Hacker News Reader

Comment by hrnz17 | Hacker News Reader

> what would stop some future societal development from inspiring the FSF to release a GPL v4 that says "this source code is exclusive property of Microsoft to use as it sees fit"?

Nothing, but the "or any later later version of the GPL" clauses have protection against this scenario. Section 14 of the GPLv3 contains the nice sentence "Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.", which is essentially legalese for "if it differs in the spirit of the license, it is not considered a new version of the GPL and the upgrade clause does not apply".

View on HN

Any one who signed the FSF's CLA to get their code into Emacs is still boned.

This is particularly dangerous because in the anglosphere, open source licenses are by default bare licenses -- they do not have the force of contract, meaning they can be revoked at any time. An organization which released any code under the GPL or any open source license can revoke the right to use that code on a whim (yes, the GPL'd code itself, not future revisions of that code), meaning a hostile FSF can prevent use, distribution, or -- critically -- forking of Emacs.

Projects such as Linux without a CLA requirement are better protected against this because of their patchwork ownership. A single contributor has less to gain, and more to lose, by revoking their license to their contributions. That's not to say it's perfect protection but it does help.

> in the anglosphere, open source licenses are by default bare licenses -- they do not have the force of contract, meaning they can be revoked at any time.

Any example where this happened to back up this claim?

Not yet. It's just how contract law works. In order for a contract to be binding, there must be an offer, acceptance, and consideration -- something of value given up in exchange for what's granted in the contract. When you download OSS from some place, you get the benefits of the rights granted by the license, but you have given nothing in return. Hence, there is no consideration, and no contract. Without force of contract, the OSS license is a bare license, and the licensor may revoke it at any time for any reason -- just as a homeowner may kick you off their property at any time for any reason, even if they allowed you on their property before.

Seems like there should be a legal organization whose only statutory purpose is that they have a process to authorize someone to sue for GPL violations. Then everyone doing GPL code could just assign their copyright to this organization, and it would be impossible for that license to be revoked, because the "owner" would be structurally incapable of taking that legal action? Ie. only the General Public Licensor organization could revoke the license, and the GPLor is prevented by charter from doing so. (But you could still go after copyright violations.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com