Re: Dangerous back door in the LGPL
Francois Gouget <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.emulators.wine.license |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Fri, 31 May 2002, Steve Langasek wrote: [...] > On the contrary, this is a problem because many people who choose copyleft > licenses want to prevent anyone from receiving preferential treatment. > That includes the FSF, and /definitely/ includes Microsoft. If the FSF > were acting in bad faith (and if Microsoft bought the FSF, you can bet > they would), they could write a successor license to the LGPL that > restricts what *other* people could do with code so licensed, while > placing no such restrictions on Microsoft itself. Ok, so the scenario you envision is the following: Microsoft would commandeer the FSF (over Stallman's dead body ;-), and then write the LGPL 3.0 so that MS can use LGPLed code but does not have to return anything in return. The original authors don't loose any right but MS gets a priviledged position. It's in fact a special case of number 2 mentioned by Matt but I can see how that would be annoying. (and whether it's MS or anyone else really does not matter) > This is indeed a potential loophole in the license, but the community is > faced with a difficult choice between opening themselves up to this sort > of abuse, or leaving themselves with no way to correct for unforseen legal > weaknesses in the license. The good news is that the FSF gives you an > easy way to choose for yourself: if you're more concerned about the FSF > "selling out", you need only add a statement to the license on your code > indicating that this clause cannot be exercised. I agree with both mitigating factors. I also do not think this is a very important issue: in the worst case a single entity is priviledged but then it becomes that entity against the rest of the community. And at least they cannot take away our rights. But it may have been worth discussing at the time of the license change nonetheless. But the discussion somehow got so focused on other issues that such aspects never came up... -- Francois Gouget [email protected] http://fgouget.free.fr/ War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who's left.