Re: GPL and LGPL question
On Tue, 18 May 1999, Seth David Schoen wrote: Wilfredo Sanchez writes: Well, that sort of scrutiny _has_ been applied to the GPL on many lists for many years, so that many people are sick of it. :-) Take a look at gnu.misc.discuss, and you should find such a thread fairly quickly. Yeah, and it wasn't my intention. I'm trying to figure out how some clauses in the (L)GPL and the OSD work together. The lack of clarity here is the biggest reason I know of why some companies prefer to avoid dealing with the GPL at all costs, even when they are open to the idea of open source in general. Yep. We're one of them. There are some very solid arguments for that decision. On the other side, the GPL has been used with tremendous success in the past as the license for a number of projects. One reason that many people trust that GPL is that it has such a long track record in comparison with some other free software licenses. How much of that track record is in court. I'm not trying to sound snippy, but most of these licenses don't seem to have had a legal challenge yet. THAT is a HUGE fear for corporate open sourcers. Really, who cares what a license says if it won't hold up in court? Other than the NPL and QPL, most of these documents were drawn up years ago, and case law has grown with different precedents since then. This proves that the developers who worked on those projects, at least, had enough confidence in the GPL to make it useful to them. A particular concern for companies, I know, is whether a license would stand up in court, and whether it can be interpreted easily and clearly. At LinuxWorld, I talked with some license enthusiasts about whether _any_ free software license has ever been an issue in a lawsuit. Apparently, the answer is no. The current version was written with the assistance of a law professor, but it would be an appeal to authority to say that this means that it would hold up. In the absence of litigation over the GPL (o si sic omnes!), each company needs to decide for itself whether the current GPL is enforceable and whether it contains loopholes or ambiguous wording. It's not just the GPL, I don't recall reading about litigation involving any of them. That's too much of a risk for most companies, and it's quite understandable. Which is why you're seeing a proliferation of licenses. If you have some proprietary code which may ship alongside GPL'ed code, you may accidentally fall into the "derived work" category. Certainly, it is reasonable to be wary of this. Yup. You decide to give away a library that you use in other software that is proprietary. No GPL, no LGPL because some competitor of yours could invoke clause 3 and release whiz bang improvements under it. Also, other than the QPL and NPL, I don't think that any of them have been written with international use in mind. The BSD and X licenses are probably exceptions because they say so little... A company, trying to protect its rights to the software that it created, but still benefit the community at large seems forced to draw up YAOSL because every case IS different. I think that some clarification of OSD #3 and #7 would help this immensely. It would be nice to put a non-infecting clause in there. By that I mean that a OS'd chunk of code cannot infect the work it is incorporated into with its license. That is my big gripe with the FSF's licenses, because they're using it to further a political agenda, not help the programming community at large. Leave politics to politicians. Pat -- Patrick St. Jean '97 XLH 883[EMAIL PROTECTED] Programmer Systems Administrator+1 713-977-4177 x115 Larson Software Technologyhttp://www.cgmlarson.com
Re: GPL and LGPL question
On Tue, 18 May 1999, Bruce Perens wrote: Re: the GPL standing up in court: a law student mailed me a 100+ page thesis on that topic. He said it would stand up in court. I have not yet had time to study his arguments thoroughly, too much travel. Hopefully I can do this next week. Did that law student take a look at some of the federal circuit court rulings concerning shrink-wrap licenses? The gist of them is that unless there is a signature on a document, they're pretty much worthless. That means that the legal remedies would amount to copyright infringement. Pat -- Patrick St. Jean '97 XLH 883[EMAIL PROTECTED] Programmer Systems Administrator+1 713-977-4177 x115 Larson Software Technologyhttp://www.cgmlarson.com
Re: GPL and LGPL question - legal
At 09:09 AM 5/19/99 -0500, Patrick St. Jean wrote: On Tue, 18 May 1999, Bruce Perens wrote: Did that law student take a look at some of the federal circuit court rulings concerning shrink-wrap licenses? The gist of them is that unless there is a signature on a document, they're pretty much worthless. That means that the legal remedies would amount to copyright infringement. This statement might have been correct a few years ago, but the strong recent trend is to uphold the validity of shrinkwrap and clickwrap licenses. The leading case is ProCD v. Zeidenberg in the 7th Circuit, http://laws.findlaw.com/7th/961139.html, but there are other recent decisions from the Illinois U.S. District court, http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/doj/y2k/sld001.htm, the Washington State Court of Appeals, http://www.wa.gov/COURTS/opinions/413040_O01.txt, and the New York Appellate Division in Brower v. Gateway 2000. John Muller [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The ladder of law has no top and no bottom"
Re: GPL and LGPL question
Bruce Perens writes: I don't agree. It's just like the public-domain to GPL case. You have the option to distribute the program under the LGPL. You choose the GPL. You re-distribute that. The person to whom you redistribute it has the option to use the GPL, just as you did. Sure, but the current version of OSD 7 doesn't say that. It says that anyone who gets a copy has to have the same legal rights that were originally granted. I don't personally think there's any problem left here, except that OSD 7 is unclear. There are a few possible approaches to fixing it for greater clarity. Anyone who thinks that LGPL 3 is broken is certainly welcome to e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] and say so. I don't think there's any problem in it from the perspective of the OSD: the LGPL _allows_ redistribution under the same terms as the software was originally distributed, and developers who write under the LGPL choose to do so, with the knowledge (hopefully) that their efforts could possibly be distributed under the GPL. If they don't like that, they could write a new library public license that did most of what the LGPL does but didn't allow the license of the covered code to be changed. As I see it, license-discuss is intended for discussions of whether the Open Source Initiative should approve or disapprove of licenses under the OSD (and whether it should make improvements and revisions to the OSD). It's not really for discussions about whether particular licenses are wise or unwise, although that's not an unimportant discussion. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown" http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: GPL and LGPL question
Wilfredo Sanchez writes: So this linking business is RMS's interpretation, but is not in the license text. I know certain other licenses get heavily critiqued for being vague, but I don't see the same scrutiny applied to the GPL here. Well, that sort of scrutiny _has_ been applied to the GPL on many lists for many years, so that many people are sick of it. :-) Take a look at gnu.misc.discuss, and you should find such a thread fairly quickly. I personally have seen an interpretation-and-merits-of-GPL thread show up on three mailing lists and two newsgroups, none of which were license-related. That debate has been going on for years, and it's pretty easy to be tired of it already. Since the OSD hasn't existed for as long as the GPL, it's a new opportunity to try to harmonize the GPL with something or something with the GPL; most other GPL topics have already been done to death. Version 3 of the GPL is being written and supposedly close to release. Many people have provided input, and there have been some _huge_ debates about what GPL v3 should contain. I'm very optimistic that it will fix some outstanding problems and ambiguities. The lack of clarity here is the biggest reason I know of why some companies prefer to avoid dealing with the GPL at all costs, even when they are open to the idea of open source in general. There are some very solid arguments for that decision. On the other side, the GPL has been used with tremendous success in the past as the license for a number of projects. One reason that many people trust that GPL is that it has such a long track record in comparison with some other free software licenses. This proves that the developers who worked on those projects, at least, had enough confidence in the GPL to make it useful to them. A particular concern for companies, I know, is whether a license would stand up in court, and whether it can be interpreted easily and clearly. At LinuxWorld, I talked with some license enthusiasts about whether _any_ free software license has ever been an issue in a lawsuit. Apparently, the answer is no. The current version was written with the assistance of a law professor, but it would be an appeal to authority to say that this means that it would hold up. In the absence of litigation over the GPL (o si sic omnes!), each company needs to decide for itself whether the current GPL is enforceable and whether it contains loopholes or ambiguous wording. If you have some proprietary code which may ship alongside GPL'ed code, you may accidentally fall into the "derived work" category. Certainly, it is reasonable to be wary of this. I realize that this is intentional; after all, proprietary code is inherently evil in the eyes of the GPL's authors. But I would argue that this hardly represents freedom. Protecting one's right to share code by removing one's right not to doesn't seem like a Good Thing to me. It's a question of emulation, an extremely old tradition in computing. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown" http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: GPL and LGPL question
Fred: Protecting one's right to share code by removing one's right not to doesn't seem like a Good Thing to me. You're not considering the unpaid contributor. If my only choice was a license like the BSD, I would contribute a lot less. The protective provisions of the GPL are what make the difference between my putting in work for the community and my being the unpaid patsy of anyone who wants to take advantage of my work and not give a thing back to the public or me. There's no sensible reason for me to be a contributor to Apple, Netscape, or Red Hat. The reason I do it is because the GPL guarantees that my work is for the _public_. Think about how different the world would have been if Mosaic had been under the GPL. Thanks Bruce
