Alan Cox wrote

Some people like to give anonymously. They still take value from their
giving.

Alan Cox wrote

While the GPL license doesn't forbid it explicitly, it is widely considered
the height of bad manners to remove an attribution from a GPL'd file.
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homesteading/ar01s03.html

The choice of the license is not a choice of economy; it is a pragmatic
evalutation of the forces at play in a particular scenario. I have certainly
used public domain when my input was low and I felt that demanding an
attribution would be burdensome. I still received benefit from that initial
post. I have used attribution-only licenses when my input was larger but
many of the users I wanted to benefit would  be commercial and, in so doing,
knowingly gave up any rights to profit. I have used BSD, GPL, LGPL, various
versions of CC and all-rights-reserved on a case-by-case basis in order to
protect my brand and intellectual property while benefitting the maximum
number of people. That is a gift economy.

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Making soup is nothing like making software.

Once you wrote a piece of code (should I called it a "soup recipe" ?), it
is eternally useful - while probably also broken to some extent of course -
without the need for you to continue working on it. That specific version
can benefit people without any further input from you. So the comparison to
the "slave soup maker" is not fair, even if there's future economic
activity based on your piece of freely distributed code (recipe).

The comparison to soup making would be fair if you were talking about
software maintainance. I.e. if you were talking about a programmer who
continuously provides the service of tweaking, improving, bugfixing,
packaging, etc. For that kind of work there are indeed companies hiring
developers/maintainers/packagers and paying them to develop and maintain
free software. So, the "soup maker" is paid for the service of actually
preparing soup on a daily-basis. The obvious name that comes to mind is
RedHat. But there are plenty of other companies that also work that way
nowadays.

Off course, there must be plenty of soup makers in the world still
complaining that someone "stole their soup recipe". But that's not the
point.

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 7:59 AM, Richard Urwin <
soronlin+openscad@googlemail.com> wrote:

Felipe Sanches wrote

Your soup recipe analogy fails because a recipe, in its fundimental parts,
would probably be subject to patent, not copyright. The expression of the
recipe on a page is of course copyrightable and by all means try selling
photocopies of Jamie Oliver's recipes and see where you find yourself.

It is a feature of copyright that a work created once can be monetized over
time. Nobody much argues against copyright in books or music, why would it
be a bad thing for software?
Software would never be profitable if the first sale ever made must pay back
all investment. They sell many copies and reap the profits over time. Few
people would argue that pirating music, video or books was legitimate.

Similarly, when I give away one copy of a work, I do not achieve much
increase in respect and I have not helped many people. It is only by giving
away many copies over an extended time that I achieve value. It is precisely
analogous to the monetary profit achieved by mainstream authors and
musicians.

Let's suppose the slave in the kitchen made all the meals for a year and
sealed them away in a magic stasis bubble before a single customer received
one. The work has still been done and the value will still be received in
the thanks of the customers over that year. The fact that the work has been
completed does not mean that the creator has or should forfeit all interest
in it.

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On 10/03/2016 11:19 AM, Richard Urwin wrote:

I'm sorry, but no, that's is not the answer. We might talk
about quite different things though. I'm talking about the
code snippets shown in tutorials/books, NOT about the whole
tutorial or the whole book.

If you are not prepared to let people use code snippets given
as learning examples, what's the point at all?

I would like the OpenSCAD documentation and very much specifically
tutorials useful for education to be usable in any way. I've
seen quite a number of references to OpenSCAD used by teachers
and that's what I want to support. And I want them to use the
stuff without even a remote risk of someone saying "you need
the school lawyer to acquire a license before you can use it".
(Yes, may still happen, there's no ideal world yet, but that's
not the point).

It really bothers me how the big companies are pushing their
proprietary apps into schools like Apple did lately with their
Swift app. In my view applications like SonicPI should be
selected for education. It would be awesome if OpenSCAD could
become a good option too, but for that to happen, we will
need to help by providing at least a fair amount of initial
documentation/tutorials for that.

Anyway, we are using Wikibooks for the official docs, so the
license of that documentation must be CC-BY-SA and GFDL
anyway as that's what Wikibooks enforces.
I'm simply proposing the additional release of all the
included code snippets to be public domain / CC0 so that
code can be used without restrictions (which is allowed by
Wikibooks as far as I read the related Wikibooks docs).

ciao,
Torsten.

tp3 wrote

Which is why I have used waivers like this one:
"Unless I say otherwise in a particular instance, I hereby waive all
personal copyright interest in all code and methodology examples I publish
on the following sites: ..." -- http://www.wikidot.com/user:info/rurwin

It would be nice if book authors did the same.
The answer is still correct though: talk to the author. If they can give you
a letter formally giving you permission to use code snippets then you would
be safe. Of course a mainstream published  book has more interested parties
and you would be unlikely to get a clear enough answer for your needs.
That's a pain.

I have a nice little program I put together to monitor both sides of a
serial conversation. Along with a special cable it's very useful for
bebugging protocol issues. However it is built on top of a code example that
shipped with Microsoft's Visual Studio. I can't distribute it to anyone who
doesn't have a Visual Studio license. It's annoying but it's the price you
pay.

You could write out the examples in your own words. Just like the soup
example above, a program is only copyrightable in its creative content. So
long as you rewrite it from memory and change the names and maybe the order
of statements, you will be safe.

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On 10/03/2016 04:58 PM, Richard Urwin wrote:

Perfect, that's essentially what I'm proposing for the code
examples in the ("official") tutorials.
Although due to German law I can't just waive the copyright,
so I have to declare it CC0 and hope that works.

See? And I absolutely don't want teachers to pay that
kind of price when trying to use OpenSCAD documentation.
Because I suspect in 98% of the cases it will just mean
it's not used at all. And that the worst option.
If someone decides to make other great documentation with
a different license, that's cool, and I'm still happy about
it existing. However, I won't contribute to that.
Like there's an Udemy course about OpenSCAD which is
currently available for 19€ and I saw someone mentioning
it is well done. That's nice to have, nothing wrong with
additional options.

ciao,
Torsten.

On 10/04/2016 04:12 AM, MichaelAtOz wrote:

Yes, but that's different in various legislations and I also
expect the more advanced parts of the tutorial to very likely
reach the limit to be accepted as original work (at least in
German law).

So why take any chances? A clear statement of intention also
has a certain value.

ciao,
Torsten.

I’ve been looking into ways of using OpenSCAD as a dataflow language, but I haven’t looked at SISAL in particular.
Most of the concepts in OpenSCAD should be pretty well mappable to a dataflow or flow-based programming graph. It would be interesting to look into isomorphic representations, where text-based and a flow graph could just be two different editing modes.

So far I’ve temporarily shelved all of this in search of more resources to get this off the ground, but take a look at e.g. Antimony, which has combined flow-based programming with an f-rep kernel to achieve smth. very similar.

-Marius

Marius said: "It would be interesting to look into isomorphic
representations, where text-based and a flow graph could just be two
different editing modes."

I've thought about this too, although from my perspective it would be
difficult to pull off[*]. Still, if someone manages to do it, it could be
awesome.

[*] The difficulty is that the text based representation might contain
information that isn't contained in the graphical flow chart, and vice
versa, so what does the file format look like, how human readable is it,
what happens to this information when you switch between views in the
editor. An Antimony-like flow graph might contain X-Y coordinates for each
block. If the flow graph is a directed acyclic graph, as in Richard's
writeup, then the text version will need to introduce variable names and
let blocks that aren't needed by the graphical view.

Antimony avoids these issues because the flow graph and the programming
language representation are two different file formats.

As for SISAL, my impression is that it doesn't have too much to do with
Antimony-style visual programming. Instead, I view it as "functional
programming for Fortran programmers". In SISAL, there is a big emphasis on
compiler technology (automatic parallelization for SMP architecture
machines and efficient code generation), and there is also a lot of
language design focused on providing a convenient and efficient way to
write loops for array based code without using recursion or other
functional programming design patterns. But SISAL is still a functional
language (in the same sense that OpenSCAD is): functions are pure and
referentially transparent, with no side effects; there are no mutable
global variables; variables are single-assignment.

On 4 October 2016 at 16:29, Marius Kintel marius@kintel.net wrote: