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 31, 2021 21:40 UTC (Sun) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642)
In reply to: If you won't be bound by your own license, why should we take you seriously? by ballombe
Parent article: Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

> 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.

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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