[Search-l] I'm confused...

[Fred Benenson]

On 5/8/07, Seth Finkelstein <sethf at sethf.com> wrote:
<snip>

        So, the above is the *pitch*. I think it's a reasonable idea,
> I hope they can pull it off. HOWEVER ... the difficulty of negotiating
> such an agreement goes up dramatically with the number of investors
> involved. And potential investors might be asking exactly the question
> you raise, roughly, why should we put up the money to fund this, when
> Google (or somebody else) might just grab the fruits of the research
> without even paying? Heck, some Venture Capital types might be
> wondering if Wikia is trying to get bought by Google! (not my view,
> but you know some of those VC guys have to be thinking it, it's the
> way they play a game with Other People's Money).


This may just be putting a finer point on Seth's but patronize me here...

In terms of licensing, this problem brings up some interesting problems. Put
simply, the GPL forces those who distribute binaries to also distribute
source code that created the binaries. Distributing binaries, however, is
not what Google, or Wikia Search would do. So that would mean that if we
were to create a project that was free software ( e.g., GPL'd) we wouldn't
have to distribute the source code to anyone else than those wanting to run
the crawler/indexer/web service themselves. This is what Google does right
now -- they run free software (LAMP, Python, etc.), make modifications, but
never trigger the source code distribution provisions of the GPL as they
never distribute binaries of it, and when they do, they're probably
distributing it to those who would never redistribute that code themselves
(enterprise level applications, etc.)

 But this isn't probably what we'd do -- and I think is in direct conflict
with the previously stated priorities of this project. Our source code is to
be free and transparent. Given that, Google could easily swoop it up and
"co-opt" even under the terms of the GPL. That is, they would not violate
the GPL by incorporating our work into their main search functionality as
long as they never distribute the "binaries" of it. What those binaries
would be is an entirely different story..

So this is a problem with the GPL, as it was primarily designed for local
machine code (source to object code compilation) and not server-client code
(source code -> html / etc).  My understanding is that the GPL v3 drafters
were working to fix this in the upcoming revisions (preventing web services
like Google from being exempt) but it didn't get anywhere. Anyone else hear
anything more about this issue?

Deciding on a license may seem like a trivial choice (why would we do
anything but the GPL?) but we can't be naive in assuming it will protect us
in all, if not any, cases.

best,

Fred
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