Topic: What is the forum's policy on blatant software license abuse? (Read 4013 times)

It's really not a problem, no offense was meant (I believe) or taken. I deliberately made it clear at the beginning of my post/rant/chapter that these were purely my personal opinions.

For me, I'm just happy that others are supporting ck & kano, as well as OS. Keep posting 

While I understand (and commiserate) with your argument, I don't think that this is what being "open source" is all about and what was the main thought of ckolivas, kano and the quoted portion of PatMan's message that I ridiculed.

I understand that ckolivas is (or was) also a Linux kernel developer/committer and he must have heard and read the arguments within the Linux community about the "bag-of-drivers" enabled/disabled with the preprocessor macros. So I'm not going to repeat that discussion here. Linux, like almost every other operating system designed after the end of sixties, has a concept of loadable driver module, and nobody is seriously discussing getting rid of that technology.

{ Small aside: if anyone is going to use the word "plugin" to describe "loadable driver module" I'm going to ridicule him for complete lack of understanding of hardware }

Obviously I cannot speak for ckolivas and/or kano; and I cannot know their goals in life and in developing cgminer under GPLv3 in particular. I just hope that they understand the progress of technology and they never ventured to be nothing but a Cerberus guarding a bag-of-drivers. I know that within the Linux community there's plenty of wanna-be Cerberuses and that subset has spilled over here, or into crypto-coin mining in general.

This may be the case, but it is just as capable of doing some serious damage, as this example of a dodgy compiled sgminer binary shows:


https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/alert-sgminerwindowscom-stealing-bitcoins-719526   - and demonstrates perfectly everything that the cgminer devs want to avoid, and I believe what PatMan was trying to highlight. Of course, the majority of users here would never download anything from an unofficial source, let alone use it - yet here we all are running Bitmain software with known security holes in the miner software thinking everything is fine & dandy?! So although you, or anyone else for that matter, may not agree 100% with what PatMan says (which isn't surprising, given the length of it  ), I think your description of it being a "deluded rant" might be a little OTT, even though it was said in a joking fashion.....still, he took it well  
I'd hazard a guess that 90% of noobs don't know how to use a MD5 checksum, let alone a decompiler to check what they just downloaded, they just "trust" that it's OK. If every manufacturer abides by what ever terms of the software license, and users were all made aware of the importance of Free & Open Source - the chances of the above happening would be drastically reduced, that's for certain.  

Thank you Obi-Wan 

Sorry, man. You've started beautifully, but then just finished of the rocker (or of the rails).

Its like all those "open source" people who say that Raspberry Pi is all "open" and neglect to discuss that the Alphamosaic VideoCore is a primary CPU on the chip and the ARM is just an ASP (Attached Support Processor).

First couple of "groundings in reality" may hurt, but I assure you that you will learn to watch your step and understand the technology and the common traps.

I'm telling my Mum on you 

Well, that's quite easy to do, when you have thousands of BTCs to pay for it.

Unfortunately this is borderline deluded rant, although built on the good intentions, the same that are used to pave the hell.

Miner software is just a lightweight shim around the fundamentally closed hardware of the ASIC. Perhaps the new readers need to be reminded about the timebomb that eldentyrell had placed in his FPGA miners, while keeping all the software open.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/algorithmically-placed-fpga-miner-255mhschip-supports-all-known-boards-49971

While I generally support the goals of GPLv3 (and ckolivas in particular), the supporters need to be grounded in reality, and periodically reminded about the fact that software needs hardware to run. In particular people who claim to run "all-open-source stack" aren't doing so unless there's no HDD/SSD in their machines or they really replaced the firmware in their disks.

The really effective GPLv3 enforcement needs to rely on standardizing the interface between the software and the hardware, not on more harassment of the hardware vendors. To further this goal cgminer needs to be made more modular and clearly delineate the "mining drivers" from the "mining kernel". Baking them together is a throwback to about 1960 or so.

I didn't say that it is. I don't doubt that GPL proponents are interested in helping the community as a whole. But that doesn't mean that the GPL is right.

With normal copyright, I can't distribute your work at all. With copyleft, I can distribute it, but I'm forced to do additional work to distribute the source code. The latter is much better, but you're still unjustly exerting control over my real property to protect your intellectual property. It is irrelevant whether you intend the license to benefit just yourself or the community as a whole -- it's still wrong to violently (via government) force me to contribute to your project just because I modified/used your copyrighted code.

Open source is often good, but the GPL is not. I use permissive licenses when publishing my own stuff, and the new forum software will use the MIT license.

First off - welcome back Kano 

As kano has, I believe, correctly pointed out - there seems to be more than a little confusion about what Open Source is, as well as what it stands for. I will admit that my personal feelings are that all knowledge, ideas & culture should be freely available to everyone who so desires it, to be able to share whatever they want with whoever they want, whenever they want & however they want, if what they are sharing was acquired legitimately, ie - from someone who shared it with them in the first place. It is the sharing of ideas, knowledge & information that moves us forward & creates better ideas - improving, empowering & enabling us to make things better for the benefit of everyone - for free.
Bitcoin itself is Open Source, anyone can use it, copy it, experiment with it and thus help improve it - and it is this very aspect that has enabled it to grow & improve at the massively exponential rate that it has done, and continues to do today - because there are no constraints on it's use & anyone can access it. Now, I see people talking of Copywrong/left/right, DMCA notices, takedown requests etc, etc. All these terms are born of, and continue to be used in conjunction with a 300+ year old draconian English Law that was aimed at preventing "just anyone" from reading and learning from books and scriptures, thus educating themselves and sharing that knowledge with others, restricting access to those books & scriptures to a select few - thus empowering them only so as to become what was then considered wise & knowledgeable so as to more easily control the masses. Pretty clever eh?
Now move on 300+ years into the digital age & the internet, where masses of knowledge, ideas, culture & information can be sent around the world in a millisecond to anyone. Everything in the world has changed apart from Copywrong/left/right, which is still based on the same 300+ year old English decree & expected to work, only now the select few are Governments & Corporations who are no longer interested in protecting the "Rights Holder" (not that they ever were  ), but more in lining their own pockets, stifling competition & restricting the flow of information in case something embarrassingly true came out (as it frequently does, thanks to certain heroic & brave individuals), and disguising it as "Copywrong/left/right protection" - when in all truth, no matter how you look at it - it's Censorship & always has been.
What do you think would have happened if a certain Satoshi had filed for a Patent on Bitcoin? I'll tell you, nothing. It would have died in the water there and then. But because it was made Open Source, it took off - and only because it was Open Source - no other reason whatsoever. When I see people posting about DMCA notices, I don't know weather to laugh or cry. One simply has to go to  https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/  to see that, like the Copywrong/left/right system, the DMCA take down system is unworkable and has failed, as it is now being used by the same Governments & Corporations to immediately remove anything that they either don't like, don't agree with, that undermines them (ie the truth), is too competitive, is a better product than theirs, etc, etc. It has become a completely legal type of internet Censorship.
For instance, imagine if ck suddenly released an updated miner that outperformed every other miner by twice the hash rate, all it would take is a single DMCA take down notice and BANG - it's gone, leaving ck a very long, hard & expensive battle just to prove that it wasn't a Copywrong violation - and these requests can be made by absolutely anyone. The fact that it is under the GPLv3 License means nothing - there have been many fake takedown requests granted against GPLv3 material, an example:  https://torrentfreak.com/hbo-asks-google-to-take-down-infringing-vlc-media-player-130715/  Just look at the statistics, so far this month there have been over 30,143,926 (that's 30 million, half way through the month) DMCA requests made to Google, then go to  https://torrentfreak.com/google-processes-millions-of-useless-dmca-notices-140715/  and try and work out how many of those are deliberately fake, false or downright lies. So please, let's just forget the Copywrong/DMCA thing, going down that road would be suicide. Bitcoin has got this far because it and everything to do with it is Open Source, trying to introduce archaic, broken, unworkable and flawed 300+ year old rules is not a forward step by any stretch of the imagination.

So, back to the problem. As I said, Bitcoin is Open Source, and it is imperative for it's continued future success that it and everything else to do with it be kept that way. It was demonstrated earlier this week that name & shame, community pressure and the odd LOUD posting had the desired affect with Bitmain - but this is not enough. I believe education of the Bitcoin community is an even more effective/important way of achieving everyone's aim, as well as making the whole Bitcoin eco-system more secure & knowledgable. For example, I and others have asked dogie to introduce a marking system for manufacturers who comply & promote Open Source software with their products, but that's just a slice of what we can do. Warnings about the hazards, risks & vulnerabilities of closed source software could be spread all over the forum to help educate the mass of noobs currently flocking to this wonderful Bitcoin world we have all created. There really is no limit as to what we can do if we pull together as we have been doing since Satoshi had a little brainwave.

There is one thing that I think we are all in agreement with: That the whole community get behind ck & kano in the meantime, back them up in any way we can to ensure that the manufacturers know and realize that the Bitcoin community is 100% behind the people who have supported us since the beginning, and that there will be zero tolerance of any closed source copywronged stolen nonsense that we can't access to see what's going on inside it.

If you got to this last sentence - I applaud you, I nearly didn't make it here myself. This is just my 30,143,926 cents, I hope I haven't offended anyone, but if I have.......send me a take down notice 

Peace 

This is a nice take, which might be brilliant, since after all the reseller is distributing that software, so he must comply with the license too.

As a fellow developer and EFF donator, I thank you very much for that.

If you wish to enforce these GPL3 licences as they are intended to, you might have significantly more success in putting legal pressure on commercial resellers, if the manufacturer is out of legal reach.

Anything that hurts the bottom line (and naming and shaming is one of them) will make the hardware manufacturer consider and hopefully do the right thing.


If distributing this software without source code is a crime, reselling miners with that software (thereby distributing it) might also be considered illegal.

Theymos, I think you have completely misunderstood the issue at hand.

The issue we have is (as ckolivas explained above) the GPL license requirements.
Those license requirements are firstly stated clearly in many places on the internet, are referenced in the header of most of the files in cgminer, and are to ensure the freedom of the software under the GPL, to stop someone from taking away that freedom.
I do think you need to read up and understand what the GPL is - you do seem to not know what it is based on your comment.
That license does require a small amount of effort to adhere to it.
That effort is to simply provide the source for the binary supplied to others - to ensure that the freedom of the software continues.

Aside: heh, I've stayed away from the forum for a while to work on a project of free software that anyone will be able to use, and come back to see this.
(... and yes the secondary reason I've done that is because there is also a sponsor paying with money for my time to work on this free software that will be available to all ...)

I think we disagree greatly then if you see copyleft as the same as copyright. GPL is not about protecting intellectual property for one person but for opening up that property for everyone's benefit in the quest for sharing of knowledge to increase the global pool of knowledge and is nothing to do with the original author protecting his pockets.

Irrespective of that I'm not asking for cgminer to be singled out for special treatment, but I do wish to point out that code from hardware manufacturers has been incorporated into cgminer on many occasions and as a result the codebase for that hardware and all its users has improved dramatically as a result, benefiting from both the knowledge of the authors of cgminer who know mining more intimately even than the hardware manufacturers, and the ability to benefit from improvements to the codebase at large, including bug, and more importantly, security updates.

We will continue to poll manufacturers who blatantly disregard the GPL on cgminer and if they do not abide then I will personally be sending you the DMCA takedown notice instead of acting myself.

I do not wish to be compromised in my ability to act as the author of cgminer and protect everyone's knowledge under the GPL nor to have it affect my actions at trying to be impartial as a moderator.

Google will remove specific links that contain infringing content,  not whole domains.

Most people are unaware of their copyright/copyleft protection powers. I think that it is totally valid to publish the source code of a software, with the conditions requiring any modifications to be also shared and be freely available. Nobody is forced to use or modify something licensed under GPL or another license.  They did not release their work for you to do what you want, they released it under specific conditions. The question of scarcity is irrelevant - these licenses encourage duplication and sharing, not limit them.

Other forms of IP protection such as patents are a different issue,  as they are not what is essentially a private contract (like copyright) in spirit.


Anyway, providers will probably release their sources when you name and shame, and if that doesn't work try DCMAing the infringing content.

Yes,  Rackspace follows DMCA. Rackspace has a US division at least, and as such Rackspace US is subject to the jurisdiction of the US as far as DMCA is concerned.  I'm not well versed but DMCA may in fact apply to all websites accessible by US visitors,  similar to financial licenses, etc.

Amazing!  Now can we extend the conversation to KNC deliveries/refunds?  BFL deliveries/refunds? Cointerra... aw forget it!

Amazing what a bit of noise can do eh? Nice one 

If it is that easy to get the big players to play ball, the rest will follow. I'm very happy that the community was able to come together and get this result, much faster than I anticipated - well done everyone!!

By the way, let's not confuse Open Source with Copywrong - they are two completely different & opposite subjects that couldn't be more farther apart. 

a DMCA takedown notice won't affect this forum, and it's unnecessary.  All that is needed is for the admins/mods to agree that the content is in violation of the forum policies

what I am suggesting  would do much more to get their attention.  Under DMCA, ckolivas can request a takedown of their domain hosting the infringing content which would also have the chilling effect of shutting down their sales site.

Since he is the copyright owner, this would need to be initiated by him