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Software Freedom Law Center vs Theo de Raadt
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent public posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, Eben Moglen, lashed back at OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt without actually mentioning his name. 'What has happened is that people who do not have full possession of the facts and have no legal expertise — people whom from the very beginning we have been trying to help — have made irresponsible charges and threatened lawsuits, thus slowing down our efforts to help them.' Moglen pointed out that they have and continue to help all open source projects, including OpenBSD, but the process takes time. 'The required work has been made more arduous because some people have chosen not to cooperate in good faith. But we will complete the work as soon as we can, and we will follow the community's practice of complete publication, so everyone can see all the evidence.'"
Almost all of my code which is released under an open source license is done under a BSD license because the only thing I really want out of people using my code is recognition that I contributed in some part to the project.
... with all that said, I have no idea why almost anyone else would write open source code that isn't under a more permissive license if they really want to 'help the community', GPL is more like a way to get people to fix your bugs :) There are plenty of big projects that have very permissive licenses that get contributions back from people even though they have no requirement to do so. Apache, zlib, libpng, openssl, all of them get plenty of stuff back, but don't REQUIRE you to make your project opensource if you use them.
If it becomes part of an open source project, under a GPL style license. Fine, thats fair, I'd hope they give back to me any fixes or enhancments, but if they don't thats okay because my name should still be in the source. This, in thoery means I'm better known in the development community and more likely to get a job working with people that appreciate my code.
Same goes for close source projects using my code, as long as they leave me credit, then some day in the future perhaps someone will say, 'hey, this guy did some good stuff, maybe we should see about hiring him?'
That is all I want out of the code I release. If I didn't care about that, I'd just call it public domain and forget about it. Occasionally I do release things as public domain when it seems far to trivial to reimplement in some other form.
To me, this is what open source is about, making it so other developers can benifit from the work I've done so maybe they build something better and everyone comes out ahead in the end.
What I don't want is for someone to have to reimplement something I've done just because my license doesn't comply with their license. To me there isn't a point in calling it 'open source' if someone can't use it in their project cause of some other silly licensing constraint or because they are trying to make money. I appreciate the BSD license style myself because I am employed as a commercial software developer. I can't use GPL'd code in any of my commercial products, so I many times have to implement something myself even though a GPL'd implementation exists.
As much as I want the world to all do things for the 'better good' of the world, its just unrealistic at this point in time to think that you're going to get quality software out of an entirely open source project unless it is run by some company or person who lays down some rules. I think too many people think GPL is the way to make all the software in the world free, but in my personal view, the really well done overall peices of software are written by someone motivated by financial concerns. In order to REALLY make money off software, open source just doesn't do it, you can always just get the source and build it yourself completely ignoring the original developers who invested their time to give you the software. On that same note, I don't think I've ever seen a dime from my source directly.
Sometimes I write code and open source it under a BSD license only to go to work the next day and pull that code into a closed source commercial product, so in that respect I suppose you could say it makes me some money, but mostly it just lets me do things in my own personal time that benifit me at work and don't require me to reimplement the whole thing if I want to use it in a personal project or at my next job. The company I work for loves it because they get all sorts of free work out of me on the weekends or after hours, I love it cause I don't have to implement stuff twice.
But
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I don't say this to be PC or placate anyone, but both sides appear to be right. Theo's side is correct that attribution was conspicuously absent. Eben's side is correct to admit it, and to fix it. Eben's side is also correct that threatening to litigate against a bunch of lawyers probably has repercussions. I think that's all Eben is saying here -- he is not saying "we won't change it, nyah!" But what he is saying is that since the response to his mistake was threats of lawsuit, his legal team has been forced to engage in S.O.P. for such cases, and withdraw. He feels that is a shame, because he's trying to work for Theo's group. But Theo's group is already casting aspersions on Eben's motives.
If it were me, I would simply do both what Theo's team is asking, and what the lawyers are asking: fix the mistakes until Theo's team is satisfied, and then withdraw. If you're withdrawing because you hate 'em now and want to scream & shout, fine to feel that way, but maybe don't say it. If you're withdrawing under protest because you feel that you should/could have done more good things together, fine to feel that way, but face facts: the relationship is poisoned at this point. Get out before the venom poisons the relationship more. Especially if the group is suspicious of your motives and is tarnishing your reputation by saying nasty stuff about you -- just get the hell away from it, spend your limited resources to help groups who are more gracious and less prone to paranoia.
If you do that, everyone wins. Theo's group gets rid of the suspicious betrayers they no longer want in their midst, and Eben's group gets away from a reputation-damaging public fight and money pit. There may also be karma -- perhaps Theo's group learns that they really needed Eben, and is forced to behave more politely with whoever next helps out. And perhaps Eben learns to be more careful up front, lest all his relationships end badly. Or perhaps, as Dane Cook says, they will "stick with the relationship for a few more years and end things violently."
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Most people belive that means you can either accept the BSD terms or accept the GPL terms (and from then on follow only the one chosen set of terms). Theo seems to be claiming that you somehow have to follow both sets of terms. I guess it depends on your definition of "alternatively".
I don't think there is any question at all. The work as a whole license needs not be the same as the excerpt licnese.
Also I agree that the copyright notices were probably prematurely altered. A safer approach might be to use language like:
"Portions may be copyright (2007) so-and-so.
So-and-so has added this notice here because he/she intends to make changes to the software and release those changes under [insert license here]. Please do not count on this file as being entirely original to the author and, if in doubt, contact the author below for a copy of his source code under the original BSD license."
IANAL, though.
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- The FSF's chief legal counsel, Eben Moglen, is "arrogant and unscrupulous" as well as "crafty and cowardly"
- Moglen has a "stated goal" that he's breaking the law by "stealing as much software as possible and putting it under the GPL even when doing so is illegal"
- The FSF is fighting a "war against reality"
- The only reason the FSF exists is to "keep stealing code until they get busted, go to court, and then go back to stealing as much code as possible."
Oh, and the "delusional and deranged" Richard Stallman is leading anyone who uses the GPL to a Jonestown-style koolaid suicide.Why does anyone bother reading JC Roberts' nuttery? He sounds like he's either 14 years old, off his meds, or both.
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I think part of the confusion here is that people are so angry about how the GPL is being used (or not used) by the commercial world the angst is bleeding over into the BSD world. But there really should be no confusion because BSD code has been used in proprietary commercial products for decades. Literally 30+ years. Not only that but many of the people using BSD code in proprietary settings are the very people that constructed and used the license way back in the 80's. And they did all that in the 90's. Anyone remember Ingres? So, no, there is no confusion.
The plain fact of the matter is that the GPL's viral nature is not helping the cause of open source at all. All it is doing is making it possible for the authors of pieces of GPLd code that become very popular to make the code proprietary, simply by stopping work on the GPL'd version. Having written several large pieces of OSS code myself I know very well that 99.9% of the people who use and talk about open source products are not in any position to take advantage of the open nature of the source code and even very good software can rot in place once the original developers stop working on it. All the GPL does is make the code rot faster. The vast majority of GPLd code used in the commercial world is used simply as a base on top of which proprietary applications run. Oops.
Again, the problem here is not the license, it is that people do not know what the intent of the original author was. That is, I haven't seen an email or posting from the original authors (is there one somewhere in this mess?) clarifying their position on the matter. It is the ethics of the situation that matter the most to the open source community and the ethics that matter most to me.
Frankly I am at a complete loss as to why these folks want to dual-license the code anyway. I see no advantage to the open-source community in doing so.
-Matt
I think you are making a fairly common error.
Again, IANAL. If this point matters to you, your safest bet is to hire a real and an unbiased attourney.
The right to sublicense is a very special right under copyright law, and my reading of cases like Gardner v. Nike are that courts are very conservative in allowing for sublicensing due to the fear of an accused infringer being harrassed by multiple successive lawsuits.
In short, the BSD license offers you a set of rights (redistribute software, prepare additional works, etc) and limits those to certain conditions (notices of permissions which must be included and the like). If a right is not granted by the BSD license, then it is not granted regardless of how those relate to the permissions issued. I would therefore note:
1) Nonexclusive licenses are indivisible and almost never (in copyright) allow for implied sublicense rights. This is pretty uncontroversial.
2) The BSD, ISC, and similar licenses offer a notice which provide, directly from the author, the right to anyone who obtains the software the rights to use the code under the terms of that license. This does not extend to added elements in derivative works, but does extend to every element of the code as licensed by the author under the BSD license. Hence Microsoft can use BSD licensed code in Windows because the University of California gave them permission to do so, but Microsoft does not have the right to change the rights on the copyrighted elements of the code they used with permission.
Hence no sublicensing right is required to excersize the other rights granted in the license.
FWIW, Eben Moglen disagrees with me, though I haven't yet gotten any objections to my reasoning which invalidate my conclusion from him. So again, take it for what its worth and with the appropriate shipment of salt. However, I would note that no BSD licensors I have talked to agree with Moglen that the intent of the license allows sublicensing.
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