Re: "Licences Wars"

Hi Omer!

On Thursday 06 November 2008, Omer Zak wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 01:33 +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > Another curious licence is the Affero GPL -
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License - which aims
> > to close the "Application Service Provider Loophole". What it means is
> > that if I install an AGPLed program on a web-server and modify it then I
> > must make my modifications public.
>
> It is my understanding that you do not have to make your modifications
> available to people, who don't surf your Web site.  So if you install
> the stuff on your own PC and allow only localhost to access it, then you
> don't have to release your modifications to the public.
>
> But IANAL and I may be factually mistaken about this.

No, you are right. I should have phrased it as an "on a public web-server". 
However, this misphrasing still doesn't make it a better licence, or make it 
any more free accrding to my interpretation of the Free Software Definition.

>
> > 5. Bad Idea No. 5: Use the GPL or the LGPL:
> > -------------------------------------------
>
> [... snipped ...]
>
> > The GPL and LGPL are of more political nature than other similar FOSS
> > licences, and as such should be avoided.
>
> I agree that GPL and LGPL have political agenda.
> I disagree that they should be avoided because of this reason.
>
> In an ideal world, in which all software vendors act fairly and compete
> only over the merits of their products, politics would not be necessary.
>
> But in today's world, politically-charged licenses - on at least part of
> the software running the world - are essential to keep the unfair
> software vendors in check.  For, without viral licenses, they can take
> over any Free Software and create closed source derivatives out of it.

The SleepyCat licence is a viral licence, but is much less politically charged 
than the GPL, and I didn't have a problem understanding it. As a result I 
recommend using it instead of the GPL, should you decide to use a viral 
licence.

Similarly, the Artistic 2.0 licence is LGPL-like, and should be used instead 
of the LGPL because it's less politically charged and problematic.

>
> Unrelated to the above, consider the fragmentation of the Unix world in
> the 1980's vs. the natural tendency to converge in the Linux world.  The
> GPL played an important role in making this convergence happen.

Possibly - I'm not sure. It preceded my time. However, there's a strong 
convergence in the BSD, X11, and Apache worlds today, and they are all based 
on BSD-style licences. GPL doesn't positively prevent fragmentation, as it 
explicitly allows forking.

>
> > Finally, not a statement of a bad idea in itself, but a call to use the
> > X11 Licence (or similar FOSS licences). That's because
> >
> > - It's simple.
> > - It's easy to understand.
> > - It's practically PD which is what people innocently expect.
> > - Much fewer worries on who can violate your licence.
> > - Still gives you protection against litigation.
> > - It's GPL-compatible.
> > - You can boast that your program is Public domain / BSD-style.
>
> However the X11 License still allows unfair software vendors to use your
> software to maintain their stranglehold over the software world.

So do the LGPL/Artistic/etc. licences within some legally-complying limits. 
And even the GPL can be used as long as one does not directly link to GPLed 
code. In any case, I'm not too worried about trying to undermine "unfair 
software vendors". If they pose a threat (which I don't think they do), then 
no amount of keeping my code GPLed will prevent that threat. If they don't 
pose a threat, then making my code viral will not help them and may likely 
pose a problem to many benevolent developers (also of FOSS). To quote Alan 
Kay, "Don't worry about what everybody else are doing. The best way to 
predict the future is to invent it.". 

----------

One thing I forgot to note is that the GPL often stands against the Hacker 
Ethics as presented by ESR in http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html 
(and which I agree with), that says that "No problem should ever have to be 
solved twice.". For example, the FSF now started the GNU PDF project so it 
will be a GPL version 3-licenced code because both ghostscript and xpdf are 
GPLv2-only. Or the story here - http://www.osnews.com/story/7241 that said 
that:

{{{{{{{{
Once before, someone had contributed a patch to add boolean operations, but 
that patch relied on a polygon clipping library provided under an 
incompatible license. There's little more frustrating than having a solution 
in hand, only to be hamstrung by legal problems. Even though it was an 
important feature for us, we regretfully postponed development of it into the 
distant future on our roadmap and proceeded with other work. 
}}}}}}}}

Or the fact OpenBSD is now re-implementing a lot of GNU GPL code from scratch 
because they find the GPL too restrictive.

And I should also note that often one can build upon non-GPL-like-code and not 
release the derived work as FOSS, without it causing any harm, and actually 
causing a lot of good. Which is otherwise prevented if the code is GPL.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/ways_to_do_it.html

Shlomi, so what are you working on? Working on a new wiki about unit testing 
fortunes in freecell? -- Ran Eilam

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