Copyright Debate - Was Screen Shots

[mariuszp]

I've done some work on layout management in my GUI.



I'm working on two branches, GUI in one of them, and a complete redesign of the VFS in another (doesn't compile yet).

(As I side note, does anyone know how I can update all the copyright statements to say 2018 instead of 2017, in both branches, without causing a clash?)

[Roman]

Why would you want to update the copyright date? It specifies the year you claimed the copyright, not the last year you touched your code.

[mariuszp]

Why would you want to update the copyright date? It specifies the year you claimed the copyright, not the last year you touched your code.

Don't I claim copyright for all the new code? I've seen lots of projects around which update the copyright date every year
("nasm" for example has commit which say they are updating the license year. although the last time they did that was in 2010, and some files say the copyright is 1996-2012... now i'm truly confused what my license should say)

[Sik]

I am not a lawyer so ask a proper lawyer to be 100% sure, but yeah every update should be its own copyrightable entity and hence you should claim copyright on every year the code was updated.

Just don't do like AT&T which went as far as modifying the header comment of files just to claim an extra copyright year on files that were otherwise untouched :v

[isaacwoods]

Disclaimer: IANAL

some files say the copyright is 1996-2012... now i'm truly confused what my license should say

The first year (the 1996) is when the code was first copyrighted, you don't change that. The 2012 can be updated every year, but something like:

Code: Select all

Copyright (C) 2017, baconwraith

Covers onwards from 2017

[mariuszp]

Disclaimer: IANAL

some files say the copyright is 1996-2012... now i'm truly confused what my license should say

The first year (the 1996) is when the code was first copyrighted, you don't change that. The 2012 can be updated every year, but something like:

Code: Select all

Copyright (C) 2017, baconwraith

Covers onwards from 2017

Well, my code already says 2014-2017...

[mallard]

There's plenty of guidance about copyright lines and the year you "should" included already out there...

However, the most important thing to note is that such a line is entirely optional and of no legal consiquence (although entirely fictional dates could be problematic). Whether you include the release date of the latest version, a list of dates or a range is mostly just a stylistic issue.

For example, in the "winver.exe" application, Microsoft used to use a range (i.e. "1981-2001" in the pre-SP3 versions of XP), but around the release of XP SP3 and Vista they switched to using a single release date (i.e. "2007" in XP SP3 and Vista). There's no particular reason why this was changed. International copyright law hasn't changed significantly in decades. My guess is that Microsoft just wanted to draw less attention to their past.

[bluemoon]

I'm not a lawyer, but imo the copyright notice is, just a notice.

By Berne Convention you automatically copyrighted your works. It doesn't matter to explicitly state the year or year range, or just omit them, unless you say you give it up. You also don't need the All right reserved, which is by default.

Note that in almost all cases you don't need to give up copyright, you can still grant license to other to use your work.

[~]

As for me, I write code and all, all the time, but I don't even really think about licenses, I just make it for fun, it's a game for me, everyone can use it as freely as if it was public domain, or more free, just like a product from an animal like a spider web, an abandoned shell... I want to live my entire life playing a game from which I can learn anything, where there's always something to do for all existing disciplines, starting from computing and other manual roots as a solid working basis.


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I think that people use copyrights because lawyer-oriented people need to work from something, so they include themselves in that way. It doesn't affect the creative individuals. Even if Microsoft was fully open source, they would still sell Windows, Office and Visual Studio because by the time somebody else understands the code, they would still be the root of the development of those programs. Currently nothing stops others to make a perfect clone of Windows, Office and Visual Studio that is open source and public domain, they just need to concentrate their efforts in several teams with a goal per team per year and they will have a Microsoft-compatible software suite in around a decade, just like Linux.

Software is imaginary, copyrights are very practical when you see that software by nature is an artifact that needs to be fully understood to be able to be maintained, and it can always be implemented in better, more portable and simpler ways, so it's almost always better to study existing concepts from one's own creativity and then any resources that give us ideas about how to implement it. So if it's easier to write it from scratch to understand it regardless of the time and effort it takes to do so, and if that effort keeps educating the new generations to experience the same development that previous developers needed to be competent, then copyright doesn't really make much sense, if you are determined you will still advance as fast as the development speed in your mind and your bodily energy allows, whether there are restrictive copyrights or not. They just have no effect if you just get to develop things.

Windows is just like an HTML5 application with hardware privilege with an HTML5 API in disguise known as WinAPI and now .NET, and a well-elaborate GUI/CLI interface for all programs that could as well be expressed in HTML5 code and then translated from HTML markup to native code using the "WinAPIs" with automation tools to pack it as native Windows OS and software. That's probably why the WinAPI felt more standard than Linux libraries at least up to Windows 7.

[AJ]

Hi,

There's a point here that I agree with - it often feels easier to restart a project rather than reading the existing code and continuing it. Of course, this does mean that you probably end up re-visiting old bugs that you'd sorted out the first time.

The rest of the post is either unintelligible or I flat out don't agree with.

Currently nothing stops others to make a perfect clone of Windows, Office and Visual Studio that is open source and public domain, they just need to concentrate their efforts in several teams with a goal per team per year

Like ReactOS? Their wiki may be out of date but it's still pretty clear from their dev logs that they are still playing catch-up with very outdated versions of Windows.

they will have a Microsoft-compatible software suite in around a decade, just like Linux.

Just....what?

Software is imaginary...

This is the paragraph I find unintelligible.

Windows is just like an HTML5 application with hardware privilege with an HTML5 API in disguise known as WinAPI and now .NET...

Again, I couldn't disagree more. Windows is an OS providing services and device access to applications. If the Windows API was an "HTML5 API", then MS were being very far-sighted because whe MFC was first around, HTML 5 wasn't anywhere near conception.

If I was being very generous, the closest you can get to a markup language being a part of the Windows API is XAML in WPF.

Cheers,
Adam

[~]

Software is imaginary just like any digital media or information for that matter, it cannot really be protected or its distribution stopped by copyrights, you would need to take it away completely from anyone. It's more practical and more profitable to manufacture actual computers and other tangible things than selling information in form of executables or books (but much more expensive), at least sell books with CDs/DVDs, but books also contain an imaginary product that is easy to reproduce and redistribute right away in any format or derivation, you can even memorize them to make them usable, unlike devices that need to be made in a factory first. It doesn't even stop a corporation from selling and keep developing.

ReactOS is the nearest candidate for a WinAPI software suit replacement. They just need a little bit more of coordination and concentrate on implementing key features of the system each year as a formal project. For example, this year they should concentrate in completing the stability of the system they already have, review the code, make stress tests, and correct any unstability. That would be a job of the whole year. If they manage to include more subteams, they could have another one to make sure that they will fully implement the modern APIs found in Windows XP within a year for at least another usability milestone. A team would only do that the whole year, the same year during which the other team will make the code fully stable.

Try to write a translator from HTML4/HTML5 to WinAPI and generic C/C++ code and assembly. The base Windows GUI and responsiveness of the code always looked very automated, very stable and simple. The WinAPI feels like an HTML5 API with full system privileges. The standard WinAPI and HTML markup can wrap and be wrapped by the WinAPI and vice-versa. If it's designed carefully, and HTML GUI can look and behave exactly like the Win32 one. That's probably why it has thrived so much. It wouldn't be much harder than making a modern version of Firefox, it wouldn't be much harder than making an interactive webpage for the GUI and the most common functionality if we take into account that our OSes still use features that were already well-known even before proper digital computers, so HTML being a GUI in itself can be implemented instead as WinAPI and associated OS components.

We seriously could write most of Windows as an HTML5 application and then make a translator to convert that markup and low level JavaScript to a native WinAPI-wrapped code environment with common controls, OLE, system services, and even .NET. HTML5 just makes clear that such things are that easier even with slow JavaScript code, and if you inspect the size of a modern Firefox 57+, it really has around the size of Windows 98.

Nowadays many people have made functional clones of the Windows GUI in pure hand-made HTML and old JavaScript code, but if that is taken far and it's translated to the low level API code of our system, the result is that it will behave just like Windows, but as you can see a big part is translated code so it needs to be very efficient and that's why it looks so basic but stable.

[bluemoon]

Software is imaginary just like any digital media or information for that matter, it cannot really be protected or its distribution stopped by copyrights, you would need to take it away completely from anyone.

This is where the law enforcement come in, you may disagree with the execution efficiency and people do violate law, and seek for extra protections, but it does not invalidate the law itself IS the protection.

I stopped reading here.

[~]

Software is imaginary just like any digital media or information for that matter, it cannot really be protected or its distribution stopped by copyrights, you would need to take it away completely from anyone.

This is where the law enforcement come in, you may disagree with the execution efficiency and people do violate law, and seek for extra protections, but it does not invalidate the law itself IS the protection.

I stopped reading here.

What happens with the people who just do it for fun and leave the code they develop just on Internet and among the persons they know in real life?

If they aren't really looking for making commercial trade and becoming a big corporation, then they are just researchers, but if they do it just for the fun of learning, then copyrights aren't really a worry for code they know they don't care to keep in custody (a concept that doesn't matter if you are just doing your job for learning and teaching things).

As long as you know the tricks and the explanations are available, you can always revisit what you've written and use it as you like, like anybody else. This mentality was more common in the 90's where you would just publish code and snippets.

You are free to write code, still make a living from itself to keep doing it, and leave it free without further ado.

Probably things like X and BSD also have that mentality but somebody just came along and packed the code with a public-domain-grade license (not nearly the authors) but the fact is that probably those programs and any program that is licensed as public domain simply doesn't care at all to think about copyright laws.

People still has to study a lot to be able to make new implementations for a new generation of rising developers even if you publish your code. So why wouldn't you want to help others by providing your code as a sample implementation, get more advances in exchange of not worrying of making the knowledge in your code exclusive to yourself? Just publishing the sources is much easier than writing the explanation of every single tiny programming trick involved, in addition.

http://google.com/search?q=X+server

[StudlyCaps]

What happens with the people who just do it for fun and leave the code they develop just on Internet and among the persons they know in real life?

If you write code, that code has copyright already. The second you write anything, it is your sole intellectual property. Of course you're free not to enforce your rights, and you can specifically release it into the public domain, but at creation copyright is already there.

X and BSD come from a time when proprietary UNIX was a big deal. Some UNIX companies used shady practices to basically take code released by the community for anyone to use, integrating that code in their commercial products, then attempting to prevent the community from further distributing the free versions.
This is the environment in which the GPL and BSD licenses where created. To prevent companies who profit from free software from attempting to make that software less free. The licenses create an easy to apply legal framework to allow you to share what you make with the world, but allow you to keep control of it.

[max]

ArcheFire is a philosopher whom us mere mortals will never understand.