The post there doesn't seem too convincing. I understand how important Gimp is, in a world where Adobe owns the scene of image editing, but others may not know that well.
I feel the post really should be conveying what they will be providing if they reach their patreon marker. A better competitor to Photoshop, Paint.net. What features will be worked on, etc. Its gotta market itself in some way.
GIMP is free software and ethical. Paint.net is the same rental model that Photoshop is now using and is completely against the public interest for us to put our resources into that sort of business.
Paint.Net used to be MIT licensed. I don't really know why he went back to closed source but I saw a comment he wrote where he said that releasing the source brought him only misery. Does anyone know any details about that?
From the wording in the blog post I think that in some of the cases where people redistributed Paint.NET they broke the terms of the license. In such cases the original author is right to feel that his work has been plagiarized. None of my projects have been big enough that this has ever happened to me so I can't really offer any useful advice for what to do. I think it's sad that he chose to close the source though and as a consequence of it I can now no longer (since 2009 actually but this is the first time I've been made aware of the change of license because the last time I was using Windows on any of my own computers was around that time and the last time I installed Paint.NET on one of my computers it was still open source) advice friends and family to install Paint.NET when they are looking for a photo editing program.
I release most of my own code under a license similar to MIT (the ISC license) and as long as the people who are using my code honor the conditions of the license they are free to rebrand it and sell it if they want to or to do whatever else that doesn't violate the license.
Often I feel that if someone is going to redistribute an MIT licensed project with modifications, they should rebrand it. For example say that I wanted to sell copies of FreeBSD as a whole with some of my own patches and modifications. I would not be able to call that FreeBSD without first working out an agreement with the FreeBSD Foundation [1]. The reason for this being that FreeBSD is a trademark of the FreeBSD Foundation and so they get to retain control of it. This is how it should be. This is what I like about the MIT family of licenses, the code is free but the license does not grant rights to use a trademark. When I say rebrand, note that proper attribution is still required.
However, if binaries are redistributed unmodified then I think it should be ok to refer to it by the original name because then that name is an accurate representation of exactly what is being distributed.
Furthermore I think that when just maintaining source changes in a public repo it should not be necessary to rebrand.
Meanwhile, if someone completely stripped my name from something I wrote and they didn't give me the proper attribution, they'd be in violation of the license and therefore the license would be void. If someone is going to use my code, they are going to attribute me in the manner that is set out in the license.
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Clearly those copying the software and changing the copyright information (or simply not including the above) were in violation of the licence and could be sued for copyright infringement.
They can also continue doing that too, since changing string of a disassembled binary isn't that hard.
That's very unfortunate for me, as a user and amateur programmer myself. It's even more a shame to see something become proprietary. I really wish people wouldn't do this.
It's even more a shame to see something become proprietary
I wouldn't call this a "shame". A project as complex and significant as GIMP/paint.net may take a lot of time to maintain and to improve. If you can't find a persistent way to fund yourself, turning it proprietary becomes a tentative option. I understand and respect the decision of the developer of paint.net. As open source developers (I am one of them), we are responsible not only for our users but also for ourselves and our families. Everyone has a life after all.
Paint.net is the same rental model that Photoshop is now using
We're talking about http://www.getpaint.net, right? This is proprietary desktop software, but as far as I can tell, it is gratis. (They do solicit donations, but paying has no bearing on the license.)
A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
For people who think that users deserve the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software they use, nonfree software is indeed unethical. Even more so when the software is used by the developers as an instrument of injust power.
It's a continuum. Respecting software freedom is the most ethical action, so
using proprietary terms is less ethical. The software may, depending on your
view, not be net unethical at that point. It's further unethical if they have
problematic terms in the EULA besides being proprietary in the first place.
Competing with free software and thus taking attention and therefore resources
away from the free software is negative ethically, in the same sense that
advertising bottled water is unethical even if it didn't have the environmental
problems that it has.
It's especially unethical if software spies on you and advertises at you or even
worse things.
Implying that non-free software is unethical isn't rude. Especially since I
didn't insist that this particular software is deeply unethical. I just
suggested that support for ethical software like GIMP is the right thing to
do and so supporting less ethical software is something I'm suggesting
avoiding.
Now, having learned from other comments about this particular case, I'll agree that as proprietary software goes, Paint.net sounds unusually good in the ethics realm, just not quite on par with GIMP, but I'd say net ethical after all.
Stallman founded the whole free software movement on the theory that asking a user to execute code without the ability to investigate/modify/share it is unethical. Read any of his essays (and you definitely should if you haven't) and it's clear that his motive is moral/ethical. This sentiment is frequently shared among open-source developers.
Comments
The post there doesn't seem too convincing. I understand how important Gimp is, in a world where Adobe owns the scene of image editing, but others may not know that well.
I feel the post really should be conveying what they will be providing if they reach their patreon marker. A better competitor to Photoshop, Paint.net. What features will be worked on, etc. Its gotta market itself in some way.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
GIMP is free software and ethical. Paint.net is the same rental model that Photoshop is now using and is completely against the public interest for us to put our resources into that sort of business.
Paint.Net used to be MIT licensed. I don't really know why he went back to closed source but I saw a comment he wrote where he said that releasing the source brought him only misery. Does anyone know any details about that?
For anyone interested, the MIT-licensed source is still out there: https://github.com/rivy/OpenPDN
https://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paint...
From the wording in the blog post I think that in some of the cases where people redistributed Paint.NET they broke the terms of the license. In such cases the original author is right to feel that his work has been plagiarized. None of my projects have been big enough that this has ever happened to me so I can't really offer any useful advice for what to do. I think it's sad that he chose to close the source though and as a consequence of it I can now no longer (since 2009 actually but this is the first time I've been made aware of the change of license because the last time I was using Windows on any of my own computers was around that time and the last time I installed Paint.NET on one of my computers it was still open source) advice friends and family to install Paint.NET when they are looking for a photo editing program.
I release most of my own code under a license similar to MIT (the ISC license) and as long as the people who are using my code honor the conditions of the license they are free to rebrand it and sell it if they want to or to do whatever else that doesn't violate the license.
Often I feel that if someone is going to redistribute an MIT licensed project with modifications, they should rebrand it. For example say that I wanted to sell copies of FreeBSD as a whole with some of my own patches and modifications. I would not be able to call that FreeBSD without first working out an agreement with the FreeBSD Foundation [1]. The reason for this being that FreeBSD is a trademark of the FreeBSD Foundation and so they get to retain control of it. This is how it should be. This is what I like about the MIT family of licenses, the code is free but the license does not grant rights to use a trademark. When I say rebrand, note that proper attribution is still required.
However, if binaries are redistributed unmodified then I think it should be ok to refer to it by the original name because then that name is an accurate representation of exactly what is being distributed.
Furthermore I think that when just maintaining source changes in a public repo it should not be necessary to rebrand.
Meanwhile, if someone completely stripped my name from something I wrote and they didn't give me the proper attribution, they'd be in violation of the license and therefore the license would be void. If someone is going to use my code, they are going to attribute me in the manner that is set out in the license.
IANAL, TINLA.
[1]: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/legal/trademark-usage-term...
The MIT license includes a parragraph:
Clearly those copying the software and changing the copyright information (or simply not including the above) were in violation of the licence and could be sued for copyright infringement.They can also continue doing that too, since changing string of a disassembled binary isn't that hard.
such a shame
That's very unfortunate for me, as a user and amateur programmer myself. It's even more a shame to see something become proprietary. I really wish people wouldn't do this.
I wouldn't call this a "shame". A project as complex and significant as GIMP/paint.net may take a lot of time to maintain and to improve. If you can't find a persistent way to fund yourself, turning it proprietary becomes a tentative option. I understand and respect the decision of the developer of paint.net. As open source developers (I am one of them), we are responsible not only for our users but also for ourselves and our families. Everyone has a life after all.
I believe "shame" in the grandparent post just means "pity".
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/oh-wh...
We're talking about http://www.getpaint.net, right? This is proprietary desktop software, but as far as I can tell, it is gratis. (They do solicit donations, but paying has no bearing on the license.)
Sorry, I'd seen web service in this direction and assumed that's what this is, since "paint.net" isn't a desktop software name really.
It really is.
Implying that non-free software is unethical? That's a rather rude thing to say.
From https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html:
For people who think that users deserve the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software they use, nonfree software is indeed unethical. Even more so when the software is used by the developers as an instrument of injust power.
It's a continuum. Respecting software freedom is the most ethical action, so using proprietary terms is less ethical. The software may, depending on your view, not be net unethical at that point. It's further unethical if they have problematic terms in the EULA besides being proprietary in the first place. Competing with free software and thus taking attention and therefore resources away from the free software is negative ethically, in the same sense that advertising bottled water is unethical even if it didn't have the environmental problems that it has. It's especially unethical if software spies on you and advertises at you or even worse things.
Implying that non-free software is unethical isn't rude. Especially since I didn't insist that this particular software is deeply unethical. I just suggested that support for ethical software like GIMP is the right thing to do and so supporting less ethical software is something I'm suggesting avoiding.
Now, having learned from other comments about this particular case, I'll agree that as proprietary software goes, Paint.net sounds unusually good in the ethics realm, just not quite on par with GIMP, but I'd say net ethical after all.
Stallman founded the whole free software movement on the theory that asking a user to execute code without the ability to investigate/modify/share it is unethical. Read any of his essays (and you definitely should if you haven't) and it's clear that his motive is moral/ethical. This sentiment is frequently shared among open-source developers.
> Implying that non-free software is unethical?
Absolutely. It is.
There may be few other options in the current global economic system, but it does not make it any more ethical.