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The "or later" clause and marriageThe "or later" clause and marriagePosted Oct 2, 2006 0:02 UTC (Mon) by socket (guest, #43)Parent article: Busy busy busybox I must admit, first, that I haven't decided how I feel about the GPLv3. I'm still trying to sift out real arguments from straw men, on both sides, and I wish there were better resources on copyright, patent, and contract law available for study online. I want my opinion, whatever it will be, to at least be informed. I remember when I first took notice of the "or later" clause about seven or eight years ago, and it worried me: what if the future versions of the GPL would be completely in conflict with the spirit of the GPL as I understood it then? I just got married last month, and that was the first time I felt good about believing that come what may, I'm committed. The future is uncertain, people change, circumstances could make anyone do things that their younger selves might have been aghast at. It was a real leap of faith for me to accept that even if things do change in my relationship, I'll make my best effort at finding real solutions rather than bailing out. I don't make leaps of faith like that lightly. The FSF has been, overall, a good organization. Past performance can predict future actions, but given enough time, anything can change. Do I absolutely trust that every future version of the GPL is one that I'll want to use for my projects? Not without knowing what the future GPLs will say. I will not decide what I think of licenses until I've read, studied, and understood them. The kind of trust the "or later" clause requires has no place outside of intimate relationships.
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The "or later" clause and marriage Posted Oct 2, 2006 0:29 UTC (Mon) by sanjoy (subscriber, #5026) [Link] Larry Rosen's book Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law (Prentice-Hall 2005) is available online, under an open-source license, the Academic Free License. It's an excellent book.
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 2, 2006 0:42 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] Omitting the "or later" clause causes enormous practical problems, as we are seeing now, because it reduces compatibility and means that the license can be extremely difficult to update if legal problems with it are found, or if copyright law changes. IMO, this outweighs any "danger" that the FSF will abuse the trust—and in any case, the worst that can happen is not very bad since you always have the option of restricting the license versions for future code releases. And the FSF is hardly alone in this practice. For example, the Creative Commons ShareAlike license says: You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this License, a later version of this License ... [emphasis added] Same for the Mozilla Public License (MPL), which says: You may also choose to use such Covered Code under the terms of any subsequent version of the License published by Netscape. So, Creative Commons and MPL don't even give the licensor a choice about whether to allow license upgrades—the ability to use later versions of the license is built directly into the license terms. And yet the FSF, which merely encourages people not to lock themselves into one version, is the one asking for unreasonable trust?
Who let the sane person into this discussion? Posted Oct 2, 2006 0:47 UTC (Mon) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] Well said.
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 2, 2006 1:14 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] quote:this outweighs any "danger" that the FSF will abuse the trust
does it?
in the eyes of many people they are already doing so.
many supporters of the GPLv2 are ignoreing the fact that it's very possible to agree with GPLv2 and what it states without having inherent, unrestricted trust in the FSF.
then you say quote:
the worst that happens is that projects tear themselves apart arguing over which license to use, either destroying themselves in the process, or resulting in two incompatable projects doing the same thing (with neither having the critical mass to survive for long)
arguably we are seeing this happen now (and the GPLv3 isn't even out yet).
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 2, 2006 1:50 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] the worst that happens is that projects tear themselves apart arguing over which license to use That's true for any free-software license—the contributors can always have philosophical disagreements that lead to forking. It has nothing to do with any supposed legal risk of giving "inherent, unrestricted trust" to the FSF. The legal risk of making your code "v2 or later" seems very minor because of the "or"—you always have the option to use the old version.
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 2, 2006 4:20 UTC (Mon) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] GPLv2 or later == giving up the expectations of always being able tomerge distributable modifications. Alice releases code under GPLv2 or later. Bob uses that code in his project and makes modifications, putting them under GPLv3. Carol does the same for her project and makes modifications putting them under GPLv2. Both Bob and Carol can distribute the results just fine. Alice, on the other hand, can _not_ merge modifications from both sources - result will not be legally distributable at all.
And for many people that ability to merge modifications back is
GPL "v2 or later" may prevent merging back modifications? in practice, probably not Posted Oct 2, 2006 5:09 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] That's true, but it has nothing to do with the FSF abusing its trust, which was what the original poster feared. The FSF has always made it clear that they would update the GPL from time to time, and that updates could be incompatible unless licensors give permission to use license updates. It's hard to have a reasonable discussion if people keep shifting their arguments — please start a new thread if you want to discuss a distinct complaint. Regarding your point, however, I'm skeptical that it will be a problem in practice. If a project is well managed and sets a firm policy that all contributions must be licensed compatibly with "v2 or later" (which didn't happen with BusyBox), past experience suggests that nearly all contributors will respect this (and troublemakers who don't can be ignored). For example, there are numerous projects that are LGPLed, and any contributor who insisted on switching to the regular GPL (as is legally possible) could theoretically force the project to either fork or switch licenses. And yet, in practice, this does not seem to happen—zillions of LGPL projects seem to be continuing quite happily without continual relicensing battles. In any case, incompatibility between copyleft license versions is almost unavoidable (which is probably why other copylefts like MPL and CC require "any later version" language). So, basically your argument boils down to either: FSF should never upgrade the GPL, regardless of what loopholes are found or whether legal conditions change; or that everyone should specify only a particular version, which would lead to much, much more incompatibility when the GPL is updated.
GPL "v2 or later" may prevent merging back modifications? in practice, probably not Posted Oct 2, 2006 5:47 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] people aren't arguing that the license should never be changed no matter what.
what they are arguing is that they don't see the new license being in the same spirit as the old one. they don't see major loopholes that need to be closed.
the FSF does see large holes that desperatly need to be closed, and they seem willing to take drastic measures to do so (and a major license change is such a drastic measure)
unfortunantly, for many people these actions are prooving their worst fears about the 'or later' clause to be true, and this loss of trust will hurt any future changes that the FSF attempts to make (including those made in response to much more pressing problems)
GPL "v2 or later" may prevent merging back modifications? in practice, probably not Posted Oct 2, 2006 6:40 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] unfortunantly, for many people these actions are prooving their worst fears about the 'or later' clause to be true These are their "worst fears?" *Yawn, hyperbole alert.* If they used "v2 or later" and the developers don't like the final version of GPLv3, they can always stick with v2's terms. Yes, hypothetically people could fork a v3 version of your code, but FUD about forking of FLOSS projects has almost always been proven false, regardless of license (whether GPL or BSD or LGPL), and the few exceptional cases (e.g. X11) were usually for good reason and ended up being applauded by the community. If the main developers of a project agree with one another, then no fork will survive; and if the main developers have basic philosophical differences then the project has problems regardless of license. And anyway, forking of v2-only and v3-only projects could happen regardless of whether the changes in v3 were big or small, and regardless of whether you agree with them. There's nothing the FSF could have done to prevent this, except for not updating the GPL at all. (Except in a fantasy world where every developer on the planet likes v3 better than v2, which would never happen regardless of what v3 changed.) In any case, considering that the FSF's changes are totally in line with what they have always said the goals of the GPL are (ensuring the user's right to modify, run, and redistribute the programs they receive), saying it's not "in the same spirit" seems tenuous. If you lose trust in the FSF because they stick to their stated ideals in the face of technical countermeasures (DRM and patents), then you haven't been paying attention for the past 20 years. (I can easily come up with much worse fears. e.g. that GPLv3 == X11, which would open up all past "v2 or later" code to closed-source exploitation. This would be a true abandonment of the spirit of the license.)
GPL "v2 or later" may prevent merging back modifications? in practice, yes Posted Oct 2, 2006 8:26 UTC (Mon) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link] unfortunantly, for many people these actions are prooving their worst fears about the 'or later' clause to be true These are their "worst fears?" You are materially misrepresenting what was said. He said: "their worst fears about the 'or later' clause". *Yawn, hyperbole alert.* If they used "v2 or later" and the developers don't like the final version of GPLv3, they can always stick with v2's terms. You are now compounding your misrepresentation of what was said with a false ridicule of their fears over the 'or later' clause. Who are you to ridicule them over what they (which category, btw., includes me) genuinely believe? May i ask you what kind of free software projects you have participated in so far, and what the level of your participation was? (In my judgement, if this attitude and social skills of yours isnt just an unfortunate one-time deviation in the heat of the moment but common practice then you could not have gotten very far into contributing to free software - but please by all means surprise me with facts to the contrary.)
GPL "v2 or later" may prevent merging back modifications? in practice, yes Posted Oct 2, 2006 11:45 UTC (Mon) by walken (subscriber, #7089) [Link] >> *Yawn, hyperbole alert.* If they used "v2 or later" and the developers don't like the final version of GPLv3, they can always stick with v2's terms.
> You are now compounding your misrepresentation of what was said with a false ridicule of their fears over the 'or later' clause.
It would help if you could clarify, in a concrete way, what these fears are.
Say you contributed code under "GPLv2 or later". now GPLv3 comes out and adds additional restrictions to v2 (the no-tivoisation clauses). tivo can stil use that code you wrote under the v2 terms. no immediate harm done as far as I can see (it'd be different if v3 was relaxing restrictions instead, though).
Later on someone might write a v3-only change, which would be an issue if you want to use his change, and he cares strongly about excluding v2, and you care strongly about allowing it. I suppose that would be too bad, but this is hardly RMS's fault if you can't agree on licensing terms with that future contributor.
Can you clarify what your fears are about GPLv3 ?
> (In my judgement, if this attitude and social skills of yours isnt just an unfortunate one-time deviation in the heat of the moment but common practice then you could not have gotten very far into contributing to free software - but please by all means surprise me with facts to the contrary.)
Aaaaw come on now, as if we don't know of any kernel devs with bad social skills... :)
Ad hominem Posted Oct 2, 2006 16:22 UTC (Mon) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] You seem to be suggesting that challenging what some people believe is wrong regardless of the merits of that belief -- in other words that opposition to GPLv3 is some kind of religion that needs to be respected outside the boundaries of reason and argument. Dismissing an argument based on the credentials and social skills of the author without regard for the merits of the argument is an elementary logical fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
I suggest you work on your own social skills before policing those of others.
GPL "v2 or later" may prevent merging back modifications? in practice, yes Posted Oct 2, 2006 16:38 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] He said: "their worst fears about the 'or later' clause". Yup. And this is hyperbole...one can come up with much worse fears, as I pointed out at the end of my message; you're the one who is misreading what I wrote. If your "worst fear" about "or later version" permissions is that the FSF will add restrictions (regarding DRM or patents) you don't like, then your doomsday scenario is pretty tame—you can always stick with v2. The FSF cannot force you to add restrictions you do not want. PS. I'm not going to take the bait and get into an ad hominem pissing contest with you. Please try to stick to rational arguments.
GPL "v2 or later" may prevent merging back modifications? in practice, yes Posted Oct 2, 2006 17:17 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] Lest you misunderstand me again, by "one can come up with much worse fears" I meant "one can come up with much worse fears in this context".In case you haven't noticed, throughout this entire thread I've focused exclusively on the context of the "or any later version" permission. I believe this is clear if you read each posting in its entirety, as opposed to snipping out isolated phrases. (You're acting like I said, "Well, nuclear war is a much worse fear," when I said no such thing, and if you read what I wrote this is clearly not what I meant.) Ingo, native English speakers rely on context and good-faith readers/listeners in order to make themselves understood. Only lawyers have to be careful to precisely turn every phrase to avoid any possible ambiguity, because lawyers have to prepare for people who deal in bad faith. Please don't make people who deal with you write like lawyers.
GPL "v2 or later" may prevent merging back modifications? in practice, yes Posted Oct 2, 2006 17:41 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] You said, Only lawyers have to be careful to precisely turn every phrase to avoid any possible ambiguity...And yet you yourself have spent much of your time nit-picking Ingo's language and have mostly ignored his very clear intent.
Bull Posted Oct 2, 2006 18:19 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] And yet you yourself have spent much of your time nit-picking Ingo's language Bull. All through this thread I've tried to stay on-topic regarding whether using "v2 or later" permission opens you up to some vague and terrible legal risks, and whether the FSF is fulfilling these fears with GPLv3 (separate from whether you agree with v3's changes). Ingo posted exactly once in this thread (so far), and his points were (a) misreading my post to claim that I was not taking the phrase "worst fears" in the context of this permission, (b) making unfounded and irrelevant ad hominem attacks. And I note that your post made not a single substantive point about the license language. Why are people so intent on changing the subject?
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 2, 2006 17:03 UTC (Mon) by mrfredsmoothie (guest, #3100) [Link] Alice, on the other hand, can _not_ merge modifications from both sources - result will not be legally distributable at all. Right. Alice will have to (gasp!) talk to Carol and ask her to grant permission to license her changes under "v2 or later" terms. Seriously, there's a lot of hyper-ventilating going on here. I admit that for *very* large projects with hundreds or more contributors, this *might* turn out to be a real problem, but it might end up being Son of Y2K, too.
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 3, 2006 5:34 UTC (Tue) by himi (guest, #340) [Link] What are the actual use-case scenarios for this?
Alice can pull the code in herself, in which case there's always going to be a potential licensing issue - without knowing what license the modifications are released under this is legally dodgy regardless of the history of the code, and Alice is an idiot if she doesn't ask for clarification/relicensing.
Alternatively, Carol can submit her code to Alice for inclusion, at which point /Carol/ is making the decision, and is either explicitly or implicitly granting a license to use her modifications.
Either way, it's something that sensible precautions will deal with, and certainly not a cause for the kind of FUD that's been floating around.
himi
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 4, 2006 1:53 UTC (Wed) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] Three words: Objective C Compiler. Aka. "when FSF went after authorsof modified gcc and forced them to release their modifications for for merge". And that was very definitely "forced", not "sweet-talked". GPL allows you to do that; if authors of modification try to make them legally unmergable for you, they lose the right to distribute the entire thing themselves. That is, except for "or later" loophole. That one allows parasitic forks that can pull from original codebase without permitting to merge back. _And_ it allows for GPLv2-only forks, to serious displeasure of FSF.
BTW, if you have "v2 or later" project, no extra restrictions of
So there are two possibilities: pressure authors of the original
Now, put yourself in position of people who do not want to drop
BTW, to address LGPL -> GPL strawman: AFAIK nobody ever tried to
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 4, 2006 8:40 UTC (Wed) by himi (guest, #340) [Link]
I'm not sure I follow this argument - unless you're somehow postulating that the people doing your v2 only fork can relicense the code, I'd get it under the "v2 or later" clause, too, which means that they can apply their DRM, but when they distribute it to me I can request the source and appropriate keys under the anti-DRM clauses of the GPLv3.
You're making an awful lot of noise about relicensing code left right and center, but you're ignoring something quite important: only the owner of the copyright on a piece of code can change the license on that code. That means that some random person coming along and creating a fork of a project under the "GPLv2 or later" license has to stick to that license on every line of code in that tree, except the stuff they write themselves. And if a person or a group is able to relicense a body of code, they own that code, and they have every right to do whatever they want with it, including taking it closed source, proprietary, and charging people millions of dollars a seat. They can put the code they write themselves under whatever license they want, whether it's a patch to some GPLv2, v3, or v20 code, but they can't simply change the terms of the original license grant from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv2 only" or GPLv3 only", and without that license change the only issue is the license on their modifications. If a project starts to accept major changes under a GPLv3 only license then your horror story of a v3 only fork may be possible, but only if that fork either convinces other contributors to release their code to it under a v3 only license, or if they replace the code that's still 'tainted' with the v2 grant; likewise for a v2 only fork. But frankly, that's the project lead's own stupid fault for not taking sensible precautions about license compatibility, and it's not something to make such a big song and dance about himi
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 4, 2006 11:22 UTC (Wed) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] Read GPL. "you have the option of following the terms and conditionseither of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation". In other words, to distribute a work under "v2 or later" it is enough to comply with GPLv2 alone. So if recepients demand something you would have to provide under v3 but not under v2 and you refuse, there's nothing they can legally do. Please, read section 9 and understand it. BTW, ask stevenj to explain it - perhaps he'll do that better. He does understand what it means, judging by his postings in this thread.
The rest of your points is based on that misunderstanding of how
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 5, 2006 4:01 UTC (Thu) by himi (guest, #340) [Link] Okay, I see the line of reasoning there, and if it's legally valid (which I'd like to hear from a lawyer) then it's a rather ridiculous loophole in the license which could probably only be fixed with a /forced/ upgrade clause.
However, it doesn't affect any of my other arguments - the /recipient/ of the code is still receiving it under the "any later version" language in clause 9, and hence /they/ can choose to act under either v2 or v3; they also /must/ pass the same rights along to any future recipients of the code. So, without actual relicensing happening v2-only or v3-only forks aren't possible except as I outlined - when /new code/ is written under either license exclusively. And that's within the rights of the authors, both legally /and/ morally, isn't it?
himi
every other major copyleft *forces* you to allow later license versions Posted Oct 4, 2006 11:56 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] So for any pool of code under GPLv2-or-later, we now have the possibility of two forms of parasitic forking :- GPLv2 only - GPLv3 only
GPLv2-or-later is a no-go now for DRM proponents because of the GPLv3 forking potential, and it's a no go for DRM oponents because of the impossibility to enforce GPLv3 terms. Both camps agree on killing it.
The first fork option is offensive to people who have contributed believing in the FSF ideals, and expecting a GPLv3 someday should the GPLv2 prove insufficient to enforce them. The second one is offensive to those who have contributed based on a careful analysis of GPLv2 terms, and how they could workaround FSF ideals while complying with the GPLv2. Both forks can be taken as a betrayal.
So we have a polarization. We have hostile forks. It's easy to blame the FSF and the GPL v3 process for it.
The root cause however is the people who managed to dissocate the GPLv2 wording from the GPLv2 original intent by building "clever" business models. They knew perfectly well then they were sitting on the wishes of some GPLv2 contributors. Their actions were divisive, and their natural result (GPL update and pressure to drop the GPLv2) should have been obvious to everyone.
The free software community will have to choose sides now. Including all the people who didn't care one way or another. But make no mistake, GPLv2-only is not the neutral choice. It ceased being so once people mixed software patents and DRM in the software distribution process. That's when the community consensus was broken.
Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is? Posted Oct 10, 2006 16:35 UTC (Tue) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link] "Yeah! Its like goldy and bronzy, only its made of iron."
I think it's very funny to hear Linux kernel devs calling GPLd forks of existing code bases 'parasitic', when the Linux kernel itself contains a not so insignificant amount of BSD licensed code.
I guess one man's 'parasite' is the same man's 'liberator of too liberally licensed code', depending on which end of the leaching^W merging chain he stands.
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