Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 7, 5:33 pm, Ben Finney <ben+pyt... at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> writes:
> > On May 6, 6:56 pm, Ben Finney <ben+pyt... at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> > > Er, no. Anyone who thinks that a copyleft license “forces” anyone to
> > > do anything is mistaken about copyright law
>
> > Perhaps you feel "forces" is too loaded of a word. There is no
> > question, however, that a copyright license can require that if you do
> > "X" with some code, you must also do "Y".
>
> No. A free software license doesn't require anything. It permits the
> recipient to do things otherwise prohibited. Copyright law taketh, and
> the license giveth as an exception to the law.

Finely parsed semantics with a meaningless difference when applied to
what I said in the context of comparing GPL vs. permissive licenses.

> That is: it is copyright law that forces the recipient to abstain from a
> broad range of actions. A free software license grants exceptions,
> explicitly allowing specific actions to be performed.

Yes, and as I said, the exceptions are not as encompassing, and come
with more restrictions, when using the GPL vs. using a permissive
license.

> > There is also no question that the GPL uses this capability in
> > copyright law to require anybody who distributes a derivative work to
> > provide the source. Thus, "forced to contribute back any changes" is
> > definitely what happens once the decision is made to distribute said
> > changes in object form.
>
> You might as well say that a restaurant “forces” patrons to pay for
> their meal. They don't; it's merely a proviso for performing the act of
> eating the food.

I certainly *would* say that.  Try eating at a restaurant with a
halfway watchful staff near a police station and see if you can get
away without payment.  Same thing with buying groceries or dry goods.
The restaurants and the stores, with the full weight of the
government, force you to do certain things if you partake of their
wares.  So do do software authors via their licenses, which, as you
correctly point out, derive their power from the fact that your legal
rights may be very limited absent a valid license to a piece of
software.

On the odd occasion that a restaurant or a store offers you something
for "free" (with no asterisks or fine print) they really mean it --
you can take it home and do what you want with it, with no force
applied.  (Don't start on the whole libre vs. gratis thing -- as far
as I'm concerned, neither "free as in beer" software nor GPLed
software is as free as the occasional free meal or trinket I get,
which is much more akin to "public domain" in software.)

> Since no-one is forcing anyone to take any of the actions permitted in
> the license, and since those actions would not otherwise be permitted
> under copyright law, it's both false and misleading to refer to them as
> “forced”.

Again, the force is applied once you choose to do a particular thing
with the software -- is is really that hard to understand that
concept?  Even the permissive licenses force you to retain the
copyright notice on the source, but other than that, they don't try to
exert any kind of control over derivative works.

By the way, in selectively quoting from my email, you conveniently
neglected to address the significant issue of Guido et al apparently
disrespecting their users by "placing a low value on their freedom".
You may think that "force" has been misused here; I happen to think
that you are (and with a lot of other company, no doubt) misusing the
word "freedom" to mean only those *particular* freedoms that *you*
deem appropriate, and trying to paint others who disagree with your
priorities as somehow immoral. Yet when good examples of these
apparently immoral people and their software are given, somehow the
conversation is always directed back away from this issue.

Personally, I usually like to give my customers (paid or unpaid) the
ability to use the software as they see fit.  It's basically a gift;
although I force them to include my copyright notice on subsequent
source copies, I don't expect anything else in return, either directly
or indirectly.  I certainly don't attempt to control the licensing of
any software they write that happens to use my software; I would view
that as an attempted abrogation of their freedom.  But this just gets
back to the ancient philosophical question of whether a man is really
free if he is not allowed to sell himself into slavery.  I would argue
that he is not; obviously you and Stallman believe that the man is not
free unless someone forces him to remain free by keeping him from
selling himself.

Regards,
Pat