Comments inline On Wed, Apr 01, 2015 at 08:43:51AM +0200, Jerome BENOIT wrote: > I forwarded the bug report to the upstream maintainer: > please find below his answer. > > - > --8><------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > - ------- > > First, imagine a bug report entitled "file.c contains some armchair coding". > Such a statement would imply there is a class of people allowed to write > code, from which the author of file.c is excluded. I feel it against the > ethos of free, open software that text would be accepted or rejected based on > the qualifications of the person writing it.
Um, but we don't have a widely regarded association for programmers, whereas we do have bars. In fact, in some situations, practice of law requires a license, otherwise it's a crime! I'd be interested in what a judge would say to this argument :) > But because much of the bug report is concerned with the qualifications of > the author, here goes: no, I do not have a law degree. However, my work as a > Free Software Foundation employee included writing white papers on > intellectual property law and a legal brief filed in the US Federal Circuit. > My recommendations and legal reasoning in the brief, a law review paper, and > other writings from the mid to late `00s are not far from the ruling and > reasoning in last year's Supreme Court ruling in Alice Corp. Over the course > of my work with the FSF on intellectual property law, I spoke directly with > the people involved in writing the AGPL, who expressed some disappointment > with how the AGPL was worded, and said that they wished that they'd just > stated directly that running code on a public server is distribution. I have > also had extensive dealings with the authors of GPLv3, and know the license, > its history, and many of the considerations that went into it very well. > These interacti! > ons went i > nto the considerations for the licensing of Apophenia. As you well know, being involved with this, license proliferation is making our job to keep users free harder. > There are three parts to the Apophenia license as written. I recommend > keeping the first, changing the text of the second, and cutting third. > > > 1. The first part of the license is the GPLv2. There are other packages that > are based on GPLv2, and not "GPLv2 or later". For example, I understand that > Debian distributes the Linux kernel. Not only is the kernel licensed under > GPLv2, the GPLv2 license as distributed with the kernel is prefaced with > explicit sniping about GPLv3: Who said anything about the GPLv2 being non-distributable? > "Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is > concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or > v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated." > http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/COPYING > > Based on this precedent, I believe that distributing a Debian package under > the GPLv2 (not "and later") is valid. Who said it wasn't? The issue is your further restrictions cause non-distribution, whereas the GPLv3 lets you remove the clauses. > My recommendation is that we replace my text with text from ยง13 of the 2007 > Affero license. It expresses a similar sentiment, but being written by > lawyers, it addresses the ad hominem issues presented in the bug report. > > The question of what happens when two libraries under different licenses are > jointly distributed is simple under the law: the intersection of all > restrictions apply. Not the intersection, the set of both. > If the license on library A says you may only distribute the code on Monday, > Tuesday, or Wednesday, and the license on library B says you may only > distribute the code on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, there isn't any > challenging legal puzzle: you have the right to distribute on Wednesday, and > only on Wednesday. Intersection, not set of both. GPL also says you can have no further restrictions, so doing that with the GPL means it's *not distributable* > Of course, if the licences have no intersection, you can't link A and B. This > explains the single paragraph GPLv2 devotes to linking, which begins "This > General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into > proprietary programs." This sentence is not an additional restriction, but a > clarification that if the license for A says 'you must distribute' and the > license for B says 'you must not distribute', a product that uses A and B is > basically a legal impossibility. The LGPL contains what is an additional or special permission to do this. > Are there features of AGPL that make it impossible to link AGPLed code with > GPLv3ed code? Yes. That's why there's a clause for this. > The not-armchair lawyers at the FSF have this to say (be sure to read the > entire > paragraph): I know their view on this. > To paraphrase the above: You are (explicitly, in this paragraph) granted > permission to link AGPLed software to other code licensed under other > licenses, such as GPL v3. Linking to a differently-licensed code base does > not free the code (or the combination) of the stipulations of either code > base. For what it's worth, this is in the license; and wasn't in your terms - this is where the root of some of the non-distributablity comes from. > Summary: > > * GPLv2 (not GPLv2 or later) is a valid license, used by other packages in > Debian. I started writing Apophenia before GPLv3 existed, and see reason to > not shift to the newer license. No one claimed otherwise, you misunderstood my claim due to nuances between GPL2 and 3. > * We can replace the Affero-ization text I wrote with text taken from the > 2007 edition of the AGPL, as above. | Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc., | 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA | Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies | of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. Please get permission from the FSF to do this unfortunate thing to their license. I'm CC'ing jgay. > I believe that this modification, using the GPLv2 + modern Affero clause, is > a better option than using the AGPL version of GPLv2 itself. Although it is > not standard in the sense of having a common acronym, it uses two standard > parts that are commonly recognized and can be sensibly combined. This is *not distributable*. It's a further restriction -- even if I agree with it. Please pick either the plain LGPL or GPL. Paul -- .''`. Paul Tagliamonte <paul...@debian.org> | Proud Debian Developer : :' : 4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352 D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87 `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~paultag `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag/conduct-statement.txt
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