AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change

Posted Jun 27, 2023 18:10 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change by pizza
Parent article: AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change

What would you say of theoretical license like the GPL with the extra clause:

12 bis/ If you exert pressure or coercion on the recipient of the software (whether by law, contract, agreement, quid pro quo, thread of retaliation or otherwise) with effect of discouraging the recipient of exercising some of the right conveyed by this license, you lose the right conveyed by this license, whether or not the recipient decide to exercise them.

This is far-fetched, but I do not see this as complely illegitimate.
What point to give right to someone if they can just be blackmailed not use them ?

AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change

Posted Jun 27, 2023 20:23 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I'd want to get such a clause checked over with the help of a copyright lawyer.

I agree with the principle, I'd just be concerned about the risk of creating unintended consequences that I didn't want (e.g. accidentally depriving someone of rights because the President of their country is putting pressure on them of the form "do as I say or your family gets tortured" and they put pressure on their downstreams accordingly), and that's where the lawyer helps.

I'd also not want to write the clause in a way where someone evil could say "you're putting pressure on me to not redistribute, because you'll only supply one USB stick with the software on it for free, and I want 1,000,000" and trigger it - again, lawyer can help draft it properly.

I also like paulj's suggestion that you only meet your obligations if you distribute the source publicly, not just to recipients of the binary, for the same idea - but again, would want a lawyer to help me get it right.

AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change

Posted Jun 27, 2023 21:15 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

This quickly turns into an how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? type of discussion.

GPL was played with in a manner similar to what RedHat is doing from very early on. As I have already pointed out: Cygnus was created before Linus have ever dreamed about starting his Freax work.

And it was critical for the success of GCC and then, later, GNU: that was how Cygnus earned money.

In a hypothetical world where that would have happened chances are high that both GCC and Linux would have never grown to become something significant (indeed, Linux 0.01 RELNOTES says “You may not distibute this for a fee, not even "handling" costs”, without tit-for-tat GPL it would have never went anywhere).

Which means that GPL had such clause from the very beginning we would have lived in a very different world. Would that have been BSD-based world or would have someone else invented copyleft?

Hard to say, really. But one thing that we can say is that such license wouldn't have been used much at all in any world.

And, of course, today it's much too late to try to add such clause.