Bug#692728: GeoGebra licence and GPL violation

GeoGebra office at geogebra.org
Fri Aug 16 13:45:50 UTC 2013


Dear Stuart,

thank you for your message and interest in GeoGebra!

We will discuss your questions with our legal team and will try to
come back to you with a detailled answer soon.

Have a good weekend,
Manuela

-- 
Manuela Hinterberger
GeoGebra | Partner Support
www.geogebra.org

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 8:25 AM, Stuart Prescott <stuart at debian.org> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I noticed today that the licence change of GeoGebra leaves the program in a
> very messy situation. GeoGebra is a fantastic piece of software for use in
> education -- I use it myself and know many others who do so, which is why I
> would like to work with you to resolve this problem.
>
> Let me firstly say that I completely appreciate why you have taken steps to
> differentiate between commercial and non-commercial licensing. My experience
> is, however, that engagement with the wider free software community is much
> more fruitful and will lead to code contributions in a way that restrictive
> licences will not. Moreover, free software authors have a very long tradition
> of being able to obtain cash or in-kind contributions from commercial
> organisations who are using free software by directly engaging with them. More
> carrot and less stick is a more reliable approach.
>
> The conclusions I draw below are not only based on the idealism of Free
> Software that I hold as a Debian Developer but also on pragmatic, practical
> and legal readings of the licences involved. I have drawn on the Debian
> project's twenty years of experience in dealing with software licences. The
> problems I highlight below not only cause problems for the Debian project (and
> its derivatives like Ubuntu) but are also a fundamental problem for the
> International GeoGebra Institute itself and all other educational institutions
> that want to use GeoGebra. The current situation will lead to GeoGebra being
> removed from the mainstream Linux distributions (Debian, Debian-
> Edu/SkoleLinux, Ubuntu, Fedora etc). It also precludes mass-deployment of
> GeoGebra in educational institutions, especially in environments where a
> student is given a physical device like a laptop that is imaged by a central
> IT department.
>
> I feel quite confident that the above scenario was not the outcome that the
> International GeoGebra Institute had in mind when relicensing GeoGebra. It
> would be great if we could have an open discussion and sort out this problem.
>
> To specific details:
>
> Let us first be very precise and recognise that this is not a licence
> clarification but a licence change. Version 4.0.34.0, for instance, clearly
> places the work under GPLv3 and CC-BY-SA 3.0. The licence text goes on to
> discuss commercial vs non-commercial use but only in the context where you
> "put the resulting work under your copyright". That is to say that commercial
> usage is permitted, the software is free for anyone to use, free for them to
> modify and free for them to redistribute. The restrictions here are against
> people claiming copyright over material that is actually the copyright of the
> GeoGebra authors; this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do and in fact is
> already covered by the GPLv3 anyway.
>
> However, the licence text attached to version 4.2.55.0 is GPLv3 and CC-BY-NC-
> SA 3.0 and additional restrictions. A conversion from CC-BY-SA 3.0 to CC-BY-
> NC-SA 3.0 is not clarification. The imposition of the extra restrictions is not
> confined to just the properties files but applies to java source code as well
> [0]; this is not a clarification but the imposition of a large number of
> restrictive conditions. The intent of this licence is to impose restrictions
> on commercial usage in such a way that users are no longer free to use the
> software. No users are permitted to redistribute the software (§10) which
> would also make redistribution of modified versions impossible as well. No-one
> is permitted to improve GeoGebra. GeoGebra is no longer free software.
>
> Have all copyright holders (java programmers, artists, translators -- there
> are many!) who contributed their work under the old licence terms agreed to
> the relicencing of their work? Does that include the CEA/CNRS/INRI who are
> copyright holders for the sections derived from scilab? The claim in §9 that
> GeoGebra is "Copyright (C) International GeoGebra Institute, 2013" is at best
> an assertion about the compilation; it does not cover significant chunks of the
> code or the bundled libraries and those bits of code are not the International
> GeoGebra Institute's to relicence.
>
>
> The licence text goes to great lengths to impose additional restrictions over
> and above the GPLv3 while also stating that GeoGebra is available under GPLv3
> (clause 3 of the GeoGebra licence). Under §7 of GPLv3, I am permitted to
> ignore any additional restrictions imposed on me by the GeoGebra licence. This
> would strike out the entirety of the "non-commercial" aspects of the licence
> and the other restrictions about redistribution (§10). (The licence itself is
> not self-consistent on the point of redistribution; §10 forbids
> redistribution, while the preamble permits it.)
>
>
> At this point in the analysis, I am left with two choices:
>
>   (a) I can conclude that GeoGebra is actually GPLv3 and strike out
>   the rest of the licence terms. Anyone can use GeoGebra for commercial
>   or non-commercial purposes; it's Free Software.
>
>   (b) I can conclude that GeoGebra is *not* available under
>   the GPLv3 as there are additional restrictions in force.  Unfortunately,
>   that means that GeoGebra is instead under a GPL-incompatible
>   licence.
>
> Scenario (b) puts the International GeoGebra Institute in violation of the
> licences of two libraries that GeoGebra is linked against. EPS Graphics and
> JLaTeXMath are both licensed under the GPL "either version 2 of the License,
> or (at your option) any later version". Additionally, the International
> GeoGebra Institute is in violation of the scilab licence which covers section
> of the java code and which does not permit discrimination based on the field of
> endeavour (§5.1 of scilab's COPYING [1]).
>
> Precompiled binaries of GeoGebra containing these libraries (such as the ones
> found at [2]) can only be offered if the licence terms of the entire download
> are compatible with the constituent parts. If we accept that "GPLv3 + CC-BY-
> NC-SA 3.0 + additional restrictions" is more than just GPLv3 (i.e. we ignore
> §7 of GPLv3), then this licence is not compatible with either GPLv2 or GPLv3
> as required by EPS Graphics, JLaTeXMath; it's also incompatible with scilab.
> At present, distribution of recent versions of GeoGebra by anyone *including*
> International GeoGebra Institute is in violation of the licence JLaTeXMath,
> EPS Graphics and scilab. Violation of the GPL means that you do not have the
> right to distribute that work. Quite simply, each of the download links at [2]
> becomes a copyright violation and any school, university or linux distribution
> that passed on copies of GeoGebra to staff/students/users would also be
> committing a copyright violation.
>
> I'm quite sure that is not what was intended.
>
> I look forward to discussing this with you further and helping the
> International GeoGebra Institute and the GeoGebra developers continue to
> deliver high quality teaching tools. Please let me know how I can help you do
> this.
>
> kind regards
> Stuart
>
>
> [0] It is also difficult to argue that the properties and the java code can
> really have separate licences in any case, but that is orthogonal to the
> problems here.
>
> [1] http://cgit.scilab.org/cgit.cgi/scilab/tree/scilab/COPYING
>
> [2] http://www.geogebra.org/cms/en/download/
>
>
> --
> Stuart Prescott    http://www.nanonanonano.net/   stuart at nanonanonano.net
> Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org/         stuart at debian.org
> GPG fingerprint    BE65 FD1E F4EA 08F3 23D4 3C6D 9FE8 B8CD 71C5 D1A8
> GPG fingerprint    90E2 D2C1 AD14 6A1B 7EBB 891D BBC1 7EBB 1396 F2F7



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