LGPL does not mandate dynamic linking, it mandates the ability to re-assemble a new version of the library. This might mean distributing object files in the case of a statically-linked application, but it is still allowed by the license.
That's not it. The LGPL doesn't require dynamic linking, just that any distributed artifacts be able to be used with derived versions of the LGPL code. Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too.
The problem here isn't a technical violation of the LGPL, it's that Rockchip doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL. What they should have done is put their modified FFMPEG code into a forked project, clearly label it with an LGPL LICENSE file, and link against that.
"In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License."
They should be covered as an aggregation, provided the LGPL was intact.
> - Rockchip's code is gone
> - FFmpeg gets nothing back
> - Community loses whatever improvements existed
> - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner
This is all conjecture which is probably why you deleted it.
Their code isn't gone (unless they're managing their code in all the wrong ways), FFmpeg sends a message to a for-profit violation of their code, the community gets to see the ignorance Rockchip puts into the open source partnership landscape and finally... If Rockchip becomes an adversary of one of the most popular and notable OSS that they take advantage of, again, for profit then fuck Rockchip. They're not anything here other than a violator of a license and they've had plenty of warning and time to fix.
Deadline and reminders? They aren't teachers and Rockchip isn't a student, they are the victims here and Rockchip is the one at fault. Let's stop literally victim blaming them for how they responded.
To be clear: Rockchip is at fault, 100%. I would sue (and obv DMCA) any company who takes my code and refuses to attribute it.
If you immediately escalate to [DMCA / court] because they refuse to fix, then that's very fair, but suddenly like 2 years after silence (if, and only if that was the case, because maybe they spoke outside of Twitter/X), then it's odd.
Maybe spend less time policing how other people are allowed to act, especially when you’re speculating wildly about the presence or content of communications
It's a call to push the devs to freely say what happened in the background, there are many hints at that "I wonder if...?" "What could have happened that it escalated?" "Why there were no public reminders, what happened in the back", etc, etc, nothing much, these questions are deliberately open.
Oh. Being rude and suggesting the devs made (in your opinion) a mistake based on your guess at their actions is not going to be an effective way to get them to elaborate on their legal strategy.
Also it’s rude, which is reason enough not to do it.
That's bullshit. The FFmpeg devs were well within their rights to even send a DMCA takedown notice, immediately, without asking nicely first.
This is what big corporations do to the little guys, so we owe big corporations absolutely nothing more.
They gave Rockchip a year and a half to fix it. It is the responsibility of Rockchip to take care of it once they were originally notified, and the FFmpeg dvelopers have no responsibility to babysit the Rockchip folks while they fulfill their legal obligations.
Yeah. This is like waiting 90 days before releasing a full disclosure on a vulnerability, and then complaining you could have contacted us and given us time, we only had 90 days now. Gaslighting 101. Those 90 days gives all those with a lot if resources and sitting on zero days (such as Cellebrite) time to play for free.
If you have to hound them to stop breaking the law they were already an adversary and the easiest way to comply would be to simply follow the license in which case everyone wins
They were given 1.5 YEARS of lead time. And FLOSS should treat commercial entities the same way they treat us.
Seriously, if we copied in violation their code, how many hours would pass before a DMCA violation?
FLOSS should be dictatorial in application of the license. After all, its basically free to use and remix as long as you follow the easy rules. I'm also on the same boat that Android phone creators should also be providing source fully, and should be confiscated on import for failure of copyright violations.
But ive seen FLOSS devs be like "let's be nice". Tit for tat is the best game theory so far. Time to use it.
My understanding is that the GPL doesn't have fucktons of precedent behind it in court. You bet the house on a big case and lose, the precedent will stick with GPL and may even weaken all copyleft licenses.
Also, it's better to gently apply pressure and set a track record of violators taking corrective measures so when you end up in court one day you've got a list of people and corporate entities which do comply because they believed that the terms were clear enough, which would lend weight to your argument.
This is not correct; you're simply required to follow all applicable licenses at the same time. This may or may not be possible, but is in practice quite commonly done.
You should keep them in different directories and have the appropriate license for each directory. You can have a top-level LICENSE file explaining the situation.
Incorporating compatible code, under different license is perfectly OK and each work can have different license, while the whole combined work is under the terms of another.
I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine.
The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.
The notice has a list of files and says that they were copied from ffmpeg, removed the original copyright notice, added their own and licensed under the more permissive Apache license.
I didn't downvote. I suspect people did because it sounded like you were defending ILoveRockchip's actions, based on either 1) not understanding what they did, and/or 2) not having access to the facts. People get snippy about abusing Free Software.
I wonder how this will work with AI stuff generating code without any source or attribution. It’s not like the LLMs make this stuff up out of thin air it comes from source material.
Best case scenario is it nukes the whole concept of software patents and the whole ugly industry of copyright hoarding. The idea that perpetual rent-seeking is a natural extension and intended outcome of the legal concepts of copyrights and patents is bizarre.
I think it's probably less frequent nowadays, but it very much does happen. This still-active lawsuit[0] was made in response to LLMs generating verbatim chunks of code that they were trained on.[1]
The die is certainly not multi-terabyte. A more realistic number would be 32k-sided to 50k-sided if we want to go with a pretty average token vocabulary size.
Really, it comes down to encoding. Arbitrarily short utf-8 encoded strings can be generated using a coin flip.
Of course, it's random and by chance - tokens are literally sampled from a predicted probability distribution. If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that.
It's trivially true that arbitrarily short reconstructions can be reproduced by virtually any random process and reconstruction length scales with the similarity in output distribution to that of the target. This really shouldn't be controversial.
My point is that matching sequence length and distributional similarity are both quantifiable. Where do you draw the line?
> Of course, it's random and by chance - tokens are literally sampled from a predicted probability distribution.
Picking randomly out of a non-random distribution doesn't give you a random result.
And you don't have to use randomness to pick tokens.
> If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that.
Don't be a pain. This isn't about uniform distribution versus other generic distribution. This is about the very elaborate calculations that exist on a per-token basis specifically to make the next token plausible and exclude the vast majority of tokens.
> My point is that matching sequence length and distributional similarity are both quantifiable. Where do you draw the line?
Any reasonable line has examples that cross it from many models. Very long segments that can be reproduced. Because many models were trained in a way that overfits certain pieces of code and basically causes them to be memorized.
Right, and very short segments can also be reproduced. Let's say that "//" is an arbitrarily short segment that matches some source code. This is trivially true. I could write "//" on a coin and half the time it's going to land "//". Let's agree that's a lower bound.
I don't even disagree that there is an upper bound. Surely reproducing a repo in its entirety is a match.
So there must exist a line between the two that divides too short and too long.
Again, by what basis do you draw a line between a 1 token reproduction and a 1,000 token reproduction? 5, 10, 20, 50? How is it justified? Purely "reasonableness"?
I mostly agree with you, but if a human straight up copies work under copyright they’re violating the law. Seems like a LLM should be held to the same standard unless they should be even less beholden to the law than people.
It’s also incredibly hard to tell if a LLM copied something since you can’t ask it in court and it probably can’t even tell you if it did.
From what I have seen, the (US) courts seem to make a distinction between 100% machine-automated output with no manual prompting at all, versus a human giving it specific instructions on what to generate. (And yes I realize everything a computer does requires prior instruction of some kind.)
But the issue with copyright I think comes from the distribution of a (potentially derivative or transformative in the legal sense) work, which I would say is typically done manually by a human to some extent, so I think they would be on the hook for any potential violations in that case, possibly even if they cannot actually produce sources themselves since it was LLM-generated.
But the legal test always seems to come back to what I said before, simply "how much was copied, and how obvious is it?" which is going to be up to the subjective interpretation of each judge of every case.
LGPL allows compiling the whole of ffmpeg into a so or lib and then dynamically linking from there for your closed source code. That's the main difference between LGPL and GPL.
But if you change or add something in building ffmpeg.so that should be GPLed.
Apparently they copied some files from ffmpeg mixed with their propitiatory code and compiled it as a whole. That's the problem here.
Copyright law defines derivative work by substantial similarity and dependence, not by technical mechanisms like linking. Technical measures such as linking is not a copyright concept.
Dynamic linking is a condition for LGPL compliance, but it is not sufficient. Dynamic linking does not automatically prevent a combined work from being a derived work.
> Dynamic linking is a condition for LGPL compliance
No, it isn’t. The condition says to allow your users to make and use their own modifications to the part of the software which falls under the LGPL. Dynamic linking is only a convenient way of allowing this, not a requirement.
Not familiar with Rockchip. Plenty of searches come up with cases of people incorporating ffmpeg into Rockchip projects. I still see the license files and headers. What is different with this DMCA takedown?
The one you reference doesn't look like it misrepresents the licenses, i.e. of you use it to make your own derivative you would expect to have to share modifications you make to the LGPL code.
The law doesn't seem to work anymore. There are so many cases where someone can do illegal stuff in plain sight and nothing can be done about it. Not everyone has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare to get a lawyer. By the time you manage to save up the money, you realize that this system is absolutely crooked and that you don't trust it to obtain justice anyway even with the lawyers and even if you are legally in the right.
The law exists mostly to oppress. It's exactly the argument that gun proponents make "Only the good guys obey gun laws, so only the bad guys have guns."
All the good guys are losing following the law, all the bad guys are winning by violating the law. Frankly, at this stage, they write the laws.
I recently had to deal with a ministry in Canada, where a worker who had been there since 20 years ago failed even a basic test of competence in reading comprehension. Then multiple issues with the OPC (Office of Privacy Commissioner) failing entirely on a basic issue.
Another example exists in Ontario's tenant laws constantly being criticized as enabling bad tenant behavior, but reading the statute full of many month delays for landlords and 2 day notices for tenants paints a more realistic picture.
In fact, one such landlord lied, admitted to lying, and then had their lie influence the decision in their favor, despite it being known to be false, by their own word. The appeal mentioned discretion of the adjudicator.
Not sure how long that can go on before a collapse, but I can't imagine it's very long.
I think it should be perfectly OK to make value judgements of other people, and if they are backed by evidence, make them publicly and make them have consequences for that person's position.
A recent review of one of Canada's Federal Institutions showed the correct advice was given 17% of the time[0]. 83% failure rate. Not a soul has been fired unless something changed recently.
I do agree however with your assessment because any (additional) accountability would improve matters.
I can't help but look at it as the sign of an empire in decline. It's only a matter of time before more people realize what you're saying (particularly the last two paragraphs) and the system falls apart.
You can see it everywhere. In this case, the fact that it took 2 years. And of course now that FFmpeg is getting more exposure in the media due to their association with AI hype, now they finally get 'fair' legal treatment... I don't call that winning. I see this over and over. Same thing all over the west.
I remember Rowan Atkinson (the UK actor) made a speech about this effect a couple of years ago and never heard about it since but definitely feeling it more and more... No exposure, no money, no legal representation. And at the same time we are being gaslit about our privilege.
> In this case, the fact that it took 2 years. And of course now that FFmpeg is getting more exposure in the media due to their association with AI hype, now they finally get 'fair' legal treatment... I don't call that winning.
It took 2 years because FFmpeg waited 2 years to send a DMCA notice to Github, not because of delays in the legal system. I think you are conflating different unrelated issues here.
Is working around accessing an embargoed site really any better than just accessing it directly? Morally, what's the difference?
If everyone just actively boycotted that site, it would become irrelevant overnight. Anything else is simply condoning it continued existence. Don't kid yourself.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes content is posted on a site people don't want to support, so making a copy of it and viewing/sharing the copy is preferable.
Not a fan of the CCP, but GH in general has a big problem with users not understanding and respecting licensing and passing off others' code as their own, sometimems unintentionally, often not.
Time to create a decentralized, blockchain-based GitHub (GitCoin?) and have every commit be a transaction on the chain. Nothing would ever be takedownable.
Git already has a blockchain; what you will need to do next is to make copies of the objects of the repositories on other servers as well. (However, I don't know if the blockchain includes tags on git (it seems to me that it might not but I don't know enough about it), although it does include objects. Fossil includes tags in the blockchain as well as files, commits, etc.)
I mean, torrenting is decentralised and not technically takedownable. But it was entirely possible to make it legally painful for people involved in it, as seen in eg. The Pirate Bay, megaupload or an entire cease-and-desist letter industry around individual torrenting users
Intentional noncompliance with copyright law can get you quite a distance, but there's a lot of money involved, so if you ever catch the wrong kind of attention, usually by being too successful, you tend to get smacked.
Github stores about 19 PB. That would cost about $20k a year on Filecoin. Filecoin currently has more supply than demand because it's speculation-driven right now.
There's a pattern here that's bigger than FFmpeg or Rockchip, and HN keeps missing it because it's too busy litigating footnotes.
Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.
The West has turned software into theology. Licenses are no longer pragmatic tools; they're moral texts. You didn't just copy code incorrectly, you sinned. You violated the sacred distinction between "dynamic linking" and "static linking" like a heretic confusing transubstantiation. So of course the response is excommunication via DMCA, administered by a US platform acting as the high court of global legitimacy.
China, meanwhile, treats code the way early America treated British industrial designs: as something you learn from, adapt, and improve until it disappears into the background of actual progress. This isn't because Chinese engineers are "confused" about copyright. It's because they don't share the Western belief that ideas become ethically radioactive if they cross an invisible legal membrane without the right ceremony.
What HN calls "license violations" are, in a broader historical sense, the sound of a rising system refusing to internalize the anxieties of a declining one. The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise. Pretending it's a universal moral truth is like insisting everyone must use QWERTY because it worked for typewriters in 1890.
So when GitHub issues a DMCA takedown, it's not defending openness; it's defending relevance. It's the West saying: the rules still matter, please keep caring about them. But history suggests that once you're relying on process to assert superiority over results, you're already late.
You can cheer this if you want. Just don't confuse enforcement with inevitability. The future usually belongs to the people who ship, not the ones who litigate why shipping was noncompliant.
Maybe I’m not smart enough to grasp all these flowery words, but is this suggesting if I spend a few years writing some code, you should get to copy it for your own interests and without compensating me as long as your sales and marketing is better than mine?
I don’t think Rockchip learned from the ffmoeg code. They simply copied it outright without attribution.
I think both of you are right. But OP may think of the larger picture. A bit like 'move fast and break things', that sort of things where you blur the lines when it's valuable enough. Not that I agree with this ethical stance, but surely there's some sclerotic aspect of being too stiff on rules. It's a weird balance.
> if I spend a few years writing some code, you should get to copy it for your own interests
If you publish the code, there's an argument to be made that yes, others should freely use it: if you could (or did) monetize the code yourself you wouldn't publish it. If you didn't, or failed trying to monetize it, maybe it's better for society if everyone else also gets to try?
> The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise
If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.
The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.
So progress is always good, no matter how many people's work you exploit without their consent? You have a nice car, can I just take it and use it myself? Why is code any different? Is slavery OK too?
A much more interesting problem is how to create prosperity without throwing people under the bus - with everybody who contributed profiting proportionally to their contribution.
Except of course for that one little detail where Chinese companies take out minor improvement patents to kick the door shut on open source projects that they build on top of.
> We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here
That self-interest has led to cooperation between humans. Humans have evolved to work together, cooperate, form social bonds, and friendships because doing so improves survival and wellbeing over the long run. Civility is part of that toolkit. It is not a denial of self-interest. Civility is part of that self-interest.
This perfectly summarizes my feeling about software licenses.
I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.
> I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.
If we can have this, but for everything, so films, books, TV, music and everything else, I'd agree. This however is not the world we live in. The amount of culture we could have from people remixing the past 50 years worth of culture would be incredible. Instead, we're stuck with the same stuff we were over 70 years ago.
The amount of progress we could make in software is probably on a similar level, but the problem is the same as it is with the cultural artefacts. So instead we're stuck in a world where money makes right, since you need money to uphold the laws intended to protect Intellectual Property™. I can't blame ffmpeg for working within the rules of the system, even if the system sucks.
Or even just, have this also apply to the code produced by those using my code. But while that's not the case, copyleft licenses (especially GPL (not LGPL)) are a way to force it to be the case to at least limited extent.
I want more high quality code and I want more high quality culture. Both have one major obstacle in the way and is at the core of this post, my comment and yours: Copyright. I fail to see why we should make exceptions to copyright for the sake of code, but not for the sake of culture.
This is not allowed under the LGPL, which mandates dynamic linking against the library. They copy-pasted FFmpeg code into their repo instead.
[1] https://x.com/HermanChen1982/status/1761230920563233137
The problem here isn't a technical violation of the LGPL, it's that Rockchip doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL. What they should have done is put their modified FFMPEG code into a forked project, clearly label it with an LGPL LICENSE file, and link against that.
They should be covered as an aggregation, provided the LGPL was intact.
"Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too"
reconcile with
"doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL"
> - Rockchip's code is gone > - FFmpeg gets nothing back > - Community loses whatever improvements existed > - Rockchip becomes an adversary, not a partner
This is all conjecture which is probably why you deleted it.
Their code isn't gone (unless they're managing their code in all the wrong ways), FFmpeg sends a message to a for-profit violation of their code, the community gets to see the ignorance Rockchip puts into the open source partnership landscape and finally... If Rockchip becomes an adversary of one of the most popular and notable OSS that they take advantage of, again, for profit then fuck Rockchip. They're not anything here other than a violator of a license and they've had plenty of warning and time to fix.
Here spent time to think and document all the IRC chats, the Twitter thread, the attitude of the SoC manufacturer, etc.
There has to be a backstory to suddenly come after 1.5 years for an issue that could have been solved in 10 minutes.
But here, as FFmpeg is LGPL and we talk about one single file, there is even less work to do in order to fix that.
If you immediately escalate to [DMCA / court] because they refuse to fix, then that's very fair, but suddenly like 2 years after silence (if, and only if that was the case, because maybe they spoke outside of Twitter/X), then it's odd.
Also it’s rude, which is reason enough not to do it.
This is what big corporations do to the little guys, so we owe big corporations absolutely nothing more.
They gave Rockchip a year and a half to fix it. It is the responsibility of Rockchip to take care of it once they were originally notified, and the FFmpeg dvelopers have no responsibility to babysit the Rockchip folks while they fulfill their legal obligations.
Seriously, if we copied in violation their code, how many hours would pass before a DMCA violation?
FLOSS should be dictatorial in application of the license. After all, its basically free to use and remix as long as you follow the easy rules. I'm also on the same boat that Android phone creators should also be providing source fully, and should be confiscated on import for failure of copyright violations.
But ive seen FLOSS devs be like "let's be nice". Tit for tat is the best game theory so far. Time to use it.
Also, it's better to gently apply pressure and set a track record of violators taking corrective measures so when you end up in court one day you've got a list of people and corporate entities which do comply because they believed that the terms were clear enough, which would lend weight to your argument.
Saying this as a GPL hardliner myself.
If you don’t own it and cannot legally relicense part as LGPL, you’re not allowed to publish it.
Just because you can merge someone else’s code does not mean you’re legally allowed to do so.
Copyleft licenses are designed to prevent you mixing code as the licenses are generally incompatible with mixing.
More permissive license will generally allow you to mix licenses. This is why you can ship permissive code in a proprietary code base.
As for linking, “weak copyleft” license allow you to link but not to “mix” code. This is essentially the point of the LGPL.
If they aren't compatible, then you can't use them together, so you have to find something else, or build the functionality yourself.
In the specific ffmpeg case, you are allowed to dynamically link against it from a project with an incompatible license.
I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine.
The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.
The notice has a list of files and says that they were copied from ffmpeg, removed the original copyright notice, added their own and licensed under the more permissive Apache license.
To those downvoting, curious why? Many of the links are not viewable, since GitHub hides them, so any discussion becomes quite tricky.
Copyright and patents are completely independent concepts.
The “perpetual” part is the issue but “rent seeking” is the entire reason that copyright and patents exist to begin with.
[0] https://githubcopilotlitigation.com [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai...
Really, it comes down to encoding. Arbitrarily short utf-8 encoded strings can be generated using a coin flip.
It's trivially true that arbitrarily short reconstructions can be reproduced by virtually any random process and reconstruction length scales with the similarity in output distribution to that of the target. This really shouldn't be controversial.
My point is that matching sequence length and distributional similarity are both quantifiable. Where do you draw the line?
Picking randomly out of a non-random distribution doesn't give you a random result.
And you don't have to use randomness to pick tokens.
> If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that.
Don't be a pain. This isn't about uniform distribution versus other generic distribution. This is about the very elaborate calculations that exist on a per-token basis specifically to make the next token plausible and exclude the vast majority of tokens.
> My point is that matching sequence length and distributional similarity are both quantifiable. Where do you draw the line?
Any reasonable line has examples that cross it from many models. Very long segments that can be reproduced. Because many models were trained in a way that overfits certain pieces of code and basically causes them to be memorized.
Right, and very short segments can also be reproduced. Let's say that "//" is an arbitrarily short segment that matches some source code. This is trivially true. I could write "//" on a coin and half the time it's going to land "//". Let's agree that's a lower bound.
I don't even disagree that there is an upper bound. Surely reproducing a repo in its entirety is a match.
So there must exist a line between the two that divides too short and too long.
Again, by what basis do you draw a line between a 1 token reproduction and a 1,000 token reproduction? 5, 10, 20, 50? How is it justified? Purely "reasonableness"?
The real (legal) question in either case, is how much is actually copied, and how obvious is it.
It’s also incredibly hard to tell if a LLM copied something since you can’t ask it in court and it probably can’t even tell you if it did.
But the issue with copyright I think comes from the distribution of a (potentially derivative or transformative in the legal sense) work, which I would say is typically done manually by a human to some extent, so I think they would be on the hook for any potential violations in that case, possibly even if they cannot actually produce sources themselves since it was LLM-generated.
But the legal test always seems to come back to what I said before, simply "how much was copied, and how obvious is it?" which is going to be up to the subjective interpretation of each judge of every case.
But if you change or add something in building ffmpeg.so that should be GPLed.
Apparently they copied some files from ffmpeg mixed with their propitiatory code and compiled it as a whole. That's the problem here.
Dynamic linking is a condition for LGPL compliance, but it is not sufficient. Dynamic linking does not automatically prevent a combined work from being a derived work.
No, it isn’t. The condition says to allow your users to make and use their own modifications to the part of the software which falls under the LGPL. Dynamic linking is only a convenient way of allowing this, not a requirement.
https://github.com/nyanmisaka/ffmpeg-rockchip
The law exists mostly to oppress. It's exactly the argument that gun proponents make "Only the good guys obey gun laws, so only the bad guys have guns."
All the good guys are losing following the law, all the bad guys are winning by violating the law. Frankly, at this stage, they write the laws.
Another example exists in Ontario's tenant laws constantly being criticized as enabling bad tenant behavior, but reading the statute full of many month delays for landlords and 2 day notices for tenants paints a more realistic picture.
In fact, one such landlord lied, admitted to lying, and then had their lie influence the decision in their favor, despite it being known to be false, by their own word. The appeal mentioned discretion of the adjudicator.
Not sure how long that can go on before a collapse, but I can't imagine it's very long.
I think it should be perfectly OK to make value judgements of other people, and if they are backed by evidence, make them publicly and make them have consequences for that person's position.
I do agree however with your assessment because any (additional) accountability would improve matters.
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/11487484/cra-tax-service-calls-au...
I remember Rowan Atkinson (the UK actor) made a speech about this effect a couple of years ago and never heard about it since but definitely feeling it more and more... No exposure, no money, no legal representation. And at the same time we are being gaslit about our privilege.
It took 2 years because FFmpeg waited 2 years to send a DMCA notice to Github, not because of delays in the legal system. I think you are conflating different unrelated issues here.
If everyone just actively boycotted that site, it would become irrelevant overnight. Anything else is simply condoning it continued existence. Don't kid yourself.
It remains to be seen how much 'pull' FFmpeg has against the 'push' of Rockchip.
Intentional noncompliance with copyright law can get you quite a distance, but there's a lot of money involved, so if you ever catch the wrong kind of attention, usually by being too successful, you tend to get smacked.
It's fairly trivial to block torrent traffic.
Checks out sufficiently dystopian, yep.
If you could work some gratuitous LLM in there, we could be a little closer to torment-nexus territory. Keep working at it.
Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.
The West has turned software into theology. Licenses are no longer pragmatic tools; they're moral texts. You didn't just copy code incorrectly, you sinned. You violated the sacred distinction between "dynamic linking" and "static linking" like a heretic confusing transubstantiation. So of course the response is excommunication via DMCA, administered by a US platform acting as the high court of global legitimacy.
China, meanwhile, treats code the way early America treated British industrial designs: as something you learn from, adapt, and improve until it disappears into the background of actual progress. This isn't because Chinese engineers are "confused" about copyright. It's because they don't share the Western belief that ideas become ethically radioactive if they cross an invisible legal membrane without the right ceremony.
What HN calls "license violations" are, in a broader historical sense, the sound of a rising system refusing to internalize the anxieties of a declining one. The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise. Pretending it's a universal moral truth is like insisting everyone must use QWERTY because it worked for typewriters in 1890.
So when GitHub issues a DMCA takedown, it's not defending openness; it's defending relevance. It's the West saying: the rules still matter, please keep caring about them. But history suggests that once you're relying on process to assert superiority over results, you're already late.
You can cheer this if you want. Just don't confuse enforcement with inevitability. The future usually belongs to the people who ship, not the ones who litigate why shipping was noncompliant.
I don’t think Rockchip learned from the ffmoeg code. They simply copied it outright without attribution.
If you publish the code, there's an argument to be made that yes, others should freely use it: if you could (or did) monetize the code yourself you wouldn't publish it. If you didn't, or failed trying to monetize it, maybe it's better for society if everyone else also gets to try?
If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.
The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.
That has zero relation to any European legalism.
A much more interesting problem is how to create prosperity without throwing people under the bus - with everybody who contributed profiting proportionally to their contribution.
Why are you turning this into a discussion about China?
Its not about china.
Its about stealing.
Its not a complex, or western concept.
Also - that word: civility. We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here
That self-interest has led to cooperation between humans. Humans have evolved to work together, cooperate, form social bonds, and friendships because doing so improves survival and wellbeing over the long run. Civility is part of that toolkit. It is not a denial of self-interest. Civility is part of that self-interest.
I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.
The rest is self-importance from bitter old men.
If we can have this, but for everything, so films, books, TV, music and everything else, I'd agree. This however is not the world we live in. The amount of culture we could have from people remixing the past 50 years worth of culture would be incredible. Instead, we're stuck with the same stuff we were over 70 years ago.
The amount of progress we could make in software is probably on a similar level, but the problem is the same as it is with the cultural artefacts. So instead we're stuck in a world where money makes right, since you need money to uphold the laws intended to protect Intellectual Property™. I can't blame ffmpeg for working within the rules of the system, even if the system sucks.
> Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.
Heard that in a very different context. Care to mention what you are referring to? How do you know?