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Comment by mseepgood | Hacker News Reader

CLA... wow, this is bad and sad. :(

I too find the CLA decision a bit strange, though I have no issue with their dual to single license transition. Dual-licensing under MIT and GPL is effectively like licensing under MIT; if someone wants to write a proprietary fork, or a GPL extension, they already could and still can.

What I find strange about the CLA is that I don't understand the reason behind it. With a solely-GPL project, I could understand an agreement like the FSF's, which has practical advantages such as a single party asserting the license terms if a third party breaks them, while promising the code will not be used in proprietary software against the author's wishes. But in this case, if the code is under the MIT license, third parties can already use the code in their proprietary code, so the agreement doesn't gain anything. So, what's the point?

I'm a worried although the JQuery foundation is not a company. The CLA basically allows them to do everything with your code and you can't revoke it.

One big bad example of CLA abuse to me is Sun's OpenSolaris CLA which allowed Oracle to take external contributions and turn Solaris back to proprietary software.

Actually it's very good news.

It means that no single zealot or bad apple can stop the code from being used in ways the users want.

E.g like this Rémi Denis-Courmont guy, a VLC contributor working for Nokia, killed the iOS VLC port for violating some GPL technicalities, despite the code being available, the users wanting it, and the team porting it to iOS for free.

And you still get GPL with their MIT licence: "The Foundation confirms that with the MIT licence, if someone desires GPL licensing, they are free to make changes and re-license it under the GPL."

I don't like how you brand Denis-Courmont a zealot or bad apple for not letting others break the license terms of his code. He licensed his code under the GPL for a reason, and if someone doesn't like his license, they shouldn't expect him to waive his rights on his code. (I don't know about the case, I'm basing this on your comment alone.)

Having the legal right to do a thing does not mean that you are invincible to criticism for exercising that right. You have the right to freedom of speech, but the things you actually say may be foolish or wrong; contrarily, cheating on your spouse is not a crime, but doing so still makes you a worse person. You have the right to keep all your money instead of giving a penny to charity, but being charitable is better. "Legal" and "good" are not the same thing.

Denis-Courmont may have licensed his code under GPL for a reason, but it can very well be a bad, zealous reason. Indeed, I would expect that almost every person who truly is a zealot and a bad apple would choose to license their code under GPL. The GPL is a license that demands total obedience to a particular ideology of software distribution, and requiring that other people obey your ideology in every detail is the defining characteristic of a zealot.

Calling him a zealot just for using the GPL seems a bit unnecessary to me, but whatever. It does not matter what his reasons are for it, he is allowing people to use the code he wrote under a certain set of conditions, which some people have not been honouring. I don't believe there is anything wrong with him calling them on that; why should he just sit there quietly while other people violate his license and profit off his work?

>why should he just sit there quietly while other people violate his license and profit off his work?

Gee, I don't know. Maybe for the good of the hundreds of thousands of users of iOS/VLC? Maybe because the other contributors had agreed to this and didn't care for the technical violation, especially since both the code was available and the app was free? Maybe because also working for Nokia seems like a huge conflict of interest?

Maybe Apple and Microsoft should release all their software under a permissive license for the good of hundreds of millions of users. Is that what you are suggesting? I do not have any problem with people/corporations releasing/selling their code as they see fit, but I do take issue at people feeling entitled to set the terms for other people's code. If the other contributors do not mind the violation, they are free to remove his code and release their code as they see fit.

Using the GPL is not really comparable to saying something foolish or wrong, and is certainly not comparable to cheating on a spouse. Such arguments reek of anti-GPL zealotry.

I don't happen to believe that what is legal is also moral.

The license terms were only broken in the most unimportant of ways. Apple did nothing to make VLC less free, did not have a custom version that needed source sharing, etc. It was a stupid technicality. Denis-Courmont did no-one good.

Honest question since I'm not really familiar with the case and might be completely mistaken: One of the fundamental principles behind the GPL is that a user can modify the program and run the modified program. Was this freedom preserved? Because if it was, my posts in this thread might be completely misguided.

That is going to depend on who you talk to. The GPLv3 has "anti-tivoization" text that keeps the device maker from locking down the device to approved programs. As far as the GPLv2 is concerned you only need to be able to modify and compile the code, and no particular device has to run it.

In this particular case, anyone that was already capable of running code they compiled on an iphone (read: people with a developer license) was also capable of making and using modified versions of VLC.

apple can suck it

Apple didn't violate "some GPL technicalities," they took away core rights from the user that the GPL license was designed to provide them.

Whether or not you agree with copyleft licenses, how can you sit there and say that someone is a zealot for wanting to enforce the terms under which they licensed their work?

Besides, it was Apple that removed the software rather than modify the terms of their distribution to allow for GPL software.

>Whether or not you agree with copyleft licenses, how can you sit there and say that someone is a zealot for wanting to enforce the terms under which they licensed their work?

1) Because for a pragmatic (not zealot) guy, the license is just a practicality, not the be all end all. If the license gets in the way of the work getting used, so much worse for the license.

2) Because if we are 10 contributors to a program, have picked GPL, but have no problem with the app being available on the App Store, and some other contributors even do the hard porting work for free, then I could call the 1 of us who disagrees and destroys everything a zealot.

3) In the general case, because the use of GPL for a project could have just as well come from external factors and not because the contributors have some grant vision about GPL/FOSS software. E.g because a few underlying libs they had to use were GPL themselves. In that case, I'd absolutely despise some idiot taking advantage of that to force the hands of the other contributors/users.

Hang on a minute. What you're trying to push aside as a technicality has been a recurring sore point between Apple's App Store and the FOSS community, and Denis-Courmont is far from the only person who has been upset by attempts to distribute GPL'd software via the App Store under terms are incompatible with both the letter and the spirit of the GPL. [1]

But in this case, since we're talking about an MIT licence, it's hard to see how the CLA makes any sense. What can it possibly allow anyone to do to anyone or with anything that they couldn't already do anyway under the MIT licence? They could release the code under a licence that doesn't even require the credit/copyright/disclaimer, I suppose, but those aren't exactly a heavy burden. Other that that, the whole point of licences like the MIT ones is basically to avoid having the kinds of restrictions that would ever result in copyright enforcement action, so it's not like you need a single party with standing to sue or issue takedown notices, for example. I don't see what anyone gains by having this extra hoop for contributors to jump though.

[Edit: Someone posted the actual text of the CLA. It seems to address significantly more that just transferring rights to the jQuery Foundation, so there may or may not be sneaky legal shenanigans going on here that I wasn't considering above.]

[1] http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-...

Apple is taking a Free program and distributing copies that have restrictions on them. But you can easily get the original Free version that has the exact same functionality, byte for byte. Seems like a technicality to me. The end user still has full access to the source code in its untainted GPL majesty.

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