peddrenth asks:
"Software licenses are, we keep saying, difficult to read. The public clicks OK without reading, either implicitly trusting or mistrusting us the software authors. There have been calls recently for companies to clean-up the license, to bullet, section, and colour their licenses, to remove THE UPPERCASE
and to draw charts and graphs to explain the license. Anyone who's had to read a 3-page document in a 3"x1" textbox knows how useful this would be. The GPL is one of the most important licenses in the world, and appears on thousands of products. Everything from windows programs to operating systems to people's artwork requires understanding and acceptance of the GNU GPL. Should we, the free software community, take the first step in this effort, and show the world what an easy-to-read license looks like? Would it be useful if long textual software licenses stood out like a sore thumb amongst the cool, pretty, and clear free licenses?" Many may think the GPL Preamble to be clear enough, and this may be true. However there are a lot of people out there that would like to read the
entire license so that they know exactly what they may be getting into,
before they agree to it. This usually implies being able reading the actual license, and not just the preamble.
"Should we use such a comparison to show the public how they're being manipulated by terms in a EULA they don't read or understand, and encourage other license-writers to include the graphs and tables themselves, showing the public what a license really means?
What would be your ideal license, what poster would you draw to explain the GPL to a child, a PHB, or an artist? Would you stick with the text, or can you think of anything better?"
jamie interjects: The root of the problem is that "intellectual property" is a kludge of a natural human understanding of property rights. Useful, but a kludge. You have to invent many
oddball concepts
to keep up the pretense that ideas are property. The GPL is a kludge (strict and precise licensing terms) implemented on top of a kludge (copyright law) and, in English or in code, there is no short and simple way to describe complex things.
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Give the person Richard Stallman's home phone #. Then tell the person to call up and ask "What's the big deal about the GPL?"
Problem solved.
[o]_O
One of the things that's nice about the GPL, and that I've just come to understand recently, is that it doesn't really matter if you 'accept' it, in the sense that you accept a EULA from MS. Since accepting the GPL actually gives you MORE freedoms than the normal copyright laws, if you don't accept the GPL on a program you get, you are actually more limited in what you can do with it. You can't distribute it, and surely can't distribute a modified version.. Whereas the other EULAs restrict you in addition to copyright restrictions, the GPL actually reduces the restrictions put upon you by copyright law.
Most of what the majority of non-lawyers need to know about the GPL can be summed up in one line:
The GPL does not impact users of the software, only distributors.
That's it. For that simple reason, the premise of this question is flawed. Most of the world simply uses software and doesn't redistribute it, therefore understanding and acceptance of the GNU GPL is not an issue.
Anyone who is distributing software (GPL or otherwise) really needs to take the time to understand the details of their redistribution agreement. As redistribution licenses are concerned, the GPL is very easy to understand and truly does stand out as a marvel of simplicity. The only simpler things are BSD and public domain :-)
.sig: file not found
Before the preamble, state:
Or is that too simplistic?
Note that this does not accomplish one important end, in that it does not clearly distinguish itself from other EULAe, except that it devotes the first few sentences to "freedoms" rather than "limitations".
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I worked for a local Government, who were already brainwashed by Microsoft's sales. Here is the dialogs during a meeting debating with a MCSE whether we should use GPL's code:
Me: We could save money using this pieces of GPL code..
MCSE: Doesn't that make all the derived work GPL?
Me: Yes.
MCSE: Then we must release our source code to public! This is confidential!!
Me: No....we are only required to release the source code when the recipents has the binary. We wouldn't release our system to public...
MCSE: but according to GPL, the source code is open to all to read!(?) The other department could read it and might release them to public!
Me: You might have misunderstood the concept...according to GPL's FAQ we do not need to release the source code if we use them within an organization. A Government is one big organization, which is very suitable to adopt GPL....
MCSE: That's NOT I heard about GPL. I don't believe in what you said! GPL is about opensource and any dervied works must be made opensource, this is a very restrictive license and there's no way out!
and things went downhill from there. My boss trusted him because he has an MCSE.
I still ponder, what qualification in MCSE would make him know GPL better than others...
As the resident office open source nut, a major part of my (non paid) role is stopping my employer stealing open source code. I have lost count of the number of times that I have found stolen open source code in our products. I say "stolen" advisedly, and it's the word I use when confronting the culprits.
The problem is that many of them simply do not understand that there is a cost associated with using "free" software. Sure, it's their fault for not reading it, but it would make my life a lot easier if we stopped wielding the word "free" like a weapon (it means too many things to too many people), and if the GPL (and other open source licenses) opened like this:
This code is copyrighted. It is not "free to use". You may not copy or use it in any way, including for non-commercial purposes, unless you follow strictly the enclosed license terms. If you do not read or follow the license terms, you will be in breach of copyright, and can and will be prosecuted for theft.
I'd say that a clear statement like this is way more important than the DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY that we tend to splash first. The disclaimer is there to protect the author, but a clear warning that open source code is copyrighted and strictly licensed protects the recipient from doing something stupid and causing grief to both parties. I'd say that it's more in the spirit of open source development to prioritise the copyright/license warning than the disclaimer.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How to explain GPL to capitalists:
This software contains the intellectual property of several people. Intellectual property is a valuable resource, and you cannot expect to be able to use someone else's intellectual property in your own work for free.
Many businesses and individuals are willing to trade their intellectual property in exchange for something of value; usually money. For example, in return for a sum of money, you might be granted the right to incorporate code from someone's software program into your own.
The developers of this software are willing to trade you the right to use their intellectual property in exchange for something of value. However, instead of money, the developers are willing to trade you the right to freely incoroporate their code into your software in exchange for the right to freely incorporate your code into theirs. This exchange is to be done by way of and under the terms of the GPL.
If you do not think that this is a fair bargain, you are free to decline and to develop your own code or purchase it from someone else. You will still be allowed to use the software yourself, which is awfully nice of the developers, since you probably didn't pay them a penny for it in the first place. If you feel that this would make you a freeloading communist welfare addict, you may instead opt to purchase similar software from a less generous developer.
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So if you changed from upper case to bold italic lower case, you would very likely face a legal challenge that your notice was not "noticable", and you would have to fight that throught the court hierarchy. However, once somebody did do this, then others could use that as precedent.
Licenses are naturally complex things.
The problem is that we're using licenses to begin with. We don't need licenses. Books don't have licenses. Poems don't have licenses. Music, despite the RIAA's wishes to the contrary, doesn't have licenses.
There are in essense only three sets of rights available to the recipient of any copyrighted work:
1) Rights previously granted under Copyright Law.
2) 1 + additional rights
3) 1 - rights already granted
Only number 3 requires a license, because only number three has to be agreed to by the recipient. This is a EULA.
Number one doesn't need any license at all. Just put the words "Copyright 2002 Joe Schmoe, all rights reserved" at the top, and you're done. 90% of commercial software could be released like this with zero problems for the authors. This is known as simple copyright.
Number two doesn't need a license either. You're granting additional rights, not taking anything away. Even if these additional rights have conditions attached to them, as with copyleft, the recipient does not need to agree to anything, because they cannot excercise those additional rights outside of the context of those conditions. I refer to this as a Permission Statement.
The general public, over the course of three decades of concerted brainwashing by the software industry, has come to believe that you need a license to use software. This is very sad. Instead of perpetuating this myth, we need to be proactive and declare that the user doesn't have to agree to any damn thing to use the software we gave them!
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Well, no. It's "if you redistribute our stuff with your stuff in certain ways (all of which are clearly defined in a one of the most readable license documents you'll ever see), you won't be covered by this license. In which case, you'll have to explain to a judge why you violated our copyright."
After all, users are never forced to sign any kind of agreement to the GPL. If you didn't sign a license, nobody can force you to agree that you were bound by the contract. But without the license to redistribute granted by the contract, you may pay a penalty for violating the authors' copyright.
Anyway, if your legal staff can't figure out the terms of the GPL, then god help you with the proprietary licenses you're dealing with.
You need not agree to a license in order to use this software.
The installation should somewhere contain copyright information, warantee disclaimer (which the user is not required to approve), and a link to the GPL. See also How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs.
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