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Toward Copyleft Equality for All

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Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#31

Post by kazinator »

fourthark wrote: post #27
kazinator wrote: post #7

> The essence in non-legalese is this: If you offer a license that isn't a copyleft license, the copyleft provisions collapse and the software is now available to all under a non-copyleft, hyper-permissive FOSS license. Why would anyone choose this? It must be for the sake of giving the downstream users some sort of assurance that a Bad Thing won't happen to them, as a sort of promise. "If we ever commercialize this,…

I am guessing that now the software can’t be included in something else that uses “predatory copyleft“. And those derivative works do not have the option to use a less restrictive license that allows such behavior. Not sure of this though.

Ah, good thinking.

But is that true? Basically, the license is copyleft now, but if certain conditions occur in the future, it will become BSD-like (let's go with that designation for familiarity).

Thus, the license is effectively (copyleft | BSD).

A project which uses regular old predatory copyleft can therefore use it now and continue to use it, whichever way it plays out.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#32

Post by richardfontana »

pabs3 wrote: post #2

This reminded me of the agreement between Qt and KDE, where if Qt is ever made proprietary, KDE can publish Qt under the BSD license: http://www.olafsw.de/a-better-qt-because-of-open-source-and-... https://old.reddit.com/r/QtFramework/comments/e9376a/trouble... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755337

Indeed that Qt-KDE "treaty" was an inspiration for the feature of copyleft-next that bkuhn lauds in this article.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#33

Post by m4rtink »

rocqua wrote: post #17
tptacek wrote: post #6

The premise of this post is that dual-licensing --- offering a piece of serverside or on-prem commercial software under (A)GPL terms, with a proprietary license available for firms that want unrestricted usage --- is "seedy". It's not clear to me how that premise is justified, and Kuhn's claim that the model has failed to increase software freedom seems totally unjustified. At the heart of Kuhn's argument about "seed…

> People sign CLAs because they want their modifications upstreamed, and to avoid maintaining forks, not because they're legally required to do so. This is still coercive though. It is the big party using their power to get developers to give up their rights. Notably, by giving up these rights, it becomes possible for the party to go against the FOSS principles that were the reason copy-left was invented.

Also, CLAs are yet another stumbling block for contributors. Many people that could easily contribute to a regular GPL/BSD project per company guidelines might be prevented from doing by the need to effectively sign a contract or might need to involve comapny legal department.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#34

Post by m463 »

tptacek wrote: post #6

The premise of this post is that dual-licensing --- offering a piece of serverside or on-prem commercial software under (A)GPL terms, with a proprietary license available for firms that want unrestricted usage --- is "seedy". It's not clear to me how that premise is justified, and Kuhn's claim that the model has failed to increase software freedom seems totally unjustified. At the heart of Kuhn's argument about "seed…

I agree.

To me the GPL is clear: You can USE the software for anything, but you have legal responsibilities if you redistribute it.

The dual license scheme seems like a good way of letting people buy their way out of the responsibility part, and generating revenue to help maintain the software.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#35

Post by tptacek »

m4rtink wrote: post #33
rocqua wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People sign CLAs because they want their modifications upstreamed, and to avoid maintaining forks, not because they're legally required to do so. This is still coercive though. It is the big party using their power to get developers to give up their rights. Notably, by giving up these rights, it becomes possible for the party to go against the FOSS principles that were the reason copy-left was invented.

Also, CLAs are yet another stumbling block for contributors. Many people that could easily contribute to a regular GPL/BSD project per company guidelines might be prevented from doing by the need to effectively sign a contract or might need to involve comapny legal department.

Remember the context here. Yes, commercially-owned AGPL projects that require CLAs are not especially easy to contribute to. FOSS projects can be more or less easy to contribute to for lots of reasons, and most of those reasons aren't "seedy". I'd argue that in most cases, the CLA case isn't "seedy" either: the commercial sponsor funds most of the work; the project isn't an elaborate scheme to get free dev cycles from the community, but rather trades access to code (and the potential for a hostile fork) for greater adoption. That seems like a trade that Kuhn should welcome.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#36

Post by sparkie »

rocqua wrote: post #17
tptacek wrote: post #6

The premise of this post is that dual-licensing --- offering a piece of serverside or on-prem commercial software under (A)GPL terms, with a proprietary license available for firms that want unrestricted usage --- is "seedy". It's not clear to me how that premise is justified, and Kuhn's claim that the model has failed to increase software freedom seems totally unjustified. At the heart of Kuhn's argument about "seed…

> People sign CLAs because they want their modifications upstreamed, and to avoid maintaining forks, not because they're legally required to do so. This is still coercive though. It is the big party using their power to get developers to give up their rights. Notably, by giving up these rights, it becomes possible for the party to go against the FOSS principles that were the reason copy-left was invented.

> It is the big party using their power to get developers to give up their rights.

Sometimes that big party is a single developer, or just a small group. They invest several years into developing a working product, unpaid, and then give it away, with the condition that anybody who wants to use it in a proprietary product must pay up.

Not all CLAs require a developer to "give up their rights." The code authors can retain their copyright, but sign an irrevocable contract which allows for the distributor to re-license their work as they see fit. The original author too, is still able to license it as they see fit.

If, on the other hand, the developers only release their work as AGPL with no separate licensing, all they are doing is ensuring that a subset of companies who might otherwise use their software, definitely wont. There are many companies who simply can't AGPL their own works and if they can't use your software, they'll find an alternative, or develop and alternative in house.

I'm certainly against the idea of coercing companies to pay for licenses by instilling fear, but I think it's only a subset of dual licensing companies which do this. A dual licensing approach isn't inherently coercive. If they're clear about their licensing model up-front then it shouldn't be an issue.

Also consider that at any point, you can take one of these AGPL dual licensed products, fork it, and not sign over any CLA, then you can distribute a fully copy-left variant of it with some additions of your own. You would question why wouldn't everyone contribute to your version rather than the one where they hand over the copyright of their modifications. There's an obvious reason this rarely happens: The bulk of the work and maintenance is being done by the company collecting the license fees, and community contributions are just a small percent. There are cases where the community version gets enough development effort to be able to spin off a successful fork - eg, MariaDB.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#37

Post by [deleted] »

rocqua wrote: post #17
tptacek wrote: post #6

The premise of this post is that dual-licensing --- offering a piece of serverside or on-prem commercial software under (A)GPL terms, with a proprietary license available for firms that want unrestricted usage --- is "seedy". It's not clear to me how that premise is justified, and Kuhn's claim that the model has failed to increase software freedom seems totally unjustified. At the heart of Kuhn's argument about "seed…

> People sign CLAs because they want their modifications upstreamed, and to avoid maintaining forks, not because they're legally required to do so. This is still coercive though. It is the big party using their power to get developers to give up their rights. Notably, by giving up these rights, it becomes possible for the party to go against the FOSS principles that were the reason copy-left was invented.

[deleted]

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#38

Post by mrob »

tptacek wrote: post #6

The premise of this post is that dual-licensing --- offering a piece of serverside or on-prem commercial software under (A)GPL terms, with a proprietary license available for firms that want unrestricted usage --- is "seedy". It's not clear to me how that premise is justified, and Kuhn's claim that the model has failed to increase software freedom seems totally unjustified. At the heart of Kuhn's argument about "seed…

Agreed. Copyleft Free software with an option to purchase a non-copyleft license exception is strictly better than proprietary software, which in many cases is the only realistic alternative. If there's something immoral about selling these exceptions then it's also immoral to release software under permissive Free licenses, which is a very unusual belief.

RMS discusses this here:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

"I consider selling exceptions an acceptable thing for a company to do, and I will suggest it where appropriate as a way to get programs freed."

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#39

Post by cxr »

kemitchell wrote: post #25
bhickey wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Kyle misleadingly calls his licenses open source when they aren't. Prosperity discriminates between commercial and non-commercial organizations rather than on how the code is used. He should stop muddying the waters.

I've never called Prosperity, the noncommercial license, open source. I've called Parity open source.

None of the URL fragments on https://licensezero.com/licenses/parity actually work. Your s don't have ids.

Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All

#40

Post by [deleted] »

singron wrote: post #28
PeterZaitsev wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this refers to the attempt of MySQL AB to invent "internal distribution" so where if you have proprietary software which you might be distributing from one department to another in the same company you can't do that with GPL2 and need to buy the proprietary version

I always wondered if an employee could make a GPL source request to their employer. Is there any more reading about any of these events or legal theory? I'm having difficulty Googling this.

[deleted]
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