I thought he made it pretty clear that he made some effort to get his software approved by exception through talking to execs, etc. So obviously that explains the "limbo". Presumably, he recognized it would just get rejected through the ordinary channels.
And with respect to the other thing, your bringing that up kinda proves what I said, doesn't it? :P
Why someone would buy that is beyond me, since they would still be non-compliant, but hey, you can try!
SFC is doing basically the same thing: They settle without demanding any money, just future compliance, and the individual developer is left in the rain.
The problem he should have noticed was that the Sun was selling the code he wrote for hundreds of thousands of dollars and not passing any of that on to him.
Step one shouldn't have been to worry about putting his header comment back in place and getting them the latest version of his code to sell to their customers. It should have been negotiating a redistribution license for his code if they wanted to continue selling it.
He didn’t, though. People signed up to a distribution method to run the code and just assumed future updates would be okay. He didn’t push the code to them, they pulled it.
He probably sees it as a form of "sticking it to the man". He probably did it as a joke initially and is now digging in his heels. He remembers the 80s when hacker culture abounded and software could have lots of inside jokes and lawyers were nowhere to be found.
Now that software has gone "mainstream" and copyright and patents and lawyers and courts and legal red tape has been rolled out everywhere he is refusing to conform and is instead sticking to his guns.
The problem seems to be that he didn't really decide.
It's easy to make a quick decision when releasing software that cannot be taken back.
And when you're finally realizing your mistake, you can only resort to what we're seeing here: pleas and threats.
And of course, on the whole huge Internet you will always have people who defy you either for legitimate reasons or just out of spite. So it's practically guaranteed that you end up with war.
I cannot make up my mind whether we should blame him (for being so nonchalant with the license) or Google (for luring him into this trap without properly educating him on the consequences).
He still could have prepared a legitimate pull request in advance. It was a terrible example, and the more I read about it, the more I think it was intentional and never had the intention to help Open Source projects in any way.
Maybe his hands were tied in the sense that releasing things open source would limit his ability to package and sell it off at a later date? I'm sure there were negotiations in progress at the time he would have considered doing so and from my POV, which could be terribly wrong, it would seem that releasing the thing you are considering to sell, for free, would sort of meddle with the entire process of selling it off?
I understand why he may not want to do it but simply commercializing the software could keep it going, then use that money to help defeat the cooyright infringers. But that is business which he probably never wanted to do. He wanted to code.
I guess that he works on something SaaS, web probably, where you aren't distributing the software, so there you are not obligued to release your modification.
if he really wanted to take only open source code, he could have cleared it with his managers and his compliance officer, and they would have let him take stuff that is clearly open source most likely.
Interesting. What i fail to understand though is how on earth he could have approved or thought that this may be a good move. I find it hilariously childish. But glad it ignited the idea of open source in game development - hope the industry figures out how to also monetise it.
you have to give it to the guy - he continued coding even after loosing in the court and having to read tons of legal papers -
Sept 10, 2021: Lost a court case, climbed a mountain, read hundreds of pages of legal papers, wrote some code. Just as determined as ever to fight on until there is genuine developer and consumer freedom in software, and fair competition in each mobile platform software component.
On the surface, his request to not republish seems laughable.
However, I'd guess Alan expected our collective failure to respect his wishes knowing that once it began to spread he could cut off access. His goal of getting a small set of the most devoted users to download and sanity check his pending release was accomplished.
And with respect to the other thing, your bringing that up kinda proves what I said, doesn't it? :P
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