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Red Hat Changes Its Open-Source Licensing Rules (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:
When leading Linux company Red Hat announces that -- from here on out -- all new Red Hat-initiated open-source projects that use the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) or GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v2.1 licenses will be expected to supplement the license with GPL version 3 (GPLv3)'s cure commitment language, it's a big deal. Both older open-source licenses are widely used.
When the GPLv3 was released, it came with an express termination approach that offered developers the chance to cure license compliance errors. This termination policy in GPLv3 provided a way for companies to repair licensing errors and mistakes... Other companies -- CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, SAP, and SUSE -- have taken similar GPL positions... In its new position statement, Red Hat explained that the GPLv2 and LGPL, as written, has led to the belief that automatic license termination and copyright infringement claims can result from a single act of inadvertent non-compliance.
"We hope that others will also join in this endeavor," says Red Hat's senior commercial counsel, Richard Fontana, "to reassure the open source community that good faith efforts to fix noncompliance will be embraced."
ZDNet points out that the move to new licenses "doesn't apply, of course, to Linux itself. Linus Torvalds has made it abundantly clear that Linux has been, will now, and always shall be under the GPLv2."
When the GPLv3 was released, it came with an express termination approach that offered developers the chance to cure license compliance errors. This termination policy in GPLv3 provided a way for companies to repair licensing errors and mistakes... Other companies -- CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, SAP, and SUSE -- have taken similar GPL positions... In its new position statement, Red Hat explained that the GPLv2 and LGPL, as written, has led to the belief that automatic license termination and copyright infringement claims can result from a single act of inadvertent non-compliance.
"We hope that others will also join in this endeavor," says Red Hat's senior commercial counsel, Richard Fontana, "to reassure the open source community that good faith efforts to fix noncompliance will be embraced."
ZDNet points out that the move to new licenses "doesn't apply, of course, to Linux itself. Linus Torvalds has made it abundantly clear that Linux has been, will now, and always shall be under the GPLv2."
Look at the middleware offerings..... Not GPL.
My overly optimistic reaction, without having studied the details, is that other distributions will fear legal messes and will drop systemd.
Please don't anybody burst my bubble. Sigh.
I thought the GPL would not allow additional conditions and this reads like, well, an additional condition. I need Bruce to explain this to me. Where are you, Bruce?
Thank you, Vladimir. Your posts are inciteful as always.
My electric kettle comes with a 20 page instruction booklet. That doesn't make it hard to use. As much as anything it's about an organization covering it's ass with a FAQ.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Regarding Linux, Linus Torvalds' own opinion is completely irrelevant, unless you wanted to use an extremely antiquated, practically useless version of Linux from the 90s.
The actual Linux kernel code is an incredible mish-mash of thousands of contributors' code, both companies and individuals. Each passing day brings more and more copyright owners into the Linux kernel, because each person retains copyright over their individual contributions, and each day brings at least one new kernel contributor.
In order to change the copyright license of the current Linux source code, ALL of the contributors of the current version of Linux -- or their estate in case of deceased people, or the liquidator company in case of bankrupt companies -- would need to agree to the license change. Even assuming that every last contributor could be convinced to agree to change the license, there would still be logistical problems in actually contacting all of them. Deceased contributors probably have invalid email addresses on file, and likewise for contributors who sent in patches from a corporate email address and have since moved on. Just the task of contacting the legal copyright holder of every line of Linux source becomes a nearly futile task, even if you go back to a hideously old and putrid version like kernel 2.0 or 2.2.
You might think that you could discombobulate some of the "long tail" of contributors by just removing any source lines (using a Git script) that were contributed by someone not in the top 100 contributors. If you did that, you might wonder, wouldn't that leave an almost-working kernel that the top 100 contributors could then carry forward with, fixing the little one-liners that drive-by patchers gave them here and there? And then you could surely hunt down a mere 100 contributors (or their estates) and change the license -- right? Well, no.
Per this -- http://www.remword.com/kps_res... : there are 19,817 kernel contributors just since 2005 (and quite a few more before then, as Linux was indeed quite popular and noteworthy among engineers in, say, 2004; people even made a halfway decent desktop OS based on it by this time). Half the people -- 9912 to be exact -- contributed 2 or fewer patch sets, which only amounts to 1% of the total patch sets. If we assume that, on average, over a large dataset, any two patchsets are equally likely to be any given size regardless of contributor (which may or may not be a safe assumption), that still means that 1 out of every 100 lines of code in the Linux kernel would have to be independently re-written by someone else if we removed the long tail of copyright owners.
And that would only reduce your total number of contributors by _half_; you'd still have 9000-some contributors who have 3 or more patchsets to their name. I wish that site would tell us what percentage of the codebase is contributed by, say, the last 15,000 people in the list of contributors sorted by number of patchsets. It would probably be something ridiculous like 20 or 30%, meaning that if you wanted to whittle down the number of copyright holders in the kernel to about 4000, you would have to re-write (independently, without peeking) about 1 in 5 lines of code on average. Eww.
Not to mention that randomly removing lines of code (or small but important fixes) all over the codebase would create a mess that probably wouldn't compile, and once it did compile, it'd need to be heavily tested, debugged and fixed just to get it nominally working on modern hardware.
So, yes, peoples' opinions about what the license of the Linux kernel "should be" are completely and totally irrelevant. We can't remove the code from a significant number of contributors to the kernel to whittle down the list, because doing so would spark a many-year project to get the kernel back to some semblance of what it is today. And we can't contact everyone and try to get everyone to agree to a license change, because you're probably going to be sim
"Regarding Linux, Linus Torvalds' own opinion is completely irrelevant"
For the current code base, you are correct.
However, for completely new contributions, his opinion does matter.
Good luck trying to get a new feature or driver merged with a GPLv3 licence header in it ...
Oh wow, someone has a thin skin. Disagreement != trolling, in spite of what the thin skinned GPL folk think.
For new Red Hat code they produce, they can of course license it any way they like.
For pre-existing GPLv2 code, a LOT of that code is licensed "GPL, v2 or any later version". Redhat can modify that and distribute it under the "or" option - any later version.
Personally, I no longer trust Stallman enough to license my code "any later version". There's no telling what he'll put in GPLv4. Had he taken suggestions and either not pit the patent stuff in v3, or clarified that wording, I'd be comfortable with "any later version", assuming later versions would update and clarify the license, not make major changes to it.
A lot of GPL code, possibly most, is under GPLv2, which hasn't changed since 1991. Many projects, and many developers, didn't switch to v3.
You can continue to use GPLv2 and not worry about any changes in the last 27 years.
The meaning of GPLv2 is pretty simple. You could invent a borderline case, but it's not that complex. I'd be more than happy to answer any questions.
It seems Stallman purposefully left the patent wording in v3 vague, so he could claim it meant one thing, while the wording leaves open a different meaning.
I also do not recall Spider Man coercing anyone.
Why the fuck are you wasting my time? SystemD being forced on all us is like someone coming and saying everyone know has to use lighthttpd and sendmail. Now please do have your bottle of milk and let the adults talk.
I will never use GPL in any of the software I release.
Actually, due to the way copyright works, his opinion still doesn't matter for new drivers. Any new driver or component added to the Linux kernel source would be considered (necessarily) a derivative work of the Linux kernel, because it would directly reference and depend upon both the specification and the implementation of probably hundreds of internal Linux functions -- for memory management, data structures, algorithms, informing the kernel about the behavior of the driver, logging, etc. I've read a few actual copyright lawyers' publicly-released opinion about this stuff, and they all agree that because the GPL enforces its terms on anything else that's considered a derivative work of a GPL work, that code would necessarily also be under GPLv2.
So, Linus could technically speaking accept a file or driver into the Linux source tree under some other license, but then Linus would be violating the copyright license of an untold number of other Linux copyright holders, whose code he is NOT entitled to re-license or to violate the GPLv2 license of those others' code by mixing it with non-GPLv2 code in violation of the "derivative works must stay GPLv2" clause of the GPLv2. Linus would potentially be on the hook for civil damages in the US at least, and he's living and working in California for a long time (probably long enough to be a naturalized citizen), so he'd most definitely be on the hook if he distributed that code to others.
Someone who contributed one or two patches to the kernel would have a tough time convincing a judge that there's any actual copyright infringement, but someone like Greg-KH, Ingo Molnar, or pretty much any Intel, Google, Red Hat or Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) employee who contributes to the codebase, would have probably touched enough internal APIs by now that certainly they'd have a claim on something that a non-trivial module would need to use. And there are a few contributors (past and current) who very vigorously believe in a "strict" interpretation of the GPLv2 and would actually be militant about enforcing their own copyright in the kernel code.
I like the MIT license. It gives people and businesses the freedom to use my stuff.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
He might well agree with RH: do ask him if he approves of the clause, and if he'd recommend to other Linux contributors. I'm sure he'll tell you if he disapproves (;-))
davecb@spamcop.net
> You're of course welcome to remove any clause from the GPL you wish. Linus Torvalds did just that when he licensed the kernel; the "or any later version" clause is removed.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/o...
You may NOT modify the license and still call it GPL, nor use the GPL preamble.
If you grep the license, the GPL.org copy,
( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/o... )
you'll see there IS no "or any later version" grant in the license. Nothing was removed. Rather, you'll find that suggestion as an option after "END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS", under "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs". It's a suggestion on how one can use the license, and is not part of the license itself.
What does appear in the license (10) is an explanation of what if means IF a program specifies "or any later version":
--
If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
--
Note first the first word "if". If the author choose to grant "or any later", the license says that means "either that version, or any later". Either, or. As in programming, in law "or" means something very different from "and". It does not mean "comply with this version AND every later version".
You can choose to follow v2 OR v3, you aren't required to comply with the combined conditions of every later version ever produced.
So if you re-distribute some of our code that's "GPLv2 or any later version", you may follow v2, or you may follow v3, at your option. You can choose to follow both. The GPL FAQ explains this as well:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/o...
--
When a program says âoeVersion 2 of the GPL or any later versionâ, users will always be permitted to use it, and even change it, according to the terms of GPL version 2â"even after later versions of the GPL are available
--
When it says "v2 or later ... permitted to use it, and even change it, according to the terms of GPL version 2", that means they have to follow all of the conditions of GPLv2, and there are no other conditions. They may elect v2 and ignore any other versions. One of the conditions of GPLv2 is that if you distribute a modified copy, you must distribute it under GPLv2.
So for any software under "GPLv2 or later", you can choose to accept the v2 license, and distribute your modified version under the v2 license. You need not follow a version you don't even know exists, and need not distribute your changes under later versions. You must put your modifications under the same license you're using to allow you to distribute it - which can be v2 OR something else.
Here's a little additional information on how Stillman intends the "or any later version" mechanism to be used. It provides a method to slowly obsolete an old version of the license in case a major problem comes up.
Suppose version 1.0 of some software was distributed under "version 1 or later" of the GPL. Many people contribute. Some people leave the project and new people join. The new people can keep distributing the old contributions, if they follow GPLv1 OR any later version. Suppose there is a court case that potentially affects GPLv1 and a new GPLv2 license is needed, with section 7 added (the liberty or death clause).
The current members of the project can choose the "or any later version" option for new versions of the software. "Any version later than v1" of course means the same thing as "version 2 or later". The project has successfully upgraded from "version 1 or later" to "version 2 or later", simply by choosing the "or later" part of the "or".
Of course, the lawsuit isn't hypothetical, GPLv2 isn't hypothetical, and we really did add section 7. Projects did in fact switch to "v2 or later" using exactly this mechanism.
This would not have been possible if the language was "v1and every later version". It's the option of selecting either or that made the migration to v2 possible.
Can't ban people who don't log in, which is why ac posting shouldn't exist. But it's probably too late to turn it off now, since this site is so unpopular compared to its heyday. It needs the posts.
Don't be afraid to be stalked by APK. He has a pretty short attention span. If you stop saying his name he will go bother someone else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can easily reason your way to "all drivers or components must be GPL", but sometimes you have to look at what you can actually get away with. The fact is that lots of phone manufacturers distribute Linux kernels + proprietary extensions, in binary form. No one sues them, and it is unclear whether such a lawsuit would be successful, despite the rather obvious and easy-to-understand language of the GPLv2.
Similarly, you can reason that Linus Torvalds couldn't relicense Linux to anything other than GPLv2. In practice, we don't know until Linus attempts to do so and someone manages to stop him by winning in court. He has already made two major clarifications/changes (depending on how you look at them) with the declaration that userspace isn't derivative and with the whole EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL invention. Note that some developers have publicly stated that as far as they're concerned, EXPORT_SYMBOL is the same as EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL -- yet no one has (correct me if I'm wrong) been sued for making a derivative module that only touched EXPORT_SYMBOL and avoided EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I like the MIT license. It gives people and businesses the freedom to use my stuff.
I prefer it too because it allows people with different ideologies to collaborate, I'm giving it away to be used so I'm not going to impose restrictions on what you do with it or force your hand on how you license things you add to it. If you want to release your modifications that's great, if you only want to contribute some bits back that's cool, if not that's fine too.
While it's true that the Linux kernel is sticking with the GPLv2, Torvalds and many of the other copyright holders have already adopted the GPLv3's cure commitment language.
You are only stalked when you pay them the attention they do not deserve...or read their comments actually.