Hi Paolo, Sorry for the very belated reply...
I think the problem with this is idea that you end up with a lot of legalese and easy-to-accidentally-violate conditions, but don't actually provide any stronger protection than the X11 license. Take Objective-C as an example: I can take an Objective-C framework and, by means of categories and runtime introspection, replace any individual method in any class. I can add or rename an instance variable in the original framework, breaking ABI compatibility with the original version, and release this. I can then use categories and introspection to modify the classes in any arbitrary way, then I can distribute my code with an evil license, and the old framework under the LGPL. Because I've broken the ABI, you can't just drop in another version of the LGPL'd framework, you have to back-port my changes. Doing this, you still don't get to use any of my new methods in your own code. The only thing you get from the LGPL is that I have to make available the source code for the LGPL'd code, but if this is already available upstream then that's not helpful. If the code had been X11 or BSD licensed, I'd have been able to do exactly the same thing, had less legalese to read. GPLv3 + your exemption would not make me release any code that the MIT license would allow me to keep private, but would give me a massive blob of legalese that I'd need to read very carefully to make sure I wasn't infringing. The GPL, as a whole, is very easy to violate with impunity for a large corporation that wants to put a bit of effort into. Here's the easiest strategy for doing so: Company A spins out company B. Company A ships product A, which uses a third-party GPL'd product and provides new interfaces. Company B ships a proprietary product that uses these new interfaces. Company A is complying with the GPL with respect to the upstream product. Company B is violating the GPL, but only with respect to Company B's product. Their product is not a derived work of the original, and is not shipped with the original, so only Company A has standing to sue. Company A decides not to sue, because they've signed a covenant not to do so when Company B was founded. Company B continues to ship code that violates the GPL with impunity. Now, maybe GPLv4 will prevent this, but GPLv3 is already a barely comprehensible mess that requires lawyers to interpret it. I did an internship with an IP law department before I went to university, and I find the GPL difficult to understand - I can't imagine how people without even my experience or any formal legal training manage it. While I agree with the FSF's objectives, I think the best strategy is to try to make writing Free Software easier, not to try to make writing proprietary software harder. This means licenses that mere mortals can easily understand, not longwinded things that a competent lawyer for a large corporation can find loopholes in but an individual programmer may accidentally violate (I violated the GPL by mistake - I gave Quentin a copy of a custom build of Colloquy that didn't crash so much without giving him an offer in writing for the source code. It was a build of an unmodified version of the upstream source, but it was still a technical violation.) There is one thing that is much more important to promoting Free Software than legal issues, and that is making people actually care about the FSF's Four Freedoms. Ask a typical person if those freedoms are important to them, and most of the time the only one they will care about is Freedom 0. Now ask them this: > When was the last time you used a piece of software that, out of the box, did > exactly what you wanted it to do? Most of them won't be able to answer. Software not working correctly is normal and expected. The value of Free Software is that you can fix it, if you have the skill to do so. The conditional clause here is the problem, but it's one that we're working on with Étoilé. Modifying a program with LanguageKit / Pragmatic Smalltalk takes less skill than writing it in Objective-C. With Pragmatic Smalltalk, you can write categories on Objective-C classes in Smalltalk, or modify them in EScript, and have these modifications loaded automatically when the program starts. For us, access to the source code is actually not a precondition for Freedoms 1 and 3. We can introspect binary-only programs and replace methods using a high-level language. With even better languages and tools, anyone will be able to modify any program to work as they want. The authors of the GPL seem to have forgotten that the objective is to promote the Four Freedoms, rather than to promote the GPL. On a completely unrelated note, have you adopted my SmallInt arithmetic algorithms in GNU Smalltalk? Someone mentioned to me a while ago that your version was slower, although I haven't checked your code to see i they were correct. And is there any progress on an ARM port of Lightning - I'd love to be able to use it for accelerating bits of GNUstep. David On 10 Mar 2010, at 11:41, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > Hi all, > > I am the maintainer of GNU Smalltalk. A fellow GNU guy pointed me to > your web page at http://etoileos.com/dev/licensing/ > > I've started a discussion on $SUBJECT at > http://smalltalk.gnu.org/blog/bonzinip/towards-permissive-copyleft-license-dynamic-languages > > -- Etoile developers are welcome to join. > > Thanks, > > Paolo > > _______________________________________________ > Etoile-dev mailing list > Etoile-dev@gna.org > https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev -- Sent from my STANTEC-ZEBRA _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list Etoile-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
