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APSL Violating the OSD (Round 9)

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the battle-rages-on dept.

nickm writes "Seth David Schoen of CalLUG fame has written an essay entitled The APSL and Export Controls. This goes beyond patent craziness and nit-picking about legal details but rather shows a direct violation of the OSD in that the APSL adds a bit of US law to the license (adding additional burdens for those outside the US). "

1 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Hold it! by Millennium · · Score: 4

    This cannot be considered a violation of the OSD. Let me explain why:

    You see, Apple is a US-based company, and therefore is subject to the laws of the United States. Because of this, it cannot export software into those countries, nor can it allow the software to be exported there. This goes for every entity subject to US law, I might add. Therefore, Apple is doing nothing more than reiterating the laws to which it is subject (which is in fact necessary or it would be allowing the software to be exported into those countries and therefore breaking the law).

    Now, let me state something here: this law does in fact affect all licenses for software written by US suthors. Therefore, if Apple is violating the OSD, so is every single piece of Open-Source software written by US authors, including the Linux kernel (or at least all versions written since Linus moved to the US), at least two of the *BSD's, and every single thing RMS, ESR, and Bruce Perens have ever written.

    For that matter, KDE and Gnome both violate the OSD. In an ironic twist, GTK does but Qt does not (it's not done by US authors, though some add-on widgets might be). Netscape and Mozilla do too.

    This is rather unfortunate for two three reasons. One, because the OSD does not take into account the laws of the land in which the software is written. Two, because US export law sucks. Three, because those of you who claim to be running fully-Open-Source systems actually aren't.

    My proposal: either amend the OSD so that the law can be taken into account, or renew the fight to change US export law. Both should be done, actually (the first as a temporary measure until the second can be done). The only other option is to move all Open-Source projects overseas.

    By the way, when I mean "written by a US author" I mean "maintained by a US author"; the maintainer would be considered to be the primary author and therefore (probably) the one responsible under US law.