Hey everyone. (lengthy; sorry). So, not too many people turned out yesterday - I'm guessing that for many, travel is still an issue in these fair Isles - but there weren't too many people who were in favour of the new license at this meeting.
Well, in fact, no-one really spoke in favour of it: even amongst the committee there who supposedly were interested in it, it was difficult to tell who the protagonists were. The person who proposed it (I think; at the time he was owning up to it he wasn't making it very clear) didn't really say much, he just took quasi-minutes of the meeting. Another person took us through an introduction to the idea, but he also didn't profess to be in favour of it, and basically just read out the text on the slides, in a kind of "it is alleged.. " fashion. Really strange: it's very difficult to argue against something when no-one will adequately make a case _for_ it :) Some notes on the meeting. I believe those quasi-minutes are going to be published on the internet, so I'm not going to try and give a summary of the overall meeting, just some thoughts I had afterwards. I believe there will be time for feedback on the ideas presented there for some period of time, I'll try to notify this list if I see it before anyone else. The general push from the meeting was one of constructive criticism I think. While it was difficult to pin anyone down on exactly why this license was needed, the "worry" was that the GPL concerns businesses who want to get around copyleft and are unsure if they can (this came across as the driving reason to me, anyway). I tried to get some positive statements about what this new license would do; all I received were more proposed failures in the GPL drafting. It was very difficult to get any kind of elevator pitch about what a new license could do, only a "GPL makes my clients uncertain" type of response. The only other reasons put forward were a kind of "The EU have their own license, so we should have our (local license for local people) also, and that would help public-sector take-up" (?!). I entirely missed an opportunity to propose my Yorkshire Public License, but it did seem to be grudgingly conceded that such parochialism was somewhat out of step with the modern, copyright-harmonised, world. Therefore, attendees asked the committee to a. look at publishing some advice under the BCS examining some issues which potentially unsettle businesses, encouraging them to take up free software, and b. do some research on those companies who are being discouraged by the licenses, before moving any further forward with a new license. I have a feeling at least some on the committee are not terribly familiar with licenses at all. Hearing that the GPL can be terminated, he said, "So, it's unsafe then?". That theme seemed to stick with him, until Mark Taylor (OSC) made a pretty impassioned point about how the "Is it safe?" question is very 1990s and that free software had moved somewhat ahead in that time. There didn't seem to be much awareness of where free software was being used in the public sector, how much traction it had in the private sector, or the extent to which small businesses were using it. In many ways, it did feel like going back ten years, worrying about how people might make money from it, is it safe, is it sustainable, etc. etc. - arguments I thought I'd heard the last of many years ago. Why the licensing was being seen as a limiting factor on take-up wasn't entirely clear to me, except that perhaps it was a larger factor in the experiences of those there. Some notes on the GPL. To this attendee, at least, virtually the entire event was spent talking about the failures of the GPLv2. No other license was even raised, except to say "BSD, MIT, etc.," (they didn't mention the Apache license, bizarrely) "are also somewhat popular". Interestingly, the lawyer present (who also professed to not being persuaded a new license was needed, and said it would be very difficult to write, but who seemed to be seen as a protagonist by the other committee members...) seemed to intimate strongly that a lot of advice he gives is basically about copyleft dodging, and believes that the GPLv2 copyleft is severely limited, particularly with respect of use of GPLv2 libraries, at least under E&W law. And has presumably been advising clients of that for some time, who are now almost certainly violating the spirit of the GPLv2, if at least not the letter. I didn't get an exact description of this fault in the GPL from him, but by piecing bits together, it seems to stem from a reading of the second sentence in paragraph 0: that the words after the colon are not tautologous to those before it. He believes the words before it take precedence (that "work based on the program" means "a derived work as defined in copyright law"), and that many uses of GPL'd software fall not under derived works (I don't think E&W law even uses that term tbh) but are collective works. I _suspect_ that basically he is advocating an NVidia approach to getting around the copyleft, in that so long as you don't distribute things together, you can license the stuff you link to the GPL any way you want. I don't really see how that gets around contributory infringement, nor do I see why being a collective work would make a difference (perhaps that's relevant to the contributory factor?), so it's likely I don't have all the pieces in that puzzle. It also seems to me that the GPLv3 has mostly addressed the concerns raised; the definitions are a lot more broad, at some other points (e.g., what happens to licenses when copyright ownership is transferred, how you can retrieve the situation if you're in non-compliance, etc.) have been pretty thoroughly addressed. I didn't get the impression that any kind of analysis of the GPLv3 had been done, so most of the points raised may or may not apply anyway. Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
