Banning GPL articles
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Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
Why is GPL a must in that situation? Why must it be GPL? Why not some other licence?
Why not GPL? :) Surely you can understand the desire of someone who has invested considerable time and effort in a project to keep others from taking their work and making it inaccessible to others? I'll agree that it's not a good fit for a lot of the code here - trying to force anyone using your gradient clipping snippet (or whatever) to open up their entire codebase isn't friendly or practical. But consider a project like ZedGraph[^] (one of my favorite CP-connected projects): it doesn't really do much good to allow someone to take and release this as a closed-source graphing library; requiring that enhanced versions be released with source allows everyone to benefit from it. IMHO, right now CodeProject is sort of a code dumping-ground. A great place to post an article, but a pretty poor host for evolving projects with multiple developers / changing developers. There's some history there as well - i know of at least a couple of promising projects that started out here and then... disappeared when their authors decided to close up the source and turn them into commercial projects. I think that's fine, as long as there aren't any misconceptions. If that's what we're gonna be, then we should go with the most permissive license possible and leave any ongoing development to whatever other sites support a given author's preference.
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...the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more...
Shog9 wrote:
the desire of someone who has invested considerable time and effort in a project to keep others from taking their work and making it inaccessible to others
My impression of the GPL is that its intent is exactly the opposite. The purpose of the GPL is to make it impossible for you to protect your work by making it a requirement that you give away the source code. On top of that, the GPL is viral. Any product developed using even the smallest piece of GPL-licensed software becomes bound by the GPL as well. In my opinion, anyone who uses GPL-licensed code in a commercial application is foolish, especially in light of today's IP litigation feeding frenzy.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
How would you all feel if we banned GPL licenced code on The Code Project? 1 = bad idea, 5 = good idea
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
HOw about a 0?? If 1 was just a bad idea, I would radte the idea a zero
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How would you all feel if we banned GPL licenced code on The Code Project? 1 = bad idea, 5 = good idea
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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GPL, in my opinion, violates the submission guidelines: If you post to CodeProject then you retain copyright of your article and code. You also give CodeProject permission to use it in a fair manner and also permit other developers to use the sourcecode associated with your articles in their own applications as long as they do not remove your copyright notices or try and take credit for your work. GPL is not compatible with this statement IMO. I vote for NO GPL code. Cheers, Drew.
The winning argument.
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WTFPL anyone? Most of the articles here present a concept an idea, so WTFPL license would be most appropriate. One should be recognized as an author but you can't force people to share or open code just because they used your source to implement something more complex. Or maybe I'm totally wrong.
Network integrated solutions | Flickr A practical use of the MVC pattern
This license grants the user the right to sue the author for potentially meaningless "problems". I Don't like it.
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I don't understand why one would want to ban them? GPL only "hurts" those who want to blindly copy/use the code in an article. I have used this site for a few good years and I can think of only a few times that I have ever taken any code from here and "just used" it in one of my projects. 99% of the time I read the articles to learn new techniques and approaches, and then use these to solve my problem at hand. The few times I did "just use" the code was because it was available completely free, and there was no point of rewriting it. I still had to take the time to understand it, otherwise I wouldn't add it to my project anyway. If it had a licence that prevented me from using it directly, I still wouldn't lose the understanding part. And once you understand something you can do it yourself. So, in conclusion, I can see how a library that is GPL'd would prevent me from "just using" it in my non GPL projects, but what's the big deal? I just won't use it. I can still look at it and see what approach was taken to solving a given problem.
zoid ! wrote:
I can still look at it and see what approach was taken to solving a given problem.
I'm no lawyer, but this phrase jumped out at me as being questionable. Does this approach stand-up in court??? Patents protect "ideas", regardless of the exact implementation. Perhaps similarly, copyrights (sometimes) prevent "derivative works". Is it really OK to study someone else's work, and then to produce a work derived from notions you got from studying their code? I'm not asking whether it's morally OK. I know that question would evoke a firestorm. I'm asking, whether it's LEGAL.
David --------- Empirical studies indicate that 20% of the people drink 80% of the beer. With C++ developers, the rule is that 80% of the developers understand at most 20% of the language. It is not the same 20% for different people, so don't count on them to understand each other's code. http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/picture.html#fqa-6.6 ---------
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How would you all feel if we banned GPL licenced code on The Code Project? 1 = bad idea, 5 = good idea
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
5, unless you would create a whole new section on Code Project for GPL code. I also do not like the "viral" nature of the GPL license. I tend to agree with the post by Drew Stainton: "GPL, in my opinion, violates the submission guidelines: If you post to CodeProject then you retain copyright of your article and code. You also give CodeProject permission to use it in a fair manner and also permit other developers to use the sourcecode associated with your articles in their own applications as long as they do not remove your copyright notices or try and take credit for your work. GPL is not compatible with this statement IMO." The submission guidelines in and of themselves seems like a modest sort of license to me. As far as the general license discussion goes, I tend to like the Apache license: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html[^] Just my two cents worth.
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated.
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How would you all feel if we banned GPL licenced code on The Code Project? 1 = bad idea, 5 = good idea
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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How would you all feel if we banned GPL licenced code on The Code Project? 1 = bad idea, 5 = good idea
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
How about displaying the category of licence as part of the code project site? Many people aren't clear about what terms their code can be used, or, if they are, it's only clear after downloading the source. I wouldn't want GPL licenced code banned, but if I'm looking to use something for work it would be nice to be able to quickly know what articles to skip over. Do you like the way I turned a poll question into a feature request? :sigh:
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It's not CodeProject's purpose, nor in CodeProject's interests to prove that GPL wasn't made by God. The question is whether protecting ignorant programmers outweighs the negative feedback.
IMHO, if somebody posts code here on CP, it should be assumed that somebody might actually put that code to use. If the code is of such inferior quality that nobody would actually use it, then it shouldn't be here in the first place. That said, GPL code should not be banned. It stands to reason that if somebody takes GPL code and "taints" his company's code base with it, then that person really shouldn't have access to the company's code base to begin with. Honestly, any developer that can't figure out how to completely re-implement, in his or her own "words", any one of the examples on this site has no business working on production code in the first place. Also, by getting more people to use GPL code, we force more people to release their source code, which is good. And another thing: just because some code is GPL doesn't mean that somebody hasn't already thought of it and used it in closed-source application somewhere. All it means is that we don't know about it yet because it was used in a closed-source application. I couldn't expect to slap a GPL on: mov ax, 0B800h; int 21h; because this code is found in nearly every DOS program ever written. However, Microsoft probably did it first. In fact, if there is one supremely efficient way to do something in a given type of application, it is a safe bet that some closed-source app has already done it that way. Thus, a LOT of GPL code probably violates the hell out of patented closed source code anyway... If you write an open-source application that does "the exact same thing, only free" that a closed-source app does, putting a GPL on it wouldn't do any good anyway, since it is likely that you have duplicated some patented process that you are completely unaware of... But I digress... The topic being GPL code on CP. Keep it. We need it. If somebody wants to put a GPL on their code before posting it here, that is their business. If you block it here, some other site will pick it up and THAT site will become "the next Code Project".