Thread: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
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joerg_rw is offline joerg_rw
2014-09-25 , 01:57
Posts: 2,222 | Thanked: 12,651 times | Joined on Mar 2010 @ SOL 3
#25
Originally Posted by woody14619 View Post
[...]That license clearly states companies and individuals may use the software in commercial products AND modify it, AND copyright, AND declare ownership of, AND sell or re-distribute the re-bundled product.

Henri Bergius, co-author of MidGard and full owner of Nemein, made this change on the wikipedia page himself in November 2003, clearly stating this to be the case. He likely did so in order to be able to sell the products of his new company, which offered CMS services based on MidGard1 to various providers, including Nokia.
The Midgard [[Library (computer science)|core libraries]] and the MidCOM CMS are distributed under the [[GNU Lesser General Public License]] (LGPL), a license which permits the software to be freely used so long as it is dynamically linked or the user can relink it to new versions of the libraries. This is the same license used by the [[GNU C Library]]. This licensing scheme qualifies Midgard as [[free software]] developed with an open source model.
Originally Posted by woody14619 View Post
Anyone claiming that all of Maemo and/or the m.o site are FOSS and "100% open source" is legally incorrect.
AHA! See? that's the problem with you and your contributions, all the time since you joined HiFo: NFC but calling others names and trying to correct them:-/
For those who still are puzzled by woody's claims: The LGPL allows Nokia to link Midgard into own software and sell such software. It doesn't mean Nokia owns Midgard. Midgard is 100% FOSS (Henri's own words woody quoted/linked). And Nokia didn't ship any other (X86) software on maemo.org server that they could claim any copyright in (maybe except mentioned few hundred lines of php scripts that were a) without any copyright but buggy like hell, b) probably publicly available via aforementioned SVN repo and c) thus got replaced by versions created by new maemo techstaff & volunteers) Not a single byte of Nokia proprietary code runs on the server. (btw: just if in doubt about Henri allegedly sold a - according to his own statement which woody linked to - 100% FOSS software to Nokia, so Nokia can "sell" this software to HiFo now: after transfer of servers we did an update of whole midgard to latest available Midgard-1 FOSS version, so no matter what Midgard been on the servers, now definitely it's 100% FOSS) If that's Nokia who thinks they have proprietary code on maemo.org (would be in line with nokia's [lawyers] sometimes pretty flawed understanding of what's FOSS software and how to make business around it), then they shall hand over a list of filenames so techstaff can clean it out.
[edit] the sad thing is: I explained that to you maybe a dozen times already. Seems you are really not willing (or capable) to learn.
[edit2] before you start another round of your favorite game "bash joerg" with that one: for content just see bottom left of this very page you're looking at: "All Content CC"
Originally Posted by woody14619 View Post
[ But please, don't take my word on that! Read the page on LGPL, and follow the reference links to the FSF page itself and read the legal document.

It boils down to this: Who will you believe when deciding if Nokia owned this material and had legal rights to assign it to HiFo? You have two choices: Someone named "Joerg_rw" on the internet, who refuses to say anything but "it's all free!" Or the creator of the software, the company that sold the CMS system/service to Nokia, the legal team at Nokia, and a generation of lawyers from the FSF who wrote and maintain the LGPL.
No, rather it boils down to a choice between: Joerg_rw (software developer since 30+ years, managed dozens of projects, handled copyright issues in OpenMoko, talked with Eero, knows the server) or Woody (err, airplane mechanics? Neither knows the server nor the meaning of LGPL, uses "He likely did so" arguments[!] and blames others for "warped sense of reality")

BR
jOERG
PS: another possible hook to link the next baseless bashing on, which I want to correct before such bashing starts: I never said 100% of all maemo.org are FOSS, I'm well aware that HiFo paid for a commercial version of vBulletin. However Nokia didn't provide that software either, so that statement stands: not a single byte of code is running on maemo.org servers that Nokia could claim was theirs. When techstaff really missed out on some hidden file that holds Nokia proprietary code, you should point to it, rather than claiming midgard was owned by Nokia.
I'm not even going to comment all the other incorrect attributions like "since you now say you've always thought it was a bad idea." It's this constant spreading lies that makes you look pretty dishonest and sneaky, and anyway I'm fed up with it.

To juiceme: sure it's OT, but it sheds some light on a) who started OT, and b) on the compentence of some of those most vocal in here and the coherence and value and correctness of their claims. It's probably safe to assume that such doesn't differ much between particular posts. It also shows who thanks those incorrect posts and thinks they are "most accurate". So it actually helps on the topic.
Last edited by joerg_rw; 2014-09-25 at 17:46.
 

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