Technology Leaders Increase Predictability in Open Source Licensing | Hacker News Reader

Technology Leaders Increase Predictability in Open Source Licensing

redhat.com

47 pointsdankohn19 comments

I guess it's nice that they're taking the part of GPLv3 that they like, i.e. not getting sued as easily, while leaving out the parts that they don't like, e.g. making it more difficult to control users by tivoising the hardware.

I suppose it's an improvement, but the GPL is supposed to be no-more-Mr-nice-guy when needed so that things like Intel ME can't happen. The idea was to have so much GPLv3 out there that it would be infeasible or impractical to go against it and try to tivoise the hardware. The GPL vaccination is supposed to provide herd immunity. Instead what happened is that through a subtle anti-copyleft campaign, big tech companies have spread to their employees the fear of touching anything copylefted, making it much easier to subvert our computing to the very core.

I don't like it, and I wish more people stood for proper copyleft. It's about the only effective defensive tool we have for protecting software freedom. Calling for weak licensing sounds nice, oh, the companies will give back source code when they can, we shouldn't be too mean to them and burden the poor tech giants with our evil licenses. No, this hasn't been the case. The tech giants are only nice when convenient for them, and very much not nice in the countless documented ways that they have been so far, as they create this very convenient but dystopian tech society we're fostering.

I think cheaper compliance means better compliance. A no-suit cure process is a win both for a company that inadvertently broke GPL provisions, and the bodies like GNU who would point at it and require compliance. It also means that a small company can roll out a GPL-licensed solution with less fear of a non-compliance lawsuit.

Litigation is expensive; it makes sense against large and stubborn violators, but the proper process costs a lot for both sides.

Or maybe I'm missing something important here?

Yes, I already agreed this is a good thing. Perhaps I wasn't clear, my apologies. It's good to be lenient, especially in cases of accidental non-compliance. This is an uncontroversial improvement of GPLv3 over GPLv2.

I'm just bemoaning the larger context of copyleft non-adoption.

> I'm just bemoaning the larger context of copyleft non-adoption.

I rarely bother to use copyleft for my personal open source work, because I'm not typically interested in hiring lawyers to try to enforce compliance. And if I wouldn't pay a lawyer to go after a violator, then I don't personally see much point in using anything more complicated than CC0 or a boring permissive license.

Licensing adds overhead. If I use the GPL, then somebody has to stop and ask themselves, "Hey, can I use reuse 30 lines of this GPLed code in this MIT-licensed project? Do I need to change my project's license? Do I need to ask permission?" Usually I don't care.

However, for certain projects, I am perfectly willing to enforce a copyleft license. In that case, I'm happy to use the GPL 3. It's a good license, and I'm very glad it exists.

I don't feel like anybody else should feel obligated to take my approach. Part of my philosophy here comes from painful personal experience that successfully commercializing code requires years of sacrifice, and 99% of what I write in my free time will never be worth that effort.

>> Or maybe I'm missing something important here?

Yeah, individual authors may not want someone else to specify how they enforce compliance. If a company wants to play nice that's fine, and I see Redhat and friends are agreeing to play nice with GPL2 code that they contribute to. FSF also has a history of playing nice - they prefer to get compliance rather than collect huge monetary awards. But that's my point, you don't have to encode being nice into the license itself. I found it rather off-putting when I first read it. It imposes restrictions on the original author of the code. Note that v2 imposed nothing on the original author.

I don't think it's about not using the GPLv3 --- a lot of software is stuck in GPLv2 because the maintainers can't get everyone who contributed (or their estate) to sign off on a license upgrade to the better but incompatible GPLv3. Even the linux kernel is stuck!

But this isn't an "escape hatch" for breaking the GPL; there's a reason the FSF made the "cure clause" explicit in the GPLv3. The explicit language should make life easier and save on court costs not only for corporate lawyers, but even more so for the excellent folks at the Free Software Conservancy, the biggest defenders against GPL violations.

As the Red Hat FAQ (https://www.redhat.com/en/about/gplv3-enforcement-statement) says:

Q: Why didn’t you simply relicense your GPLv2 projects under GPLv3 and let the community benefit from the cure approach that way?

A: In many cases, this would not be possible or practical. For example, we couldn’t relicense our Linux kernel contributions under GPLv3, because the overall license of the Linux kernel is “GPLv2 only”.

Some GPLv2 copyrighted works, such as the Linux kernel, have many contributors. Each contributor is a copyright owner of their contribution.

I'm fine with these Technology Leaders using a new GPLv2 derived license on NEW code they contribute. After all, it's their code.

Existing code, like the Linux kernel, and other code, already have a specified license. Can the license on the Linux kernel even be changed without consent of everyone who ever participated? (Some of whom may no longer be living.)

>Existing code, like the Linux kernel, and other code, already have a specified license. Can the license on the Linux kernel even be changed without consent of everyone who ever participated? (Some of whom may no longer be living.)

Around the time of GPLv3, Eben Moglen made a statement to the effect that it might be possible because "My guess is that Linux is a collective work…as evidenced by a decade of LKML [the Linux Kernel Mailing List] discussions. That’s my guess." It would certainly be controversial and seems highly unlikely in any case. [ADDED: IANAL and have no opinion on the legalities involved.]

https://www.cnet.com/news/linux-to-gplv3-a-practical-matter-...

This is not a new license by the way. It's a commitment "to extending the GPLv3 approach for license compliance errors to the software code that each licenses under GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 and v2."

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