101–110 of 162 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would the GPL not be considered a commercially negotiated contract?
If the TPP is ratified, would it be worth updating the GPL to say "You agree that this is a commercially negotiated contract"?
[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/200104_seminar.html
"Party" here means party to the treaty, right? So, governments can't require source disclosure (except for critical infrastructure), but this specifically exempts contracts about such from this rule: > [Nothing in this Article shall preclude] the inclusion or implementation of terms and conditions related to the provision of source code in commercially negotiated contracts It seems like this wouldn't affect licensing…
And that's about it.
These are rules for States. It has no bearing whatsoever on the GPL. This prevents a country from forcing somebody like Microsoft or Apple to give up their source code for "inspection" in order to access their market. It also helps to prevent States from demanding and acquiring encryption or other private keys (there's a separate section that also explicitly forbids mandating backdoors be added). Not everything in th…
TPP is designed to give commercial entities equivalent rights to nation states. That's what the 'Investor-State Dispute Settlement' provisions refer to. Under these provisions a commercial entity could 'steal' Open Source code, without the requirement to release the source code. In effect rendering licenses such as the GPL unenforceable. At the very least it may cause a dilution and hinder the growth of the Open Source sector. Now I wonder whose interests that that would advance and who helped to write such provisions.
The "parties" of a treaty are governments. This has nothing to do with GPL. This is saying that a government can't say "you aren't allowed to sell software in the country of Frain as a non-Frainian unless you provide the source code for that product (whether to the end user or to the government)". They leave an exception for "critical infrastructure", because it was hard to argue that the government of Frain shouldn'…
And these non-capitalist countries are?
All countries are capitalist. They may claim otherwise, but if the party that paid for the means of production makes a claim on the value of the produced goods, then they are capitalist. It doesn't matter if the party that provided the capital was a private citizens or a government. If the workers that produced the goods don't have sole claim on the value of what they produced, the system is capitalist. The only difference in the USSR, Maoist China or even North Korea is that the state tried to monopolize capital.
These are rules for States. It has no bearing whatsoever on the GPL. This prevents a country from forcing somebody like Microsoft or Apple to give up their source code for "inspection" in order to access their market. It also helps to prevent States from demanding and acquiring encryption or other private keys (there's a separate section that also explicitly forbids mandating backdoors be added). Not everything in th…
So, as an actual lawyer i actually think i disagree with you in practice. Imagine for a second that the US gets tough on GPL violators, and says "well, if you want to sell android devices in the US, you have to produce the GPL source code". Or something even simpler, along the lines of "products marketed in the US must comply with all licensing obligations of software that it contains". This one actually happens behi…
So, just because a piece of legal language can be interpretted a certain way, that does not mean it is likely to prevail in court. In this sort of case, I'd be surprised if any TPP negotiator or representative, or any documentation from the TPP process, will indicate that this language was intended to break the GPL and open source in general.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also would prevent government agencies from demanding i.e. the source code of a car's ECU to verify its safety and emissions behavior. The only way out of this would be to declare car ECUs (or other systems) as "critical infrastructure", the definition of which I'm sure will be subject to many political tug-of-wars once this is implemented.
Playing the devil's advocate here, but you shouldn't need access to a car's source code to measure its emissions. The test is broken, not the software.
These are rules for States. It has no bearing whatsoever on the GPL. This prevents a country from forcing somebody like Microsoft or Apple to give up their source code for "inspection" in order to access their market. It also helps to prevent States from demanding and acquiring encryption or other private keys (there's a separate section that also explicitly forbids mandating backdoors be added). Not everything in th…
"These are rules for States. It has no bearing whatsoever on the GPL." TPP is designed to give commercial entities equivalent rights to nation states. That's what the 'Investor-State Dispute Settlement' provisions refer to. Under these provisions a commercial entity could 'steal' Open Source code, without the requirement to release the source code. In effect rendering licenses such as the GPL unenforceable. At the ve…
ISDS is intended to provide standing for a company from one country to request relief from the government of another country. Without ISDS, the Vietnamese national government could simply take whatever U.S. property is located in Vietnam, and the U.S. company would have no recourse.
These are rules for States. It has no bearing whatsoever on the GPL. This prevents a country from forcing somebody like Microsoft or Apple to give up their source code for "inspection" in order to access their market. It also helps to prevent States from demanding and acquiring encryption or other private keys (there's a separate section that also explicitly forbids mandating backdoors be added). Not everything in th…
Just to agree with this point and elaborate: when the text uses the word "party" it refers to a nation signing the treaty, and not people. So when it says "No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory," Party refers to…
It seems like it would also apply to new or existing laws requiring the disclosure of code inside proprietary voting machines, medical equipment, and of course, the Volkswagon ECU. Then again, could those things be considered "critical infrastructure"?
The Department of Homeland Security considers the entire "Information Technology sector" as "critical infrastructure":