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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"
So, I actually count myself among the few that like Richard Stallman. I've met him, and he's a nice guy. But does anyone recall the furor over GPLv3 when it first came out, & some of the new provisions? This caused a lot of projects to stick with v2.
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.
~dijjnn
That is a lost cause, even though I've heard some fancy legal theories on how they could relicense Linux without getting either approval or ripping out that code from those not actively approving. Even though they might possibly work in a few jurisdictions I doubt they work in all or even most countries of the world, it'd make Linux a copyright minefield.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Because the GPLv2 is abandonware. If FSF wants to pick it up and spin a GPLv2.1 and an LGPLv2.1 off the GPLv2 branch, then maybe it would be a viable license. As it stands, as legal flaws are found in the license, your only choices are to move up to GPLv3 and accept all the baggage that comes with it, convince your developer community to all sign over copyright, or convince your developer community to all agree to a license change to a BSD or MIT license after the fact. Good luck with that.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This is a real issue. For instance, I wrote a physics textbook, which is open-source, and I wrote a bunch of ruby and latex code that helps to produce the pdf from the latex sources, automatically handling some things relating to placement of figures on the page that are awkward to do with plain latex. My book, including the ruby and latex code, is under CC-BY-SA. I got an email from a guy at MSU who was writing a textbook, and had already started using my code to handle the illustrations. He wanted to check whether it was okay under the license, since he didn't intend to release his own book under a CC license. Well, my answer ended up being that I really didn't know whether it was okay or not. It wasn't clear to me whether his work counted as a derived work. On the one hand, you could say that what he was using was simply some software I wrote, so his book isn't a derived work based on my software any more than a book written in MS Word is a derived work based on Word. On the other hand, there's really no perfect separation between the software and our books. When you write a book in latex, the latex code *is* a piece of software. My code generates various boilerplate in its output, some of which is text that is visible to the reader, so it's under my copyright and license. Of course I could have just told him that it wasn't an issue, and I wouldn't sue him, but I had intentionally chosen the strong copyleft because that's what I wanted. I suspect that a lawyer would tell him his work was actually not a derived work, but I also suspect that he (and his eventual publisher) wouldn't even want to get into that issue.
Although the issue is real, it seems goofy to me to suggest GPLv3 as the fix for the problem. First off, there are huge philosophical differences between v2 and v3. Also, there is so much GPL v2 code out there that you can't necessarily just relicense under GPL v3 without causing yourself hassles with license incompatibilities. I also don't quite understand how they think they can bypass the fact that various countries have various inconsistent and ambiguous definitions of a derived work. The only thing that forces anyone to accept the GPL license attached to a work is that copyright law doesn't allow them to do certain things without a license from the author. Those things include (1) copying and redistributing the work, and (2) creating and distributing derived works from it.
Find free books.
It's not like they've determined there's some fundimental legal principle which brings the whole thing crashing down, as you see in EULAs for example.
Right. Which strikes me as interesting that they'd suggest "upgrading" from a distribution license (GPLv2) to a EULA (AGPLv3). Remember, if you have an in-house branch of an AGPLv3 package, and you let a customer SSH in to run it, then you have to grant them full rights to your changes (even though you haven't distributed it). I dig RMS and I love the GPL, but I hate that derivative abomination.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
GPL2 is not about to become invalid. But consider all of the changes we have gone through since GPL2 came out. Back then, the most complicated input device that people were likely to have in their homes was a touch-tone phone. Music came from phonograph records and cassette tape. The "@" sign was a little-used oddity on the typewriter keyboard for most people. Home computers were more the exception than the rule, and their CPUs used 16-bit addresses.
With the advent of consumer digital media we got a ton of law, both legislative and case law. Garbage legislation like ECPA and then DMCA, and a great increase in software patenting. All of that law essentially blind-sided the GPL, which had to cope with it but was not written with knowledge of it.
So, a license upgrade to deal with all of this is like installing a security patch on your operating system. It's just a sensible thing to do.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
In the past, I never really cared too much about the details of open-source licences, but with every decision being driven now by lawyers, I can no longer ignore them. The main problem with the GPL, as I understand it, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand. The individual clauses are completely unambiguous, but once you have over a certain number they seem to have a habit of cross-infecting, so they become a bean-feast for litigators.
So we tend to be left with a situation where if we want to make any money out of our software, we have to write or clone a commercial agreement. Whereas if we actually want to offer a truly open piece of work, a BSD licence has the advantage of being unambiguous, easily comprehensible and short.
As it stands, as legal flaws are found in the license, your only choices are...
Or live with it. The problem they bring up is that "derivative work" is not well defined. So worst case scenario, some edge cases that may or may not be ruled "derivative works" may or may not be bound by the license.
So what? Without some real examples of what might be problematic it's hard to tell how important these issues are. And chances are some of these issues have been dealt with already (see the GPL linking exception).
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
The problem is that all versions of the GPL have governed distribution, and they're on solid ground with copyright law. Basically, they grant you additional distribution rights above and beyond what you'd normally be allowed as long as you comply with certain restrictions. End users don't even have to agree to the GPL to use software so licensed because usage isn't governed by copyright. The GPLv3 (and the AGPLv3, confusingly enough) even explicitly states this:
Contrast with the AGPL which seeks to control how you run the software by adding:
So, there are new limits to how I can modify the software that have never existed in any prior FSF license. If I start with a GPLv3 library and only want to use one function, then I'm allowed to do that. Not so under the AGPLv3! Taken to the extreme, imagine that Linux was relicensed under the AGPLv3. If you host a Linux server, then you have to offer copies of the Linux kernel (which holds the networking code) to any client that connects to it. Wouldn't that be fun to comply with?
When did having the program you're using running on your own computer become a prerequisite for obtaining GPL rights?
When the GPL was written as a distribution license.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Except that this is a story about a "web conference hosted by the license-sniffing firm Black Duck software". Blackduck is hardly going to allow any criticism of its partner, Microsoft, nor allow its major thorn, the GPL, to go unmolested. Go re-read plaintiff's exhibit 3096 about stacking conference panels. Even without a sock puppet organizing the conference, M$ has a prolific history now of interfering with and shutting down conferences on competing (that's everything by the way) technologies.
"So you want to love those conferences to death. I've killed at least two Mac conferences. First there was the Mac App Developers Conference. I was on the Board of Directors of the Mac App Developers Association long ago, and after I left I worked to try to turn it into a cross- platform developers conference, and I did. I managed to make their last conference was very cross-platformn, both Windows and Macintosh, which of course turned off their Macintosh audience; half of the conference was irrelevant to them. They didn't care about Windows. They were a bunch of Mac guys. Which diluted the value of the conference. And they didn't know how to advertise the Windows guys when the Windows guys showed up. So they lost money that year and the group folded. Oh, well. One less channel of communication that Apple canuse to reach its developers." Plaintiff's Exhibit 2456, Comes v MicrosoftWhen you're dealing with Microsoft, you're dealing with cockroaches. Get over it.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I wonder who pays these gentlemen.
If you had read the summary you'd see they work for the OSI and the Linux Foundation. Hardly organizations that are anti-GPL, anti-FOSS or anti-Linux.
OSI was founded by people who were unhappy with the Free Software Foundation and the GPL. OSI Founder Eric S. Raymond recently said that the GPL is no longer needed.
better story: OSI attempts earth-shaking announcement about GPL to draw attention away from fact that their status as nonprofit in California is suspended. Perhaps it was due to failure to file required tax documents (for California and U.S. IRS) for many years, that issue was discussed on Bruce Peren's now-defunct site Technocrat
http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/corpdata/ShowAllList?QueryCorpNumber=C2224685
This is very petty lawyer-ing and typical misunderstandings from software EULA lawyers chasing their own tails for so many years.
GPL covers SOURCE CODE, and thru "derivative works" covers binary "performances". The whole reason we even have EULA's (End User LICENSE Agreements) is that there was one case 30 years ago where somebody argued that typing source code from a book to RAM and from the RAM to CPU was "infringement" and duplication of the work. So because of the internal machine copies needed, you have to be granted a special LICENSE to USE any kind of software (source code or binary). EULA writers have used US law's reliance on "contracts" to throw the "kitchen sink" in EULAs and call them "contracts" rather than license for use.
yes, the terms they point out have been more precisely defined since 1991. Judges respect stability and don't fall for dizzying logic like this. Judges will realize terms change and favor the UNMODIFIED document nearly every time as a matter of good faith. GPL v2 has been in heavy use unmodified for 18 years, that's incredible stability in an industry where other EULA writers reserve the right to edit/change/modify their EULAs online, without notice, and you pre-agree to the new terms you haven't even seen yet. The GPL is a legal rock, if the best they can do is mince words there's no threat at all.
The whole web-app phenomenon
No. Just... stop. Before we had web apps, we had shell apps and BBS doors and hundreds of other ways to do client/server. This is not some new thing that came along in the last few years.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Because it's like that saying if you get handed lemons, make lemonade. GPL relies on the exact same copyright law pertaining to EVERYBODY and available to EVERYBODY but turns the implementation on it's ear by giving things away in a very specific and legal manner that software companies don't like. They can't break GPL without seriously breaking the law that protects their own copyrights.