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Pushing Back Against Licensing and the Permission Culture
kthreadd writes "Luis Villa has an interesting discussion on the topic of not licensing at all, what he calls POSS or Post Open Source Software. With a flood of new hackers flocking to places like GitHub which doesn't impose any particular requirements for hosted projects, the future of Open Source may very well be diminishing. Skip licensing, just commit to GitHub. What legal ramifications will this have on the free and open source community going forward?"
From the article: "If some 'no license' sharing is a quiet rejection of the permission culture, the lawyer’s solution (make everyone use a license, for their own good!) starts to look bad. This is because once an author has used a standard license, their immediate interests are protected – but the political content of not choosing a license is lost. Or to put it another way: if license authors get their wish, and everyone uses a license for all content, then, to the casual observer, it looks like everyone accepts the permission culture. This could make it harder to change that culture — to change the defaults — in the long run. So how might we preserve the content of the political speech against the permission culture, while also allowing for use in that same, actually-existing permission culture?"
younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. fuck the license and governance, just commit to github. - James Governor (@monkchips) September 17, 2012
Ah, yes, eloquently stated. And, you know, it's totally okay to do that but let's assume that you've "fucked" the license and governance and your code is great and popular. Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes to it and shipping that code for mad moneys? What forces them to give back their changes that might make that code better? What did you and the community gain by contributing to that company's revenue? What if I just took your code and put it on a CD and started selling it with no credit to you and no link or reference to the source code? Wouldn't that rub you the wrong way? Just a little? Well, what if that company then claimed that your code was an unlicensed version of their code and moved to have it remove?
And that's why we have open source licenses. So those are out there and if you're lazy or whatever you can just download this file (or the corresponding OSS license you like) and put it in the root directory of your source tree. Are you really too lazy to include a simple txt file in your source tree? At the possible expense of your $MOST_HATED_COMPANY turning the screws on you?
This article seems to focus on just the "hey browski, I heard you liked code, here's my code" hippy hacker mentality and grievously ignores the "did Facebook just use an altered version of my library to track its mobile users?" possibilities.
To follow the analogy started by the twitter post: OSS licenses are like a condoms. Stop being lazy and just use one.
My work here is dung.
if there is no license than someone can take the work, use it for their own product, make money and not give anything back
once this happens, what is the point of making a piece of software better?
From TFA:
the open license ecosystem assumes that sharing can’t (or even shouldn’t) happen without explicit permission in the form of licenses.
This is because our legal system makes this assumption. Wishful thinking does not make laws go away. If you release software with no license, then it is legally presumed to have full copyright protection. You need to explicitly give up your rights.
The point of F/OSS licensing is to use copyright and license terms against the commercial software makers who presently hold a very tight and expensive control over business, government and individuals.
It doesn't make anyone "look bad" and even enables them to take from the unlicensed software pool and take it private.
As long as we get to call it GNU/PFLOSS I'm sure it'll be fine
In a world without copyright laws that would be feasible. But we don't, and it isn't. Commit code with no license and legally nobody is allowed to distribute your software. No company will ever willingly use your code, even if it does something unique and useful.
Grow up you hippie and accept that you have to learn something about laws before you interact with society.
By default all code that does not have a license is "all rights reserved" http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/github-needs-take-open-source-seriously-208046
This sounds like an ugly legal minefield. At best, no-license code is so trivial as to be worthless; at worst, it's a lawsuit and complete economic ruin for some people. It's certainly better in today's legal environment to educate yourself and license your code. Do your due diligence, don't be a lazy bum.
I am sure some lawyer's career (and his yachts) are just waiting to be made here.
I wish I could smoke crack and have other people pay for viewing ads at my place... this is fucked up and unless the code is posted as public domain, there is an implicit license that exists.
Perhaps one of our resident "IAAL"s can clarify this, but in the absence of an explicit license, doesn't copyright still apply to a code snippet by default? So rejecting the use of the GPL or other FOSS doesn't mean just any corporate asshat can come along and steal your work - Quite the opposite, it means no one can legally use your code.
Which works out perfectly for the hobbyist coders - including these so-called "POSS" coders - who really don't give a damn about who "owns" a given code snippet. As the only real down side, such an approach makes it impossible for a company like RedHat to contribute to the community by improving that code, because without some sort of explicit license, no sane company will touch it ("Yeah, that Windows 9 thing you guys wrote? It counts as a derivative work of MyFirstPokerApp, thanks for giving me that private Caribbean island I always wanted, Redmond!"). But the original author still very much enjoys the protection of copyright-by-default, at least in the US.
FOSS is as much, or more, about your rights as a user of software.
The "No License" scheme give users no legal rights, just a vague "We probably won't sue you" pseudo-right. Yeah. Good luck with that.
Hard to believe Luis Villa is. What no paralegal to do the leg work?
This article shows a lot of ignorance of how copyright law works. Whether or not you agree with copyright law is irrelevant. Code that is simply posted to github is not by default in the public domain. Copyright is granted implicitly.
It's not possible for code that is not licensed to be used in any way by proprietary or open source projects. That's just not how copyright law currently works. Unless you grant a user specific rights to use the code, copyright law currently does not allow someone else to legally use the code in any derivative way.
Having well-defined license such as the GPL keep source code free. They project all of us. A proliferation of unlicensed Git code is ultimately harmful for everyone in the entire industry because it muddies the waters and puts companies and open source projects in legal jeopardy. It also dilutes the ability of open source code to enforce it's openness with those who would abuse it. Saying "screw it just post code, crappy or not" also dilutes the quality of code that people perceive in open source projects.
Maybe this is where things are heading, but it's not good for anyone, and certainly not legal with our current laws. The only way this would work is if github forced a poster to state whether or not the code was in the public domain. If not and no license was declared, github should put up a big warning, say you cannot legally fork and use the code since the author claims exclusive copyrights.
One very good reason to use a license is its liability disclaimer. If you release your software without one, there is always the danger that some idiot will find a way to use it in such a way as to remove all his files, consequently suing you for damages. With the astronomical costs of litigation in the US, a lawsuit, whether you win it or not, is a financial death sentence. It is worthwhile to take every measure you can to defend yourself from this.
Legally this is problematic, as without a license, nobody has any permission to distribute the software. Github can, certainly, as the author gave permission explicitly, but copyright is "default-deny" - there's no distribution permitted without explicit permission.
So, an eeebil corporation (or anyone else) can't take your work at all. They'd be in the wrong if they did. Similarly, if you took the work, changed it, and redistributed it, you'd also be in the wrong. Plain copyright applies unless overridden.
You really should throw a licenses on there. Even if it's a no-restrictions/no attribution/creative commons license that says you can do whatever you want with the code. (There are plenty out there. Just find one and slap it on)
Why? Because you never know when someone will take your code, use it, copyright it, then sue you for using the code you wrote yourself in the first place.
It has happened before. Just go look up the old AT&T/BSD lawsuits.
If nothing, just do it to cover your ass in the event some faceless corp wants to ruin your life for creating a free tool or library. Or hey, maybe you don't want your code to end up something you find abhorrent like weapons, censorship systems, or reality TV.
Use a license that pokes fun at the concept of licensing: the WTFPL (the DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE).
Seriously though, to change this "permission culture" thing, you need to get ahead of the intellectual property movement by starting a "right to think" movement. It won't be long (historically speaking) before computers and networks access is weaved into every tool we use--if not the human brain itself.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Here's what I read....
Blah, blah, blah....blah, blah....Open Source....blah, blah, blah, Blah...(cont)...
Why does Slashdot continue to post daily news about the "Open Source" movement. Most of us don't care about Open Source. At all. Please stop.
If you think your personal making-a-statement against "permission culture" is more important than the practical ability of others (including distributors) to use the code you produce without exposing themselves to legal risk, then you're part of the "permission culture" - you feel entitled to deny others permission to use your work.
If you want to make a responsible statement against "permission culture", release your work into the public domain, and include a one-clause BSD license for use in jurisdictions that don't recognize public domain.
There's an interesting hack you can do against unlicensed / unattributed code. Slap your name on it, now tell github to stop violating your copyright and remove "your" code from their server that someone else stole and uploaded. After all, the original author didn't care enough about his work to put a license on it, so you have a minor moral and ethical permission to take it as yours, after all, its abandonware, and if you no longer want your code distributed on github, well...
I imagine the trial would be hilarious.
"He stole my code and deleted it from my github account"
"its not the plaintiffs code, the only known licensed version of it in the whole world is from the defendant. The plaintiff himself repeatedly stated the code he was publishing was not licensed, our position is the plaintiff stole the defendant's code, deleted the copyright and license from the headers, and uploaded it to his pirating account, which we shut down"
"..."
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Licensing is all about protecting the creator of the work. It can lay down explicit allowances for the consumer, but make no bones about it, they are not there for you the user. Regardless of how software is licensed there needs to be some protections for the consumer. Things have gotten absolutely ridiculous. How about regulation that enshrines: 1) Separation of hardware and software in all devices. Both from the "bundling" standpoint as well as the right to move software without permission or notification to the author 2) Rights to privacy of the consumer (i.e. once money has changed hands, I have the right to refuse your software from sending/receiving ANYTHING from/to the internet and still have my software function properly) 3) Similar to 2 but deserves distinction... the right to use software anonymously i.e. compulsory registration and named user licensing are gone. 4) Enshrine 1 license 1 (unnamed) user as the defacto law of licensing. In other words, no limiting HOW I use your software and as long as it is only a single use at time, legalities should be met. I may think of a use that no one ever imagined before.
I understand developers want to protect their work. But their right to protection ends at using their software as a reporting tool to my network or computers inner workings.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes to it and shipping that code for mad moneys?
Their legal department. Without a more permissive license, they're stuck with default copyright terms (no copying except for narrow "fair use" exceptions) so they can't distribute it. Ethical companies wont touch it, unethical ones would have no qualms about pirating BSD/MIT/GPL/whatever licensed code anyway, and the hackers and hippies don't care about licenses will use it and carry on not caring about licenses.
Sorry I should have been more clear. What you're talking about is the permission culture (you need permission to use our code). I was making the argument under the assumption that by committing unlicensed code not everyone needs permission to use it. From the article:
In other words, those people choose not to use a license because, on some level, they reject the permission culture and want to go back to the pre-1976 defaults. In this case, publishing without a license is in some way a political statement – “not every use should need permission”.
Therefore my discussion was formed using the pre-1976 defaults. Which the article also covered:
In the US, prior to the 1976 Copyright Act, you had to take affirmative steps to get a protectable copyright. In other words, you could publish something and expect others to be able to legally reuse it, without slapping a license on it first.
So yeah you're right the current premise is post 1976 Copyright Act but I was talking about what it would be like without using an OSS license and pre-1976 like the article presupposes.
My work here is dung.
Read the GitHub EULA. They do not currently claim ownership of uploaded content. However, they claim the right to modify the agreement: " GitHub reserves the right at any time and from time to time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, the Service (or any part thereof) with or without notice. ... GitHub shall not be liable to you or to any third party for any modification, price change, suspension or discontinuance of the Service.
A classic example of a formerly open database becoming closed is CDDB, the track list database for audio CDs. Once open source, the current owner, GraceNote, doesn't even allow clients other than their own, and inserts ads. Another example is Google's takeover of the historical netnews database and closing it to full downloads.
To avoid that, it's important that creators limit the rights that some service gets merely by hosting the content. A service like GitHub could claim that as soon as someone else makes a check-in, the aggregated content becomes theirs. The GPL, which covers derived works, prevents that.
The author finally put in print that open source has a political posture. Sadly, in America the right wing has locked on to the false notion that capitalism and freedom are welded at the hip and that anything that resists the spread of rabidly, aggressive capitalism is fishy, perhaps socialist, and perhaps even communist. That is a gimmick designed to crush open source.
It does not seem to dawn on many people that some people just do not want to sell out to the system, bow down. and worship money. That does not make them communists. It might make them a follower of people like Christ, Buddha or Lao Tse. All of those gentlemen would not be friends of capitalism at all. Matter of fact capitalism and Islam are in opposition as well.
And just to add, as a commercial ISV why would I ever in a million years either donate code/work to your code base when I have no reason to believe I'm even allowed to use it or that it will continue to be available to me in the future, or that my competitors won't just skeef that code and use it to beat me in the market. Anyone who thinks "POSS" means jack seems full of it to me. If you can't be bothered to find a license you can live with and expect the rest of us to just hope we won't be screwed or walked all over you are going to be sadly disappointed. FOSS is about everyone giving back, those licenses exist for a reason. You're not doing business with me without I get their protection, and for every project out there there are a lot of alternatives. IMHO the OSS licensed ones will prevail.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I've had enough of the permission culture.
Humans are free to give away or sell that which they own or create. There is nothing magic about software- when people create software, they are free to distribute it in whatever way seems appropriate.
Where does this idiocy about 'free software' and 'licenses' come from? Tribal thinking. Pseudo religious philosophies.
Some nutcase sets himself up as the 'guru' of the 'open source' movement. Weak minded Humans, in mortal fear of thinking for themselves, keep turning to this self-created 'leader' for guidance. "Is your free software PURE or TAINTED" this guru asks, and all the weak-minded dribblers that follow their master run around in circles saying "it must be pure, it must be pure".
People who create software for free distribution are the only ones who get to have an opinion on the license they choose. They want 'no strings', they say 'no strings'. They want restrictions so horrid that potential users are better off using commercial options, so be it.
In the end, even a little investigation shows that the 'free' software movement splits into two parts.
1) no strings software produced for the satisfaction of coding- gifted to the rest of Humanity
2) vile, political, 'open source' software designed to grow a tribal movement with profoundly religious overtones. People that touch this software, and attempt to make money from it, are frequently "burnt as heretics" even when they try to follow the license. This is by intent. It mirrors Christians hated by other Christians because they do something like use the 'wrong' version of 'The Lord's Prayer'.
Some 'open source' software appears to fall between 1) and 2), with nonsense about 'dynamic' vs 'static' linking, and its ability to require other software that touches it to have to be made 'PURE' as well.
The gurus of open-source are both bad and mad. Their followers are often quite sane and reasonable, and think their 'religion' can be run in a way that is a positive contribution to computer science. Ordinary programmers seeking to benefit from the freely provided code of others simply navigate around the vile looniness of the gurus.
Anyway, large open-source projects, with many individual contributors, produce code of the lowest possible standard. Consider Firefox. Not one of its programmers has the faintest understanding of memory management, appropriate data structures or efficient algorithms. FF only works because it runs on insanely powerful PCs with insanely large RAM pools. My point is that the official 'Church of Open-Source' does nothing of real value when its ambitions run beyond a modest library, or a project in the hands of more than a handful of people.
Dribble about 'permission culture' is the kind of cretinous rubbish written by third rate hacks for those American magazines that Yanks actually consider valuable. The art of spewing words about a subject the author knows nothing about, and certainly doesn't have the brains to understand, with a real chance of winning a Pulitzer Prize, or a Hollywood script-writing gig.
is called "public domain."
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Isn't the basic BSD license essentially the same as completely permissive? Anyone can borrow the code, do whatever they want, and not flow back changes. Yet the code is still licensed.
The author mentions that most people think personal use copying is ok.
I would say the same is true of companies, but only for open source, for some reason.
Companies often download open source, modify the software, copy the modified software among hundreds of people, demonstrate the modified software publicly, then say they will release the software when the product is released.
But, there was no copyright or licence that granted the internal copies of the modified software, as the modifications were not published.
If a company used evaluation copies of Windows, internally, copying to hundreds of developers, then demonstrated something publicly obviously on an evaluation copy of windows, what would happen?
Side rant: Often "viral" is mentioned in FUD concerning Open Source, but one should note that regular copyright is also "viral", in the sense that if you make a derivative copy of commercial software (or writing or music ...), you are still bound my the copyright/license of the original work.
Recommended reading: Copyfree is not quite the Public Domain .
In the ideal world there would be no problems with releasing software without any legal notice, or explicitly as "public domain". The present-day legal systems, however, are very far from ideal. Some governments don't recognize the concept of "public domain", and the developers / users of such software can run into all sorts of difficulties with the way their businesses are regulated. Some governments also have certain silly "implicit warranty" laws: if you give away software and that software eats someone's data (or has security holes, or any other issue), they may be able to sue you!
Many businesses (especially small businesses / independent developers) cannot understand all the details of how this would affect them without paying for a legal consultation ahead of time, which results in a significant "chilling effect". People avoid software that presents legal ambiguities, which applies not just to "public domain" software but to GPL and other long-winded restrictive licenses.
A clear solution to this is to only use copyfree licenses, like the new BSD license, MIT/X, ISC, CC0, OWL, etc. These licenses essentially say: "do what you want, just don't sue me, and don't pretend you wrote it". That's the very essence of free software! Attaching further restrictions, even when well-intentioned, always does more harm than good. The gradual success of copyfree software is powerful evidence that copyleft restrictions are not necessary, and there is much evidence of them causing a great deal of harm.
I highly recommend for everyone to listen to this interview with D Richard Hipp (bsd-talk podcast #194). He is the author of SQLite, which is one of the most widely-used pieces of software ever developed! In that interview he talks about why he chose to release his latest project under the BSD license. Hipp tells of his attempt to give away SQLite as "public domain", and how some governments make even that seemingly simple prospect very inconvenient. He also mentions how SQLite was originally forced into GPL for dependency issues, and how inconvenient that was - he had to rewrite those components from scratch in order to make his software useful...
--libman
I wrote it, if you don't like my license text, write the code yourself.
License your code under a free software license. Preferably GPL or another copyleft license which is compatible with the GPL.
like most of us i've self-published a bunch of crap in the past fifteen years or so,
ranging from music CDs in actual stores to numerous personal software components,
and i've intentionally kept them bare of any licensing information for two reasons:
1. as a small protest against the permission culture.
2. i feel that incorporating the permission culture into the creative work cheapens the work.
when folks have re-purposed my work (that i know of), they've always asked first and have always offered to include attribution.
Nothing. So what? Seems like it'd be good for the economy.
Nothing. So what? Why do you assume it is appropriate that I force anyone into anything?
If the community did gain something, perhaps a healthier company, better security for its employees, or whatever, good. But there was no intent for that either, so if not, meh. The point is simple: I wrote some stuff, here it is, bye, going to write some more stuff now.
What if you did? I wouldn't get my 15 minutes on "Oprah" or something? I don't need your approval or adulation... how about that? And if you benefit, that's great. I hope you do.
The day it shows up on the net and the day that functionality shows up in their software should trivially prevent that kind of claim, but if they did, then I'd probably pull it just to avoid any contact with lawyers, frankly. it wasn't there to earn money, or fame, and so removing it isn't any kind of a load. I kind of think this is a situation almost no one would ever see. It's too obvious that the company is making a false claim just based on the usual array of "memories" the network has, from wayback machine like entities to caches and logs and etc. Could it happen? Sure. But if you're not looking for fame and fortune, really, so what. Having said that, I've got a lot of code out there with no license. A database, auroral prediction engines, NWS data interpolators, etc.; and I've other code that's straight up trade secret: no license, but no code released. SDR software, etc. It's never happened to me. I don't worry that it will, and I see no particular serious ill effect if it did. I see *far* more damage if I stick some license on there like the GPL and thereby throw a monkey wrench into progress for someone else. Lastly, what's to stop them from doing this even if you had, say, the GPL stuck on your code? If they're going to lie, they're going to lie. At that point, you're back to lawyers and court, and you can go there alone as far as I'm concerned. Every day not spent in a courtroom or a lawyer's office is a better day from my perspective.
Licenses exist because lawyers are like parasitic cockroaches, which have infiltrated every aspect of your life. Between that and the "I wanna be famous" thing, people become natural victims; and in the process, with many of these licenses (GPL, I'm looking at you), they prevent their code from doing the most it can in the most hands it could. If the author is happy with that, fine. But some of us just want to write code sometimes, and public domain or "throw it in the air and see where it comes down" is perfectly fine for those projects.
Me, I'm really tired of both patent and copyright sewers. While I recognize the law and behave from my side of it -- no pirating, no violating licenses -- I"m just tired and I no longer want to engage in ownership tizzies on the creative side. As far as I can tell, it's done us no better in any case than a trade secret would have, and its done us far worse in many cases -- the amount of time and money spent on the copyright and patent system with participants trying to eat each other alive in court is nothing short of a tragedy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The original poster works on "gitweb", yet another web interface to git that sucks and is a complete waste of eveyone's time, and LISP. LISP is the source of so many, many, many bad programming practices it's genuinely frightening. I've worked with any number of LISP proponents, and the only ones who were any good were a rare genius like Richard Stallman. This guy.... is not one of those.
No, copyright prevents that. Copyright cannot be assigned or transferred implicitly. It requires an explicit signed assignment or work-for-hire status for a party other than the author to claim copyright.
The place where that idea breaks is what broke that idea in the first place (and why GNU and all the gang came about). Crazy old Richard Stallman was one of the kids you described (POSS). He and his buddies wrote software 'just to give away'. He had a good job at the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, and so they shared libraries and software and all was grand. Then a company came along, took all of the software they had created, copyrighted it, and then charged all of them for it. Guys had to pay for software they themselves had created, and they weren't compensated in any way from the company. When they tried ignoring the company and kept sharing, a few got sued by the company (and the judge looked at who copyrighted the software, not who wrote it). It was a shitty deal, and why crazy old Stallman created GNU and the GPL (who suddenly doesn't look so crazy). Those who fail to learn from history are destined to repeat it. Post software without a license, but don't be surprised when nasty companies (Who are solely interested in stealing and making money) come along and steal and make money. You have all been warned.
1. Release code with no license (i.e. it is copyrighted by default).
2. Wait for someone to copy it.
3. Hire copyright troll attorney.
4. Profit!!
While GitHub COULD close uploads in the future, all past uploads still remain under copyright, which isn't owned by Github. Git COULD also change the TOS to say "we own everything that is uploaded." And if you agree to it, then everything you upload AFTER the change is owned by git. Everything before is still owned by the people who created it.
Afterall, Github's been proven to be a utopia of wise, well-informed developers who know exactly what best practices are w.r.t. releasing files into the wild