Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new crypto license
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
> You also agree that either the Licensor or a Recipient (as an intended third-party beneficiary) may enforce the terms and conditions of this License against You via specific performance. (emphasis added)
CAL, section 2.3.
This line about specific performance may make this “license” into a legally-binding contract, because specific performance is a contract remedy. Usually, if you fail to meet a license condition, you just lose your license, which might make you liable for infringement (e.g., of copyright). Here, this line may mean that a court could force a “licensee” to comply with the condition instead of just paying monetary damages.
The license vs. contract thing doesn't bother me, because as far as I have been able to determine there is not much difference when it gets to court.
What bugs me about that clause is that specific performance (in common law systems...not sure about civil law systems) is from equity, not law. Equity is a set of remedies that some common law systems developed to address cases where the law couldn't really provide a just remedy for the litigants.
In other words, equity is sort of a meta law system that can be invoked by judges to handle things that the regular system cannot. I'm not sure that a contract, which is governed by that regular system, can invoke things from the meta system.
Of course it can. A contract can include whatever it wants, but whether a court will accept such a term as enforceable is another matter.
If such a licence were to be subject to the jurisdiction of UK courts, I don't think the licensor (or the recipient as a third-party beneficiary) would win.
Here, the CAL contains additional language indicating that the author intends for the CAL to be not just a license, but also an enforceable contract including the license conditions:
> In order to receive this License, You must agree to its rules. The rules of this License are both obligations of Your agreement with the Licensor and conditions to your License. You must not do anything with the Work that triggers a rule You cannot or will not follow. (emphasis added)
CAL section 2.
https://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html
> In the United States, once you own a copy of a program, you can back it up, compile it, run it, and even modify it as necessary, without permission from the copyright holder. See 17 USC 117.
> Once you've legally downloaded a program, you can compile it. You can run it. You can modify it. You can distribute your patches for other people to use. If you think you need a license from the copyright holder, you've been bamboozled by Microsoft. As long as you're not distributing the software, you have nothing to worry about.
IANAL, so I won't comment.
This is a license that bakes in a lot of assumptions about who should be running the code and how. If you can afford to comply with them, you are probably a corporation.
There's a trend towards two(-or more) tier proprietary software licenses that formalize the difference between economic exploitation and consumer usage of software but that still want the cachet of being called "Open Source".
The CAL falls very clearly under this category, for all its apparent good intentions.
I also got the feeling he was using rhetorical techniques to change the topic or blunt a inquiry, rather than as methods to resolve disagreements.
Consider the paragraph 'I don't think that's an appropriate characterization .. You'll see a lot of people jumping onto any pretext they can find in order to oppose it.' It starts off implying there are multiple sides to the issue, which puts you off-guard, then characterizes the opposition in stark black-and-white terms.
That sets up a sort of false dichotomy by leaving out those people who oppose it for non-pretextual reasons.
He being Bruce Perens.
I respectfully disagree, those licenses all have some negative component to them which make them not applicable in all cases. MIT/BSD do not have those same negatives (different of their own) and definitely are needed as well imho. Not saying those three aren’t important, just they shouldn’t be the only three.
Edit: clarified MIT / BSD are not without their own issues, just not the same as the other three.
MIT/BSD do have some legal drawbacks for certain use cases; see the Boost license as an example of a reaction to perceived negatives of MIT/BSD. In particular Boost does not require a copy of the license to be distributed with a binary. Have you ever shipped a binary containing MIT-licensed code, but didn't also explicitly ship a copy of the MIT license along with it? If so, you're technically in violation of the license.
Sure I think the OP you're replying to isn't implying that MIT/BSD is insufficient. He/she is saying that the three "AGPLv3, the LGPLv3, and Apache v2" are insufficient but these five "AGPLv3 + LGPLv3 + Apache2 + MIT + BSD" would be more sufficient.
Correct, I’m saying you need at least all five for something like sufficiency.
The three Bruce points out aren’t enough imho.
I also recall when he proudly announced he'd GPL'd a copy of the Public Domain TIGER data files.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/
> The term “public domain” refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws
(my emphasis)
This is about the situation that the US government is not permitted to obtain copyrights for their own work in the US, but there's apparently nothing to stop it being copyrighted in other countries.
I say this in deepest sympathy for the man, I'm similarly non-charming but much much more repellent.
I would read the agreement too, but IANAL nor am i an intellectual property expert. Legal agreements are tricky and can have non-intuitive consequences.
It seems like the problem these days is new people learning it from context and not knowing there is an official definition that was settled a long time ago.