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The Digital Standards Organization - The Hague DeclarationThe Digital Standards Organization - The Hague DeclarationPosted May 16, 2008 23:03 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (subscriber, #75)Parent article: The Digital Standards Organization - The Hague Declaration They make one comment that I strongly disagree with: We would argue that copy-left licenses are most appropriate for reference implementations. The whole point of a reference implementation is that it should be available for anyone trying to implement the standard. Copyleft explicitly fails in that goal; it's available only to copylefted implementations. Reference implementations should use a permissive license that lets any implementer- copyleft, permissively licensed, or proprietary- use it. Otherwise the standardization is no longer open; it's biased in favor of one kind of software.
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The Digital Standards Organization - The Hague Declaration Posted May 16, 2008 23:25 UTC (Fri) by pieterh (guest, #52123) [Link] Thanks for making this point. Digistan has no agenda to promote any particular software development methodology or market model. I've clarified the analysis but not changed the basic statement. The reason for preferring copyleft reference implementations is not to favor a particular software development model but rather to protect the standard from capture by silent extension. It is harder for vendors to take a reference implementation, modify it to break compatibility with competitors' products and then package it as closed source. We've seen such behavior quite frequently, it would be less common with copyleft reference implementations.
The Digital Standards Organization - The Hague Declaration Posted May 16, 2008 23:45 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] Of course, the real problem for openness with a copyleft implementation is that it is likely to be incompatible with even other free/libre copyleft implementations. Perhaps this is not something you want for a standard?
Copyleft reference implementation Posted May 17, 2008 0:33 UTC (Sat) by rgmoore (subscriber, #75) [Link] The reason for preferring copyleft reference implementations is not to favor a particular software development model but rather to protect the standard from capture by silent extension. It is harder for vendors to take a reference implementation, modify it to break compatibility with competitors' products and then package it as closed source. I think that you're missing the point. It's only harder for them to break compatibility if they choose to use the copyleft licensed reference implementation. If they re-implement the standard rather than using the reference version, they're still free to extend it without sharing their work. And proprietary vendors will want to do exactly that because they want to avoid possible license conflicts with the rest of their software. All that making a copylefted reference implementation will accomplish is to make life miserable for any Free Software implementation that uses an incompatible license.
Copyleft reference implementation Posted May 17, 2008 5:42 UTC (Sat) by cannedfish (guest, #49561) [Link] LGPL is copyleft too.
Copyleft reference implementation Posted May 17, 2008 22:06 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] With LGPL: If you change the implementation (and distribute it) you have to distribute the modified implementation as well.
Copyleft reference implementation Posted May 18, 2008 10:58 UTC (Sun) by cannedfish (guest, #49561) [Link] Correct. I was commenting on said issue of license incompatibilities with free software though...
Copyleft reference implementation Posted May 19, 2008 6:48 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] It also have the flip side of limiting licensing diversification, which is a bad thing on most counts. The GPL/LGPL, by the sake of being the first (or the first that mattered) and the most popular copyleft license then that means that end users expect compatibility with it. This creates a ad-hoc standard... as long as everything stays compatible with the GPL then that means the GPL is always going to be the 'least free' of the popular free software licenses. I work in a place were I have to go through authorization to include all software in the end product. If a distribution had a dozens of semi-incompatible licenses it would be a nearly impossible task to get the approval to use Linux. Maybe right now it would be 'ok', but the way things are heading it's only getting worse, more expensive, and more difficult. (yeah! government! (that's sarcasm)) The legal overhead would be more expensive then just purchasing some proprietary product from a different vendor. Believe me, the only people that care about having different sorts of licenses are developers. Nobody else cares... well that's not accurate.. everybody else cares (although they'd rather NOT care) and they simply don't want to deal with it. GPL is bad enough, we don't need more of the same. Don't get me wrong. I think the GPL is the key to making free software a competitive system in today's climate (and thus is wonderful).. but having another copyleft license that is not compatible with GPL is only going to hurt except for maybe very specific cases. In other words GPL is a necessary evil and that sort of thing should be kept to a minimum.
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