Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's acceptable to not want an organisation to be able to relicense your software under arbitrary terms, which the GPL does allow the FSF to do.

The GPL 3 is a pretty benign improvement on the GPL 2 (though I know Linus objects to the Tivo clause). I don't think anyone who was happy with their software being used under the terms of GPL 2 would be unhappy with it being used under the terms of the GPL 3 additionally, rather than exclusively.

But let's imagine the next version of GPL 4 was "Additionally the authors may at their discretion use it under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license". Nothing wrong with it as a license, but that's a bigger leap in terms of license changes.

It's not hypothetical that they could exercise that kind of power - they _did_ with the GFDL with the "wikipedia can relicense as CC-BY-SA" clause in GFDL 1.3.

I think most people would agree that that was a responsible use of that power. but I can understand those that don't want to extend the trust that all future uses will be responsible.

Would that >= license be enforceable in court? It seems lame to create a license that forces you to agree to whatever future license changes come about.

It could go several ways but I can't see a judge wanting to entertain complaints that a new GPL version isn't to your liking if the changes are minor, especially so since it's always going to remain valid in GPLv3.

If the FSF goes rogue and changes the GPL to be incredibly restrictive (i.e., allowing proprietary redistribution, and I realise this can be considered permissive..) it might be possible to get it to be ruled invalid defaulting to the more permissive licence, especially if you have deep pockets, or if the FSF change the licence to be ridiculously permissive like 0BSD then it's not going to be legal in countries like Germany, either way any major change is likely to result in an international enforcement nightmare.

If GPLv4 were more restrictive, people would still be able to use the software under the terms of gplv2 or gplv3.

The scenario where FSF goes "rogue" would be if gplv4 became more permissive, e.g. if it stopped being a copyleft licence.

It doesn't force anyone to agree with any changes.

It says "the recipient can use this under GPL v2 or any later version as published by the FSF", which means if they recipient is happy with the rights they got under GPL v2 they can keep using it under that version for as long as they like.

The only person agreeing to future license changes is the publisher of the code, and they're the ones that chose to publish it under "GPLv2+" or whatever.

Sure, but that still means that the fault of not being in the ecosystem falls on the person who specifically edited their license to not be a part of the full ecosystem going forward regardless of whatever reasons they had for doing that.

Calling that a fault shows bias. You could just as well call it a choice.

A choice that results in consequences is normally how you assign fault for those consequences.

For those consciously omitting “and later”, the effect of not allowing that probably isn’t a fault, but a desired outcome.

“You can do A, B, and C with the software I wrote, or whatever X may at some future date decide you can do with it” isn’t something everybody is happy with. It certainly requires some long-term trust in what X will or will not do.

The assignment of fault and it being a desired outcome are rarely mutually exclusive concepts.

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