Seminar On Details Of The GPL And Related Licenses

bkuhn writes "Given the recent confusion about LGPL on slashdot, and the concern it raised for those convincing corporate legal departments to adopt to Free Software, perhaps your readers might be interested in FSF's legal seminar on the GPL and related licenses. The first one is in Silicon Valley, and if it is successful, we hope to hold others in the next 8 months in New York City and Tokyo." Since the FSF and the GNU project have long created and fought for software that's shareable, Free, and Not UNIX, what's taught at these seminars will probably differ sharply from what you can hear at next Monday's SCO conference call on the "IBM lawsuit, UNIX Ownership and Copyrights."

Comments

Never could understand

[inode_buddha]

Why there's any confusion myself - it's pretty straightforward to me. OTOH, it's good to see the FSF giving their official explanations, maybe I'll learn something.

Could someone here tell me what's so hard to grasp about the GPL? or LGPL? Not trolling, just wondering. Maybe its just completely different world views or something. *shrugs*

Re:Never could understand

[Arandir]

Was it straightforward to you before you were told by someone else what it means? After all, there is still a great deal of disagreement over what some clauses mean.

Remember the KDE fiasco? The situation was hunky dory, until Redhat came along and issued a white paper saying that KDE was illegal. Then Debian got in on the act, and before you knew it, there was this completely new interpretation of the GPL coming from the FSF. Do you really think that none of the KDE developers read the license? Of course they did!

Then there was the Corel LinuxOS fiasco. They had a "private" beta, and everyone jumped all over them. Do you really think that none of the lawyers at Corel bothered to read the license?

And consider the latest fiasco with Java and the LGPL. People have been using the LGPL with Java for years. Not once did anyone every complain. Then suddenly someone at the FSF offered up a contrary opinion, and all hell broke loose.

Notice I used the word "fiasco" with all of the above examples. That's because the GPL is a complicated and hard to understand document, yet everyone thinks they know what it means. The LGPL is even worse, because everyone thinks it's simpler, when in fact it's more complicated.

Re:Never could understand

[IamTheRealMike]

The main problems are that people don't understand, or are confused by:

a) The references to derivative works - what exactly is a derivative work? How can you tell?

b) The meaning of redistribution.

The whole Java/LGPL thing was a storm in a teacup caused by people who didn't understand the wording or the spirit of the license.

I sometimes wonder if it's due to the nature of the people involved. Programming is sometimes an sexact and inflexible science - literality is important. The law on the other hand is anything but those things.

So, for instance, I've seen people wrangle and argue over exactly what is and isn't linking, without realising that this is beside the point - the LGPL is very clear that if you use the code in your program, the user should be able to drop in a replacement they compiled themselves - otherwise, what is the point of having the source (for the user) if they are powerless to use it to improve their own apps? In standard C or C++ apps, static linking prevents the user from doing that, so you can't do it (or rather, you must offer a version that uses dynamic linkage). In Java, all linkage is dynamic, so as long as the user can drop in a new jarfile, or set of classes, you're set. In Python etc, you're almost always compliant even if you embed the code direct into the source files, because the user can still go in an edit those parts. At least, that's *my* interpretation.

Likewise, I've seen people say you can't link GPLd code with anything other than a GPLd program - also rubbish. Any GPL compatible license will do.

Basically people forget that licenses are agreements between the author of the code, and themselves. The author expresses their wishes for how the code can be used, and you must abide by those wishes. The GPL/LGPL/BSD and so on are just useful boilerplates to save people reinventing the wheel. You can always ask the copyright holder to grant you a commercial license if you want to use some GPLd code - they may so no, but also they may not.

Erm, Timothy??

[SuperDuG]

What the hell does SCO have to do with GPL? I mean really this just seems like a way to jab at SCO for something completely not on topic.

Lets see, GPL, GNU not UNIX, so lets mention SCO? Where the hell is the logic, just seems like you wanted to post a link that might cause a little slashdotting to SCO's site. One might infer this as particularly malicious.

SCO has never once said anything against the GNU, in fact the GNU actually semi-support the SCO standpoint, if code was not given by the author than it violated the codes original copyright.

I do believe making this thread appaling to the commentors because of a mention to SCO is pretty tasteless and definantelly offtopic.

Oops, wrong FSF...

[Dr. Zowie]

The seminar will cost $500 per participant.

That would definitely be from the Free Software Foundation and not the Free Seminar Foundation...

Re:Oops, wrong FSF...

[Jason Earl]

If you think that is bad the FSF's Deluxe Software Distribution set costs $5000. Clearly the FSF really means it when they say that it is Free as in Freedom and not Free as in Free Beer. Cheapbytes probably sells the same package for $10 + s/h.

$500 is actually a ridiculously low price for what is offered in the seminar. Heck, the State Bar of California has approved this program for 7 hours of MCLE credit, for crying out loud.

Oh, please

[The Bungi]

Since the FSF and the GNU project

Please spare us the editorial comment. In yesterday's article, Dave Turner specifically bemoaned the fact that CowboyNeal had not double-checked his facts and just went ahead and posted. The story submitter then apologized to Dave for going "sensational", which is apparently the only way to get a story through the "editors" nowadays, with the exception of anything that remotely smells of "M$" or the RIAA.

So I think an apology to the FSF (and your readers) is in order.

Why SCO is not tangential

[rdewald]

Those who follow discussions concerning the arguments being prepared for the SCO lawsuit are betting right now that the GPL will be among the targets of that action. They may be right, they may be wrong, but references to that action are relevant to any discussion about software licensing these days.

Will they address concerns with the GFDL?

[Bootsy Collins]

Debian has moved a large amount of documentation licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License into the non-free section of its software archive, out of concerns that the GFDL is not free, at least as far as "free" is defined by the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

One issue is essentially with the ability of authors to define "invariant sections" of their documents, the subsequent modification of which would violate the GFDL. This conflicts with the requirement of the DFSG that licensing must allow modifications, and must permit the modifications to be distributed under the same licensing terms as the original, as e.g. the GPL does.

Other people have raised the concern that the GFDL's restrictions on the use of "technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute" -- a restriction that, on the surface, makes sense in that it prevents attempts to limit the freedom others have to read the distributed copies -- could have the unintended consequence of forbidding putting documents covered by the GFDL on devices which are encrypted for personal security.

I'm curious whether FSF folks speaking about licenses plan to discuss this at the seminar(s).

We call it "hereditary"

[TuringTest]

I have no moderation points, so i'll bite the troll.

How can a voluntarily adopted license "force" anybody? As you say, you just have to reject the use of GPLed software if you don't like it. And remember that the GPL must only be accepted if you redistribute another's program, not just if you use it. A programmer should be aware of the terms in which the code she relies upon is licensed, right?

The whole point of the GPL is to build a community of people freely sharing code and donating it to each other. The license is tuned and tweaked to do just that, and do it really well.

If someone want to use the GPL for a different purpose (like, say, earning some money), hey, the code it's free! They can do it, but they should be very aware that the license is not intended to do that. So, it's not the FSF fault if they got it wrong, as their goals are cristal clear.

Re:We call it "hereditary"

[JoeBuck]

There are good arguments to use the GPL, even for business-minded folks who disagree with RMS's idea that all software must be free.

The GPL is quite usable for making money. Consider TrollTech, the providers of QT. Their use of the GPL/QPL combo (though the GPL alone would work just as well) got the product of a small Norwegian company known all over the world, and the fact that proprietary developers don't like the GPL means that Troll Tech can sell developer licenses at significant cost.

BSD fans who accuse GPL fans of communism have it backwards: giving work away completely for any purpose, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, is a hallmark of the BSD license. As Russ Nelson (of OSI) has said, "When I write proprietary software I expect to get paid". By choosing the GPL instead of a non-copyleft license, the author is in a sense insisting on compensation for his work, either in the form of changes that get contributed back, or with the possibility of selling someone a license to use terms other than the GPL.

What might really harm the BSD folks is the growing practice by holders of software patents to license those patents for use in GPL code, but not in non-copylefted code. IBM is doing a lot of this: they've made some of their patents available to both the Linux kernel and GCC. I would prefer to see no patents at all, but don't see a way of letting the BSD folks use the patents without effectively giving the patent away to all. They could say, OK, BSD folks, use of the patent is OK as long as full source is provided for the whole app, but did you notice that these conditions are effectively a copyleft, like the GPL (if you use it you have to give the whole source away)?

Java

[siskbc]

Could someone here tell me what's so hard to grasp about the GPL? or LGPL?

Did you miss the Java thing over the last few days? The assumption was that when developing java stuff, you could link to something that's LGPL'd without *GPL'ing your project. But the linking timeline is pretty convoluted, and it resulted in some people getting a bit of a surprise when they discovered the projects they're working on would be *GPL'd, which they had thought not the case.

So some clarification is a good thing.

FSF vs Open TV

[BlueTrin]

Actually, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which monitors the scene and enforces the GPL, says a Mountain View company has been violating the GPL for more than a year. The foundation calls the violations serious and is threatening a lawsuit.

The specifics of the FSF's beef with OpenTV have to do with the company's policies in sending source code to licensees of OpenTV software tools created under the GPL. According to the foundation, OpenTV has either refused to provide the code, or has attached improper conditions on providing it, to several programmers who have every right to it.

OpenTV's intellectual property lawyer, Scott Doyle, says there's been missed communications on both sides but that the company has no intention of violating any legal agreements. He says the company plans to post the code in question online.

But if the FSF is right that OpenTV is violating the GPL, and if this behavior is found to be legal by the courts, the entire free-software and open-source movements could be derailed. Agreeing to share the improvements you make in the GPL-licensed software you've used is an essential part of the larger ecosystem.

Some people I respect say the GPL is a bad idea, period. They say it's too restrictive of programmers' rights, in the sense of forcing them to open what they've done to the world. Fine: If you don't like the GPL, don't create software from code that used it in the first place. Then put different licensing terms on what you've done.

But legal agreements are supposed to matter in our system. Just because the GPL turns the idea of intellectual property somewhat around doesn't make it less valid.