Avi, Why do you keep changing the subject line? You started a new thread about "borrowing" (copying) code, people responded to that thread, and you've immediately changed the subject to "Copyleft" even though you talk about much more than copyleft licences.
(You barely mention copyleft at all -- and what you say about it is very inaccurate.) On Tue, Dec 04, 2018 at 07:50:21PM -0500, Avi Gross wrote: > Alan, > > Just a reminder. I am NOT suggesting the first way to solve a problem > is what I described. I am saying that sometimes a roadblock (real or > imagined) can be gotten around using methods like that. In my experience, the sorts of organisations which make it difficult to install third-party software (whether FOSS or proprietary) are also the sorts of organisations which will fire you immediately for copying someone else's code. YMMV. > Agreed. There are copyrights that have to be considered, albeit often > SMALL amounts are considered OK. Attribution is a good idea in > general. There's another factor to consider: software patents. If you're going to copy a small amount of code, you may still violate their patent. (Disclaimer: I am not a patent lawyer.) In that case, giving credit to them will be tantamount to admitting to willful infringement, which in most jurisdictions that I know of receives triple damages. That's how broken the patent system is: the penalties for infringement encourage people to avoid doing a patent search. Its better to say "We couldn't be bothered doing a patent search" than to say "We tried to do due diligence but failed to spot this patent", because when it comes to patents, if you make the effort but fail, you are deemed to have willfully infringed, whereas if you intentionally make no attempt to avoid infringing, your infringement is deemed to have been an innocent mistake. Crazy but true. > The problem that began this is when someone puts roadblocks in the way of > what works. There may be very good reasons for this policy that you call a roadblock. And we only have the Original Poster's word that he is not allowed to install pexpect. That could be his misunderstanding, or perhaps he can't be bothered going through the process to get approval. In fairness, some places do make that process rather gruelling... in a previous position, I worked with a client whose change request process for installing new software on a production server could easily take three or four months for approval to come through, if it was given at all. Now, you might be tempted to roll your eyes and call that bureaucracy gone mad, but they had very good reasons for that level of caution and conservativeness. A colleague got a figurative spanking after he accidentally brought their production server down (fortunately only for ten minutes, although that was ten minutes too long) by rolling out a buggy "bug fix" directly onto the production server without testing it on a staging server first, or getting approval for the change. https://i.chzbgr.com/full/7756111616/hED5FBCC9/ > If someone for example wants to be able to use something as trivial as > math.pi but for some reason won't load the math module, you could > suggest they look up the value of pi to umpteen decimal places and > create an object called math Perhaps a class) containing nothing but a > value called pi .... [...] > Or, I suggest you can copy the real math module into the same place. > You may want to edit it with a comment. So rather than adding a single constant, you're going to risk infringing the copyright and moral rights of other programmers by copying a 75 kilobyte C library that you don't need, just to get the value of pi which you could legally and easily copy from your calculator or Google in about five seconds. Are you being paid by the hour? *wink* > But, yes, bad example as pretty much any implementation of python will > include the math module as it is standard. Indeed. Let's take a better example: the pexpect library. The OP is not able (not permitted? not physically able? can't be bothered?) to install the pexpect library. So your advice for him is to... install the pexpect library, potentially ignoring its licence terms, making a copy of the source (hoping that its all Python and not C that needs compiling) and edit the source to "add a comment" (saying what?). I think you haven't really considered that if the OP is not able to install the pexpect library, he probably won't be able to copy it into his application either. To say nothing of the ethical issues of copying software without obeying the licence terms. Fortunately pexpect itself is licenced under a very permissive licence that allows copying with (almost) no restriction: https://github.com/pexpect/pexpect/blob/master/LICENSE but as a general matter of principle, suggesting people just copy the source code they want and stick it in their application is rather risky and potentially dubious advice. Not risky for you, of course, its no skin off your nose if somebody takes your advice and gets sued or fired from their job. > Your post does remind me that there are many versions of copyright > including some with the silly naming of "copyleft" that allow rather > free use but with limits. That's incorrect: there's only one "copyright" (although of course each nation has its own laws enforcing it, and may grant its own slightly different monopoly rights under the copyright banner). "Copyleft" is, of course, a pun on copyright. But it isn't "a version of copyright". Only governments can create copyrights. It is a software licence. Copyright is a government-granted, and enforced, monopoly on the legal right to make copies of a work (among other privileges). A licence, on the other hand, is an agreement between two private parties where the copyright owner agrees to permit the other party to do certain things which they otherwise would not be allowed to do. Such as making copies or modifications to the software. > They may charge large businesses or > government agencies. They may demand you leave in some text as in > comments or not make changes or notify them to get permission so they > can keep track or ... This is a completely inaccurate description of what copyleft licences do. Any licence which required such conditions would not be copyleft. It is pretty much as far from the copyleft ethos as it is possible to get. (Aside from "some text" if that is a copy of the licence itself.) > I brought up some questions a while ago that boiled down to how a > program can know what is already available on the machine the code is > being run on. Clearly if you use an unfamiliar package, one solution > would be to bring the needed files with you in the distribution of the > program. Yes, it may not be the latest or greatest, but you can > imagine many ways where it can conditionally fall back on the copies > included if a regular import fails. How could a "regular import" (as opposed to what?) succeed *except* by means of having a copy of the library available somewhere accessible to the application? The only distinction here is whether the library is installed within the application itself, using whatever mechanism is used to bundle libraries within an application, or installed externally to the application. Either way, there must be a copy. In my experience, it is usual that bundling a library bundled in an application will shadow the system library, rather than being used as a fallback if and only if the system library is missing. Things might be different in the C world, or other languages, but that's how the Python import system typically works. For example, try running this at the shell: touch math.py python -c "import math; print(math.pi)" Believe it or not, that's a feature, not a bug :-) -- Steve _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
