a dissenting opinion: this is useful [LWN.net]

a dissenting opinion: this is useful

Posted Apr 14, 2011 15:10 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589)
In reply to: a dissenting opinion: this is useful by wingo
Parent article: Project Harmony decloaks

Dear wingo:

Context: I'm currently in the midst of constructing a non-profit foundation for Tahoe-LAFS and also a business of my own. The business doesn't have any special access to licensingit is so far a pure open source strategy. (Perhaps a bit of a rare beast nowadays.)

Although, there would be nothing preventing my business from in the future *buying* a license to use Tahoe-LAFS in a proprietary way from the foundation! I think Mozilla gets some funding that way, although I'm not sure. If anyone could confirm or deny I would appreciate it.

(Of course the Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation, which is not controlled by me, would have to agree to sell such a licence.)

Let's see, so you are strongly averse to letting your code be used in proprietary software at all. That's easy to understand. So for example if the non-profit foundation sold rights to make proprietary derivatives then you wouldn't want to contribute your patches to that project at all, right?

Does this also imply that you never contribute patches to any code base which isn't copyleft? No BSD/MIT/Apache-licensed contributions from you?

Another interesting twist to this whole thing is the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence. That licence is like the MIT/BSD/Apache licence in that it allows people to make proprietary derived works, *except* that they are required to release their derived work under the TGPPL within 12 months. So it is a sort of time-delay copyleft. How would you feel about contributing code to a project that used that? http://tahoe-lafs.org/~zooko/tgppl.pdf

Tahoe-LAFS itself is currently distributed under your choice of GPLv2+ or TGPPLv1+:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/READM...

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this issue.

Regards,

Zooko

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a dissenting opinion: this is useful

Posted Apr 14, 2011 16:34 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

> There is a important difference between a entirely permissive licensed codebase and a copyleft codebase where a single entity has the right to sell proprietary licenses. In the former, everyone has the same rights but not in the latter case.

Yes, of course, but wingo didn't indicate that *that* was his concern. I guess there are many separate concerns here and different people care about different ones. It makes it easy to argue past each other I bet.

a dissenting opinion: this is useful

Posted Apr 25, 2011 14:12 UTC (Mon) by wingo (subscriber, #26929) [Link]

Hi Zooko,

Thank you for your reply, and apologies for the delay in the response.

The question at hand is not my aversion to having my code be used in proprietary software; while it does exist, it's not an overpowering concern. I mostly work on Guile these days, which is an LGPL project, so it can form part of a proprietary application. I contribute code under other, more permissive licenses occasionally as well, though it's not my preference. I prefer to work towards a world of sharing, and copyleft is one way to do that. The TGPPL is another way; not as good, but it could be warranted, strategically.

No, my real concern is about the way in which the different contributions come together. Are we on equal footing or aren't we? If we are, then let's all work together, cooperating via the permissions we grant in the licenses, but with no need to assign to some other party. What having a contributor agreement says to me is that "in this project, some contributors are more equal than others." Obviously a properly-governed foundation as the holder mitigates this to a degree, but I don't even think that the FSF assignment policy is necessary for any purpose, and is clearly detrimental to getting casual contributors.

Regards,

Andy