Re: Hacking License
Il giorno mar 11 dic 2018 alle ore 06:15 Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> ha scritto:
>
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 1:45 AM Paul Jakma wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> If you are talking about grsecurity, the contract from 2017 was on
> their website, is now on archive.org but the current version is not
> public:
If Linux was licensed under the Hacking License, the Grsecurity rights
to modify it would be terminated by the introduction of the Stable
Patch Access Agreement.
However, Linus and all the Linux developers that had contributed
before their target versions, would have had assigned their copyright
on their patches, so they would be able to simply import them.
Another GPL based practice and interpretation that the Hacking License
wants to regulate is that of ExtJS a GPLv3 JavaScript library
(originally derived by YUI) dual-licensed by Sencha.
AFAIK there are two issue there (I'm not sure if they addressed them
recently, but they used to be):
1. Sencha (ExtJS's copyright holder) states that any server-side code
that produces ExtJS based code or data that must be fed to ExtJS based
code, must be released as GPLv3 too.
2. Sencha releases as GPLv3 only the first major version and the first
minor version of a new release, and only release as proprietary the
code the successive minor versions (that can largerly extend the
widget available).
AFAIK, the GPLv3 interpretation that lead to 1 is VERY weak (it's
basically lawyers-based power play), but Sencha does not accept
external contributions to hold the rights for 2.
If ExtJS (or a similar client side library in a distributed system)
was released under the Hacking License, this would happen:
1. Server side code that produces/interacts ExtJS would form an
Application and would be considered as a Wrapper, to be licensed with
a compatible license (but not necessarily under the Hacking License).
2. If ExtJs was a Derived Work of a software release under the Hacking
License, Sencha would have no right to keep any version proprietary.
They would still have the right to sell copies of it or to sell bug
fix priority token or support subscriptions... just not to private
other hackers from hacking their Derived Work. Also, Sencha would
grant all copyright holders of all the software they compose
(including software under permissive licenses like MIT or BSD) the
non-exclusive copyrights on ExtJS, so that if they had to misbehave,
tons of people could legally take on their business model.
The Hacking License is not designed to forbid commercial use of Free
Software, but it's designed to put much stronger incentives to fair
play.
Giacomo
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