Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 11, 5:24 am, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 10 Mai, 17:01, Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'll be charitable and assume the fact that you can make that
> > statement without apparent guile merely means that you haven't read
> > the post I was referring to:
>
> >http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
>
> Of course I have read it, and not just recently either. But this is a
> position paper by the author of the licence, and it doesn't mean that
> someone who has written a GPL-licensed library completely agrees with
> that position. And anyway, it's a case of "take it or leave it" - it's
> not like the author or the FSF are sneaking stuff into every product
> and every corner of the market and then telling you that you can't
> "unchoose" their stuff.

OK.  Now I'm REALLY confused.  I said "Certainly RMS
carefully lays out that the LGPL should be used sparingly in his "Why
you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library" post.  (Hint:
he's not suggesting a permissive license instead.)"

to which you replied:

"Sure, but all he's asking you to do is to make the software available
under a GPL-compatible licence."

and then I tried to politely show that you were wrong about RMS's
intentions, but now, but you're saying "oh, of course, he'd say that
-- he wrote the license"  which is basically what I've been saying all
along.  But if you have read it like you say, then it appears you were
being very disingenuous in your original reply!

> Although it seems quite unfair, the e-mail discussion about the
> licence does show that Stallman was not initially convinced that works
> should be affected in such a way (with regard to the Objective-C
> compiler developed by NeXT), and that Haible was not strongly opposed
> to changing the licence. You can argue that Stallman overreached by
> demanding a licence change and that consideration of such matters has
> progressed since that time, but Haible always had the option of not
> using or supporting readline - only the latter is contentious,

"was not strongly opposed to changing the license"  As I already
mentioned, he was more interested in doing useful stuff than worrying
about the license.  Yes, readline was the hook that sucked him into
using the GPL, but IMHO RMS was flat out wrong about the licensing
implications.  As I mentioned, though, the morality and the legality
are probably different animals.

> and the
> obligation of GPL-compatible licensing (as opposed to GPL-licensing)
> now diminishes how contentious this is today.

NO.  If you are building an application, and distributing GPLed stuff
as part of it, the FSF still maintains that the license is such that
the entire application must be GPLed.  You keep acting like this isn't
true, but it absolutely is if you're distributing the entire
application.

> > I think that, legally, they probably don't have a leg to stand on for
> > some of their overarching claims (e.g. about shipping proprietary
> > software that could link to readline, without even shipping
> > readline).  But morally -- well, they've made their position
> > reasonably clear and I try to abide by it.  That still doesn't make it
> > "not really FUD."  I'd call this sort of badgering "copyright misuse"
> > myself.
>
> Again, you have to consider the intent of the licensing: that some
> software which links to readline results in a software system that
> should offer the "four freedoms", because that's the price of linking
> to readline whose licence has promised that any system which builds
> upon it shall offer those privileges.

But I did consider the intent, and as I have made clear, I think
that's a bullying tactic that fragments the software world
unnecessarily.  Obviously YMMV.

> > > As for rst2pdf, what your modifications would mean is that the
> > > software would need to be redistributed under a GPL-compatible
> > > licence.

NO.  You're still not paying attention.  The FSF's clear position is
that if you actually *redistribute* software under the GPL as *part of
a system* then the full package must be licensed *under the GPL*.

> Once again, I refer you to the intent of the licensing: if someone has
> the software in front of them which uses svglib, then they need to
> have the privileges granted to them by the GPL. Yes, if the software
> also uses some component with a GPL-incompatible licence, then this
> causes a problem.

It appears that the FSF's position is the ability to link to svglib
would require software to be licensed under the GPL.  I don't believe
that, but I do believe that if rst2pdf distributed svglib (or even
patches to svglib which were clearly derivative works) then yes,
rst2pdf would have to be distributed under the GPL.  This kind of
bullshit is only acceptable to people who only think a single license
is acceptable.

> [...]
>
> >http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem
>
> > "A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version
> > of that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program
> > must be released under the GPL if it is released at all."
>
> > This makes it clear that the overall work must be GPLed.  Now, all of
> > a sudden, downstream users cannot do some things they could have done
> > before.  Can you not see that taking a preexisting MIT-licensed
> > project and adding code to make it GPL could negatively affect some of
> > its users and that that is not necessarily an unalloyed good?
>
> Well, I have referred several times to WebKit without you taking the
> hint,

OK, I don't work with webkit.  I knew you were hinting at something,
but why the games, I don't know.  I guess it's all about mystique and
games.

> but that provides a specific case of a project which is LGPL-
> licensed despite being based on (in GPLv3 terminology) libraries which
> were distributed under the GPL and combined with that software.

What other libraries?  I don't know it's history.  I give you specific
examples at problems; you hint around at things you claim are not
problems and then still don't give specifics.

> Similarly, the effort to ensure that CPython's licence was GPL-
> compatible had a lot to do with the right to redistribute with GPL-
> licensed code (actually readline, if I remember correctly).

Yes, but the Python project doesn't actually distribute readline, and
(as I mentioned) people are more informed now, and it would be
difficult for RMS to bully Python into relicensing.  But if the Python
distribution *included* GNU Readline, then RMS would be on firmer
ground, and the license would probably have to be changed.  This is
*exactly* the situation I was describing with svglib -- can you still
not see that it is a problem to just toss unsupported free software
out there with a GPL license?  Unsupported Apache or MIT is fine --
fix it or ignore.  Unsupported GPL is an attractive nuisance.


> Is readline trivial? Was readline trivial in 1992?

Again, you could have neural net prediction and other fancy
technologies, but in general, yes, the concept is pretty trivial and
there were many systems that already had such things back then.

> Does it even
> matter, because the author is more or less saying that they don't want
> their code incorporated in a proprietary system?

Yes it matters because as others have pointed out, sometimes people
use stuff which is purported to be "free" without a full understanding
of all the implications.  But this gets back to my general complaint
about co-opting the word "free" which you don't think is a problem
because you have chosen to use other words.

> It's interesting to
> see that GPLv3 doesn't talk about derived works or derivatives (at
> least not as much as GPLv2), but instead talks about things being
> "based on" other things, but as I've already said, at the point of
> someone running a bunch of software components together, the intent of
> copyleft licences is to say that the user should be able to take that
> (or part of it, in the case of "weak copyleft" licences) and change,
> recompile and distribute its sources, modified or not.

Trust me, I know the intent, and could even consider it a noble goal.
But I think a lot of the means employed in getting to this end are
simply wrong.

Regards,
Pat