For companies that build equipment like CNC machines or lasercutters, it’s tempting to use open-source software in a lot of areas. After all, it’s stable, featureful, and has typically passed the test of time. But using open-source software is not always without attendant responsibilities. The GPL license requires that all third-party changes shipped to users are themselves open-sourced, with possibility for legal repercussions. But for that, someone has to step up and hold them accountable.
Here, the manufacturer under fire is Ortur. They ship laser engravers that quite obviously use the Grbl firmware, or a modified version thereof, so [Norbert] asked them for the source code. They replied that it was a “business secret”. He even wrote them a second time, and they refused. Step three, then, is making a video about it.
Unfortunately [Norbert] doesn’t have the resources to start international legal enforcement, so instead he suggests we should start talking openly about the manufacturers involved. This makes sense, since such publicity makes it way easier for a lawsuit eventually happen, and we’ve seen real consequences come to Samsung, Creality and Skype, among others.
Many of us have fought with laser cutters burdened by proprietary firmware, and while throwing the original board out is tempting, you do need to invest quite a bit more energy and money working around something that shouldn’t have been a problem. Instead, the manufacturers could do the right, and legal, thing in the first place. We should let them know that we require that of them.
the only person who can sue to correct a GPL violation is the copyright holder of the code. (In the same way you cant sue someone for manufacturing an illegal spider man toy, unless you own the rights to spider man)
I have posted that issue on the grbl Github page and the answers I got were: They tried to get the code from several manufacturers but failed and wished me luck in changing anything.
https://github.com/gnea/grbl/issues/1133#issuecomment-1172851735
Anyone can at least point to that GPL violation.
Here is some information from the Free Software Foundation for dealing with violations of a GPL. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html
The jury is actually still out on that. The Free Software Conservatory has a case against someone over BusyBox testing if a third party can sue.
Personally, I agree with you but they make a cogent argument. It will be interesting to see how it goes.
Be glad they didn’t pull a Tivo.
Offices (https://ortur.net/pages/contact-us) are only a short distance from Shenzen. Time to sic Naomi Wu on them?
Be afraid, very afraid.
Maybe there needs to be some debate about why so many “Open” Source licenses are so so restrictive, and whether this is at all desirable? GPL particularly. Most are so restrictive you can hardly say “Open” or “Free” without a smirk… in my opinion the only real Open or Free source projects are the ones that make no restrictions at all. Then you’re REALLY doing it for the love of it. Anything else, and you’re probably in it for something; often some wish to spread your own political view of what “free” or “open” should mean and enforce it on everyone else. Which is hardly “free”thinking… and what about someone who wants to produce some project which uses many Open Source components, and can hardly breathe for trying to figure out a way to do so when all the components have difference license restrictions, which contradict each other…
I believe there’s a place for open source and a place for closed. Many commercial products take years of development, and years more of support afterward. When you’ve done all that work and seek to somehow sell some to pay for all the work you’ve done on it – then the last thing you want is someone else copying it and selling it cheaper (they didn’t do the work, remember). Often there’s no way of keeping secret a mechanism or an electronic circuit because these are easy to see right in front of you. Firmware is the only thing that can be kept as some kind of secret ingredient. It isn’t unreasonable. Often developing a circuit or writing a piece of software is the easy part of product development. Documentation, board layout, getting rid of bugs, component sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, support – this is where 90+ % of the effort goes.
At the same time there’s a big wide place for open source too.
It doesn’t need to be one or the other. Both are valuable. But licenses which try and force something down your throat, some particular view, don’t resonate well with me. I’m not saying it’s OK to break the licenses (as in the example in this article). After all, the license is the license. Like it or leave it. I’m just saying, maybe collectively we hacker types should think about what “free” and “open” really mean and if all this legal spiel in these enormous licenses really correlates well with our love of all things tech.
I’m not sure what you mean with “licenses which try and force something down your throat”. It is of course up to the developers to choose what ever license they want. And if that license does not fit your need, don’t use the code, it is that simple.
If i want to develop code that benefit like minded persons that’s my choice as much as it is yours to use it accordingly or solve your problem some other way.
There are so many things wrong and inconsistent with this comment that it is hard to believe you are making it in good faith.
Yes, Open means exactly that. Open to view, review, and build upon. If I’m doing something for “the love of it”, why would I want you to be able to take that and lock it away behind your profit paywall? I do it for the love of sharing with everyone. Not just you.
I also challenge you to give examples of open source licenses that are contradictory to unusability. Some are more restrictive than others, but you imply that some are mutually exclusive with their terms. Please cite these mutually exclusive licenses.
>When you’ve done all that work and seek to somehow sell some to pay for all the work you’ve done on it
But if you’re using GPL code, you *didn’t* do “all that work”. You copy / pasted it. LGPL code can be linked to without exposing your entire code-base. And if you don’t like the terms the code is published under, then go ahead and actually do the work to create the process instead of trying to leech it and monitize someone else’s work.
You claim both are valuable, but seem to only advocate for the licenses that are the most restrictive. The ones that keep everything locked away with no attempt to share or grow the knowledge of the community.
As you say, “the license is the license”. The GPL style licenses are what makes the “hacker types” able to share and grow everyones understanding as well as create some truly amazing software that simply would not have the budget allocation given in a corporate setting. How twisted is it then to say that the same companies that wouldn’t fund the development should gett to use it, lock it, and profit from it without having put any stake into the creation of it.
I think you are misusing the word “we” in your last sentence. I don’t think you understand what the hacker community is really about.
“I think you are misusing the word “we” in your last sentence. I don’t think you understand what the hacker community is really about.”
So glad we made you our spokesman!
I actually agree with the first post. A requirement to disclose all modifications to open source software is not a position I stand behind.
This isn’t a debate about if the GPL is a good licence or not, it IS the licence, and Ortur is violating it, you don’t get to say “oh, I don’t like the terms of this, so I won’t follow them”.
Feel free to write your own open source software and release it as BSD if you like, but if you choose to base a system off one which is GPL, then you agree to abide by the GPL, simple as that, the author(s) want it GPL, so it is GPL.
Yes James, I agree. I’m not saying violate a license. I said, like it or leave it.
I’m saying many people just jump on GPL because that’s the thing to do.
As I go around the internet, I admire it when someone has the courage to say “do whatever you like”. That’s real free and open. When I see some long licence blurb, after a little bout of vomiting I feel asleep after the first couple of paragraphs.
Open source software would not have raised without this requirement. It´s what allowed it to grow and occupy its prominent position today.
That’s fine with me. Please don’t use my code then.
I don’t quite agree, but it does spark some thought.
There should be a third middleground between “use and charge freely” and “charge but disclose all details” (gpl)
That might be use and charge freely but always disclose original, source and site.
Something like:”we used this(link), awesome software, added this and that, bit and bob, but you can try the original if you like. Be aware that feature x might be unstable if you do”
It raises an interesting thought. If your modification to the base source is just a “module loader” that only executes at runtime or something, then that could likely mean that the only bit that needs publishing is the loader as it’s the only modification to the original source, and all the rest of your code (the module that gets loaded) can stay proprietary.
You’d still have to say “we use X base software, but all these features are additional and proprietary” and publish the loader when asked to, but would you need to publish the feature module itself?
“Something like:”we used this(link), awesome software, added this and that, bit and bob, but you can try the original if you like. Be aware that feature x might be unstable if you do””
That exists. It’s called GPL. That’s the entire point of the license: if you use GPL code, and modify it, you are required to release the modifications. You are not required to support them, you are not even really required to document them (though it’s pretty cheeky not to), you just need to make the source modifications available.
Psuedo:
You only need to release your mods to GPL source if you release the executable to the world.
So long as it remains private you aren’t required to do anything. Use away and keep your changes private, nobody cares.
A real problem is Sturgeons law. 90% of everything is crap. 90% of GPL code contributions are crap, 90% of GPL projects are crap. It takes forever for the ecosystem to back out a mistake popular with the noisy wrong ones.
Then there is politics. Behavior codes other than not submitting steaming piles of code. All the shit Linus catches for telling people the honest truth about their code.
Democratic meritocracies don’t work if you give morons the vote. All projects without someone competent acting as gatekeeper are shitshows. GPL isn’t a magic bullet.
“ A requirement to disclose all modifications to open source software is not a position I stand behind.”
Then don’t use open source software as the basis for your projects. Start from scratch.
Or start from a BSD project. Include the required notice.
If you do, expect a GPL advocate to speak. They’ve relicensed all the BSD stuff as GPL (perfectly legal) and now want to forget it still exists as BSD. When this is pointed out, they just disappear, only to do the same thing again next month. It can be complicated.
> There are so many things wrong and inconsistent with this comment
> that it is hard to believe you are making it in good faith.
I am. But it might not correlate well with your opinion. I’m sure we could politely agree to differ if necessary.
> Yes, Open means exactly that. Open to view, review, and build upon.
> If I’m doing something for “the love of it”, why would I want you to
> be able to take that and lock it away behind your profit paywall?
> I do it for the love of sharing with everyone. Not just you.
Sure. The love of sharing it with everyone. Or with just the people who agree to share it too, and with the same license, that is to say, the same view of what sharing means, as yours?
> I also challenge you to give examples of open source licenses
> that are contradictory to unusability. Some are more restrictive
> than others, but you imply that some are mutually exclusive with
> their terms. Please cite these mutually exclusive licenses.
I don’t think I’ve been able to say awake long enough to trawl through an entire license. Is it not the case that in some or many cases, a license requires that if the work is used as a part of a larger work, then the whole work must be licensed under the same original license? How would that work, if you have used two (or more) components, with different licenses, and each one requires that the original license applies to the entirety (necessarily including the other component)?
> > When you’ve done all that work and seek to somehow sell some to pay for all the work you’ve done on it
>
> But if you’re using GPL code, you *didn’t* do “all that work”.
> You copy / pasted it. LGPL code can be linked to without exposing
> your entire code-base. And if you don’t like the terms the code is
> published under, then go ahead and actually do the work to create
> the process instead of trying to leech it and monitize someone else’s work.
Yes I agree and I did say that. Like it or leave it. If you don’t like the terms, don’t use the work, write your own. I agree. I’m not saying otherwise. What I’m saying is it would in my opinion, be nicer if people published “open”/”free” work and didn’t care where it got used. Like it or not, when you write your own code too, you aren’t developing everything from scratch. Maybe you didn’t copy and paste a whole block of code, nor did you import a module or library someone wrote; but you are using ideas you piled up over the years, that in many cases someone else thought of. How many times a day do I use Ohm’s law? I didn’t invent that. Ohm did. Or in code – a linked list. A circular buffer. A Newton Raphson iteration. Each time I write these, I’m unconsciously re-using something I saw somewhere decades ago and learned from. When we create something, we don’t do so from scratch. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Why make that any more difficult?
If companies could make more use of free or open code… would that be a bad thing? It would make their development cycle shorter. It would make the world more efficient (less wasted time re-inventing wheels). It would drive down prices. I know you’ll say no it won’t, it will just increase company profits. But wherever there’s price competition between manufacturers, prices would get driven down to the point where the company can reasonably make something and it be worthwhile doing so – and that point is lower if they have had to spend less time re-inventing wheels pointlessly.
Is making profit a bad thing? Who buys the food on your table? Food costs money. The table and the roof over it, cost money. Most of us have an employer, who makes profit; they bother to be your employer because they make profit.
> You claim both are valuable, but seem to only advocate for the
> licenses that are the most restrictive. The ones that keep everything
> locked away with no attempt to share or grow the knowledge of the
> community.
I spent more words on the case for closed source commercial applications specifically because it’s a view less heard in this community.
> I think you are misusing the word “we” in your last sentence. I don’t
> think you understand what the hacker community is really about.
My website http://hanssummers.com has been online since 1999. Electronics and software. Nowhere is there any license mentioned about who can do what. Everyone can use it as they see fit.
With no licence listed, the default is full restrictions. e.g. nobody could take one of your circuit diagrams and re-use it for their own projects.
You might want to consider throwing a CC licence on the site if you actually want people able to use it as they see fit.
You do, of course, realize that “no license” means “most restrictive license,” right?
You put your software out there with no license. That means that anyone who uses it is in a legal no man’s land.
Copyright says nobody else may make copies of it. That includes derivative works.
That won’t bother the fly by night people and companies who ignore licenses entirely, but anyone who has to abide by licenses and stay legal will avoid your code like the plague.
https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/
“Your most free no license” is a “no freedom” license.
Ok fair enough. Nothing said, maybe assumes copyright applies, or could be argued to do so. You’d have a hard time enforcing that perhaps, on a website where you were publishing loads of personal hacker type projects, and said nothing about licensing…
OK so best license is when someone explicitly says “use it for whatever you want”
“That won’t bother the fly by night people and companies who ignore licenses entirely, but anyone who has to abide by licenses and stay legal will avoid your code like the plague.”
Indeed. I have twice implemented QA reviews of open-source licenses in use within business products as part of a merger or acquisition due diligence. Unlicensed software can be a big problem.
Incidentally, rpm based distribution is much better in that respect – you can directly query the licenses from rpm with a querystring parameter. I’m not aware of a way to do that with .debs
Sounds like you want the MIT license.
You have a poor understanding of copyright and licensing of you think “no license” == permissive.
Additionally, a “this is free for anyone to use or modify” (including CC licenses) are terrible for functional things, as they don’t release you of liability.
MIT license is relatively short, permissive, and contains the legalease that should in theory release you from your work harming others.
It isn’t just about taking a code once and build something new on it. Especially with the laser cutter manufacturers you can see that they also benefit from the evolution of grbl. You can go back in their firmware history and see that they implement a new version of grbl whenever grbl was updated!
With GPL you can at least make sure you get their ideas and bug fixes in return, too.
I am also of the type “Take my code snippets for what ever purpose you like”, but this is for small, special projects with absolute no commercial background. Marlin, grbl and the like are actively maintained and improved. Would not be nice, if one of the laser cutter manufacturers doesn’t just ignore the GPL but on top would start a lawsuit against the grbl developers, claiming they would violate their firmware code. GPL is to prevent that kind of backfire!
I might be mistaken, but if you use GPL code in your code base, your entire codebase is now subject to GPL. If that is indeed the case, then how granular is that? Does it mean your *entire* code base or just the parts that directly use the GPL code?
Absolutely *everything* that is compiled into the binary that uses the GPL code, must also be made available under the GPL. The LGPL exists for things like libraries that want to permit being dynamically linked into a non-free binary, but the full GPL requires going all in.
Selfish people who wanted something for nothing would complain about how this was a “viral license” infecting everything it touched, but it doesn’t get included in code without someone deliberately choosing to pull it in. If you don’t agree with the conditions, you don’t have any right to use the code and can use something else or write it all yourself.
You don’t have to release it when it compiles.
You have to release it when you share/ship the executable.
Can you imagine the size of the steaming pile of ‘learning to code’ changes that have been compiled on GPL projects?
It would look like emacs.
Didn’t say anything about “when” it happens, just about “what” it includes. If you give someone a binary which was built using any GPL code at all, then *all* the code used to build that binary has to be made equally available.
My understanding is you could take GPL code that does something useful you need, create your own LGPL wrapper library around the useful GPL thing. Release the LGPL wrapper library and the GPL code you versions you used and keep your secret sauce in the code you made the uses your LGPL library.
rather “the GPL code for versions you used” … stupid dysgraphia.
Ooof.
It’s not as simple as black (closed) and white (open). There are things in between, and honestly it’s good that there are. And in this specific case it’s not even that much of a restriction. The GPL allows the use and modification of licensed software for everyone, including commercial use and redistribution, at no cost. The only requirement: If the code is modified and redistributed outside of a private or internal context, the modified source needs to be made available to the general public.
And your argument about “years of development” and “all the work you’ve done on it” is just 100% applicable here. You’ve put massive amounts of work into a piece of software and now a commercial entity just takes all of it for free, does some minor modifications to integrate it into their product and starts selling and making profit off it. They literally didn’t have to do much of “all the work you’ve done on it”. The _least_ they can do is make their modifications public. Plus in this case it’s not even the software they’re selling but their own hardware product, which happens to rely on software they took for free.
Additionally, I’m honestly surprused the GPL allows for unrestricted commercial use. Because down the line, commercial entities do not care about your love of all things tech. The single goal of a commercial entity is to make profit. Keep costs low and revenue high. What better way to keep costs low than to reduce them to almost zero by taking something existing for free and integrating it into your product? The GPL is not forcing anything down their throat, especially not some particular view. What it does is have them give at least something back to us hacker types who did it due to their love of all things tech instead of just blindly aiming for profit.
> Additionally, I’m honestly surprused the GPL allows for unrestricted commercial use
Like it or not, the GPL starts with trying to encode the 4 freedoms of Use, Study, Share and Improve. FSF believes that all software should have these freedoms, but until a major policy change they’ll use copyright law to grant you these freedoms as long as you reciprocate.
Commercial use falls under the freedom to use. There was a bit of a point-and-laugh at iTunes back in the day when the licence forbid you using it in a nuclear power plant.
“You’ve put massive amounts of work into a piece of software and now a commercial entity just takes all of it for free, does some minor modifications to integrate it into their product and starts selling and making profit off it. They literally didn’t have to do much of “all the work you’ve done on it”.”
not sure this necessarely describes the level of work put on top of the grbl firmware on most current engravers. I would say 80% of current engraving firmwares are other features that are NOT Grbl core. The biggest dificulty, and i would see the problem here is, some of these features are 100% home brew – Grbl unrelated – and are what defines, commercially, some products from another.
Granted, license agreemnt is license agreement, but a lot of the special sauce is quite proprietary.
A full agreement with license would imply here some brands would do a lot of the development, which makes GRBl able to do what it wouldnt do normally, and users and other brands take full advantage of this. In full spirit of open source of course, but would not be conductive of R&D, quite contrary.
The R&D investment to make the echosystem work is much more than “minor changes”.
Now of course, is a take it or leave it license yes, but i can see the view point from the other end as well
If, as you say, 80% of the code base is their own work, they can bloody well write the other 20% as well. It’s not theirs, they’ve refused to “pay” the price for using it. It doesn’t matter how much work they think they’ve put in, it’s still built on stolen code.
“What better way to keep costs low than to reduce them to almost zero by taking something existing for free and integrating it into your product?”
If all they do is copy something freely available with “minor” modifications as you said, anyone can do it. Why wouldn’t someone else do it and undercut their sales price? Over time, the price drops and the community wins.
The goal of the GPL has never been to restrict use. It has always been about ensuring that the users always have access to the code and the ability to legally modify it.
If I remember correctly, the GPL only requires that you distribute/give the source code to entities that you have given/sold the binary to.
In turn they can redistribute the source code to anyone so it is now a days easier to publish it to the general public.
The GPL is from 1989 (version 1)/1991 (version 2) so distribution was a physical thing back then so no forcing general distribution of source because of cost.
yes only to those you sell/give the binaries (I think there is some controversy with, say google, running GPL code on only their own servers, do they then have to distribute that to users of their website?)
I think you ask those who want to have the source pay for the cost of doing so, i.e. in the old days a cd and postage
The real benefit that has been seen many times with an open source license like this is a big name company builds off it, does some new developments they really need for their workflows and everyone wins. The company didn’t need to pay for the creation or licensing of the source they built off and will continue to benefit from ongoing free updates to that source, the wider community that created that source get the choice to implement and integrate the companies updates if it suits – which it usually does.
If a company goes and adds some good new features its also effectively free advertising too, as the folks that work in or are interested in that field get all those news bits associating the new feature to the company that developed it for themselves.
Fully permissive do whatever you like to it open license certainly can have their place, but as the end result can easily become abandonware and may well be buggy with no fixes applied (as the closed off built ontop of such open projects usually seem to stick with hopelessly out of date and so bug ridden and insecure sources forever). That sort of license might appeal to places wanting to build off somebody else’s work, without paying anything for the privilege in even the smallest way of having to honour a license and share their own updates, but that doesn’t mean it will actually lead to good products or higher profit margins for them. When everything wrong in their own code only they can fix – that is more dev costs or a shoddy product. And as the source projects coding practices and functions change for security/performance/feature reasons you have to do ALL the work rejigging your code to match if you wish to benefit from all the extra polish added to the open source base project.
IMO if you design/program/create something you get to define what rights others have in using or not using it. Beggars cant be choosers and complain that the thing they get for free has restrictions.
Yes agreed completely. You’re the author, you decide how it’s used. Well… unless you used some component or something which was GPL’ed. In which case now you have to go with GPL. Or whatever…
Anyway I’m just calling for a bit of thought on what “free” and “open” means.
Is there nobody else out there except me, who when they surf around the internet and see a project and the only disclaimer is “use it however you like” – finds that refreshing?
Yeah that’s definitely a big caveat, cant use someone else’s library or api without following their license. I know it sounds like everyone is piling onto you for wanting a really free to use standard of licensing, but you are not alone (there are definitely certain situations where I would enjoy that as well). Pretty much everything I release I do so with a comment saying use it or modify how you like with the only exception of don’t claim you created the original source (please give me proper credit) and please don’t sell my software/hardware designs without contacting me first so I can make sure you do so in a way I’d feel ok about. Beyond that go crazy and have fun. I don’t think any of my terms are overly restrictive or unreasonable.
If literally everyone shared their code in that manner it would certainly be a perfect world to me. The next best thing is as mutch GPL code as possible.
Not at all! Lots of people choose Apache / BSD / Public Domain as licenses for a more “use it how you like” experience.
GPL keeps the code free/open, at the cost of restricting the ways you can use it, Apache/BSD lets you use the code freely, including hiding your changes to it.
The former actively promotes the increase of open source, if by force. The latter is all carrot — maybe if you liked using this free code, you’ll also contribute. You get to choose your relationship with the world.
It’s fairly obvious which of these two business likes, but business are also (like Soylent Green) made of people!
Anyway, the point is that GRBL is GPL. And the law is the law.
GPL doesn’t restrict the way you can use the code. It simply says that you have to provide reasonable accommodations for those who want to see your modifications to the original source (essentially release your source code).
In practice, this does mean that businesses are hesitant to use GPL code so that they can keep their code a secret, but they totally could use GPL code and still charge for their product (or their user’s data).
Yeah, the “free as in libre” vs “free as in beer” thing is confusing, and those even those phrases miss a lot of the stuff going on with licensing.
My impression is that a lot of stuff has been moving towards MIT-licensed or similar recently, so a lot of other people are also chafing under copy-left restrictions.
OTOH, GCC wouldn’t be what it is today without GPL. The same goes for many other cornerstone projects. But yes, maybe we don’t need everything to go down the same path.
I’ve been thinking about the Ortur case in particular, where a machine that you bought runs the firmware and depends on it to run right.
There, it’s even more important that the end user can tweak the code themselves, in case they need to modify / fix the machine.
As an end-user, I’d _much_ rather have GPL code that I can see than MIT that I can’t.
You can’t blame the GPL for GCC.
Projects live past their expiration date, happens under every license. GCC isn’t THAT much worse than SAP, Oracle apps or Javascript.
Haha, I think you misunderstood what was meant by the GCC reference. It supports Objective C because NeXT tried to work around the GPL and failed., and eventually decided to just work with GNU on their Objective C compiler. I suspect before open source was a name, on a looser license, companies would have just taken it and never contributed back — AT&T notoriously didn’t bother even keeping the copyright licenses on the BSD code they incorporated into Unix, which was about the only requirement the license had.
nothing “unless” about it, the author of the code decide that the “how it’s used” is in code that must be GPL
If you’re using my code, you should respect my choice of license terms. If you can’t abide by those terms then you shouldn’t use my code. I don’t think you really have the right to take my code and use it without my consent.
My code, my choice.
Sorry, but you don’t understand licensing at all. You are mixing GPL and “open source”. The GPL requirements you have problem with are not a side effect. They are the purpose of GPL. GPL requires basically to contribute your enhancements to the community in exchange for using the code. It is the same principle as commercial licence requiring to pay money for the code you use. Of course there are many open source licenses that permit the user of the code to do whatever they wish with it and give nothing back. The original author can choose any licensing he/she wishes and I do not see any problem with it. Feel free to write something useful and see companies using it to make money and not give back anything if you thing that is the one true way.
No you don’t get to make money off somebody else’s free work. If you’re using with other software that is not free and open source then there’s a very high likelihood that you’re using that somebody else’s free work to profit. That’s not ok. If you are doing it completely free and open source then you are doing it out of desire. Cool can get behind that. Why is that so hard to understand?
What do free and open mean in a free demo or OpenVMS? Or an open platform based on open standards, which may very well not be open source.
Below you reveal that you don’t know that all copyrightable works are copyrighted on creation in modern copyright regimes (most of the world, sans a few countries that barely have computers), and that licenses are required for someone else to safely use anything, even if it is put online. Like all other legal documents, they tend to be longer than you think they should be because the authors needed to make sure that everyone, including the judge and lawyers, was on the same page.
We’ve thought about what “free” and “open” really mean. We’ve had these arguments a thousand and one times. Perhaps you should look at those arguments, and understand why GPL fans like the GPL before starting it again.
So what did I learn in this whole thing?
Firstly apparently I was right that some debate is needed since a lot of people put in an opinion, various differing opinions.
And I see that by saying nothing, what I write on a website is copyrighted. So if I want it to be free and open I have to say so. Which must mean I really ought to hire a copyright lawyer and sue all the people who’ve used my work and this time next year we’ll be millionaires. It also means I should probably add a note at the footer of every we page that you’re free to use the stuff here however you like, no restrictions, and no liabilities. And that really should be sufficient, if anyone wants to pay lawyers to interpret so few words then that’s fine go ahead.
I learned that I like GPL even less than I thought I did but that several other open source licenses do sound a lot better. I still think GPL tries to promote itself and it’s concepts. If you put a GPL license on your work you aren’t just licensing your work, you’re making a statement about how you think the world should be run and you’re investing your work as a contribution to try to make that happen.
And as I expected, so many people still seem to think profit is a bad thing. Even though for the vast majority of you, profit is what puts the food on your table, the roof over your table, and the shirt on your back. No profit, and you’re going hungry, wet and cold
Furthermore it seems so many people still don’t understand, any company is always making profit from other people’s work without paying for it anyway. We don’t pay Ohm’s ancestors every time we use Ohm’s law, or Von Niemann’s every time we use a microcontroller. We didn’t write our own programming language (C) or our own compiler. We didn’t re-invent every day, the linked list, circular buffer, binary search or any other number of other things we use every day. Someone else did, and we profit from that, for free. In so doing, product development is faster, prices must tend to be pushed down, progress is faster.
Progress has to be faster and cheaper when we stand on the shoulders of giants rather than start every day from scratch. This has to be better for all of us. Regardless of whether we’re the ones making the profits or the consumers using the devices. Whether it’s in a commercial context or an open source context, standing on the shoulders of giants is in everyone’s interest. All the restrictive nature of GPL does, is restrict that, obstruct progress, and pursue a Utopian inconsistent and unsustainable ideology.
Any license you use is stating something about how the world should work. If you release a work under less restrictive licenses, you’re stating something about how “open” and “free” means that people can take it and not give back.
It’s not about profit; Open Source or DFSG free licenses require the right to sell the software for money. The GPL merely requires that they release the source to derivative works. Hardware manufacturers, like this case, are the least affected by this. Almost every major computer company uses GPLed software to make a profit; IBM, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, for example. Working for a small IT company I find GPL software to be useful; I can use it to provide services, and even ship it to a customer.
How are we to stand on the shoulders of giants if we can’t see what they’ve done? GCC has been so successful because a bunch of people writing frontends like getting backends for all major systems for free, and a bunch of people writing backends like getting all the basic languages in one package.
With GCC, The FSF did write its own compiler. If you’re worried about profit, why should you get to use a compiler without paying for it? Pay for a Visual C license, or buy one of IBM’s compilers. Why can IBM charge you for a compiler and forbid you from reverse engineering it, but the FSF not give you a compiler for free that you can read the source code, just not take proprietary?
If you don’t like the GPL, don’t use programs written under it. Programs released under the GPL don’t restrict anything, compared to them not being released or being released under a proprietary license. Most of the world looking for a free Unix have opted for Linux and built on that. If you don’t like that, you can use Minix or BSD, or you can spend a solid chunk of change and license commercial Unix.
Thanks Arsenijs for the blog entry!
It actually caused the support of Ortur to send another reply to my request for the source code. Unfortunately not from the headquarter directly, but from the man of the support that I got in contact with. He explicitly mentioned the blog entry on Hackaday. He is also not amused that the software department still hasn’t sent me an answer.
To be continued…
Glad to hear that! ^__^
…and even better (but not yet carved in stone): They are now talking of a roadmap to open the sources!
Please keep us and https://hoitg.de/ posted.
Things happened in a time called “weekend” (don’t really know what that is) and so did not really fit in my yesterday schedule ;-)
At least quick updates are now published:
https://HOITG.de/s012.htm
and with a blog entry on my Hackaday _project_:
https://hackaday.io/project/186305-dont-ignore-open-source-licenses
Wild speculation alarm!
What if Ortur hasn’t done _anything_ with the GRBL codebase? I mean, why would they? I have used it in five projects and only once changed anything — and even that was a simple bit-flip to avoid wiring up an electrical inverter. It’s great code as-is.
If that’s the case, I think they can comply with the GPL by simply pointing at the GRBL github. (Not a license lawyer.) Because all they have to do is provide the code that they’re using.
They implemented a flame detection (simple IR detector). I am not sure if that is part of the normal grbl branch. They have added $parameters. They have ported it to a non ATmega platform. I would not say that they make use of pure grbl.
Looks to me like they never ever wasted a second in reading the GPL, at least I can’t see them following the rules. If it was that simple to them, I (and many others before me) would have got an answer.
Too much speculation?
OK, so they did plenty! Thanks for that. I didn’t know how much.
Good luck on getting it set right. And thanks.
that maybe none of their work, the bootup banner says GrblHAL. GrblHAL is a project that uses the grbl code but adds a bunch of enhancement, some controlled by extra $parameters and it runs on numerous different processors
https://github.com/grblHAL/Controllers
Even if they were just compiling unmodified grbl, to comply with GPL they would still need to include a copy of the license, and a clear statement of what GPL-licensed software they are using.
You clearly don’t understand the GPL license. If they simply USE any of the GPL code and compile it into an end product, that end product also falls under the GLS license. Those are the terms. The GPL code does NOT have to be modified to propagate the GPL license.
By law, they are still required to provide the code upon request. That is that.
Just ignore licenses entirely, it obviously works.
I have watched similar things first hand. Since working closely with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project for over a decade there have been many 3rd party clones and variants of the hardware/software.
Our license requires that all mods should be shared with the community, as we have done, but most do not share their work.
This became incredibly difficult around 6 years ago when we became popular enough to be heavily cloned or used on other hardware variants. Not only were the 3rd parties not sharing their mods but WE were expected to handle any/all support requests which came our way from their customers since “We made the firmware”. This led to some serious flamewars online…and some of our devs were insulted/trashed in public. It is a great way to thank someone for a gift…right?
At any rate…most of the variants/clones started advertising using a Marlin variant which was compatible which eased the stress on our limited devs/customer support…but I don’t feel the reputation as a helpful and giving community really recovered. Since most of our devs refuse to support 3rd party boards this makes it seem as if we are unwilling to help “anyone”…which is not the case.
If you are using opensource code or hardware. Be willing to release your code/mods…and most importantly…be willing to support your own customers. This is a major failing (and pattern) amongst most of the “how can they make this so cheap?” hardware suppliers out there currently. This applies to lasers, mills and especially 3d printers. If the primary support channel is a reddit forum…or a customer driven IRC/Discord…you are not supporting your customers or respecting the spirit of opensource as a whole.
I have no problem with people taking any/all of my work and using it to make something new…but please…share alike and support your own customers. I want to see what you can make to change the world…but please respect the path you use to get there.
And the official project policy isn’t even “we don’t support 3rd party boards” (no matter how many people get upset thinking we don’t), it’s really “please ask the 3rd party manufacturer before you ask the project volunteers, and if they don’t answer, come back to us and we’ll likely do our best to help”.
Open Source != Free Source
Its up to the writer to determine how they would like to share their work and that (no matter how strange or ridiculous one may think it is) is infallible by law.
Just look at conical for example. All open source right? If I make a license agreement that someone may only copy the code after consuming a jar of pickles and sending the receipt to a PO box in Argentina, then well, that’s the license. Deal with it or don’t use it.
The only things that really bother me, is when someone publishes a module or work under MIT and becomes jealous later when their work is used according to license to make others money, and then decides to destroy or inject a DDoS into the code (I’m looking at you colors.js!). Choose your license and stick with it. I don’t know many actual open source contributors that disagree with that sentiment.
But no matter the license, never… I mean never.. violate a license in a commercial project.
In my experience, if one has requirements that fall outside the existing licensing structure, one can attempt to negotiate a special, separate license with the current maintainers. This can (and in my opinion should) include some form of payment which would make the transaction official. It does not have to be massive, but that is part of the negotiation. I would encourage the company to seek that route if they wish to keep their modifications private.
There’s a lot of misunderstanding here. The GPL does not restrict what you can do with the software. It only says that if you incorporate GPL code in a product that you give or sell to someone else, you have to include a user-readable copy of the GPL license in the distribution of the product, and make the source available (including any additions or modifications that you made to it) for a cost no more than the distribution of the data. That’s it. Make the license visible and provide a link to the github repo and you’re 100% compliant.
You can literally use GPL code for any purpose, ethical or unethical, without violating the GPL license. You can use it to defraud people out of their money (the code may be legally licensed, but the fraud is still illegal). You can even use it to build a weapon (some of the drones dropping grenades in Ukraine are reportedly flying with GPL code, so it’s already happening.) Sadly, and to the horror of many GPL contributors, not even that is restricted.
I can see that if you’re Gollum and you think that your software is the Precious, that you might not want to distribute your source code. Fair enough, you wrote it. But if you can’t or won’t comply with the terms of the GPL, then GPL code isn’t available to you, either. Instead, you’ll have to find a redistributable system with a license that matches your business model. There are plenty of other non-GPL platforms to choose from but you’ll likely have to pay for licensing them, especially if you want support. Again, that’s fine as long as it fits with your business. Another option is to restructure your system so you’re not distributing your precious code. Providing a GPL front end but selling access to proprietary web services is a common tactic for working around this.
100% agree. Also to expand on your point of Gollum thinking their code is precious.. it wasn’t precious enough to write from the ground up, or even check the license readme lol
Most likely their changes are basic and not as special as they think they are. Most likely they are not at all special, but their amateur approach to software and code has them suffering from the Dunning Kroger effect.
Also GPL3 says that the hardware should be open to replace the software. (aka anti-tivoization)
Grant at 3D Musketeers just had a really interesting conversation with an intellectual property lawyer over this, regarding such things as violations of CC by Creality and the Bambu Labs Carbon X1 utilizing code from PrusaSlicer.
The upshot is: There’s no such thing as international law, China doesn’t care, and the patent and copyright system does nothing to protect anyone who isn’t a megalithic multinational conglomerate.
The only practicable solution is to have US Customs enforcement prevent the import of devices that violate IP law until China either has to play by the rules or go bust.
This has some rather horrific side effects.
I’m still on board with the idea, though.
Frankly, i would like the govenment to step in. If a vendor is clearly violating the license, sales and (more important) import cannot continue.
I have been a personal victim of this issue. Our firmware was bluntly downloaded, and put on cnc machines. The vendors even e-fused the cpu and sent support questions our way. Its just painful to see that happen, and as a result i became very picky on what contributions im still making.
=( sorry to hear that.
Who reads those things anyway, every company I’ve worked at in the last 15 years just use whatever fits and even pirated software or license keys aren’t uncommon.