Bug#781566: COPYING2 contains some armchair licensing

Wed Apr 1 12:32:31 UTC 2015

Comments inline

On Wed, Apr 01, 2015 at 08:43:51AM +0200, Jerome BENOIT wrote:
> I forwarded the bug report to the upstream maintainer:
> please find below his answer.
> 
> - --8><-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> - -------
> 
> First, imagine a bug report entitled "file.c contains some armchair coding". Such a statement would imply there is a class of people allowed to write code, from which the author of file.c is excluded. I feel it against the ethos of free, open software that text would be accepted or rejected based on the qualifications of the person writing it.

Um, but we don't have a widely regarded association for programmers,
whereas we do have bars.

In fact, in some situations, practice of law requires a license,
otherwise it's a crime! I'd be interested in what a judge would say to
this argument :)

> But because much of the bug report is concerned with the qualifications of the author, here goes: no, I do not have a law degree. However, my work as a Free Software Foundation employee included writing white papers on intellectual property law and a legal brief filed in the US Federal Circuit. My recommendations and legal reasoning in the brief, a law review paper, and other writings from the mid to late `00s are not far from the ruling and reasoning in last year's Supreme Court ruling in Alice Corp. Over the course of my work with the FSF on intellectual property law, I spoke directly with the people involved in writing the AGPL, who expressed some disappointment with how the AGPL was worded, and said that they wished that they'd just stated directly that running code on a public server is distribution. I have also had extensive dealings with the authors of GPLv3, and know the license, its history, and many of the considerations that went into it very well. These interacti!
>  ons went i
> nto the considerations for the licensing of Apophenia.

As you well know, being involved with this, license proliferation is
making our job to keep users free harder.

> There are three parts to the Apophenia license as written. I recommend keeping the first, changing the text of the second, and cutting third. 
> 
> 
> 1. The first part of the license is the GPLv2. There are other packages that are based on GPLv2, and not "GPLv2 or later". For example, I understand that Debian distributes the Linux kernel. Not only is the kernel licensed under GPLv2, the GPLv2 license as distributed with the kernel is prefaced with explicit sniping about GPLv3:

Who said anything about the GPLv2 being non-distributable?

> "Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated."
> http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/COPYING
> 
> Based on this precedent, I believe that distributing a Debian package under the GPLv2 (not "and later") is valid.

Who said it wasn't? The issue is your further restrictions cause
non-distribution, whereas the GPLv3 lets you remove the clauses.

> My recommendation is that we replace my text with text from §13 of the 2007 Affero license. It expresses a similar sentiment, but being written by lawyers, it  addresses the ad hominem issues presented in the bug report.
> 
> The question of what happens when two libraries under different licenses are jointly distributed is simple under the law: the intersection of all restrictions apply.

Not the intersection, the set of both.

> If the license on library A says you may only distribute the code on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, and the license on library B says you may only distribute the code on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, there isn't any challenging legal puzzle: you have the right to distribute on Wednesday, and only on Wednesday.

Intersection, not set of both. GPL also says you can have no further
restrictions, so doing that with the GPL means it's *not distributable*

> Of course, if the licences have no intersection, you can't link A and B. This explains the single paragraph GPLv2 devotes to linking, which begins "This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs." This sentence is not an additional restriction, but a clarification that if the license for A says 'you must distribute' and the license for B says 'you must not distribute', a product that uses A and B is basically a legal impossibility.

The LGPL contains what is an additional or special permission to do
this.

> Are there features of AGPL that make it impossible to link AGPLed code with GPLv3ed code?

Yes. That's why there's a clause for this.

> The not-armchair lawyers at the FSF have this to say (be sure to read the entire
> paragraph):

I know their view on this.

> To paraphrase the above: You are (explicitly, in this paragraph) granted permission to link AGPLed software to other code licensed under other licenses, such as GPL v3. Linking to a differently-licensed code base does not free the code (or the combination) of the stipulations of either code base.

For what it's worth, this is in the license; and wasn't in your terms -
this is where the root of some of the non-distributablity comes from.

> Summary:
> 
> * GPLv2 (not GPLv2 or later) is a valid license, used by other packages in Debian. I started writing Apophenia before GPLv3 existed, and see reason to not shift to the newer license.

No one claimed otherwise, you misunderstood my claim due to nuances
between GPL2 and 3.

> * We can replace the Affero-ization text I wrote with text taken from the 2007 edition of the AGPL, as above.

| Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
| 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
| Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
| of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Please get permission from the FSF to do this unfortunate thing to their
license. I'm CC'ing jgay.

> I believe that this modification, using the GPLv2 + modern Affero clause, is a better option than using the AGPL version of GPLv2 itself. Although it is not standard in the sense of having a common acronym, it uses two standard parts that are commonly recognized and can be sensibly combined.

This is *not distributable*. It's a further restriction -- even if I
agree with it.

Please pick either the plain LGPL or GPL.

    Paul

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