Hi Till, On Monday 05 December 2011 15.41:38 till wrote: > The exception is possible because of the exception?
A license is just a piece of text, in the end. Anyone can come up with any license, and it becomes effective through copyright. So there is no way anyone could restrict the copyright holder from additional conditions and exceptions to any license, including the GPL, as long as you do it in ways that do not violate the Copyright of the license itself. Exceptions to the GPL have been around since the 80s, really, so are not a new thing. The problem was always incompatibility that might result from this, and how to enable the re-use of code in other projects. That is why GPLv3 has been drafted to address this on a more systematic level, so its compatibility with versions of itself with additional permissions / exceptions as well as other licenses has been greatly improved. In any case. An exception can be granted by the copyright holders. In this case, making a fairly limited exception that is similar in spirit to the operating system library exception is within the bounds of what one can reasonably expect to still correlate with the wishes of the original authors. Otherwise, explicit agreement establishes the new license + exception. If someone then explicitly disagrees, removing their code will always be an option to restore the overall license cleanliness, which is why this is something that should be offered. With explicit agreement from everyone who was around and spoke up, and a standing offer to remove code of those who do not agree, Roundcube would indeed be on the safe side of things. > The third link makes no sense to me because we don't compile anything here. > How is this applicable for RoundCube? Compilation, or whether something is a library, makes comparatively little difference for licensing matters. So virtually everything you can read there applies. > I'm sure this is easy to grasp for some people, but I'd like to see this > explicitely stated in writing before we decide on this and then all of a > sudden some of our users end up on gpl-violations.org. Which code has Harald Welte contributed to Roundcube? Has he disagreed in public with this proposal? Only a holder of a significant piece of Copyrights that has objected to the change would be in a position to actually challenge the license in court. So the people who could go to court on a Roundcube violation are the same ones who are on this list. > Must have missed those emails – is there a way to see this conversation > somewhere? If you want written legal advice from counsel, you'll need to pay for that. The situation thus far was largely put together on the technical side by Thomas and Alec, and I gave the legal options some thought after having spoken with Thomas about what he considered the implicit policy of the Roundcube community on plugins and skins. So I was doing what I could to help and while I am not a lawyer, I have a little bit of experience in the area from my previous incarnation: https://fsfe.org/about/greve/ Having drafted the Fiduciary Licence Agreement, created the concept of the Freedom Task Force and overseen its creation, worked with gpl-violations.org for some time, coordinated parts of the GPLv3 process and participated in it, having run the legal projects of two EU projects, and after having discussed the situation with Dr. Till Jaeger for sanity who gave me his feedback as a personal favour among friends, I feel sufficiently confident that this is indeed a path we can take. But yes, I am not a lawyer. If you want a legal opinion on which you can later claim damages if you are sued regardless, you'll need to pay a lawyer for that. > > Yes, without the explicit exception that is probably the case. > > It's a 100% propability. In my experience, 100% probabilities do not exist in legal matters. But I will agree with you that it is more than 90% likely that right now proprietary modules and skins violate the license. If assuming that distribution has taken place under GPLv2 this would automatically and irrevocably terminate the license for the affected party until the licensor -- which is every Copyright holder, including those we no longer know where to find -- have granted a new license. I suspect this reading would actually put a lot of users at risk of being sued for Copyright infringement right now, even though they did things that that would be considered acceptable by majority opinion. Naturally these people could then claim that they used Roundcube under GPL Version 3, which is a reasonable assumption, as Thomas explained, and thus would have their rights automatically re-instated after they stop violating the license through proprietary plugins or skins. But then they'd have to turn those plugins off, or license them under a GPL compatible Free Software license, which might be a non-Copyleft license, so would then not place any requirements on them for distribution of source code. Because that situation is a bit more complex than one would wish for, I suggested to Thomas that he might simply make the line of what is acceptable explicit, and showed him how that would be possible. If you feel that you would rather not touch the license, then we would be happy to continue distributing Roundcube under GPLv3 with no exceptions, as we do not require them for what we do because we don't do proprietary. > I'm a commercial entity as well and I still contribute to open source. Most > of my clients allow me to open source a lot of things as well. We open > source it using very liberal licenses (not GPL). The term "liberal" always begs the question "liberty to do what?" In the case of many "liberal" licenses that would be "liberty to sue Roundcube authors for patent infringement while commercially distributing the code they contributed to the project" as well as "liberty to monopolize the code contributed by others." I find neither accepting, nor increasing the overall liberty of the project. That's why for me, patent clauses are typically an absolute necessity, as are reciprocity provisions. You also don't have to go far to find examples of either of the above happening, and license is arguably one reason why GNU/Linux has taken on a lot more steam than the *BSD systems. But yes, I agree there are specific cases where you want a license to provide additional permissions, because of some strategic purpose or higher goal. But my default is clearly and strongly on Copyleft. I do however understand that some people have a different perspective, and that is fine as long as it does not dictate what I have to do. > No one wants to be forced to contribute. I personally contribute when the > circumstances permit it. Which is why I don't base my work on *any* GPL > -licensed software. LGPL is as close as I get. Does that mean your contributions to Roundcube were not under GPL, but actually BSD licensed? Best regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve Chief Executive Officer Kolab Systems AG Zürich, Switzerland e: [email protected] t: +41 78 904 43 33 w: http://kolabsys.com pgp: 86574ACA Georg C. F. Greve --- 8< --- detachments --- 8< --- The following attachments have been detached and are available for viewing. http://detached.gigo.com/rc/XE/jaTYu46d/signature.asc Only click these links if you trust the sender, as well as this message. --- 8< --- detachments --- 8< ---
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