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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.'"
I'm a software developer, and I don't always write open-source code. I've written plenty of OS code, contributing to PHP, GCJ, SDL etc. and I GPL'd my geolocation website, but I also write commercial code.
It can be hard to see a perfectly good piece of code, that does exactly what you want, and then have to go and re-implement it yourself, but that's what the GPL requires, and that's what I do. At the moment, I'm drawing over 1000 tiles for a CIV-2 type game, because the 'freeland' tiles are GPL, and having to put the amount of work in to duplicate it that I am doing, I completely understand why.
I think that if anyone relicenced any of my OS code under their own, more restrictive (to pluck an example out of the air: GPL rather than BSD) licence, I would be incensed. It remains to be seen if this has happened within Linux, and if it has, hard questions are going to require very good answers..
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I would suggest to Theo that if he wants those GPL slackers to give back to the BSD community and not run roughshod over the BSD license that he add a simple provision that forces the miscreants to give back their improvements.
In fact, in the interest of sharing hard work freely with others, I happen to have a draft copy of what such a license would look like right here.
P.S.
The license shown even encourages non-GPL borrowers to keep their code open, all for the same low price.
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
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
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If you are using a piece of BSD-licensed code, you must forever obey those three terms. They allow you to LINK code against any code - GPL, proprietary, whatever. BUT, you must always reproduce the copyright notice and the list of conditions. Nothing gives you the right to remove them.
So, you can create a derivative work that uses both GPL and BSD code, but that BSD code hasn't become GPL'd and you must still obey the terms of the BSD license. This is a common misconception because the BSD license's terms are so liberal. So, Linux (and other GPL projects) can appropriate code from the BSD world provided that they obey the three terms listed in the BSD license. GPL projects can add GPL code to BSD code in the same file, but until the BSD code is gone from that file - which would probably happen over years of rewrites - they have to obey those three clauses. No where does the BSD license say "you can disobey these clauses because you've changed the license."
Enforceability of contracts is what makes the GPL work. If the GPL world says it doesn't work when it's someone else's license, their projects are in deep trouble. And to think, this whole mess could be solved by simply removing that stupid relicense crap which has almost no practical implication other than GPL-ego.
The current 3 clause BSD license allows someone to release derived works under the GPL (or under closed-source commercial license). If you don't like that, then don't use the 3 clause BSD license. Licenses have specific meaning that should be understood before they are used. Ok, I think you are mischaracterizing the dispute. I don't think that anyone disagrees about the BSD license allowing for derivatives under the GPL v2 (see my latest journal entry why I don't think this applies to the GPL v3).
The large issue has to do with whether the BSD license allows for sublicensing (i.e for a licensee to offer a portion of his/her rights to a downstream licensee as a separate license). I personally don't think it does. Instead, I see the BSD license as a direct grant of rights to anyone who gets a copy of the source code.
In the case of a derivative work, nothing here prevents you from enforcing your own copyrights in any way you see fit (as long as you obey the terms of the BSD License). However, you cannot dictate to other people what terms govern the code which was provided to you under a nonexclusive BSD license. This is actually a big difference. Mr Moglen is on record saying that he thinks that the BSD license allows for this sort of sublicensing, and I disagree.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Since previous iterations of this discussion have been dominated by wildly inaccurate characterizations of the BSD license, it seems only proper to actually include it:
http://ftp.bg.openbsd.org/OpenBSD/src/share/misc/license.template
To break it down even further:
Now, obviously, slapping a copy of the GPL in the file is within your rights to “use, copy modify, and distribute” the software. However, it is entirely pointless to do so: the GPL places additional restrictions on what you may or may not do with the code, yet those restrictions are voided by the fact that the BSD license — and, let’s not forget, removing the BSD license is the one thing that the license forbids — grants you those very rights that the GPL takes away. In order for the restrictions of the GPL to be effective, you must remove the BSD license, which you cannot legally do.
Now, can we please stop this nonsense about the BSD license giving you the right to re-license code under the GPL?
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.