Picking a license

[Paul Boddie]

On 12 Mai, 16:10, Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 12, 7:10 am, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> > What the licence asks you to do and what the author of the licence
> > wants you to do are two separate things.
>
> But the whole context was about what RMS wanted me to do and you
> disagreed!

What RMS as an activist wants is that everyone releases GPL-licensed
code, except where permissively licensed code might encourage open
standards proliferation. What RMS the licence author requests is that
your work is licensed in a way which is compatible with the GPL.

[...]

> > 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.
>
> You say you "have not pretended" but you've never mentioned that it
> would or even acknowledged the correctness of my assertions about this
> until now, just claiming that what I said was false.

Well, excuse me! I think we both know that combining something with a
GPL-licensed work and redistributing it means that the "four freedoms"
must apply, and that recipients get the work under the GPL. You can
insist that I said something else, but I spell it out in this post:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/034fbc8289a4d555

Specifically the part...

"Not least because people are only obliged to make their work
available under a GPL-compatible licence so that people who are using
the combined work may redistribute it under
the GPL."

In case you don't find this satisfactory, "their work" means "their
own work".

[...]

> > More loaded terms to replace the last set, I see.
>
> IMO "Bullying" is the correct term for some of Stallman's actions,
> including in the clisp debacle.  I knew you wouldn't agree -- that's
> why YMMV.  And I'm not "replacing" any set of terms -- part of the
> "bullying" is the "forcing."

Stallman gave Haible the choice to not use readline. Maybe that wasn't
very nice, and maybe Haible didn't believe that using readline would
incur any consequences, but that's what you get when you use a
copyrighted work. Your language is all about portraying the FSF as
operating in some kind of illegal or unethical way. I guess you
believe that if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick.

> > Again, what I meant was "your software", not the whole software
> > system. As I more or less state below...
>
> BUT THAT DOESN'T MATTER.  Once the whole package is licensed under the
> GPL, for someone downstream to try to scrape the GPL off and get to
> just the underlying non-GPL parts is harder than scraping bubblegum
> off your shoe on a hot Texas day.

Big deal. If a project wants to avoid even looking at GPL-licensed
code for the reason that someone might end up getting the code under
the GPL, and that they're so bothered that the opportunity to not
grant such recipients the privileges of modification and
redistribution disappears because of the GPL, then that's their
problem.

[WebKit is LGPL-licensed but KHTML linked to GPL-licensed code,
shouldn't WebKit be GPL-licensed?]

> I didn't make that claim and have never heard of that claim, and I'm
> not at all sure of the relevance of whatever you're trying to explain
> to the licensing of an overall program, rather than a library.

The point is precisely the one you concede about a project needing to
be licensed compatibly with the GPL, even though to use the combined
work, the result will be GPL-licensed.

[...]

> > 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.
>
> And I don't have a problem with that.  Honestly I don't.  But as far
> as I'm concerned, although you finally admitted it, a lot of the
> dancing around appeared to be an attempt to disprove my valid
> assertion that a combined work would have to be distributed under the
> GPL, and that no other free software license claims sovereignty over
> the entire work.

I never denied that the GPL would apply to the combined work! Read the
stuff I quote above. Your *own* stuff (for example, the WebKit stuff)
can be licensed compatibly with the GPL (for example, the LGPL), but
the *whole* thing as it lands in the user's lap will be GPL-licensed.

[...]

> > 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.
>
> OK, so what you're saying is that readline is so dull and unrewarding
> that the only reason to bother writing it is to reel people in to the
> GPL?

No, what I am saying is that a fair amount of work might have gone
into making readline, even though it may not be shiny enough by some
people's standards, but that doesn't mean you can disregard the
authors' wishes by insisting that is it "trivial" or unimportant,
whereas your own software somehow is important. As soon as you go down
that road, everyone can start belittling the works of others purely so
that they can start disregarding the terms which regulate those works,
and then it's a free-for-all.

[...]

> > Well, if people are making use of "some good code found for free on
> > the Internet", particularly if they are corporations like Cisco, and
>
> I'm not talking about Cisco.  I'm talking about people like the author
> of clisp, and you well know it.

Well, Cisco seemed to have a bit of a problem. Maybe they thought that
this "free stuff" was just a commodity, too.

> > 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.
>
> Well, the FSF seems to have softened its stance, but at the time,
> clisp wasn't even distributing readline.  That's why I use terms like
> "bullying".  The bully now knows it's harder to get away with that
> particular lie, but he's still scheming about how to reel more people
> in.

What the FSF did was regrettable if the author didn't feel he had a
choice. I have no idea what went on beyond what the public mailing
list record can reveal.

Paul