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FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-nextFOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-nextPosted Feb 14, 2013 11:17 UTC (Thu) by aggelos (subscriber, #41752)In reply to: FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next by nmav Parent article: FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next
AFAIUI, it's a level-playing field clause. The idea is to prevent a member of the community from enjoying a special status, as only they can derive proprietary versions (there is a grace period to allow smooth copylefting of code that starts as a proprietary product). Most importantly, a single copyright holder also gets to 'cure' license violations for some kind of compensation and copyleft-next wants to discourage the business model of trying to trick people into a violation or creating FUD about copyleft requirements in order to get others to "buy" "legal certainty" from you.
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FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 14, 2013 18:49 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Open Source projects *already* have a means of preventing a member of the community from enjoying that "special status": unless the project maintainer requires a copyright assignment agreement or contributor agreement handing over the right to relicense, any actively developed project will have contributions from many copyright holders, all of whom would have to agree on any relicensing (proprietary or otherwise).
Personally, I'd have found copyleft-next rather interesting and compelling if not for issues like this. An effort to produce a simpler copyleft license does not seem like an appropriate time to introduce novel opinionated additions.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 14, 2013 20:52 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]
Point taken. It is certainly true that this provision is distinct from the main goal of copyleft-next.
But I do like the underlying idea behind this provision. It corrects what I consider to be an error in all previous copyleft licenses, an error that has had very troubling ethical consequences. You're right that another way to correct it is to encourage non-copyright-assignment/non-CLA copyleft project legal governance. However, I don't want this license to be tainted by that practice the way earlier/existing copyleft licenses have been. I feel quite strongly about this; you're not wrong to describe this provision as 'opinionated' in nature.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 14, 2013 21:45 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
I don't object to the principle you've suggested here, though I also don't see anything wrong with projects that choose to allow that practice. (I see nothing wrong with the "share your code or pay us" licensing model, and I certainly wouldn't consider it an error in all previous copyleft licenses.) However, I'd much rather have seen that as an optional addition to a license, rather than a required part of an otherwise much simpler license; as long as this provision remains in copyleft-next, I'll stick with the GPL. Given that you started this project partly in response to the many novel and controversial licensing provisions in GPLv3, such as the anti-DRM clause, it seems suboptimal to introduce your own novel and controversial licensing provisions.
The main reason I don't consider this an error in previous copyleft licenses, and the reason I brought up assignments/CLAs: the copyleft licenses themselves have no inherent asymmetry. If you write a project yourself, and hold all the copyrights, I see absolutely nothing wrong with choosing a dual-licensing model, including one that provides paid non-copyleft licenses. If you accept contributions, then unless those contributors sign an assignment or CLA, you can no longer use that dual-licensing model without the agreement of those contributors. If you want to maintain that dual-licensing model while taking third-party contributions, you have to introduce an assignment or CLA, and *that* introduces the asymmetry; the copyleft license doesn't.
I see no asymmetry here, and thus I see no bug in existing copyleft licenses here.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 18, 2013 14:23 UTC (Mon) by ian00 (guest, #55476) [Link]
"*that* introduces the asymmetry." And this excludes *that* asymmetry...
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 18, 2013 14:18 UTC (Mon) by ian00 (guest, #55476) [Link]
I completely agree with you on adding this provision and why.
Ethical consequences ... Posted Feb 21, 2013 16:21 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
But if I understand this aright, your "fix" has an equally troubling ethical consequence.
Let's say I've spent loads of time and money developing my product. I want to PROTECT my customers, like Qt/KDE did. It sounds like I can't use your licence to do it. Oooppsss.
Personally, I have no problem with people trying to monetise and sell their software. But as a customer I don't want to be trapped with outdated software and no source when technology moves on, and I think developers have a duty to their customers. Pity I can't use your licence to achieve that :-(
Cheers,
Ethical consequences ... Posted Feb 21, 2013 16:32 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]
I don't understand. To make this simpler let's forget copyleft-next and suppose the license is the GPL. What is there in pure GPL that prevents you from "PROTECTING" your customers? I don't even know what you mean by "PROTECTING". It seems to be "making sure customers have up-to-date software and source code". What in the GPL prevents you from doing that?
Ethical consequences ... Posted Feb 21, 2013 17:01 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
So you ignore the point I'm trying to make!
The GPL promptly makes all my hard work in writing the software valueless (certainly in terms of being able to extract an income stream). You're imposing your "software wants to be free" ethic on me, and not respecting my "the labourer is worthy of his hire" ethic.
In my scenario *I* wrote the software, I want to *sell* the software, and I want to make sure that if I fall under a bus my customers won't be left up s**t creek.
Okay, that obviously means I don't buy in to *hard* copyleft, but your attitude is in the "GPL or die" camp. And you're using copyleft to enforce stuff that is outside the realm of copyright, namely you are (in practice) forrbidding copyright licencing agreements. That's exactly the sort of thing that alienates a lot of copyleft-friendly people who your copyleft-next is allegedly aimed at.
Just as the anti-tivoisation clauses in GPL3 alienated a lot people who saw them as stepping outside the realm of copyright and into the realm of enforcing idealism, so this clause to me smacks of exactly the same.
At the end of the day, if I am sole copyright holder (or have a licence from contributors that says I can) and distribute both proprietary and GPL versions, then those other contributors know up front what they're letting themselves in for. And it's a *contract* matter, not a *copyright* matter.
Equally to the point, I (should) know exactly what I as the copyright holder am letting myself in for. Actually, I have seen at first hand what happens when a company tries to convert their product into a dual-licence proprietary/GPL state. Firstly, they would never have touched your licence in a month of sundays. And secondly, it went rather tits-up because they didn't actually understand what they were getting themselves into. But even given that mess, they have a community. If you want to investigate, google "OpenQM". And people, if you find stuff you don't like, PLEASE don't dive in - they are nice people, really!
Cheers,
Ethical consequences ... Posted Feb 21, 2013 17:36 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]
> The GPL promptly makes all my hard work in writing the software
> valueless (certainly in terms of being able to extract an income > stream). You're imposing your "software wants to be free" ethic on > me, and not respecting my "the labourer is worthy of his hire" > ethic.
I believe you may be confusing "free as in freedom" with "free as in
> Okay, that obviously means I don't buy in to *hard* copyleft, but
No.
> And you're using copyleft
No, I'm essentially saying 'if you use a strong copyleft license for
> At the end of the day, if I am sole copyright holder (or have a
It's not the contributors I'm concerned about here, primarily, though
> Actually, I have seen at first hand what happens when a company
That's exactly the effect I wish to achieve.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 14, 2013 22:04 UTC (Thu) by aggelos (subscriber, #41752) [Link]
Oh, absolutely agreed that having multiple copyright holders is the healthy way to deal with the "proprietary relicensing" problem. Not just multiple in fact, also different kinds of copyright holders (e.g. not only corporations that don't care about the code itself). Given that the initial author(s) get to choose the license, if they wanted to keep their options open, they wouldn't choose copyleft-next 0.1 anyway. So the clause might be of limited use in practice (except in special conditions; no real-world examples come to mind).
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 15, 2013 0:15 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Exactly. And given all of that, I think that clause fails the test described in the article: "For each provision, Fontana asked whether the incremental complexity associated with the provision is necessary and worthwhile."
Given the inherent controversy involved in releasing a new copyleft license, especially one not currently endorsed by the FSF, I think copyleft-next should strive for "simple" and "uncontroversial" as primary goals.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 15, 2013 1:58 UTC (Fri) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] If that provision does get cut out, the reason will be failure to meet that standard. However, I don't see what's so controversial about the intention of the provision. Businesses experimenting with copyleft-based dual-licensing and open core models will always have other licenses to choose from.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 15, 2013 2:47 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the problem is that you are falling into the same trap the FSF did with GPLv3.
you either thing that
A) everyone agrees with you on this topic (hint, not everyone does, a lot of people are Ok with the idea of a project selling proprietary licences if it funds the opensource code)
or
B) this is such a critical item that it's worth having many people not use the license, or convert from it to GPL so that they can then sell the proprietary licenses.
and if you can't make that conversion to GPL to bypass the restriction, then you are imposing an additional restriction to what the GPL includes and are not GPL compatible)
Many times projects start off under one license, and it's only years later that they decide to raise money by selling GPL exceptions. In many cases, the uses that the code then gets put to would probably be legal even under the GPL, except for creating what would effectively be a mirror of an obsolete version of the source (unmodified code compiled and shipped in an appliance for example)
So this is a provision that is controversial, and can be pretty trivially bypassed, why is it so valuable again?
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 15, 2013 3:36 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Exactly. And potential users of copyleft-next also benefit when *other* people use that license; you want to encourage widespread adoption, and license clauses not directly addressing copyleft seem counterproductive for that.
I'd really like to see the simplest possible license that provides approximately the same set of essential protections as the GPLv{2,3}; thus, I'd really like to see this license act as a strict subset of those licenses.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 15, 2013 3:57 UTC (Fri) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]
> you either thing that A) everyone agrees with you on this topic
> (hint, not everyone does, a lot of people are Ok with the idea of a > project selling proprietary licences if it funds the opensource > code)
Of course I realize not everyone agrees with me. People disagree about
But this is not a matter of selling proprietary licenses to fund open
> B) this is such a critical item that it's worth having many people
There's some evidence that these kinds of problematic business models
> and if you can't make that conversion to GPL to bypass the
The license is explicitly outbound GPL-compatible. No GPL-incompatible
> So this is a provision that is controversial, and can be pretty
I'm afraid I don't see the controversy. I see a (probably declining)
As for bypassing it, the point is to discourage any use of the license
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 15, 2013 5:05 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
I think I might understand your concern now. If you mean dual-licensing business models that follow the poorly named "open core" model and sell an extended proprietary version, then I agree with you; that seems just as problematic as selling proprietary software in the first place. On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with selling permissively licensed versions of the same code as a revenue model.
I'd still rather see this as an optional addition to the license, though, rather than a required provision.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 15, 2013 21:19 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
To sell permissively licensed versions of the same code require you to be the sole copyright holder. So either you require copyright assignment or you refuse all external contributions, both alternatives being antisocial.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 17, 2013 12:31 UTC (Sun) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]
Or that you get a license agreement from contributors explicitly allowing you to sell permissively licensed versions of the same code.
The Chromium CLA does that, for example:
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 15, 2013 5:10 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> But this is not a matter of selling proprietary licenses to fund open source code, which strikes me either as a propagandistic or else a quaint way of seeing it. Rather, it's the problem of abusing copyleft specifically to sell proprietary licenses, with a number of specific attendant problems, such as promoting FUD around copyleft.
The problem is how to you block the bad behaviour (which as you note is not especially popular to start with) without blocking the acceptable versions.
your 'Anti-MySQL' clause isn't any better than the FSF's 'Anti-Tivo' clause. both are reactions to fairly rare abuse cases, and both are divisive in that there are large numbers of people in the community who don't see the behaviour as being so wrong that it's worth complicating a licence (and loosing all the non-abusive variations of the behaviour) to block the abusive behaviour.
> A business (or its legal advisor) contemplating some copyleft-based open core scheme or the like will take one look at copyleft-next and decide to use some other copyleft license for such a purpose.
that assumes that that approach is in their minds at the start of the project. It may be something that's first discussed years into the project (when it gets big enough and functional enough for people to be interested in paying for it)
It's very common for projects to start and grow, and then hit a crisis where the work to maintain them is large enough to need the core people paid to do the work, but not have a funding source in place to do this. It's times like this that the 'run it through the GPL to strip this clause' would happen.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 21, 2013 10:41 UTC (Thu) by Otus (guest, #67685) [Link]
> The license is explicitly outbound GPL-compatible. No GPL-incompatible
> restrictions will survive licensing derived works under the GPL. But > no one should ever get to the point of having to convert to GPL to > bypass the provision in question. A business (or its legal advisor) > contemplating some copyleft-based open core scheme or the like will > take one look at copyleft-next and decide to use some other copyleft > license for such a purpose.
Suppose project A decides they are OK with the provision preventing an open core model and decide to use copyleft-next (CN) for their license. What's to stop them from rethinking later, changing the project license to GPL and developing a proprietary version with the open core model?
Yes, the lack of copyright for parts of the code would do that unless they require copyright assignment or a more permissive contributor license, but how is that any different from the situation of CN without the provision?
IOW, I don't see how the provision adds any restrictions on use of the code or project format. It just means if some project does eventually decide to go open core, their further contributions will no longer be compatible with other CN projects, only GPL ones. That seems to hurt only those who use CN "in good faith" as their license.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 21, 2013 14:39 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]
> IOW, I don't see how the provision adds any restrictions on use of
> the code or project format.
That's right; it doesn't. It is meant to be a strong disincentive to
> It just means if some project does eventually decide to go open
That's an interesting argument. The effect of this provision would
First, such open core code will remain available for use by
Second, assuming the open core project uses GPLv2/GPLv3/AGPLv3, such
So I think your argument reduces to the argument that this provision
In short, I'd rather have the copyleft-next universe be smaller and
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 15, 2013 2:06 UTC (Fri) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]
The purpose of the provision is actually to deter licensors from attempting to use copyleft-next as a mechanism for promoting proprietary license sales in the manner we have seen in the past with other copyleft licenses. I don't expect it to have some "gotcha" effect on some entrepreneur who failed to read the license. The point is to prevent such use of the license in the first place.
In this sense referring to it as a 'poison pill', while sort of appealing, may be misleading. It's effectively a "keep away from this license if that's what you want to use copyleft for" sign.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 23, 2013 19:32 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
The thing is that this anti-mssql agenda changes your license from a general purpose copyleft license to yet another niche license.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 23, 2013 21:04 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
It is not a anti-mysql agenda. It is a clause that protects contributors from one sided copyright license agreements. You should be careful not to mislabel things since it is not specific to MySQL in any way.
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 23, 2013 23:58 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
MySQL is the poster child for the behaviour you are against, just like Tivo was the poster child for the behaviour that the FSF was against when writing that clause in the GPLv3.
Just like the 'anti-tivo' clause in GPLv3 did a lot to cause the split in developers, this 'anti-mysql' clause in this license will split developers as well
If your purpose is to divide the community further, then go ahead.
but if you want to unify the community drop this clause
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 24, 2013 2:19 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Using MySQL as poster child isn't accurate nor relevant. Ghotscript started the model and while MySQL adopted it, most of the current revenue for MySQL are from support subscriptions and has been for a very long time.
Besides your argument is too simplistic. BSD communities don't prefer any copyleft licenses at all so even GPLv2 was very divisive for them. So we have to ask ourselves, what is the target of the license and which communities are we helping?
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 24, 2013 3:29 UTC (Sun) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]
> MySQL is the poster child for the behaviour you are against, just
> like Tivo was the poster child for the behaviour that the FSF was > against when writing that clause in the GPLv3.
There is a big difference between the copyleft-next provision and the
> If your purpose is to divide the community further, then go ahead.
This makes it sound as though there is a sizable "community" of people
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 25, 2013 21:40 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the anti-tivo provision was justified by the FSF as "granting additional freedom to downstream users"
they used almost the exact same language you are using to defend that provision
FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next Posted Feb 26, 2013 2:46 UTC (Tue) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]
Okay, I do see some similarity. There's an equality principle
underlying both provisions.
GPLv3 section 6 states that the anti-lockdown provision does not apply
In other words, the policy problem the anti-lockdown provision was
In the copyleft-next provision, the original licensor is effectively
There's also an equality principle underlying some of the GPLv3 patent
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