Nico Rikken wrote:
Thanks J.B. and Darryl,
Thanks for the clear expositions, which confirm my thoughts.
You're welcome. If you're looking for more confirmation on how
non-copyleft free licenses can be a ruse where derivatives take your
freedoms away (even while non-copyleft free license advocates claim such
licenses maximize freedom for all), check out today's clarification of
Canonical's language about redistributing binaries in Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
As Matthew Garrett wrote in his blog[1], the Ubuntu Community Manager
confirmed "that any binaries shipped by Ubuntu under licenses that don't
grant an explicit right to redistribute the binaries can't be
redistributed without permission or rebuilding" despite that Canonical's
assertion is in clear violation of both GPLv2 and GPLv3 but probably
not, as Brad Kuhn points out in his blog, non-copyleft free licenses[2],
hence the concern about what that means for users of those programs.
Two years later, and with much effort by two non-profit groups (the Free
Software Foundation[3] and the Software Freedom Conservancy[4]),
Canonical has added a "trump clause" to its license terms which makes it
clear that nothing found in Ubuntu's license modifies or reduces rights
under each program's license.
Kuhn spells out the case against non-copyleft free licenses quite
clearly[2]:
This whole situation seems to me a simple argument for why copyleft
matters. Copyleft can and does (when someone like me actually
enforces it) prevent these types of situations. But copyleft is not
infinitely expansive. Nearly every full operating system distribution
available includes a aggregated mix of copylefted, non-copyleft, and
often fully-proprietary userspace applications. Nearly every company
that distributes them wraps the whole thing with some agreement that
restricts some rights that copyleft defends, and then adds a trump
clause that gives an exception just for FLOSS license compliance. I
have never seen a trump clause that guarantees copyleft-like
compliance for non-copylefted programs and packages. Thus, the
problem with Ubuntu is just a particularly bad example of what has
become a standard industry practice by nearly every “open source”
company.
This, as Kuhn rightly points out, is yet another practical instance of
how software freedom differs from the inadequacy (when viewed from a
user's perspective) of being "open source". You'll note that neither of
the two groups working with Canonical on this bill themselves as "open
source" organizations, even though both work with open source advocates.
It's a defense of software freedom that motivates these organizations to
push Canonical into GPL compliance.
[1] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/35969.html
[2] http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/07/15/ubuntu-ip-policy.html
[3] https://www.fsf.org/news/canonical-updated-licensing-terms
[4] https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/jul/15/ubuntu-ip-policy/
_______________________________________________
Discussion mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
