My understanding is that it isn't under the theory of what counts as a derivative work requiring a license (and, thus, what is subject to GPLv2 in the first place) espoused by the FSF, however, I believe that view has been hotly disputed as to its accuracy under US copyright law (at least) for about as long as the GPL has existed and never been tested in court.
The FSF, in general -- as is unsurprising for entity that relies on maximally leveraging copyright protections to achieve its ends -- holds to a fairly maximalist view of the legal rights of copyright owners.
> Among these, that if we wish to produce any derivative works (under the GPL's definition of "derivative"), we must also release these under the GPL.
This is not quite correct, in my opinion.
Copyright only applies to your work, and works which are derivative works according to copyright.
You can't write a license that requires someone to release 'all' his work under the GPL, for example. (It may be different if it's a contract.)
That's just what the FSF wants you to think. Of course, it usually doesn't pay to go through the legal hassel to defend yourself from unjustified claims by the FSF -- thus it's an effective chilling strategy.
> It would be like if you released software using GPL2, then the GNU project released GPL3 which was much more restrictive, required you to pay rms for any software you release and tried to claim that anything licensed with GPL2 was now licensed with GPL3.
Yes, but that's not so hard to imagine, it's basically:
Imagine the GPL is issued by a for-profit company not an ideological nonprofit, and imagine the “X or any later versiom” clause is replaced by or “Any authorized version clause”, and imagine that the for-profit company decides that the use of the older versions are contrary to its existing interests?
Heck, there is a reason that even as it is written, and even with the FSF being a nonprofit with a stable ideology, some people, when licensing their own work, usd GPLvWhatever without the or-any-later version clause.
> Why? A license is just a contract, no? Can't the clauses be arbitrary?
You don't need to abide by a copyright license if you aren't doing anything for which permission of the copyright holder is required in the law -- a copyright license is only needed to do things which would otherwise be prohibitd as within the exclusive purview of the copyright owner.
As the GPL isn't a sale contract that you must agree to as a precondition for receiving a copy of the software, when you receive a copy of GPL-covered software you can do anything you want with it as long as that isn't legally within the exclusive prerogative of the copyright owner (or contrary to the law for some other reason), and the GPL itself is irrelevant. The assertion by the FSF that particular uses of GPL-licensed software are constrained by the license is, therefore, necessarily an assertion that those uses are within the scope of the exclusive rights provided by copyright law.
> So no, it's not about a specific situation. It's about the principle of the thing.
That's fair.
> i.e. if the FSF can be founded on the principle of freedom, why can't I claim to believe in the principle of freedom too?
They're founded on a principle of freedom as defined specifically by the four freedoms.
> The logical conclusion of that statement is that copyright doesn't really matter, whether the license is GPL or not. Violators can ignore the copyright, secure in the confidence that the majority of people won't have the resources to sue.
Yes there's a problem with the Copyright system. But the law does act as a deterrent because there is always risk involved in violating it.
> So why don't we assign copyright for all open source projects to the FSF?
The simple answer: they only accept copyright assignments for GNU projects.
They don't have the staff for enforcing others' copyrights, though; there's other organizations for that, like the Conservancy.
> After all, if the software is free, it doesn't really matter who the copyright holder is, right?
Sure it does: only the Copyright holder has standing in court.
> If it is a derived work of your comment, then you are the copyright holder for this comment
Is that correct? I am also not a lawyer, but this seems wrong to me.
If I make something that is a derived work of some other copyrighted work, my understanding is that I still own the copyright on the parts of the final work that I made (assuming what I made meets the thresholds for being copyrightable). But I am not permitted to distribute that work unless I receive a license to do so from the owner of the work I've derived from.
My understanding seems to dovetail with how the GPL works. If I write a program that links to a GPL library, and that does indeed cause my program to become a derived work of the GPL library, I still own the copyright to my program. In order to distribute my program, I have to abide by the terms of the GPL. But even if I were to violate the terms of the GPL (thus terminating my rights under the GPL), I still would not lose my copyright interest in the program I wrote, only my right to distribute it.
> That's rather hard to believe IMO, as I've never read or heard anything from the FSF that is purposely deceitful in this manner.
The FSF has claimed that several licenses that have requirements not present in GPLv2 are compatible with GPLv2; the FSF is very aggressive in pushing the use of their license and their bias for such use definitely colors their representation of facts.
> Heads up - the GPL is a copyright license, not a contract with users.
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.
> The converse is hardly true since almost all non-GPL open source code can be relicensed as GPL.
While the FSF has actively promoted this view, for many actual open source licenses for which they promote the view, it requires a rather creative (at best) reading of one or both of the two licenses involved to support this claim.
> So how exactly, does assigning copyright to the FSF make anything better for anyone? It helps the FSF, sure. But everyone else (including the author) is negatively impacted by it.
The author assigning the copyright benefits from GPL enforcement---enforcement they likely would not have the resources to do themselves.
The code is still free software; the author can continue to use it in other free software projects. Do you have a specific situation in mind where the author might want to still have copyright (aside from a matter of principle) so we can focus on that for discussion?
> The GPL grants you that permission so long as you follow the terms of the license. In other words, it isn't "your products", it's a joint product, and the other contributor wants a say on how the joint product is delivered.
I've already responded to this in another comment.
The GPL doesn't "simply grant you this right". FSF think this right is essential and that it's unethical to not grant this right. If RMS simply wanted to give you a permission, he could've used a variation of the BSD/MIT licenses.
> but they stay well within copyright law to change the system from within.
But they still think the system is wrong.
> Have you considered that perhaps it's copyright's temporary monopoly grant which is "at odds with certain capitalistic ideas"?
I've heard this argument, and I don't think it's very compelling, but really what's the point? Why should anyone feel compelled to make such an argument? As if capitalism is the religion of the state, and every ideology must be compatible with it, or else!! So you have to go around and make these interpretation about what "true" capitalism is all about.
> U.S. copyright law makes it difficult for anyone other than the copyright holder to do that.
Or, rather, the FSF originally believed this to be true. This HN post from today[0] is an instance of someone other than the copyright holder suing for GPL compliance. They are not claiming any kind of copyright ownership over the GPL code that they're suing over. We know now in hindsight that the FSF was overly cautious about this.
An interesting tidbit is that the GCC project (under the FSF banner) recently stopped requiring copyright assignment to the FSF[1]. Mostly because they want to distance themselves from the FSF, but partially because it didn't turn out to matter after all. A developer certificate of origin (DCO) suffices for their purposes.
> Under US copyright law, which is the law under which most free software programs have historically been first published,
They are published with a worldwide public licence; I'm not even sure how one can publish something such as that under any specific law.
One drafts a public licence, and different parts of it are enforceable to different degrees in different jurisdictions.
It is of course quite possible for the licence to be gnostic of the country of the acceptee, and apply differing provisions in different cases, but I would feel such would strongly go against F.S.F. philosophies.
>Imagine you hold a patent and publish some code that implements your patent under the GPLv2. Everyone who gets the program from you is granted, by the GPL, the right to use . . . your patent, which you can't deny because of the GPL.
It is rare that one can say with certainty how a court will find, so let me just point out that neither Eben Moglen nor the FSF agree with your position as quoted above. To be exact, their position as of the late 1990s (when I studied the GPL) is the opposite of your position, and they are very unlikely to have changed their position since then.
> Plus it seems extra presumptuous to claim some kind of inherent right to profit off derivative works of my software.
Who's claiming that? On the other hand, I've met more than a few pro-FSF people who seem to think it's cromulent to claim that I don't have the right to profit off my work (which is insane; you can pick whatever license you'd like, copyleft or not, and so can I).
> If you could attempt to ELI5 how I'm potentially getting part of this wrong, or point me to some article, I'd appreciate it!
Suffice to say: a shallow reading of the GPLv2 might lead one to believe that the CDDL and the GPLv2 are incompatible. And I believe SFC and FSF's readings of the GPLv2 and copyright law, which the GPL incorporates by reference, are shallow. There are quite a few reasons to believe a CDDL and ZFS combination would not be incompatible. If you want learned legal opinions expressing my/this contrary view there are a few. [0], [1], [2]. Moreover, I'd warn you that SFC and FSF are not disinterested parties. They have agendas which extend beyond whether ZFS is actually incompatible to what that might mean for the GPL.
If you want my unschooled personal understanding -- most generally, there is no reason to believe that dynamic linking creates a derived work. Without further reasoning, FSF's analysis obliterates this boundary without reference to case law, and without an argument as why this must be the case. Whereas I think there are sound copyright law reasons to think where one creates an API boundary, through the use of dynamic linking or otherwise (a modular kernel interface), fair use allows one to make use of software at that boundary.
This is a difficult pill to swallow for many FOSS advocates because this would mean closed source software modules would be permissible in combination with the Linux kernel. And while I understand their political reasoning for disfavoring this view, I think their legal reasoning is weak. I also think the FSF view makes it much harder to build software which interoperates with other software, which BTW should be a key goal of the FSF and FOSS advocates.
I'm just not sure your copyright license has this kind of power. Imagine you build some software which links to MegaEvil Corp's libc, whose license specifically states, if you link to this libc, your work is a derived work of MegaCorp libc, you forfeit all copyright to MegaEvil Corp. My feeling is any court would say building any such software at an API boundary is fair use and copyright law simply does not grant any court the power to enforce this copyright term.
More specifically re: ZFS module and the GPL, I'd dig into what is a "derived work". The GPLv2 after all incorporates the copyright term by reference at Section 0 when describing a "work based on the Program". I'd consider the ambiguity of what is the "whole" work as described in Section 2 and how that might be construed in light of the long held copyright distinction between derived and collective works. I'd also consider recent copyright jurisprudence when asking whether any court would take the view that distributing the Linux kernel and ZFS module is a copyright violation. [3], [4].
> If the program is closed source, then yes, you've broken copyright law.
My point is that although many believe that linking proprietary code and GPL code into the same process breaks copyright law, it's not clear that the law actually forbids it. https://tech.popdata.org/the-gpl-license-and-linking-still-u... is one analysis by someone else skeptical of the FSF's position.
> It's not their fault that people have a completely fucked up interpretation of "derivative work" that includes any combination of two completely separately developed works.
Indeed, "derivative work" is a well-understood term of art in Copyright law. So the courts will have to decide if that's truly what they will interpret, or will they take the redistribution & usage restrictions of the GPL as a separable matter.
Yeah, individual authors may not want someone else to specify how they enforce compliance. If a company wants to play nice that's fine, and I see Redhat and friends are agreeing to play nice with GPL2 code that they contribute to. FSF also has a history of playing nice - they prefer to get compliance rather than collect huge monetary awards. But that's my point, you don't have to encode being nice into the license itself. I found it rather off-putting when I first read it. It imposes restrictions on the original author of the code. Note that v2 imposed nothing on the original author.
My understanding is that it isn't under the theory of what counts as a derivative work requiring a license (and, thus, what is subject to GPLv2 in the first place) espoused by the FSF, however, I believe that view has been hotly disputed as to its accuracy under US copyright law (at least) for about as long as the GPL has existed and never been tested in court.
The FSF, in general -- as is unsurprising for entity that relies on maximally leveraging copyright protections to achieve its ends -- holds to a fairly maximalist view of the legal rights of copyright owners.
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