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Re: Hacking License



On Mon, 10 Dec 2018, Ian Jackson wrote:

Or are you really convinced that these other issues are showstoppers and that without handling them in your licence, downstreams will abuse their position ? Frankly that doesn't seem particularly likely.

Without denigrating what you're saying on compatibility and understanding (as below)...

There is an issue with the GPL style copyleft of abuse by corporates. In particular, abusing the ability to discharge source distribution privately, and then using various forms of side-contracts to (indirectly) "discourage" recipients from exercising their GPL rights.

As this all happens in private, it makes it hard for copyright holders to take action. It can be hard to gather basic facts (e.g. the side contracts). The recipients - who are potentially having their GPL rights impinged - are not necessarily willing to even tell the copyright holders about this, never mind co-operate. Etc.

Then there's the more general issue that the AGPL doesn't really work for non-interactive distributed-system software, should you want your distributed-system software to have its source be made available to anyone operating other bits (or implementations of) the distributed system.

I think maybe you are seriously undervaluing the benefits of using a
licence that everyone already knows and that is compatible with many
other Free Software licences.

regards,
--
Paul Jakma | paul@jakma.org | @pjakma | Key ID: 0xD86BF79464A2FF6A
Fortune:
Look out!  Behind you!


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