Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 12, 1:00 pm, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> 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.

Sorry, didn't know they were twins.

>
> [...]
>
> > > 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".

OK, but in the last several threads on this sub-part, you kept
contradicting me for some supposed technicality (how was I to know
there were two RMS's?) when I was trying to make the same point.

>
> [...]
>
> > > 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,

It wasn't even legally correct.  At that point, Stallman had access to
counsel, etc. and should have known better.

> and maybe Haible didn't believe that using readline would
> incur any consequences,

He wasn't distributing it!  It didn't incur any legal consequences;
only the consequence due to not realizing that using readline placed
him squarely inside RMS's chess game.

> but that's what you get when you use a
> copyrighted work.

No.  That's what you get when you use a copyrighted work authored by
an idealist who is trying to spread his choice of license.

> Your language is all about portraying the FSF as
> operating in some kind of illegal or unethical way.

Sorry, didn't mean to be that subtle.  RMS and others at the FSF have,
on multiple occasions, made statements about how licenses work which
are legally false.  This is not illegal, but it is, in my opinion,
unethical.  Some of these claims appear to not be made so boldly any
more, so perhaps they are catching on that others have caught on.

> I guess you
> believe that if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick.

I don't care about mud or sticking.  I am happy to see that the
current wording of the FAQ probably means that another clisp/readline
scenario won't happen, and like to believe that the public outcry over
this sort of thing, and reminders of it in this sort of discussion,
help to remind the FSF that others are watching them.

> > > 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.

Yes, I understand it's no big deal to you.  However, what you have
said is not quite right.  If I license something under the MIT
license, I cannot guarantee that no one will ever get it under the
GPL, because it could be redistributed downstream under the GPL (but
then I don't care to in any case).  However, I *can* guarantee that
the code I write (and all the underlying code it relies on) will
remain freely available from me for people who need the ability to,
for example, link with proprietary code.

Despite this not being a very big deal to you, the whole tempest in a
teacup here is about this very issue.  Yes, I understand it is a
problem for me, or any other author who wants to provide code that can
be used freely by people who download it.  And, as has been pointed
out in this discussion, many people don't read licenses very
carefully, so someone who doesn't want to restrict other people from
linking his library with third party proprietary code should think
twice about using the GPL.

> [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.

You keep spinning around on what you're trying to argue or prove.  I
don't know what I'm supposed to have "conceded" -- I was only stating
the obvious about how if I incorporate GPL licensed code in a project,
the entire project has to 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.

Yes, but at the outset, I was talking about incorporating (at least to
the point of redistributing) GPL-licensed code.  That forces the
license.

> 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.

Ahh, well done.  You've sucked me into a meaningless side debate.  If
I'm not distributing readline, then legally the license distribution
terms don't apply to me.  End of story.  (Morally, now we might get
into how trivial it is or isn't.)

> > > 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.

Well, that's the problem with an "attractive nuisance."  It's
attractive, or people wouldn't use it, and it's a nuisance -- either
you have to have the lawyers look at all this paperwork, or you can
just ignore it and hope for the best and be bothered by the nuisance
later.  And before you start talking about how the license isn't any
worse than Microsoft, etc.  -- just remember that, for Cisco, part of
what makes it attractive is the availability of source.

> > > 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.

But you don't need to know anything else.  RMS claimed clisp was a
derivative work of readline, even though readline wasn't even
distributed with clisp.  That's just plain copyright misuse, and if it
had gone to court with good lawyers, RMS might have lost the copyright
protections for readline.

Regards,
Pat