD) and is definitely better than proprietary licenses


> While "legal", it's just not *fair* (in my case, the entire system
> was proprietary so it wasn't an issue).
>
> The GPL ignores modern technology (by "modern", I mean techniques
> that were in use 60 years ago and are now *commonplace*).  It
> really only works among folks who *want* to share -- in which
> case, I argue that it's not *needed*!

I'm sorry that the GPL doesn't make all hardware and software open so 
that you can tweak it to your hearts content but what would you suggest 
replacing it with?  Doing away with the license all together doesn't 
sound like it would make anything better.  It feels more like the 
trolling that has been going on on the LKML about dropping 32 bit 
support, or doing away with keyboard support.

RMS was eager to be able to be able to tweak and fix everything that he 
got.  But of equal importance is upstream being able to take 
improvements from downstream and incorporate those improvements. The 
spirit of the GPL is the former but the letter is the later. Doing away 
with the GPL will be detrimental to the later.  Even if a company isn't 
following the spirit at least upstream can still benefit.

-- 
-john

To be or not to be, that is the question
                 2b || !2b
(0b10)*(0b1100010) || !(0b10)*(0b1100010)
         0b11000100 || !0b11000100
         0b11000100 || 0b00111011
                0b11111111
255, that is the answer.