Re: GPL, "license upgrades", and the obligation to offer source code
On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 06:52:41PM -0700, Michael K. Edwards wrote:
> work you wrote?" And by extension, "Why should a court feel obliged
> to grant any copyright holder's request to enjoin Does and Roes from
> claiming rights to his work under license terms that he did not have
> the option of reviewing at the time he last contributed to the work --
> even if he consented to the license upgrade clause at the time?"
Most simply, I guess I'm of the mindset that I should be allowed to place
my work under whichever terms I please. For example, I strongly dislike
the law which allows revocation of all past copyright licenses after ~30?
years, overriding even written contracts and transfer of copyright. No
matter how strongly I wish to Free my work and give it to the world, it's
impossible to truly do so, since my heirs, if I live such a short life,
can invoke that law and override my wishes completely. I'm not permitted
to truly Free my work, because the law's condescendence doesn't allow it.
I don't go so far as to claim that I wish the right to sign myself into
slavery, but I do wish to be able to license my works as completely freely
as I wish.
> I constructed the "DNPLv2/v3" strawman as an example of how a "license
> steward" can effectively close off people's access to their own work
> with a little bit of technical maneuvering but without explicitly
> biased language. It is often said that ignorance of the law is no
> excuse, but there ought to be a limit to just how big a rights grab
> you can pre-authorize sight unseen.
Well, it's not quite a "rights grab": they're giving themselves rights,
but not diminishing those of others. I guess I'm not a big subscriber
to the GPL these days, so it doesn't particularly bother me that someone
might be able to "take my work proprietary", since I don't lose anything
in the process, but I can see a copyleft-minded person taking strong
objection to it.
> Like the right to renegotiate the terms of a copyright license after a
> certain number of years, the right to decline terms that you haven't
> seen ought to be inalienable.
(This, by the way, is the "right" which I objected to above, which I noticed
on rereading that you referred to.)
> Oh, a bounded set of options is fine, like "my agent can commit me to
> pet any fixed number of cats, not to exceed three, per copy I
> distribute"; but not "my agent can bind me to do, or not do, anything
> he pleases". And remember that a copyright license is just a
> contractual promise not to sue. Blanket authorization to alter
> license terms on a work is not just authority to adjust the scope of
> the license but authority to add arbitrarily onerous conditions on the
> exercise of my own copyright. Not to force copyright assignment,
> though; that's among the things which a US court cannot construe
> without positive written evidence.
It seems like a lot of your arguments have a feel of "revokation" behind
them: you speak of these upgrade clauses as if the original terms are no
longer available. There's nothing like copyright assignment--I can still
offer the work under whatever terms I want (regardless of additional terms
having been offered). License terms on the work are not being "altered";
they're being amended in a way that can only ever result in a net loosening
of restrictions, since the original terms always remain valid. (We might
disagree on the significance of that; given that I tend to X11-license my
work, if you copyleft, that's an understandable disagreement of philosophy.)
I guess that's the essense of my confusion, though: upgrade clauses never
allow additional restrictions to be forced upon a work, since you (the
licensee) are always free to ignore the option.
(FWIW, I'm not sure that I buy "contractual promise not to sue"; it seems
like a reasonable analogy, but not really an accurate one. If I incorrectly
sued you for distributing my GPL-licensed work, you might countersue for
the cost to you--but I don't think you'd claim that my lawsuit was violation
of contract. Deja vu--I suspect we've had this exchange before.)
As an aside: while I'm sure the "similar in spirit" clause in the GPL is
too vague to satisfy your "bounded set of options" in general, if a GPLv3
was released, and it actually was, to a typical, reasonable Free Software
developer, similar in spirit[1], would you object to its use, given that
the alternative is the existance of some fatal loophole, which otherwise
(due to the very nature of the GPL) is essentially impossible to fix? It
[1] For example, if the GPL came to court with a licensor claiming the
"modified files to carry" clause means modifications must be painted on your
car, and a court agreed, rendering all GPL software practically unmodifiable.
The FSF fixes this, by correcting the ambiguity. I don't know of any *real*
loopholes in the GPL to offer, but note that I'm specifically referring to a
real, clear-cut loophole such as an ambiguity, and not to issues like the
"ASP loophole" being "fixed" by adding new, controversial restrictions. (I
suspect that if the FSF releases a GPLv3, it *will* include restrictions that
people won't like applied to their software, but let's limit ourselves to
the smallest possible change, "fixing a bug", which is likely to be accepted
by the biggest group.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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