Picking a license

[Paul Boddie]

On 11 Mai, 22:39, Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> OK.  Now I'm REALLY confused.  I said "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.)"
>
> to which you replied:
>
> "Sure, but all he's asking you to do is to make the software available
> under a GPL-compatible licence."

Alright, then, all he's asking you to do is to make *your* software
available under a GPL-compatible licence. That's what I meant in the
context of the discussion. Usually, people complain about how the GPL
dictates a single licence, forbidding all others, that is then
inseparable from their work ("It's my work but they make me GPL it! I
can't even control my own work any more! The FSF owns it!" and such
nonsense), but I've already given examples of this not being the case
at all.

> and then I tried to politely show that you were wrong about RMS's
> intentions, but now, but you're saying "oh, of course, he'd say that
> -- he wrote the license"  which is basically what I've been saying all
> along.  But if you have read it like you say, then it appears you were
> being very disingenuous in your original reply!

What the licence asks you to do and what the author of the licence
wants you to do are two separate things.

[...]

> NO.  If you are building an application, and distributing GPLed stuff
> as part of it, the FSF still maintains that the license is such that
> the entire application must be GPLed.  You keep acting like this isn't
> true, but it absolutely is if you're distributing the entire
> application.

I wrote "the software" above when I meant "your software", but I have
not pretended that the whole system need not be available under the
GPL. Otherwise the following text would be logically inconsistent with
such claims:

[...]

> On May 11, 5:24 am, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> > Again, you have to consider the intent of the licensing: that some
> > software which links to readline results in a software system that
> > should offer the "four freedoms", because that's the price of linking
> > to readline whose licence has promised that any system which builds
> > upon it shall offer those privileges.
>
> But I did consider the intent, and as I have made clear, I think
> that's a bullying tactic that fragments the software world
> unnecessarily.  Obviously YMMV.

More loaded terms to replace the last set, I see.

> > > > As for rst2pdf, what your modifications would mean is that the
> > > > software would need to be redistributed under a GPL-compatible
> > > > licence.
>
> NO.  You're still not paying attention.  The FSF's clear position is
> that if you actually *redistribute* software under the GPL as *part of
> a system* then the full package must be licensed *under the GPL*.

Again, what I meant was "your software", not the whole software
system. As I more or less state below...

> > Once again, I refer you to the intent of the licensing: if someone has
> > the software in front of them which uses svglib, then they need to
> > have the privileges granted to them by the GPL. Yes, if the software
> > also uses some component with a GPL-incompatible licence, then this
> > causes a problem.
>
> It appears that the FSF's position is the ability to link to svglib
> would require software to be licensed under the GPL.

It would require the resulting system to be licensed under the GPL. As
it stands by itself, rst2pdf would need to be licensed compatibly with
the GPL.

> I don't believe
> that, but I do believe that if rst2pdf distributed svglib (or even
> patches to svglib which were clearly derivative works) then yes,
> rst2pdf would have to be distributed under the GPL.  This kind of
> bullshit is only acceptable to people who only think a single license
> is acceptable.

Take it or leave it, then.

[...]

> > Well, I have referred several times to WebKit without you taking the
> > hint,
>
> OK, I don't work with webkit.  I knew you were hinting at something,
> but why the games, I don't know.  I guess it's all about mystique and
> games.

You mentioned WebKit as a non-GPL-licensed project which attracted
contributions from hard-nosed business. WebKit started life as KHTML
and was (and still is) LGPL-licensed, but for all practical purposes,
KHTML was only ever experienced by KDE users whilst linked to the Qt
framework, then available under the GPL. Now, given that WebKit now
works with other GUI frameworks, yet is still LGPL-licensed (and this
has nothing to do with recent Qt licensing developments, since this
applies to the period before those changes), it is clear that any
assertion that WebKit "was made GPL-only", which is what a lot of
people claim, is incorrect.

> > but that provides a specific case of a project which is LGPL-
> > licensed despite being based on (in GPLv3 terminology) libraries which
> > were distributed under the GPL and combined with that software.
>
> What other libraries?  I don't know it's history.  I give you specific
> examples at problems; you hint around at things you claim are not
> problems and then still don't give specifics.

I've now given you the specifics.

> > Similarly, the effort to ensure that CPython's licence was GPL-
> > compatible had a lot to do with the right to redistribute with GPL-
> > licensed code (actually readline, if I remember correctly).
>
> Yes, but the Python project doesn't actually distribute readline, and
> (as I mentioned) people are more informed now, and it would be
> difficult for RMS to bully Python into relicensing.

All RMS and the FSF's lawyers wanted was that the CNRI licences be GPL-
compatible. There are actually various aspects of GPL-compatibility
that are beneficial, even if you don't like the copyleft-style
clauses, so I don't think it was to the detriment of the Python
project.

> But if the Python
> distribution *included* GNU Readline, then RMS would be on firmer
> ground, and the license would probably have to be changed.  This is
> *exactly* the situation I was describing with svglib -- can you still
> not see that it is a problem to just toss unsupported free software
> out there with a GPL license?  Unsupported Apache or MIT is fine --
> fix it or ignore.  Unsupported GPL is an attractive nuisance.

Well, if you're planning to release code and just walk away from it,
then choosing a permissive licence might be acceptable, but not all
code "found" by people on the Internet is abandoned, even if it is
apparently mere fodder for their super-important project.

> > Is readline trivial? Was readline trivial in 1992?
>
> Again, you could have neural net prediction and other fancy
> technologies, but in general, yes, the concept is pretty trivial and
> there were many systems that already had such things back then.

Well, that may not be a judgement shared by the authors. There are
numerous tools and components which do dull jobs and whose maintenance
is tedious and generally unrewarding, but that doesn't mean that such
investment is worth nothing in the face of someone else's so-very-
topical high-profile project.

> > Does it even
> > matter, because the author is more or less saying that they don't want
> > their code incorporated in a proprietary system?
>
> Yes it matters because as others have pointed out, sometimes people
> use stuff which is purported to be "free" without a full understanding
> of all the implications.  But this gets back to my general complaint
> about co-opting the word "free" which you don't think is a problem
> because you have chosen to use other words.

Well, if people are making use of "some good code found for free on
the Internet", particularly if they are corporations like Cisco, and
they choose not to understand things like copyright and licensing, or
they think "all rights reserved" is just a catchy slogan, then they
probably shouldn't be building larger works and redistributing them.
This may seem unfair to you, but there are plenty of other
organisations who are much less charitable about copyright
infringement than the FSF or the average Free Software developer.

But if you're more or less saying that the intentions of an author can
(or should) be disregarded if the desire to use that author's work is
great enough, well, that's certainly interesting to learn.

Paul