If you won't be bound by your own license, why should we take you seriously? [LWN.net]

If you won't be bound by your own license, why should we take you seriously?

Posted Jan 28, 2021 0:00 UTC (Thu) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642)
Parent article: Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

It seems to me that everything that needs to be said about the SS Public License has already been said. I have posted twice about it and related issues. The only thing I haven't seen said succinctly, although it's been hinted at by many, is this:

There is no one on the planet yet who has agreed that they will run a project under the SS Public License and be themselves bound by the SS Public License.

That really says it all. Whatever your view about copyleft licenses generally: legitimate and well-intentioned copyleft licenses (e.g., CC-BY-SA, GPL, and Affero GPL) have many projects that use the license in an inbound=outbound contributor licensing fashion. All (two of the) SS Public License uses have a strict CLA that give the publishing entity non-SS-Public-Licensed rights to the contributions. We shouldn't take anyone seriously who promulgates a license but won't use it themselves in an inbound=outbound way. Period. I suggest we all try to not give further interest to this clearly risible licensing proposals from MongoDB and Elastic.

If there's energy to focus here, I'd say it's toward figuring out how to handle good governance of forks of these two projects. I hope folks can maintain the discipline to discern and bifricate these two very different issues.

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If you won't be bound by your own license, why should we take you seriously?

Posted Jan 28, 2021 0:06 UTC (Thu) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link]

> It seems to me that everything that needs to be said about the SS Public License has already been said.

Apologies, my links that were supposed to be embedded in that sentence didn't come through when I switched from Plain Text drafting to HTML drafting in LWN's comment interface. I had meant to link to the same two posts that Jake links to in the parent article: VM Brasseur's and Drew DeVault's articles at these URLs:

https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2019/06/07/the-probl...
https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not...

I didn't see much point on writing a fresh post myself after seeing those excellent pieces…

If you won't be bound by your own license, why should we take you seriously?

Posted Jan 30, 2021 16:51 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (2 responses)

Would you be willing to address some (perceived or real) loophole in the AGPL ?

If you won't be bound by your own license, why should we take you seriously?

Posted Jan 31, 2021 21:40 UTC (Sun) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link] (1 responses)

> Would you be willing to address some (perceived or real) loophole in the AGPL ?

I've encouraged anyone who thinks we need to come up with better copyleft to join the copyleft-next project. I am not willing to take seriously companies who don't even bind themselves by copyleft licenses they promulgate when they disingenuously claim, as Elliot of MongoDB did, that they're attempting to make a better copyleft for end-users. Their goal is to push people from copyleft to proprietary licensing. Period.

As a matter of community priority: copyleft violation is widespread and that most devices in the world today (by a count of millions and perhaps billions) do not give users the software freedom that copyleft ensures due to copyleft violations. As such, my priority, as a copyleft theorist is to figure out why copyleft is not working to defend software freedom and what we need to do to fix it. Making a even stronger copyleft than AGPL can't be the right priority in that climate, since even the weaker copylefts, such as plain GPL, are so widely violated.

If you won't be bound by your own license, why should we take you seriously?

Posted Jan 31, 2021 21:57 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> As such, my priority, as a copyleft theorist is to figure out why copyleft is not working to defend software freedom and what we need to do to fix it

I think that's pretty obvious. Certainly in America, it's difficult to enforce. Copyright theft is just accepted as a fact of life.

One only has to look at Reuters - they nicked a newspaper article (where the author had basically licenced it "Creative Commons just attribute me") and when the author complained, they just said "if you kick up a fuss we'll make sure you never publish another article again!"

What you want is the European attitude - copyright theft for gain is a criminal offence in Britain (even if it's not really enforced), and given that Europe tends to emphasise preventing future breaches it shouldn't be too hard - given evidence of previous breaches - to get an injunction requiring importers to certify IN ADVANCE that their gear doesn't breach copyright.

That would pretty much kill the habit of importing something illegal and discontinuing it before you get called on it ...

Cheers,
Wol