this

A “license” (copyright or otherwise) is either a gratuitous license or a contract, and, while there are some important legal differences, gratuitous licenses are generally enforced under contract principles. So, generally, contract law applies to licenses.

Generally, the FSF and related groups have argued that the GPL is a contract license with mutual consideration, and I believe this has prevailed in some cases (it is possible for it to be true in some cases but not all, since contract depends on specific facts between the parties and not the written terms alone.)

> Ironically, the SFC I think tried to file their case in state court. Copyright law is a federal matter.

One principle of contract law is that the existence of a contract limits parties to action for breach if the terms are violated by the other party, not whatever action they would have on the underlying rights without the contract.

indeed. Tragedy is the right word!

With the right licensing language it doesn't need to be.

Authors must maintain contactability through emails listed in source / git commits, if authors fail to respond to pings about changes to licensing in a timely manner they forfeit their rights.

https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/unrelate...

When you make the claim, you are generally expected to provide proof, yes that's how it works.

>they explicitly supported the attempt to eject him from the Free Software Foundation on the basis of trumped up allegations

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/

no one asked that question. GPL source code include some of the largest and most used software systems today.

The rights to the code belong to the AUTHOR of the code. Random users have no rights. The GPL is a grant to someone to use code without payment. Failure to follow the GPL means the AUTHORS rights are restored and license to use freely revoked. Again, users have no claim in this situation.

This SFC interpretation of third party rights is ridiculous. I hope some of the bigger hitters in this space come out with some statements on this.

This is why you don't want lawyers calling the shots. Lawyers are looking to get paid, they'd rather get a cash settlement than get the code. If the lawyers are working for you, the copyright holder, then you can choose how to handle the situation. But if you sign the code over to the lawyers, it will no longer be your call.

It’s just such a weird flawed premise of a measure I can’t imagine how it’d be useful in determining anything about their motivations.

After he left the FSF he joined the Software Freedom Law Center (Eben Moglen's operation), but only lasted a year. He then started the Software Freedom Conservancy, which resulted in a lawsuit from the SFLC, due the similarity in name and focus.

Most companies are willing to share their code as GPL requires when asked.

What they aren't willing to do is provide authorization keys etc to hardware etc as they don't feel GPLv2 requires that. Because most GPLv2 devs ALSO don't think GPLv2 requires that not a lot of litigation there.

My guess is that if SFC does get a smaller kernel contributor to assign copyright the kernel devs may try and remove their contribution.

The likely result here is that the request will be refused (or just ignored) by default. Which means that there is no chance the license will ever be complied with, and users will never receive the modified code that they are entitled to under the GPL.

What's the point of licensing under the GPL if users never get the rights the GPL grants them?

Of course, many other non-specialists have contrary opinions. If you have a link to a legal opinion to the contrary (by a lawyer skilled in the relevant areas), could you please share it?

That seems unlikely, or somebody would do it just for the laughs. (I certainly would)

Most 501c entities are corporations.

You probably mean “to a business entity that is not itself a 501c”, but generally a 501c is free to sell assets to other entities without regard to form or (absence of) nonprofit status, though there are other restrictions that might come into play.

Especially if my approach has single handedly created the largest body of copyleft / collaborative / open source software out there with massive amounts of actual collaboration.

The irony is so strong here. Basically jerks, who can't get along with others (including each other, witness the battles between SFC and SFLC etc etc) with little value creation themselves want to force their view on others, even though folks have already voted with their feet.

By all means create the Affero GPLv3. Try to get folks to write software for it. That's fine.

But don't pretend to be on some moral high ground speaking for developers / creators who wrote the code. Let them speak for themselves. And don't go back and having lost the effort to get Affero GPLv3 or whatever adopted close the various SAAS and Tivo loopholes, go back and say some old license has these terms.

could any statement be less substantiated than pure FUD like that?

You are of course right about copyright holders being able to chose whether to enforce their license (at least if they were smart enough to use a license that will actually stand up in court!)

No. But if they went around sending demand letters that were complied with (because they came from a reputable law firm) by getting the code open sourced it would. I'm not saying these lawyers should be listened to. I'm saying some lawyers should. And excluding all lawyers is as dumb as trying to get funded for your FaceBook clone saying you only need the money to "hire a programmer" would be.

> Only Linus can speak to Linus's goals

This is nonsense. I might be wrong but I can certainly speak to his goals. We can even discuss what we think they are.

>There seems to be a modern confusion that the folks NOT doing any of the work in writing code have all sorts of rights with respect to it (or time of a dev to fix their bugs). False.

I'm sorry but this makes no sense, it's weird how often I see this sentiment in open source. If you hired a lawyer to represent you and give you legal advice and defend you and court (which is multiple full time jobs) then you're paying them to do a job for you. You're not giving any of your rights away. You don't have to choose to hire SF Conservancy, you can hire another firm.

Not necessarily. For example, work for hire, or copyright being assigned to the employer. Or maybe the work itself isn't copyrightable in the first place. There's even a fun provision where US government work doesn't have any copyright in the first place! You might also have transferred the copyright of your work after you created it in a way which doesn't give you any retained rights.

I have no clue whether whatever SFC has been claiming about the legal status of GPL is true or not (quite frankly, I haven't bothered even looking at what they're saying). But if the legal system's interpretation of GPLv2 doesn't match what most authors want or agree to, that sounds like precisely the kind of thing authors should want a lawyer to tell them, so they have a chance to switch to a different license.

* Estoppel. Not going after someone when you are made aware of their violations may preclude you from ever being able to go after them.

* Severability. If one clause of your contract is unenforceable, the entire contract may become unenforceable unless you have a clause saying otherwise. (And even then, sometimes that won't apply!).

Taking the audience of HN as a reasonable sample of competent coders, I have seen more than a few commenters give very confident and very incorrect interpretations of the law. I am not so presumptuous to think that I am not in that class, although I do hope to do so more rarely than the average commenter.

And for what it's worth, I don't believe that the exaggerated premise I used was one that requires a lawyer to understand; it was merely an example that was so outrageous it would not be unreasonable for a lawyer to tell you that it was impossible for you to do what you want to do. An example that is not so outrageous is if you want to release something into the public domain--for there are jurisdictions where giving up all of your rights as an author is impossible.

Honestly, just quickly looking through the two licenses to answer a simple question... GPLv3 [1].

From a legal perspective, "simpler" documents tend to be less clear, because a lot more of the interpretation will rely on common law jurisprudence [2], and the "common" here doesn't mean "everybody agrees"--it in fact means "every jurisdiction has its own set of rules that may or may not translate directly in other jurisdiction."

> And despite all the claims here, intent is going to matter. When you sue Linus and say the GPL doesn't mean what he and everyone else actually creating this code think it means, then he's going to say, this was our intent. And you are going to have a VERY tall mountain to climb.

Given that a software license is close to a take-it-or-leave-it contract, ambiguous interpretations are generally going to be interpreted in favor of the person who has the take-it-or-leave-it option--which in this case is not going to be Linus and co.

[1] The criteria I used: "how do patents interact with this license." From what I can tell, GPLv2 technically doesn't actually contain a clause where the licensor grants the licensee any and all necessary patents--it instead talks about what happens if the code violates a third party's patent. Admittedly, reading the GPLv2 to not include a patent license grant is somewhat of a malicious reading, but the GPLv3's verbiage here is pretty explicit: "Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version."

[2] I'm limiting my analysis here to US jurisdictions, because that's what I know.