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Doubts Raised About Legal Soundness of GPL2
svonkie writes "Two prominent IP lawyers have warned that the all-pervasive General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) is legally unsound. They claim GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are much better suited for the realities of modern open source software. 'If you go back in time to when GPLv2 was written, I don't think people were aware of just how ubiquitous this license would become and how closely scrutinized it would be,' said Mark Radcliffe, partner at the firm DLA Piper and general counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI). 'At that time, open source was not something as broadly used as it is now.' Radcliffe was joined by Karen Copenhaver, partner at Choate Hall & Stewart and counsel for the Linux Foundation, for a GPL web conference hosted by the license-sniffing firm Black Duck software"
They claim GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are much better suited for the realities of modern open source software.
...
"At that time, open source was not something as broadly used as it is now."
Maybe the way it was written is why FOSS is where it's at? Might not be such a bad idea to keep it around?
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
I'm wondering if this isn't just FUD to try to get people to switch to v3. Which is icky, but it did occur to me.
What would either the OSI or the Linux Foundation gain from such a thing?
How much of this is about nudging Linus... pushing him, really... into applying GPL 3 to the Linux kernel?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
So your definition of "extremist nut," then, is someone who thinks they should actually be allowed to exercise the rights that the license is expressly designed to give them. I fail to see how there's anything extremist about requiring that you not distribute software under the license if the hardware directly prevents the users from using the software in a manner that the license explicitly says they can...
The license was already proven in court numerous times in different countries. It can definately hold up. I don't care that there are two big IP lawyers. Especialy when you keep in mind the fact that IP has less chance of holding up. IP laywers don't like copyleft for a reason.
Nothing got disproven with that useless article. That, together with you post, will not make an impact at how FLOSS advocates look at the license and it sure as well will not stop them slow them down or even irritate.
Resistance is futile, proprietary pussy.
Here be signatures
The point of the GPL was that it was very simple and broad-sweeping. Naturally this does make it vulnerable to attack in the sense that the legal system might feel threatened by the massive impact of such a game-changing license; copyleft practically redefines IP law in a way that those in the legal institution (eg lawyers, judges, lawmakers, and the business interests that pay for them) don't acknowledge, understand, or otherwise feel comfortable with because they don't feel in control. All it takes is a mere technicality to disqualify the GPL from functioning at all, and the Free Software community is justifiably anxious about that, but the GPL has been successfully upheld in court time and time again, so I wouldn't worry.
At this point there should be no doubt of the legal soundness of any version of the GPL, but it all boils down to a matter of principle. If a society believes in Free Software, then the GPL's legal application is perfectly simple and valid. To those hostile to freedom in the society, then the application of the GPL becomes something artificially difficult/problematic.
If Richard Stallman wanted to help open source, he would resign from the FSF.
RMS doesn't give a crap about open source. He advocates Free Software.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The GPLv2 author's "intent" is irrelevant in court.
To the extent that a word has not been specifically defined within the license, its common legal meaning will prevail.
The reason is that the license is intended to inform the potential licensee of his rights and restrictions before he agrees to it. If the "intent" was not clearly stated in the license and courts allowed it to apply anyway, the licensee's rights would be violated since he did not know what he was agreeing to.
You went with BSD because you were willing to make a no-strings-attached gift of your software to everyone. Had you not been willing to do that, you would have found a license that did acceptably what you had wanted from GPL2.
For many of us, sharing-with-rules is more attractive than gift. This is especially true for business, because sharing-with-rules admits the potential for dual licensing. This is one of the few ways to carry out Open Source business that actually works.
GPL vs. BSD is essentially a matter of business (or non-business) strategy. You pick the rules that work for you, and then you pick a license.
Bruce Perens.
Yet the US courts are where the majority of this issue will be argued. Even I, as a Rightpondian, can see the sense in that. Chill. Not everything is a calculated insult to your national sovereignty.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
No you didn't. I didn't compose an open source song, and that guy over there didn't make open source blueberry jam.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think/hope you mean among the non-vocal majority who actually like him :) Stallman has done a HELL OF A LOT for the IT industry, and ethical/free software in general. Lately there seems to be a vocal group out to generate hate towards him, but I like to think his record still more than negates their pitiful smear campaign.
That said...
lol. We must have met different people. I like what Stallman's done, but trying to have a conversation with him was like trying to swap stories with the loudspeakers at a rock concert --- I mostly just felt like my ears were bleeding and I had to get away ;)
These are lawyers talking about a possible flaw in a legal document.
It's like a coder talking about a bug in a C program. You can say to yourself "Oh, that coder's just causing trouble. There's no real bug" - but that doesn't change the reality that the compiled program will do just what the C instructions tell it to do - nothing more, nothing less. (Well, except that a legal document is interpreted more subjectively - if the document is not written very precisely then different readers may interpret it differently... This is why we live in a world of "legalese" - it sounds arcane and needlessly complicated to non-lawyers but that's just because non-lawyers haven't learned the terminology and practice of precisely phrasing a legal document and guarding against the various rules which may be in effect "by default"...)
We have to be realistic about this - there have been some GPL-related court cases in which the GPL was upheld, but there are also issues surrounding the license, as well as how those are likely to play out in actual court cases, which may be unresolved or unfavorable to people who value software freedom. If one hopes to fix the problem, then one has to be realistic about where and what the problem is. We have a certain set of goals when we license something under the GPL - if we want to actually achieve those goals, we have to do our best to make sure the GPL is legally sound.
The problem of what constitutes a derivative work is one that I've heard before... The problem is that what you or I might consider a GPL violation could in fact be a very small piece of GPL code pulled into a very large non-GPL project. It's difficult to call that a "derived work" of the GPL'ed project. It's using GPLed code but the project as a whole may very well not be "derived" in a real sense from that GPLed work. If the project is big and the bit of borrowed GPL code is small, courts may not take the offense seriously. I don't know if this is something that can be solved with a better license, or if the kind of protection the GPL demands is beyond the scope of copyright... Anyway, it seems like a problem. Even if we want to tell people "you can't reuse parts of this code in other projects unless those projects are GPLed, too", we may not be able to rely upon that demand being fully effective...
Finally, it's worth emphasizing that law is not a static thing. It's a set of agreements between people subject to interpretation and alteration by people. Saying "it works and it doesn't need to change" may not be realistic. If people are working to undermine the GPL, then other people must work to reinforce and improve the license, if it is to be viable in the future. Basically, if the GPL matters to you then you need to fight for it.
Bow-ties are cool.
Why shouldn't they get the source code to a program they are using, even if it is over SSH? Isn't that the whole point of the Open source and the GPL. Software authors granting the same rights they enjoy to their users? When did having the program you're using running on your own computer become a prerequisite for obtaining GPL rights?
May the Maths Be with you!
If you borrow the phrase 'derivative work', which is defined by copyright laws, and then the definition of 'derivative work' is changed in the copyright laws, does that mean the definition in the GPLv2 has also changed?
It doesn't matter how you word it, when the legal definition of the words you use change, what they mean in the license will change. You have to use words that have legal meaning to write your license, if the legal meaning of those words changes, the meaning of your license will change.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The article essentially says that the terminology used needs more rigorous definition, and needs to match more closely with the existing legal terminology.
The article also says, "This marks one of the core questions of GPLv2: Is it based on copyright or is it a contract that, while borrowing some copyright terms, ultimately stands on its own?", which is so bizzare that it makes me question the whole thing.
I have no idea why anyone who knows anything about contract law or the GPL would ask this question. The GPL involves no consideration (payment) and therefore is not a contract in any jurisdiction governed by Common Law. The GPL further depends explicitly on the software author's copyright for its legal force.
So why exactly would anyone think this is a "core question of GPLv2"? A core question of clueless jurnos writing far outside their comfort zone, maybe. But not a question anyone who wasn't that profoundly ignorant would ask.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
No open source licence of any kind has ever put restrictions on the output of a program or of code. If he uses your code to make illustrations, those are his illustrations, as if they were drawn by hand, and he can do with or licence them as he pleases. If this wasn't the case, then every picture ever made with the GIMP would be GPL'd!
May the Maths Be with you!
Oh I don't know....GPL V2 has been in and out of the court all over in Europe.
Most settle without a hitch.
Some, need to have it explained in front of a judge.
This guy doesn't know what he is talking about, and if the GPLv2 was unsound legally, it would have long been over turned.
GPLv2 even scares Microsoft's lawyers.
The guy just wants attention.
Send him a cookie.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
The licensee has no rights whatsoever, except the rights received from copyright law.
Er, I think you have that backwards, but it's a common mistake, usually made by big media companies and their **AA agencies. Licensees have every right to copyright works except those rights specifically withheld by copyright law.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I wish you could convince the US Congress of that, so that they'd overturn the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which is about restricting what you can do with a work.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I don't understand your point. It is open source. The source code is in latex format. Latex is a Turing-complete programming language, which people use as a format for writing documents. You can download the source code of my book here (scroll down to the bottom of the page). The source code is under a copyleft license (CC-BY-SA). So I would say that that makes the book an open-source book by any reasonable definition of open source.
Find free books.