That would not work unless they used a non-open-source license. And it's academic, because they can't rescind the license. This is such a basic feature of contracts that it goes all the way back to British common law.
You are confusing two different things. The kernel team certainly doesn't give its copyrights to FSF. FSF does ask for copyright assignment 4 official GNU projects, because they want to be able to update the licenses long into the future. Maybe also because they want to be the ones to enforce against copyright infringe errs of those programs.
But this whole thing about whether you can rescind or not it's the most basic of contract law and really does go back to English common law. If you could take back a contract for arbitrary reasons like "I changed my mind", nobody would bother with contracts at all.
In what science-fictional alternate universe would I have not read the GPL? Really.
When you parse licenses, you have to be conscious that they do not exist in a vacuum. They rest upon the entire body of law and precedent going back, in the US case, to British Common Law (yes, courts still cite it here). An important part of all of this law is that when you make a grant, it remains a grant unless the terms of the law or the grant itself allow you to take it back. And generally, they do not. For one thing, the entire structure of business based upon contracts would fail if you had the right to rescind them any time you changed your mind.
So, it does not matter if GPL2 doesn't say it does not terminate, it does matter that the text does not provide any means other than violation of the terms for it to terminate.
I think he referred to me as a "Social Justice Warrior". A lot of you have seen benefit from my "Social Justice" work, such as all of this Open Source stuff, removing the requirement that you pass a test on Morse Code before you can have a ham license, etc.
You know, can someone explain wether in the USA one is allowed to basically claim to be a lawyer *and* also claim to be speaking in a professional instance, without actually being one *and* licensed for practice?
Where I live, that is a crime, and can land you in jail.
I suspect that he's not actually violating the law until he attempts to contract to provide someone with legal counsel. All of my consulting contracts make it clear I'm not an attorney, for that reason.
I think you're missing the point. Of course copyright requires the permission of the copyright holder (who is not necessarily the author, much copyrighted work is work-for-hire). But having granted a license, can you just say "I changed my mind?" Lots of people would like to get out of contracts that way, but the law doesn't let them.
About the most relevant part I can see of this is that it is effective starting 35 years from the grant. By which time your Linux contribution is likely gone. I will discuss this one with an attorney when I get a chance, but I don't yet believe it's a problem for us.
There is no question that Hans Reiser wrote good code, but he was also extremely abusive to the kernel team, and thus made it very difficult for anyone to work with him.
That right there is the number one reason I don't try to contribute to the kernel. My code may be decent enough but I have an abrasive enough personality I personally feel I would cause more headache than my code contributions might be worth.
Well, congratulations on being introspective enough to see this. 20 years ago I found it quite difficult to get along, indeed on one or two occasions I told the entire Slashdot community to screw themselves:-)
Age or experience seems to have mellowed me in that regard. Maybe it will work for you.
I think Linus has badly miscalculated in adopting the CoC, it's like an open invitation to all the trolls who are going to try to tear him down and replace him.
Linus is too smart for this. He can behave in a collegial fashion. Even if he is on the spectrum (which we are getting hints of here, and maybe I am too) he is so high-functioning that he can moderate his own behavior if motivated to do so. And ultimately the folks running the CoC report to him, and he can get rid of it if he wants.
Greg and the others at the top are not idiots either.
Nobody on the kernel team is going to force acceptance of bad code on the basis of code-of-conduct issues. If you call someone "crazy" and they rightly point out that you can, and should, be more colegial, that is not going to result in code acceptance.
Um, I think what you are writing is mostly true for injury cases.
Law firms do not compete to offer their services to Open Source developers to litigate their infringement. Since I am creator of the most-litigated Open Source program (although I didn't bring any of the suits), and I run a compliance business, I am really clear on this.
I also worked for Pixar, and our own attorneys represented us when necessary.
Seriously, this is exactly where open source shines!
Nobody has to make any compromises, and everybody can get what he wants!
If people disagree, they fork. And then share everything they still have in common.
It's beautifully simple and healthy. It works because information is free.
And frankly, it's how our legal system should be too.
(The only hindrance there of course being that land is not forkable like that. But I'd still like to see competing states on the same lands. i mean we know that monopoly is bad, so we should not allow the dominant group [aka government] to have it either.)
Good post, so I quoted the whole thing at level 2 instead of 0. But competing states on the same turf, rather than divided by borders, would probably be constantly at war.
There is no question that Hans Reiser wrote good code, but he was also extremely abusive to the kernel team, and thus made it very difficult for anyone to work with him. There will be similar reasons that brilliant people will be constitutionally unable to participate in group development, and their code will be excluded because they will be excluded.
I am so glad I did not go to work for Hans. I spoke with Nina on the phone once. This is all so weird.
First, let me confirm that this threat has teeth. I researched the relevant law when I was founding the Open Source Initiative. In the U.S. there is case law confirming that reputational losses relating to conversion of the rights of a contributor to a GPLed project are judicable in law.
The relevant case doesn't come from before the founding of OSI, so Eric appears to be confused here about what research he performed when. The relevant case is Jacobsen v. Katzer, and the parts about reputation come from my own expert testimony. They don't provide a method to terminate a license for a reputational loss.
Half of the tech community is saying people can rescind code on GPLv2 because they read GPLv2 comparried it to GPLv3 and saw that there appears to be a reasonable case for such an interpretation.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Haw! giggle. sniff.
Maybe 1% of the "tech community" have ever attempted to thoroughly parse a license, much less compare the terms of two, most of them click "yes" without ever reading the language.
If you want to terminate your license, you first have to find cause to do so, which would only be non-compliance under the GPL terms. But what does a terminated license actually mean? It means you have the right to sue for copyright infringement. So, now that you have terminated your license, you actually have to get a lawyer and bring a copyright infringement suit to make it stick.
Just ain't gonna happen that 1) anyone on the kernel team wants to do this 2) they rescind their code and 3) they get together $100K to $5M and bring suit..
He's a really skilled and effective troll. He's entirely roped in a whole bunch of people who should have known better (I didn't recognize him at first either) and who have spent energy on this whole "rescind" thing when, as far as I can tell, no real kernel developer even plans to rescind anything.
You can't rescind the code, but you can abandon the maintenance of it.
Yes. As I was quoted in the Motherboard article referenced above, you can decline any further participation in kernel development. However, the noisy folks about this issue do not appear to actually participate in kernel development.
Any actual kernel developers who leave will be replaced by one of the other 4000 active this year. If they have been vociferous about their rights to entirely unlimited conduct (and all of the side-issues that seem to come with that) it may be that the folks on the kernel mailing list are already tired of them and won't miss them.
Whether developers can or cannot legally rescind their code the new CoC is absolutely guaranteed to drive away people who believe their contributions are more important than their genitals.
The fellow spreading this story that you can "rescind" code is more commonly known as MikeeUSA, a misogynist and general nutcase. In one email, he complains that because of people like me, the law doesn't allow him to marry very young girls. I mean single-digit young. He claims to be an attorney but nothing he has written makes me think he is. He was joined in this by some folks known from gamergate. They aren't legitimate kernel developers.
This is just obnoxious gamergate folks grabbing at publicity where they can get it.
I have an opposite fear: Sometimes I have to sit in an audience while someone who knows diddly squat about Open Source gives a speech about it (or even a keynote), and I would really like to engage them right in front of the audience and point out all of their mistakes, but in general that doesn't work for the audience. I just hate to sit through those things. About my most productive response was to write this in response to a completely clueless speaker.
But how did I become a speaker? I had a neurological deficit resulting in a speech impediment and coordination problems. Throughout 1-12th grade, I took at least 10 years of either instruction from a speech pathologist or year-after-year enrollment in the school's rhetoric class (which wasn't really addressing a problem in speech pathology). So, any fear of audiences was beaten out of me.
Most people hate and fear being in front of an audience. For some, the solution really is for them to one-on-one with a teacher. But for most, the solution would be early instruction that makes them more comfortable with the situation. The sink-or-swim method of just putting them in the front of the room is probably not the right way.
Slashdot Mirror
That would not work unless they used a non-open-source license. And it's academic, because they can't rescind the license. This is such a basic feature of contracts that it goes all the way back to British common law.
You are confusing two different things. The kernel team certainly doesn't give its copyrights to FSF. FSF does ask for copyright assignment 4 official GNU projects, because they want to be able to update the licenses long into the future. Maybe also because they want to be the ones to enforce against copyright infringe errs of those programs. But this whole thing about whether you can rescind or not it's the most basic of contract law and really does go back to English common law. If you could take back a contract for arbitrary reasons like "I changed my mind", nobody would bother with contracts at all.
Nope, won't be baited by a net.moron.
In what science-fictional alternate universe would I have not read the GPL? Really.
When you parse licenses, you have to be conscious that they do not exist in a vacuum. They rest upon the entire body of law and precedent going back, in the US case, to British Common Law (yes, courts still cite it here). An important part of all of this law is that when you make a grant, it remains a grant unless the terms of the law or the grant itself allow you to take it back. And generally, they do not. For one thing, the entire structure of business based upon contracts would fail if you had the right to rescind them any time you changed your mind.
So, it does not matter if GPL2 doesn't say it does not terminate, it does matter that the text does not provide any means other than violation of the terms for it to terminate.
Yawn. I am not feeling the need to further educate you.
I think he referred to me as a "Social Justice Warrior". A lot of you have seen benefit from my "Social Justice" work, such as all of this Open Source stuff, removing the requirement that you pass a test on Morse Code before you can have a ham license, etc.
You can read the ruling online as well. There is not another case regarding reputation and Open Source software.
Read this and this.
I suspect that he's not actually violating the law until he attempts to contract to provide someone with legal counsel. All of my consulting contracts make it clear I'm not an attorney, for that reason.
Go read my testimony, not the Wikipedia. It's available online.
I think you're missing the point. Of course copyright requires the permission of the copyright holder (who is not necessarily the author, much copyrighted work is work-for-hire). But having granted a license, can you just say "I changed my mind?" Lots of people would like to get out of contracts that way, but the law doesn't let them.
About the most relevant part I can see of this is that it is effective starting 35 years from the grant. By which time your Linux contribution is likely gone. I will discuss this one with an attorney when I get a chance, but I don't yet believe it's a problem for us.
Well, congratulations on being introspective enough to see this. 20 years ago I found it quite difficult to get along, indeed on one or two occasions I told the entire Slashdot community to screw themselves :-)
Age or experience seems to have mellowed me in that regard. Maybe it will work for you.
Linus is too smart for this. He can behave in a collegial fashion. Even if he is on the spectrum (which we are getting hints of here, and maybe I am too) he is so high-functioning that he can moderate his own behavior if motivated to do so. And ultimately the folks running the CoC report to him, and he can get rid of it if he wants.
Greg and the others at the top are not idiots either.
Nobody on the kernel team is going to force acceptance of bad code on the basis of code-of-conduct issues. If you call someone "crazy" and they rightly point out that you can, and should, be more colegial, that is not going to result in code acceptance.
Um, I think what you are writing is mostly true for injury cases.
Law firms do not compete to offer their services to Open Source developers to litigate their infringement. Since I am creator of the most-litigated Open Source program (although I didn't bring any of the suits), and I run a compliance business, I am really clear on this.
I also worked for Pixar, and our own attorneys represented us when necessary.
Good post, so I quoted the whole thing at level 2 instead of 0. But competing states on the same turf, rather than divided by borders, would probably be constantly at war.
There is no question that Hans Reiser wrote good code, but he was also extremely abusive to the kernel team, and thus made it very difficult for anyone to work with him. There will be similar reasons that brilliant people will be constitutionally unable to participate in group development, and their code will be excluded because they will be excluded.
I am so glad I did not go to work for Hans. I spoke with Nina on the phone once. This is all so weird.
The relevant case doesn't come from before the founding of OSI, so Eric appears to be confused here about what research he performed when. The relevant case is Jacobsen v. Katzer, and the parts about reputation come from my own expert testimony. They don't provide a method to terminate a license for a reputational loss.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Haw! giggle. sniff.
Maybe 1% of the "tech community" have ever attempted to thoroughly parse a license, much less compare the terms of two, most of them click "yes" without ever reading the language.
If you want to terminate your license, you first have to find cause to do so, which would only be non-compliance under the GPL terms. But what does a terminated license actually mean? It means you have the right to sue for copyright infringement. So, now that you have terminated your license, you actually have to get a lawyer and bring a copyright infringement suit to make it stick.
Just ain't gonna happen that 1) anyone on the kernel team wants to do this 2) they rescind their code and 3) they get together $100K to $5M and bring suit..
He's a really skilled and effective troll. He's entirely roped in a whole bunch of people who should have known better (I didn't recognize him at first either) and who have spent energy on this whole "rescind" thing when, as far as I can tell, no real kernel developer even plans to rescind anything.
Yes. As I was quoted in the Motherboard article referenced above, you can decline any further participation in kernel development. However, the noisy folks about this issue do not appear to actually participate in kernel development.
Any actual kernel developers who leave will be replaced by one of the other 4000 active this year. If they have been vociferous about their rights to entirely unlimited conduct (and all of the side-issues that seem to come with that) it may be that the folks on the kernel mailing list are already tired of them and won't miss them.
Not sure I even want to know what this means.
The fellow spreading this story that you can "rescind" code is more commonly known as MikeeUSA, a misogynist and general nutcase. In one email, he complains that because of people like me, the law doesn't allow him to marry very young girls. I mean single-digit young. He claims to be an attorney but nothing he has written makes me think he is. He was joined in this by some folks known from gamergate. They aren't legitimate kernel developers.
This is just obnoxious gamergate folks grabbing at publicity where they can get it.
I have an opposite fear: Sometimes I have to sit in an audience while someone who knows diddly squat about Open Source gives a speech about it (or even a keynote), and I would really like to engage them right in front of the audience and point out all of their mistakes, but in general that doesn't work for the audience. I just hate to sit through those things. About my most productive response was to write this in response to a completely clueless speaker.
But how did I become a speaker? I had a neurological deficit resulting in a speech impediment and coordination problems. Throughout 1-12th grade, I took at least 10 years of either instruction from a speech pathologist or year-after-year enrollment in the school's rhetoric class (which wasn't really addressing a problem in speech pathology). So, any fear of audiences was beaten out of me.
Most people hate and fear being in front of an audience. For some, the solution really is for them to one-on-one with a teacher. But for most, the solution would be early instruction that makes them more comfortable with the situation. The sink-or-swim method of just putting them in the front of the room is probably not the right way.
I sure could argue that porting is a field of endeavor, but there's not much point since #10 isn't going anywhere.