Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 10, 6:01 am, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 10 Mai, 03:09, Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On May 9, 6:39 pm, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> > > but if they aren't pitching it directly at you, why would you believe
> > > that they are trying to change your behaviour?
>
> > Because I've seen people specifically state that their purpose in
> > GPLing small libraries is to encourage other people to change their
> > behavior.  I take those statements at face value.  Certainly RMS
> > carefully lays out that the LGPL should be used sparingly in his "Why
> > you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library" post.  (Hint:
> > he's not suggesting a permissive license instead.)
>
> Sure, but all he's asking you to do is to make the software available
> under a GPL-compatible licence.

I'll be charitable and assume the fact that you can make that
statement without apparent guile merely means that you haven't read
the post I was referring to:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html

> [...]
>
> > rst2pdf was licensed under the MIT license before I started
> > contributing to it, and there is no way I was going to even consider
> > adding patches for a GPLed package (which would certainly have to be
> > GPLed) into the rst2pdf repository.  (Say what you will about how
> > sometimes differently licensed code can be combined, but RMS has to
> > share quite a bit of the blame/credit for the whole combining licenses
> > FUD.)
>
> I think the FSF are quite clear about combining licences - they even
> go to the trouble of telling you which ones are compatible with the
> GPL

Yes, but one of the things they are quite clear on is that the overall
work must be licensed as GPL, if any of the components are licensed as
GPL.  They claim this is true, even if a non-GPL work dynamically
links to a GPL work.

 - so I don't see where "FUD" comes into it, apart from possible
> corner cases where people are trying to circumvent the terms of a
> licence and probably know themselves that what they're trying to do is
> at the very least against the spirit of the licence.

Legally, I don't think they can dictate the license terms of, e.g.
clisp just because it can link to readline.  But practically, they DID
manage to do this, simply because Bruno Haible, the clisp author, was
more concerned about writing software than spending too much time
sparring with Stallman over the license, so he finally licensed clisp
under the gpl.  clisp *could* use readline, but didn't require it;
nonetheless Stallman argued that clisp was a "derivative" of
readline.  That case of the tail wagging the dog would be laughable if
it hadn't worked.  In any case, Stallman's success at that tactic is
probably one of the things that led him to write the paper on why you
should use GPL for your library.  (As an aside, since rst2pdf *can*
use GPL-licensed svglib, it could possibly be subject to the same kind
of political pressure as clisp.  But the fact that more people are
better informed now and that the internet would publicize the dispute
more widely more quickly means that this is a battle Stallman is
unlikely to wage at this point, because if the leader of any such
targeted project has enough cojones, the FSF's inevitable loss would
reduce some of the FUD dramatically.)

> Even then,
> warning people about their little project to make proprietary plugins,
> or whatever, is not really "FUD".

I think that, legally, they probably don't have a leg to stand on for
some of their overarching claims (e.g. about shipping proprietary
software that could link to readline, without even shipping
readline).  But morally -- well, they've made their position
reasonably clear and I try to abide by it.  That still doesn't make it
"not really FUD."  I'd call this sort of badgering "copyright misuse"
myself.

> As for rst2pdf, what your modifications would mean is that the
> software would need to be redistributed under a GPL-compatible
> licence.

That's parsing semantics rather finely.  In practice, what it really
means is that the combination (e.g. the whole program) would
effectively be GPL-licensed.  This then means that downstream users
would have to double-check that they are not combining the whole work
with licenses which are GPL-incompatible, even if they are not using
the svg feature.  Hence, the term "viral."

> I'll accept that this does affect what people can then do
> with the project, but once again, you've mentioned at least one LGPL-
> licensed project which was previously in this very situation, and it
> was never actually GPL-licensed itself. Here's the relevant FAQ entry:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL

Yes, I've read that, but this is much more informative:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem

"A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version
of that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program
must be released under the GPL if it is released at all."

This makes it clear that the overall work must be GPLed.  Now, all of
a sudden, downstream users cannot do some things they could have done
before.  Can you not see that taking a preexisting MIT-licensed
project and adding code to make it GPL could negatively affect some of
its users and that that is not necessarily an unalloyed good?

> [...]
>
> > This is exactly the same situation that Carl was describing, only with
> > two different open source packages rather than with a proprietary
> > package and a GPL package.  The whole reason people use words like
> > "force" and "viral" with the GPL is that this issue would not have
> > come up if svglib were MIT and rst2pdf were GPL.  (Note that the LGPL
> > forces you to give back changes, but not in a way that makes it
> > incompatible with software under other licenses.  That's why you see
> > very few complaints about the LGPL.)
>
> Actually, the copyleft licences don't "force" anyone to "give back
> changes": they oblige people to pass on changes.

True, if pedantic.  I meant "give back" in the more general sense.

> [...]
>
> > But I have definitely seen cases where people are offering something
> > that is not of nearly as much value as they seem to think it is, where
> > one of the goals is obviously to try to spread the GPL.
>
> Well, even the FSF doesn't approve of trivial projects using the GPL:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatIfWorkIsShort

Sure, that's a pragmatic view -- copyright might not even be permitted
on something that short that is mainly functional.  However, length is
not the only arbiter of trivial.  To stay with the same example,
personally, I would consider readline "trivial" within the context of
a lot of software which might use it, regardless of whether the
readline implementation itself used all sorts of fancy neural net
technology to predict what word the user was going to type or
whatever.  But whether it was trivial or not, if I ship software that
*could* link to it but doesn't *require* it (like the case of clisp)
without shipping readline, I think it's FUD and an attempt at
copyright misuse to call my software a derivative work of readline.
But obviously YMMV

Regards,
Pat