joepal wrote:However, learning: If there had been a copyright violation, that would have been on me, even in sweden. I'm ultimately responsible for the content posted here. Admittedly, the worst that would have happened is that someone might have complained and then I would have removed the post, and that'd be it. But still, the responsibility falls on me.
Yeah, I knew there wasn't any real danger, otherwise I'd contact you beforehand. Still, if you need somebody to take a fall for you, I can do this. I live in a country where copyrast laws don't really hold power. (And I have to say laws in general don't really have much power here, much more important thing being who you are and whom you know. This apparently can be a good thing.)
joepal wrote:There is also quite a large difference between thinking the copyright and intellectual property construct used in the western world is absurd and hurtful (which I can sympathize with), and knowingly violating the implicit agreement you enter when using something someone shared with you without asking anything in return other than respecting a few basic and not very hard to follow rules.
Basically, if you think telling the author of this piece to go screw himself over his terms is ok, then you'd also be ok with microsoft taking MakeHuman and turning it into MS Human and not sharing it under an open source license?
To be quite frank, I'd be okay with that. All in all licenses tend to cause more harm than good, even most well-meaning ones created in the best faith. For an instance, GPL family was created as a way to fight copyrightists with their own weapon, and although I can't help admiring the tactical genius of such a move, ethical and social implications turned out less than ideal. As much as I respect RMS (happy birthday to him btw!), I don't really care for the license-worshipping and formalist culture he created. We as engineers and software developers and "IT people" in most general sense have basically allowed lawyers to run our industry. How's this any good for it?
So what if MS took MH codebase and made a non-free fork of it? We'd still have our code that we could develop further, and users would certainly prefer the open version to the closed one, as long as the closed one doesn't have any totally revolutionary new features. If MS did add new features in its fork, we could reverse-engineer and backport them to our own version. The MS advertising would help reach out to a lot more people that aren't currently aware of MH. At least some of them after trying "MS Human" would look up and find the project it's based on and eventually join our community. So, if anything, such a move by a corporation would be, in grand total, a major incentive to MH development. Licenses and court trials, on the other hand, are just showstoppers.
All that said, I'm aware my views on copyright are rather extremist as far as Europe goes. I am willing to look for a compromise that would allow the believers to follow the licenses while in the same time avoiding censoring and removing people's contributions. Maybe such a compromise would be adding more types of licenses to the contrib section, for example together with CC0 and CC-BY add things like CC-BY-NC, Personal use, Educational etc. Then whether people would follow the licenses would be up to them and not you.