And why not go all the way and start public domaining stuff? SQLite is public domain, for example.
Mainly because we want to be protected from patent lawsuits. It's really painful to give your stuff away with no strings and get sued for your trouble. The Apache license tries to protect you from that.
One camp basically says "I only want your sources if you distribute the software in binary form", while the other basically says, "I also want them if you run them on your servers." Over-simplified, but you get the idea.
I think it's more a matter of history. There was no SaaS when the GPL was written, or the GPL would have addressed the issue. In the first discussions leading to GPL3, way back in 2004, we were talking about addressing the "ASP problem" in GPL3, not the Affero version. Further GPL revisions stick to the basic principles of the first.
It really breaks down into "sharing is possible" and "sharing is mandiatory", and everything else is an elaboration on that theme.
The Apache-style license is a gift because a company can use the work without any quid pro quo. Obviously, much Open Source is written as part of someone's employment, whether it is BSD or GPL licensed.
Dual licensing does give some special rights to one party. In general, this one party is the main contributor, and their business purpose doesn't work without dual licensing - because they won't have a revenue stream that supports their creation of the software. A license that does not fulfill that purpose is hardly more "business friendly" than one that does.
This is not a matter of philosophy, just business sense.
The hard part is giving contributors an incentive to sign over their copyright (or at least a right to relicense). It worked for MySQL because people wanted their contributions to be in the supported version of the server, which everybody else was hacking upon. It did not work for Sun, but then again Sun handles Open Source horribly. Marten Mikos just left there, following Monty out the door.
Maybe I'll write an article about dual-licensing in the future.
I gave my particular example, which was a program written in a month of evenings that got a subsequent 5 man-year plus contribution from other developers. The primary two companies interested had a (probably misled) economic incentive to keep their work away from their competitor.
The simple fact is, that many companies do not agree with these 4 BECAUSE they do not handle every situation.
Well, if you want me to believe you, try showing how those licenses don't satisfy a particular business purpose that would be satisfied by one of the other 70. Cite the particular text of the licenses that applies to the business purpose you're interested in.
The point here is that we need to be more analytical about this issue.
So, we ended up with a modified BSD license: the standard 3-clause plus one more to address the lawyer's concerns
This is a problem. It seems that every attorney has their own fear, which they insist on writing into their own license that you must use.
But IMO the largest part of the problem is that few companies are effective at managing their own attorneys. Many technical managers feel that law is a black art and that they can only manage what they understand. Top managers with this problem tend to structure the company so that middle managers can't push back on Legal, and must do whatever Legal says. And thus, company attorneys generally get their way even on small points. A general counsel who sits on the board is even able to do this to the CEO, if the other board members aren't good at managing attorneys.
If it is imposed on the attorney that using an OSI-accepted license is important, the attorney can probably do a reality-check on their own fear. The fact that this doesn't happen is more an issue of management effectiveness than anything else.
Bruce's single "Shared with rules" license gets forked depending on the rules. GPL3 has the obvious rules, but under that heading would be the "Kinda BSD, except can't be used by the military of any country/companies that test on animals/people who eat meat/etc..."
This is why I wrote the DFSG / Open Source Definition. It provides a single name for a set of licenses that grant a particular set of privileges.
I did consider licenses that prohibit military use, and decided they were a bad idea, and the DFSG / Open Source Definition does not allow them. The license that was a bad example the time was the Berkeley SPICE license. This license was written during the period of South African Apartheid, and prohibited use of the SPICE circuit simulation software by the police of South Africa. 10 years after Apartheid was over, the license restriction was still in effect. Even though the police by that time were probably Black.
The other big prohibition to consider was Commercial Use. There were a number of "personal-use only" licenses at the time. I figured that licenses that prohibited commercial use made the software pretty useless and that it would not have effective collaboration to advance its development.
Licenses are important because they use rules to structure partnerships. We need to understand them, and how to use them. Yes, there are people who are very partisan. But just calling them zealots doesn't get at the reasons for their license, and whether those reasons make sense for you.
Obviously you need a license that matches your values.
The purpose of my article is to get you to explore those values and select a set of licenses that really match them. Some of the people who select GPL do so not for Richard's given reasons but for business purposes. I would not want to mislead them that their values demand a "gift" style license which is less effective for their particular business purpose. And making Free Software under the BSD license is not incompatible with Richard's philosophy. Remember that Richard is against software being copyrighted, and BSD licensing is pretty close to abandonment of copyright.
why shouldn't developers/publishers be allowed to use whatever license they want, and make up their own if nothing else meets their needs?
You are free to use your own license, containing whatever text you wish. The main limitations on you are 1) whether you can get anyone else to participate and 2) whether your license is effective in court. If your license requires me to sell my first born son into indenture, the court is not likely to uphold your license.
As you observe, standardization is desirable. One of the biggest goals of Open Source is to make more Open Source. You should be able to combine different Open Source programs into another new one, in a way the creators of the original pieces did not envision. To do this, the licenses must be compatible with each other. So, having everybody write their own is, in the long run, detrimental because all of those licenses will be incompatible with each other, or nobody will be able to understand if they are compatible or not.
So, I laid out one scenario in which lots of people and companies can use a minimal set of different Open Source licenses that fulfill the different purposes that people have for Open Source, and are compatible with each other. You are free to use that list, or ignore me.
Yes, forks are good. It's just funny that it's Monty behind it.
I am trying to arrive at a balance between community and company. Company in this case is me, and almost my sole occupation for half a year so far is building this software. I'm still doing some consulting to pay for it. But the bottom line is that you can always repair an error in not giving enough away, but you can't repair giving too much away, and if I blow this I could be financially ruined. The question really comes down to: is it sufficient for the community to have GPL rights forever, which they do in most dual-licensing systems, or do they need more.
No problem. But let me explain what I think the real situation is when you link BSD and GPL stuff together. Say you do so. You then continue to accept BSD-licensed modifications to your program, and operate in general as a BSD-licensed project. So that you can grant to others all of the rights that they expect from BSD-licensed software, including the right to link in software under GPL-incompatible licenses, you put a note somewhere that developers will notice. The note says "IF YOU ADD SOFTWARE UNDER A LICENSE THAT IS NOT GPL-COMPATIBLE, YOU MUST REMOVE LIBREADLINE."
This, IMO, is not a big deal for a BSD project. You can't combine GPL software with just anything, and this has not changed because the GPL software was linked with some BSD software.
The situation is different if the GPL software is a critical part of the program that can't be removed easily. But that is not libreadline. And I would not expect a BSD project to put GPL software in that role.
If you want to talk about one-sided situations, I'd point first at the situation in which proprietary software developers use BSD code without giving anything back. The GPL is intended to prevent just this sort of situation.
I am indeed responding to you. It's just that I don't believe the bullshit BSD propoganda that you are trying to push on me. It is entirely possible to distribute a command shell composed of BSD-licensed code and libreadline.
The BSD license is GPL compliant, and you can link BSD and GPL code together. It's only licenses that make restrictions that the GPL does not make which are incompatible. The problem with allowing restrictions that the GPL doesn't make is that at some point you get enough restrictions it's not Open Source / Free Software any longer. While you can trust a license to always say the same thing, OSI has not always said the same thing and doesn't promise to do so in the future. So, "any OSI approved license" could be anything at all, at some time in the future.
Previous to this netbook, I had a Sony Vaio with a Celeron 1GHz from about 2004. The netbook might be a little slower, I'm not sure. It came with 160M disk - bigger than the Sony, and 1G ram, same as the Sony. Using Debian the netbook does everything I want. I doubt this would be the case with XP or Limpus. The keyboard is big enough for my big fingers to touch-type upon, and the display is sufficient. I tend to use big fonts on it.
It didn't play HDTV video well at the full screen resolution in the one test I've done so far - I don't know if this is strictly a hardware limitation or if the Intel 945G graphics driver could be improved. Maybe DVD video, with its lower resolution, would work. Video in the smaller box generally offered by youtube and its ilk is fine.
It is, however, rather slow at building the Linux kernel, which I was only doing to optimize the netbook itself. For building my own, smaller, software, it works fine. So, using it for development is fine, using it to write documents or presentation with OpenOffice.org3 is fine, email and web are fine. I had to build a wifi driver that is out of tree, and I compiled a few drivers into the kernel that were usually modules so that the "expansion" flash card slot worked correctly. I think the other, non-expansion (because the card sticks out) flash card slot might not be working correctly yet. I just plug in a USB card reader in its place. I am running 2.6.28, which has the MTRR fix (see perens.com/blog for the MTRR discussion) and the best power management. I did some tuning with powertune.
I think this is some of what the MySQL folks are complaining about. Monty wants to fork it!!!!
I have some ideas about how to make dual licensing work better for the community. The basic problem is that they don't reliably get any commitment back from the company to whom they are turning over their work. So, I would give them an unlimited license to their own contribution, including the right to relicense, and make a covenant to continue development in Open Source for two years or remove their contribution. That would apply to my assigns as well, meaning anyone who bought the company would still have that commitment. Two years gives the community time to watch how things are working and decide to fork if necessary.
My web presence is driven mostly by an account at Dreamhost, a nice net hosting company that runs Debian and charges very little. I also have a cheap ($30/month) dedicated server at corenetworks.net also running Debian, which currently runs the one application that wouldn't work at Dreamhost because I need to run my own server on a low-numbered IP port.
There are 3 workstations in the house, and one server. The upstairs workstation that Valerie and I use, and my office workstation downstairs and the server are running Debian. There is an HP Ethernet connected scanner/printer that connects to Samba on the server for storing scans and prints using IPP from CUPS. There is an old machine running XP that is only for Quicken, and TurboTax once a year, and for the situations once in a while where I have to see how web sites look in IE or programs run on Windows. I could probably host Quicken on Linux with Wine or Codeweavers, which would leave only Turbotax (which doesn't run for long enough each year for Codeweavers to support it).
My main laptop is an Acer Aspire One running Debian, with two 8-hour batteries and its original 3-hour battery. I fly a lot. I have a PowerMac laptop that someone gave me, for testing how things look or work on Macintosh, but it's not seen any work yet. There is an older laptop hanging around, and I just gave 5 or 6 laptops to the Alameda Computer Recycling Center. There is also a Nokia 770 running Linux, and I've an old Motorola A780 cellphone running Linux. I have a number of embedded systems boards that run Linux, sitting in my workshop. I have a little music player that plays Ogg. My 2007 Prius has had the video input hack, and displays the video output of my ham radio on the console screen. I could connect Linux to it, if I had more time to play.
I really like Debian. I try to practice what I preach, things pretty much are run entirely on Free Software here, except for the personal finances. The company finances do run on GnuCash, and I have GnuCash doing e-banking, so perhaps someday we'll ditch Quicken. Turbotax is pretty much the perfect proprietary program - not written for love, not written by programmers at all, deep and current information, high liability. It would be hard to make a good Free substitute for it without a sugar daddy of major proportions, like the government.
But this didn't give you much more insight into me, did it:-) I'll get a real interview sometime.
Third parties (like your customer's competitor, to whom you distribute) make this more complicated. Also, maybe SFLC wants to make a point about the GPL vs. NDAs and will help the consultant for free. They've beat big companies before.
You can develop a modified version for your consulting customer under an NDA in which you agree not to distribute your then-proprietary modification, because (in theory) you are not giving the customer any GPL software, only stuff that is proprietary at that time. But if either party gives the other BOTH the GPL software and the modification, together, then the NDA doesn't apply to that transfer and the whole thing is under the GPL.
In FSF's place I would not have given such a pat answer. I think this is harder to comply with in practice than they make it appear.
It does not matter what your contract is with the company is. This is because the company's own license for any GPL software explicitly says that they can't add terms to the GPL. So, they can give you an NDA, and they can require you to destroy software after the contract, but that can not apply to anything under the GPL. Only the copyright holder of the GPL software could give the company the right to apply an NDA or other agreement to his license.
If they give you GPL software, they have all of the license obligations that the GPL has in place for the act of "distribution". It does not matter if they write down something formally that they do it, or not.
Here is the applicable text in the GPL3 license regarding these issues:
10. Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients.
Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties with this License.
An "entity transaction" is a transaction transferring control of an organization, or substantially all assets of one, or subdividing an organization, or merging organizations. If propagation of a covered work results from an entity transaction, each party to that transaction who receives a copy of the work also receives whatever licenses to the work the party's predecessor in interest had or could give under the previous paragraph, plus a right to possession of the Corresponding Source of the work from the predecessor in interest, if the predecessor has it or can get it with reasonable efforts.
You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it.
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Mainly because we want to be protected from patent lawsuits. It's really painful to give your stuff away with no strings and get sued for your trouble. The Apache license tries to protect you from that.
Bruce
I think it's more a matter of history. There was no SaaS when the GPL was written, or the GPL would have addressed the issue. In the first discussions leading to GPL3, way back in 2004, we were talking about addressing the "ASP problem" in GPL3, not the Affero version. Further GPL revisions stick to the basic principles of the first.
It really breaks down into "sharing is possible" and "sharing is mandiatory", and everything else is an elaboration on that theme.
Thanks
Bruce
The Apache-style license is a gift because a company can use the work without any quid pro quo. Obviously, much Open Source is written as part of someone's employment, whether it is BSD or GPL licensed.
Dual licensing does give some special rights to one party. In general, this one party is the main contributor, and their business purpose doesn't work without dual licensing - because they won't have a revenue stream that supports their creation of the software. A license that does not fulfill that purpose is hardly more "business friendly" than one that does.
This is not a matter of philosophy, just business sense.
Bruce
The hard part is giving contributors an incentive to sign over their copyright (or at least a right to relicense). It worked for MySQL because people wanted their contributions to be in the supported version of the server, which everybody else was hacking upon. It did not work for Sun, but then again Sun handles Open Source horribly. Marten Mikos just left there, following Monty out the door.
Maybe I'll write an article about dual-licensing in the future.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Well, if you want me to believe you, try showing how those licenses don't satisfy a particular business purpose that would be satisfied by one of the other 70. Cite the particular text of the licenses that applies to the business purpose you're interested in.
The point here is that we need to be more analytical about this issue.
Bruce
This is a problem. It seems that every attorney has their own fear, which they insist on writing into their own license that you must use.
But IMO the largest part of the problem is that few companies are effective at managing their own attorneys. Many technical managers feel that law is a black art and that they can only manage what they understand. Top managers with this problem tend to structure the company so that middle managers can't push back on Legal, and must do whatever Legal says. And thus, company attorneys generally get their way even on small points. A general counsel who sits on the board is even able to do this to the CEO, if the other board members aren't good at managing attorneys.
If it is imposed on the attorney that using an OSI-accepted license is important, the attorney can probably do a reality-check on their own fear. The fact that this doesn't happen is more an issue of management effectiveness than anything else.
Thanks
Bruce
This is why I wrote the DFSG / Open Source Definition. It provides a single name for a set of licenses that grant a particular set of privileges.
I did consider licenses that prohibit military use, and decided they were a bad idea, and the DFSG / Open Source Definition does not allow them. The license that was a bad example the time was the Berkeley SPICE license. This license was written during the period of South African Apartheid, and prohibited use of the SPICE circuit simulation software by the police of South Africa. 10 years after Apartheid was over, the license restriction was still in effect. Even though the police by that time were probably Black.
The other big prohibition to consider was Commercial Use. There were a number of "personal-use only" licenses at the time. I figured that licenses that prohibited commercial use made the software pretty useless and that it would not have effective collaboration to advance its development.
Licenses are important because they use rules to structure partnerships. We need to understand them, and how to use them. Yes, there are people who are very partisan. But just calling them zealots doesn't get at the reasons for their license, and whether those reasons make sense for you.
Bruce
The purpose of my article is to get you to explore those values and select a set of licenses that really match them. Some of the people who select GPL do so not for Richard's given reasons but for business purposes. I would not want to mislead them that their values demand a "gift" style license which is less effective for their particular business purpose. And making Free Software under the BSD license is not incompatible with Richard's philosophy. Remember that Richard is against software being copyrighted, and BSD licensing is pretty close to abandonment of copyright.
Thanks
Bruce
You are free to use your own license, containing whatever text you wish. The main limitations on you are 1) whether you can get anyone else to participate and 2) whether your license is effective in court. If your license requires me to sell my first born son into indenture, the court is not likely to uphold your license.
As you observe, standardization is desirable. One of the biggest goals of Open Source is to make more Open Source. You should be able to combine different Open Source programs into another new one, in a way the creators of the original pieces did not envision. To do this, the licenses must be compatible with each other. So, having everybody write their own is, in the long run, detrimental because all of those licenses will be incompatible with each other, or nobody will be able to understand if they are compatible or not.
So, I laid out one scenario in which lots of people and companies can use a minimal set of different Open Source licenses that fulfill the different purposes that people have for Open Source, and are compatible with each other. You are free to use that list, or ignore me.
Thanks
Bruce
Hi Folks,
I happen to be at my desk again today, and can discuss this article, if any of you have questions or, more likely, comments :-)
If I write 30 responses, there will be a break. Slashdot locks me out for four hours after 30 postings from one IP.
Bruce
Yes, forks are good. It's just funny that it's Monty behind it.
I am trying to arrive at a balance between community and company. Company in this case is me, and almost my sole occupation for half a year so far is building this software. I'm still doing some consulting to pay for it. But the bottom line is that you can always repair an error in not giving enough away, but you can't repair giving too much away, and if I blow this I could be financially ruined. The question really comes down to: is it sufficient for the community to have GPL rights forever, which they do in most dual-licensing systems, or do they need more.
Bruce
No problem. But let me explain what I think the real situation is when you link BSD and GPL stuff together. Say you do so. You then continue to accept BSD-licensed modifications to your program, and operate in general as a BSD-licensed project. So that you can grant to others all of the rights that they expect from BSD-licensed software, including the right to link in software under GPL-incompatible licenses, you put a note somewhere that developers will notice. The note says "IF YOU ADD SOFTWARE UNDER A LICENSE THAT IS NOT GPL-COMPATIBLE, YOU MUST REMOVE LIBREADLINE."
This, IMO, is not a big deal for a BSD project. You can't combine GPL software with just anything, and this has not changed because the GPL software was linked with some BSD software.
The situation is different if the GPL software is a critical part of the program that can't be removed easily. But that is not libreadline. And I would not expect a BSD project to put GPL software in that role.
If you want to talk about one-sided situations, I'd point first at the situation in which proprietary software developers use BSD code without giving anything back. The GPL is intended to prevent just this sort of situation.
Thanks
Bruce
I am indeed responding to you. It's just that I don't believe the bullshit BSD propoganda that you are trying to push on me. It is entirely possible to distribute a command shell composed of BSD-licensed code and libreadline.
The BSD license is GPL compliant, and you can link BSD and GPL code together. It's only licenses that make restrictions that the GPL does not make which are incompatible. The problem with allowing restrictions that the GPL doesn't make is that at some point you get enough restrictions it's not Open Source / Free Software any longer. While you can trust a license to always say the same thing, OSI has not always said the same thing and doesn't promise to do so in the future. So, "any OSI approved license" could be anything at all, at some time in the future.
Bruce
Not all interfaces have to use header files from the GPL code.
Previous to this netbook, I had a Sony Vaio with a Celeron 1GHz from about 2004. The netbook might be a little slower, I'm not sure. It came with 160M disk - bigger than the Sony, and 1G ram, same as the Sony. Using Debian the netbook does everything I want. I doubt this would be the case with XP or Limpus. The keyboard is big enough for my big fingers to touch-type upon, and the display is sufficient. I tend to use big fonts on it.
It didn't play HDTV video well at the full screen resolution in the one test I've done so far - I don't know if this is strictly a hardware limitation or if the Intel 945G graphics driver could be improved. Maybe DVD video, with its lower resolution, would work. Video in the smaller box generally offered by youtube and its ilk is fine.
It is, however, rather slow at building the Linux kernel, which I was only doing to optimize the netbook itself. For building my own, smaller, software, it works fine. So, using it for development is fine, using it to write documents or presentation with OpenOffice.org3 is fine, email and web are fine. I had to build a wifi driver that is out of tree, and I compiled a few drivers into the kernel that were usually modules so that the "expansion" flash card slot worked correctly. I think the other, non-expansion (because the card sticks out) flash card slot might not be working correctly yet. I just plug in a USB card reader in its place. I am running 2.6.28, which has the MTRR fix (see perens.com/blog for the MTRR discussion) and the best power management. I did some tuning with powertune.
Yeah, but as I've explained here, this is more complicated and liable to go wrong than people realize.
I think this is some of what the MySQL folks are complaining about. Monty wants to fork it!!!!
I have some ideas about how to make dual licensing work better for the community. The basic problem is that they don't reliably get any commitment back from the company to whom they are turning over their work. So, I would give them an unlimited license to their own contribution, including the right to relicense, and make a covenant to continue development in Open Source for two years or remove their contribution. That would apply to my assigns as well, meaning anyone who bought the company would still have that commitment. Two years gives the community time to watch how things are working and decide to fork if necessary.
Bruce
My web presence is driven mostly by an account at Dreamhost, a nice net hosting company that runs Debian and charges very little. I also have a cheap ($30/month) dedicated server at corenetworks.net also running Debian, which currently runs the one application that wouldn't work at Dreamhost because I need to run my own server on a low-numbered IP port.
There are 3 workstations in the house, and one server. The upstairs workstation that Valerie and I use, and my office workstation downstairs and the server are running Debian. There is an HP Ethernet connected scanner/printer that connects to Samba on the server for storing scans and prints using IPP from CUPS. There is an old machine running XP that is only for Quicken, and TurboTax once a year, and for the situations once in a while where I have to see how web sites look in IE or programs run on Windows. I could probably host Quicken on Linux with Wine or Codeweavers, which would leave only Turbotax (which doesn't run for long enough each year for Codeweavers to support it).
My main laptop is an Acer Aspire One running Debian, with two 8-hour batteries and its original 3-hour battery. I fly a lot. I have a PowerMac laptop that someone gave me, for testing how things look or work on Macintosh, but it's not seen any work yet. There is an older laptop hanging around, and I just gave 5 or 6 laptops to the Alameda Computer Recycling Center. There is also a Nokia 770 running Linux, and I've an old Motorola A780 cellphone running Linux. I have a number of embedded systems boards that run Linux, sitting in my workshop. I have a little music player that plays Ogg. My 2007 Prius has had the video input hack, and displays the video output of my ham radio on the console screen. I could connect Linux to it, if I had more time to play.
I really like Debian. I try to practice what I preach, things pretty much are run entirely on Free Software here, except for the personal finances. The company finances do run on GnuCash, and I have GnuCash doing e-banking, so perhaps someday we'll ditch Quicken. Turbotax is pretty much the perfect proprietary program - not written for love, not written by programmers at all, deep and current information, high liability. It would be hard to make a good Free substitute for it without a sugar daddy of major proportions, like the government.
But this didn't give you much more insight into me, did it :-) I'll get a real interview sometime.
Bruce
Sorry, I have to get legal advice about whether I can give you legal advice about who can legally give you legal advice.
Third parties (like your customer's competitor, to whom you distribute) make this more complicated. Also, maybe SFLC wants to make a point about the GPL vs. NDAs and will help the consultant for free. They've beat big companies before.
You can develop a modified version for your consulting customer under an NDA in which you agree not to distribute your then-proprietary modification, because (in theory) you are not giving the customer any GPL software, only stuff that is proprietary at that time. But if either party gives the other BOTH the GPL software and the modification, together, then the NDA doesn't apply to that transfer and the whole thing is under the GPL.
In FSF's place I would not have given such a pat answer. I think this is harder to comply with in practice than they make it appear.
Bruce
It's a silicon.com forum featuring myself and some other folks. I quick look on google did not turn it up.
It does not matter what your contract is with the company is. This is because the company's own license for any GPL software explicitly says that they can't add terms to the GPL. So, they can give you an NDA, and they can require you to destroy software after the contract, but that can not apply to anything under the GPL. Only the copyright holder of the GPL software could give the company the right to apply an NDA or other agreement to his license.
If they give you GPL software, they have all of the license obligations that the GPL has in place for the act of "distribution". It does not matter if they write down something formally that they do it, or not.
Here is the applicable text in the GPL3 license regarding these issues:
Bruce