Re: Patch Licensing Terms

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Paige DePol once stated:
> 
> I think I will just go with the MIT license Lua uses then. Upon further
> reflection I don't know if I want to force people to have to release their
> changes under a specific license just because they used some of my code.
> Oh... wait, is this the issue people were having years ago with the changes
> to the GPL? The "poison pill" or whatever that Microsoft was calling it?

  Not quite.  The GPLv2 states that you must, for up to three years, supply
the source code to your program to anyone who has obtained a binary version
of your program (either by buying a copy from you, or if you give them a
copy) if they ask for it.  They then can modify the program to suit their
needs, and if *they* make their version available (either for sale or giving
it away), they too, are bound to make their changes available to their
users.

  But this doesn't prevent a company from taking the software and burning it
into firmware.  Yes, they have to make the source code available to their
customers who ask, but they don't have to make a way for the customer to
reload the device with a modified firmware.  This is the so
called-TIVOisation loophole.

  The GPLv3 fixes this loophole, thus a user of your code can not only
obtain the source code, but can modify it and reflash the firmware of a
device to run the modified code.  Not many companies like this.

  I'm still not sure how the GPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2 (they are
incompatiable, but I still don't understand the arguments).

> If people are using my code than I am happy enough with attribution, though
> I will still hope that they would release and share their changes.. but
> I won't force them to via a license.

  Just keep in mind that the BSD/MIT licenses allow a company like Intel to
use your code in their top-secret, can-read-all-memory, maybe-backdoored-
maybe-not and can't-disable-it Management Engine, present in all Intel chips
since 2008 [1][2] (I'm just saying ... sorry if this is too political for
this list).

  -spc

[1]	Making Minux the most used operating system these days, as it's
	being used to run the Intel Managmenet Engine.

[2]	Good news everybody!
	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology#Known_vulnerabilities_and_exploits