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A comment on Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software. Parent comment

Re:Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by fsloth on Sunday June 14, 2015 @01:41AM (#9713842)
Can you provide examples of software that were released by their original author using BSD/Mit style licence and got steamrolled by a third party who took their code and mangled it?

At least to my knowledge the opposite seems to be more common. Experts release a library under a very permissive licence, and everybody wins. One such example is libPNG.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-LICENSE.txt

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Re:Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by alecco on Sunday June 14, 2015 @01:08PM (#9715576)
I got an example, you are likely using it right now.

KHTML (LGPL, not GPL) taken by Apple to make WebKit (LGPL), later "rewritten" and licensed BSD for 2.0.

Apple did also the dirty trick of giving a single huge patch against the previous release of KHTML making it almost impossible to integrate back to the main codebase. Even LGPL can be abused. Lesson learned the hard way by the community.

And you now have everyone parroting how great WebKit is, nobody remembers the original team at KDE. It was brutal.

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Re:Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by anonbanker on Sunday June 14, 2015 @02:50AM (#9713981)
Microsoft did exactly this in Windows 2000 with the BSD-licenced Kerberos. Embraced and Extended.
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Re:Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by throwawaykf05 on Sunday June 14, 2015 @09:40AM (#9714844)
Microsoft used their own implementation of Kerberos. From the Kerberos Wikipedia entry:

> While Microsoft uses the Kerberos protocol, it does not use the MIT software.

The license of the original implementation is thus irrelevant. Pretty much the only thing that would have prevented MS would have been if there were patents on Kerberos.

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Re:Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by dummyfellow on Sunday June 14, 2015 @03:47AM (#9714104)
Did MS use kerberos implementation or the protocol, wiki page isn't very clear on it. If it is 2nd then it would be an entirely different issue, which even GPL/copyleft wouldn't have helped (though oracle java lawsuit may do so).
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Re:Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by anonbanker on Saturday June 20, 2015 @12:20PM (#9750320)
Yes, they used the code itself (which was legal due to the 3-clause license), but didn't credit until publicly shamed. There was a huge stink back in the day because of it.
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Re:Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by throwawaykf05 on Sunday June 14, 2015 @09:46AM (#9714854)
MS extended the protocol, not the implementation.

How would the Oracle lawsuit change anything? Protocols are almost explicitly the things that are not protected by copyright. The problem is, people here are confusing interfaces in human-readable code (copyright-eligible) with interfaces for binary interoperability between systems (not eligible).

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Re:Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by anonbanker on Monday June 22, 2015 @02:57AM (#9756623)
no dude, not only did they take the code and extend the protocol[1], while attempting to relicense it[2], but then they tried to sue /. to remove posts of people that talked about it[3].

1. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Microsoft-und-Open-So... 2. http://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-... 3. http://features.slashdot.org/story/00/05/18/2015251/our-atto...

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Re:Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by pjmlp on Sunday June 14, 2015 @03:29AM (#9714070)
If Apple hadn't made Swift open source now at WWDC, that would be a fine example.

Or the zillion of extensions being made by companies on top of LLVM.

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