You can't have it both ways. [LWN.net]

You can't have it both ways.

Posted Sep 26, 2006 11:47 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
In reply to: GPLv3 & additional permissions/restrictions by mingo
Parent article: Some GPLv3 clarifications from the FSF

Either the additional terms clause 7 will cause "balkanization" or it will cause "trending-to-purification", and your argument is just swinging between those instances.

You are right that clause 7 is biased towards "purification". And that is intentional IMHO, so "balkanization" is less likely to occur. If you can compatibilize "things with additional permisisons" with "things with no additional permissions" under the "things with no additional permissions" umbrella, then balkanization is not occurring (at least from the point of view of "things with no additional permissions".) OTOH, if you can compatibilize "things with (some, restricted) additional requirements" with "things with no additional requirements" under the umbrella of "things with additional requirements, that don't apply to the whole body equally". Which, although not as simple, is not very different from the situation today, applied to multi-holders, multi-license systems like the the linux kernel (that has BSD/2clauses code, BSD/3clauses code, v2-only code, v2+ code...)

So, yes, there is a bias in clause 7 towards the distribution of works under the "pure" v3 conditions. But this is really intentional.

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You can't have it both ways.

Posted Sep 26, 2006 12:00 UTC (Tue) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link]

So, yes, there is a bias in clause 7 towards the distribution of works under the "pure" v3 conditions. But this is really intentional.

And dont you see a fundamental problem with that approach, if what to you is an "additional permission" is another person's "core value"?

Dont you think the FSF's answer: "oh, just use extensions by the way" is insufficient to such people, because a fundamental bias towards a "pure" set of morals is codified?

Dont you think that such an answer could be outright offensive as well, not just plain insufficient, if that "core value" is also a "belief" of that person, and if that person sees the real question of "whether we should be dictating morals to begin with" being (it appears to me, intentionally) dodged and a non-answer "use extensions" answer being provided?

You can't have it both ways.

Posted Sep 26, 2006 14:09 UTC (Tue) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link]

>And dont you see a fundamental problem with that approach, if what to you is an "additional permission" is another person's "core value"?

If this person wants to use a license to propagate these core values and make them non-removable she should not use the GPL.

The core values the GPL set out to protect are the four software freedoms.

I'm sure there are lots of people who would rather not have their software used by the for example the military or in baby mulching machines, but it is not the job of the FSF to steer the GPL in that direction.

>Dont you think the FSF's answer: "oh, just use extensions by the way" is insufficient to such people, because a fundamental bias towards a "pure" set of morals is codified?

To my understanding the additional permissions are not there to address new ethical questions, but simply to make it easier to distribute software using code that is licensed under a free but GPL-incompatible license. (such as the CDDL, which would allow for GNU/Solaris)

The GPL3 is the vision of the FSF as to how to defend the four freedoms they set out to defend. If the four freedoms are a '"pure" set of morals', then yes, there is a fundamental bias towards that. In fact, it is the very foundation of the GPL.

>Dont you think that such an answer could be outright offensive as well, not just plain insufficient, if that "core value" is also a "belief" of that person, and if that person sees the real question of "whether we should be dictating morals to begin with" being (it appears to me, intentionally) dodged and a non-answer "use extensions" answer being provided?

Only if that person is offended that the FSF will not alter their original goal at her behalf.

I would be very disappointed if the FSF would codify new ethics into the GPL even if I would completely agree with the goal these new restrictions would aim for.

<AOL>I agree</AOL>

Posted Sep 26, 2006 14:49 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

Zack responded to mingo exactly the way I would. Thank you.

That's the point: If you want to GPL your work (and make it automagically
compatible with lots of things "in the wild" to mix and match) those are
the rules. And the rules exist to protect the Four Freedoms.

You can't have it both ways.

Posted Sep 26, 2006 16:08 UTC (Tue) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]

"To my understanding the additional permissions are not there to address new ethical questions, but simply to make it easier to distribute software using code that is licensed under a free but GPL-incompatible license. (such as the CDDL, which would allow for GNU/Solaris)"

I basically agree with everything you said, but it's worth noting one thing here: If the point of allowing additional permissions is to make it possible to combine code with code written under other, more permissive licenses, it's important to note that removing those permissions removes the ability to make that combination, so a downstream redistributor would have to strip out any code that was no longer compatible with the more restrictive license.

I think the whole question of compatibility and of distributing mixed-license code is under-addressed in the license and in licensing discussions in the community.

The FSF site says a license is GPL-compatible if it allows distribution under the GPL. That's somewhat misleading. The code [in most cases] remains licensed under its original terms. The compatibility is that the terms of the other license are not violated by distribution under the terms of the GPL - you're still distributing the included software under the terms of its own license, because those are the only terms that allow you to distribute it.

You can't have it both ways.

Posted Sep 27, 2006 1:08 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

how is any downstream distributer (especially years later) supposed to know what the source for all the bits of code were so that they can strip out the bits of code that 'needed' that extra permissions to be there?

David Lang

Simple...

Posted Sep 27, 2006 9:01 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

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