The funtooture of licensing -- GPLv3?

[Daniel Robbins]

Hi All,

I've had a chance to review the GNU GPL 3 as well as Artistic 2.0, and continue to look at the Ms-PL.

I am leaning towards the GNU GPL 3 as a copyleft license. While the license is very verbose, there is good community understanding of the terms of the license and what the "GPL" means. Ms-PL is extremely elegant but has not has nearly as much public review as the GPL 3, and besides elegance doesn't offer any practical benefit over the GPLv3.

I am not comfortable with a "or any later version of the GPL" clause, since I do not have the opportunity to review future GPL licenses before allowing them for my software. (See http://hritcu.wordpress.com/2007/01/06/gplv2-or-later/ for a good explanation of this.) At the same time, this clause has value, since major versions of GPL licenses are incompatible with one another, and the "or later" clause helps to alleviate this incompatibility problem. So what I am looking at doing is as follows (read the second sentence in the big paragraph carefully):

/*

Copyright 2009-2010 Funtoo Technologies, LLC.

This program is free software; you can redistribute and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 as published by the
Free Software Foundation. Alternatively you may (at your option) use any
other license that has been publicly approved for use with this program by
Funtoo Technologies, LLC. (or its successors, if any.)

See http://www.funtoo.org/licensing for additional licensing information.

*/

This "use any other license that has been publicly approved for use" license clause allows me to graft in GPL-4 or other licenses as appropriate, *after I have had a chance to review them*. If I turn evil and graft in horrible evil licenses, it still does not change the fact that the software is available under the GPL-3 and is thus free software.

I plan to manage the licensing of each Funtoo software package independently -- this is necessary as some of my code has additional constraints placed on it (having been derived from Gentoo, or from other work) and thus I can't unilaterally approve future GPL or other licenses for all my Funtoo projects.

I am also looking at using the Simplified BSD license for some projects where it makes sense, with a similar clause.

I think this is a pretty good plan. It gives me the control I want, makes GPLv3 work for me, and managing the licensing of each Funtoo sub-project independently works for my particular situation.

-Daniel

[Pablo E. González]

:joyness overload:

Yes, much people doesn't like this kind of "restrictive" statement the GPL
does. I mean, it isn't restrictive in a "free software" meaning, but in a more
"objective" point of view, when we talk about an absolute freedom, yes, GPL
doesn't want you to go away from it to another licenses. In that case, the
license compatibility issue appears as, say, you allow some kind of
restrictive licensing as the owner of the product; but "in fact", GPL may not
allow this. I've read a nice GPLv3 explanation @ IBM site, but i think you may
know that better than me :)

Bottomline: Just be sure your other license plans are compatible with GPLv3,
because GPL (Stallman) doesn't like other licenses (yep, I'm not
fundamentalist :P).

Best regards,

Paul.
-
El Sunday 29 November 2009 a las 20:47:59 Daniel Robbins
<drob...@funtoo.org>,escribió:

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[Erick Michau]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Daniel Robbins <drob...@funtoo.org> wrote:

Hi All,

I've had a chance to review the GNU GPL 3 as well as Artistic 2.0, and continue to look at the Ms-PL.

I am leaning towards the GNU GPL 3 as a copyleft license. While the license is very verbose, there is good community understanding of the terms of the license and what the "GPL" means. Ms-PL is extremely elegant but has not has nearly as much public review as the GPL 3, and besides elegance doesn't offer any practical benefit over the GPLv3.

I am not comfortable with a "or any later version of the GPL" clause, since I do not have the opportunity to review future GPL licenses before allowing them for my software. (See http://hritcu.wordpress.com/2007/01/06/gplv2-or-later/ for a good explanation of this.) At the same time, this clause has value, since major versions of GPL licenses are incompatible with one another, and the "or later" clause helps to alleviate this incompatibility problem. So what I am looking at doing is as follows (read the second sentence in the big paragraph carefully):

/*

Copyright 2009-2010 Funtoo Technologies, LLC.

This program is free software; you can redistribute and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 as published by the
Free Software Foundation. Alternatively you may (at your option) use any
other license that has been publicly approved for use with this program by
Funtoo Technologies, LLC. (or its successors, if any.)

See http://www.funtoo.org/licensing for additional licensing information.

*/

This is more seducing than the Ms-PL (even though I never read the Ms-PL and never will - I'm sure I'm not the only one with the cliché). (as a side note maybe is it not so futile to acknowledge the cliché surrounding the Ms-PL and its not-so-reviewed aspect).

As an idea (I have no knowledge of its application):

how hard would it be to craft your own license based on GPLv3 or Ms-PL or whatever? 

as in fedoraproject http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/Licenses/LicenseAgreement12 or opensuse http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_License 

Note how they all start on the first paragraph by:

"this collective work pursuant to the GNU General Public License version 2"

and then they state/add their own uniqueness.

For me it means you can license funtoo GPLv3 and add a whole set of (smartly selected) additions in the freedom you give through the license.

As an extent I imagine you could even have an Ms-PL base and add your custom clauses (please correct me if I make wrong statements).

And be sure to add a clause where when a funtoo software is not licensed by default it will be licensed to the Funtoo license (may sound strange but it's one of those legal tricks).

I just threw quick thoughts, I may be totally wrong (correct my misunderstandings if you have the time/will).

Keep in mind that whatever license you choose it won't drive us away from funtoo but might for futur funtooist.

Or you could even mimic the debian social contract (though I don't think there is a legal dimension to it) http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Thanks a lot for your time and work and take your time to find the most suited license.

my 2 cent feedback

Erick

 

This "use any other license that has been publicly approved for use" license clause allows me to graft in GPL-4 or other licenses as appropriate, *after I have had a chance to review them*. If I turn evil and graft in horrible evil licenses, it still does not change the fact that the software is available under the GPL-3 and is thus free software.

I plan to manage the licensing of each Funtoo software package independently -- this is necessary as some of my code has additional constraints placed on it (having been derived from Gentoo, or from other work) and thus I can't unilaterally approve future GPL or other licenses for all my Funtoo projects.

I am also looking at using the Simplified BSD license for some projects where it makes sense, with a similar clause.

I think this is a pretty good plan. It gives me the control I want, makes GPLv3 work for me, and managing the licensing of each Funtoo sub-project independently works for my particular situation.

-Daniel

[Daniel Robbins]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 11:17 AM, Erick Michau <erick....@gmail.com> wrote:

> This is more seducing than the Ms-PL (even though I never read the Ms-PL and
> never will - I'm sure I'm not the only one with the cliché). (as a side note
> maybe is it not so futile to acknowledge the cliché surrounding the Ms-PL
> and its not-so-reviewed aspect).

> As an idea (I have no knowledge of its application):
> how hard would it be to craft your own license based on GPLv3 or Ms-PL or
> whatever?
> as in fedoraproject
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/Licenses/LicenseAgreement12 or
> opensuse http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_License

I think it would be possible to craft my own license. Ms-PL is under a
Creative Commons license so it can be "forked".
Right now I would only see a benefit in forking Ms-PL if I were
planning to use it, just to give it a different name.

> Note how they all start on the first paragraph by:
> "this collective work pursuant to the GNU General Public License version 2"
> and then they state/add their own uniqueness.

In a sense, that is what I am doing by allowing future licenses --
without polluting the original licenses. Maybe I could augment my
clause to allow future terms to be inserted by Funtoo in the future,
to the main copyright clause? But I don't think this is legally
necessary -- in the future, if I wanted to add additional terms, I
could simply add them at that time to the main copyright clause -- the
earlier versions would still be available without any of those terms.

> For me it means you can license funtoo GPLv3 and add a whole set of (smartly
> selected) additions in the freedom you give through the license.

I am open to ideas here but right now don't have any ideas on how to
add smartly-selected additions to increase the freedom of the license
:) Say in 15 years, maybe I would want to release my old projects
under a BSD license too, because I just want to allow people to easily
grab pieces of my code for other projects. I can do this with the
approach I am proposing.

> And be sure to add a clause where when a funtoo software is not licensed by
> default it will be licensed to the Funtoo license (may sound strange but
> it's one of those legal tricks).

If you have any good links discussing this, please send my way. I am
not sure if I will need this since I think all my software has a
pretty clearly defined license when I release it.

> I just threw quick thoughts, I may be totally wrong (correct my
> misunderstandings if you have the time/will).

I do appreciate the feedback :)

> Keep in mind that whatever license you choose it won't drive us away from
> funtoo but might for futur funtooist.

Yes, I think it's good to keep future users in mind.

> Or you could even mimic the debian social contract (though I don't think
> there is a legal dimension to it) http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Something like this may be good for a larger project - Gentoo also has
a social contract which was based on Debian's. If I have more Funtoo
developers, I think the key thing then is to have a "Funtoo Developer
Contract" of how they should interact with the community. The other
stuff in the social contract does not really impact things.

> Thanks a lot for your time and work and take your time to find the most
> suited license.

You're welcome.

> my 2 cent feedback

Worth more than 2 cents in my opinion. Sorry for the delay in replying.

-Daniel

[Erick Michau]

No I don't have any. I recalled a discussion I had with a colleague and I remembered this idea which seemed elegant at first sight. But when I actually give it more thoughts, I realize it's somehow a false idea resolving a false problem.

It's the same idea as adding a LICENSE file at the root of your archive instead of adding a header to each of the files within the archive. It depends on the user's perspective (LICENSE applies to the archive only file or LICENSE applies to all the files contained in the archive) but has the same impact legally speaking.

I don't think there is anything worth digging in this idea, and if there is, please enlighten me.

PS: as a start, I gave a try to read /usr/portage/licenses/Ms-PL (never say never :). It's slim but dense. I'm surprised it's that small. Will click by microsoft website in a near future to get more info.

 

> I just threw quick thoughts, I may be totally wrong (correct my
> misunderstandings if you have the time/will).

I do appreciate the feedback :)

> Keep in mind that whatever license you choose it won't drive us away from
> funtoo but might for futur funtooist.

Yes, I think it's good to keep future users in mind.

> Or you could even mimic the debian social contract (though I don't think
> there is a legal dimension to it) http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Something like this may be good for a larger project - Gentoo also has
a social contract which was based on Debian's. If I have more Funtoo
developers, I think the key thing then is to have a "Funtoo Developer
Contract" of how they should interact with the community. The other
stuff in the social contract does not really impact things.

> Thanks a lot for your time and work and take your time to find the most
> suited license.

You're welcome.

> my 2 cent feedback

Worth more than 2 cents in my opinion. Sorry for the delay in replying.

-Daniel