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Lerna relicences to protest ICE

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Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#2

Post by eindiran »

I'd be very happy if someone could present a counter argument to this: this is something expressly against the spirit of the MIT license and Lerna should not continue claiming that the software is MIT licensed. https://opensource.org/osd In particular, this seems like a pretty explicit violation of the "no discrimination against field of endeavor" clause.

Here is the text of the MIT license:

" Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. "

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#3

Post by CaliforniaKarl »

This is an amazing thing to do, but I have one concern.

My straight reading of the new license file makes me that, assuming I am not related to any of the entities listed (or their subsidiaries), then the license I am bound by is the license titled "MIT License".

I bring that up, because the MIT License says I need to preserve only the copyright notice (the first line of the file, as per https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf), and "this permission notice". I could see someone arguing that "this permission notice" begins where it says "MIT License".

The annoying thing is, I don't have an explicit definition for "permission notice" (for example, I searched on https://dictionary.findlaw.com but didn't find anything). I could devils-advocate argue that the 'permission notice' starts where it says "MIT License".

Taking that argument, if I _really_ wanted to get this to one of the entities listed, I would make a new distribution of the software, consisting of just the copyright statement and MIT License, which I would then distribute to the entity.

Yeah, it's definitely a reach, I'm just bringing this up to say that craft people who wanted to may find an opening to exploit here, so some fine-tuning may be warranted!

P.S. I'm also a little concerned about replacing "2015-2017" with "2015-present", partially because 'present' isn't a year, and partially because, when development stops (as all things in time eventually become dormant), this could be viewed (especially when looked at in isolation) as an attempt at overreach.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#4

Post by bdhess »

eindiran wrote: post #2

I'd be very happy if someone could present a counter argument to this: this is something expressly against the spirit of the MIT license and Lerna should not continue claiming that the software is MIT licensed. https://opensource.org/osd In particular, this seems like a pretty explicit violation of the "no discrimination against field of endeavor" clause. Here is the text of the MIT license: " Permission is hereby gr…

I don’t think there is a reasonable counter argument. It’s not a free license, for the same reason the JSON license isn’t.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#JSON

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#7

Post by dragontamer »

This is fundamentally anti-free software and completely against the point of the MIT License.

If you want control over your code, you should use your powers of copyright more carefully.

EDIT: In particular, whats to stop ME from grabbing the code, and then giving it to Microsoft? What prevents a particular individual AT Microsoft from downloading and using your code? And what enforcement mechanism do you plan if you ever discover that Microsoft is using your code?

There are all sorts of questions and contradictions. I don't think this works.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#8

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

As usual, this is only valid if every contributor has agreed to the relicensing. Otherwise the project maintainers are infringing the copyright of the contributors by violating the license granted to them by each contributor. I see this all too frequently. It's scary the legal recourse people open themselves up to by not understanding licensing.

That aside, I know very little about these companies involvement in "ICE" and there's no references given. I imagine there are others like me who would like to better understand the situation.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#9

Post by roblabla »

eindiran wrote: post #2

I'd be very happy if someone could present a counter argument to this: this is something expressly against the spirit of the MIT license and Lerna should not continue claiming that the software is MIT licensed. https://opensource.org/osd In particular, this seems like a pretty explicit violation of the "no discrimination against field of endeavor" clause. Here is the text of the MIT license: " Permission is hereby gr…

It's still the MIT license for other people though. Licenses are a contract between a licensor and and a licensee. OSS requires the Licensor to provides the license in a non-discriminating way, and some licenses, like the GPL, explicitly enforce this. But the MIT license itself has no such provision. You could license a project with MIT to user A, and not to user B.

This is all just rule-bending though. I'm very conflicted on this issue. On one part, I agree with the sentiment that this is against the spirit of open source. On the other hand, I do like to see the software community taking a political stance, and using action in an attempt to enact change, on such issues.

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