> 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.
Apparently things are a bit more complicated than this, since works created by government employees are in the public domain in the US, but foreign copyrights are still held by the government. Unless the software is released with a FOSS license where applicable, I don't think public domain government code is compatible with other FOSS licenses (which are generally worldwide).
Even if it weren't the case that the US government held full copyrights abroad, it's still something of a problem because some jurisdictions do not have a concept of public domain - this is why the concept CC-0 licensing comes into play (it's public domain with a permissive license fallback).
> 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.
He is opposed to proprietary software using his code which he gave to the world on the condition that it, and derivative work, remains open for its users to view and modify.
The work belongs to the FSF, so it's ultimately their decision what happens with it, in pursuit of the goal of software which you can legally inspect and modify for yourself.
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.
In Anglo-American law, at least, a license is a permission which may either be gratuitous (most open source software license usually would fall into this category) or part of a contract (which requires mutual consideration, among other things, rather than a one-sided grant).
But, IIRC, gratuitous licenses are, in US copyright, enforced under contract principles, mutatis mutandis, not under the bare law otherwise applicable to the rights transferred. And I think the FSF is very much aware of that, and that is a big reason for the automatic termination on breach provisions of the GPL, to get back to the bare law, no license situation, at least after an established breach.
> 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?
> Ah, the ambiguities of the english language! You are talking about the original code, whereas I am talking about the derived work.
Right, but when talking about freedoms regarding a specific work, the derivative works aren't really relevant, since my (as an end user) freedom to use/modify/redistribute/etc. the original work remains unhindered.
Likewise, my choice to release software under an MIT-like license does not in and of itself detract from end users' freedom; what downstream projects do with my code is not my concern so long as my in-code copyright notices are maintained. For all I know, my code is being used in projects with GPL or MPL or CDDL or Artistic License 2.0 or BSD-style or Apache or what have you licensing terms.
> the roles can be mutually exclusive.
That's not what "mutually exclusive" means. "Mutually exclusive" means that you can either be an end user or a publisher - never both. The whole philosophy behind FOSS dictates the precise opposite of mutual exclusion; the "Four Freedoms" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition) make this very clear.
Sure, you might happen to be one or the other, but the point is that free software empowers you to be both at the same time. By restricting one's freedom as a "publisher" (as you say), you're inherently restricting one's freedom as an "end user".
> Why do people like him think copyright laws are bad and made by rich people, but also support open source software, which relies on the same copyright laws to exist.
There are quite very different open-source licenses. Copyleft licenses do depends on copyright, that is true. On the other hand, typical non-copyleft licenses are in my opinion much less dependent on copyright.
A world without copyright does in my opinion not correspond to any open-source license that I am aware of: you are allowed to reverse-engineer and distribute any software that you want and you must not forbid this to any person using your software or any work derived from it, but nobody is obliged to provide any source code.
In my personal opinion such a license is a gap in the "market of open source licenses", so if some reader feels inspired to create such an open-source license, I utterly encourage the respective reader to do so.
> Even using a licence more restrictive than GPL seems to me unethical and against public interest, but would exclude the majority of employment prospects.
No, it would not.
You may believe it would because the vast majority of the software we use is widely distributed (OS, Web browser, Office suite, games…). On the other hand, the vast majority of produced software is actually custom software. (As you may have noticed, the two occurrences of "vast majority" doesn't refer to the same quantity.)
Custom software doesn't need to be proprietary to sustain their income.
> Given the way Linux is copyrighted (with many holders), it'd be an absurd situation if any copyright holder could just decide, after the fact, that they don't want their code being distributed under that license anymore.
Even leaving aside general issued on the revocability of licenses that aren't special to copyright law, the US has a special provision making all licenses and transfers of rights by authors under copyright revocable by written notice, during a 5 year window 35 years from when they occurred; see 17 USC Sec. 203.
> So...what are you basing your legal theory on here?
The general American (Anglo-American, I think, as I'm fairly certain the principle is a common law one which is older than the US) of licenses.
> What is astonishing about the current debate is that the calls for the broadest possible interpretation of copyright are now coming from within the Free Software community.
It is not astonishing at all given:
* proprietary codebase have not been indexed by copilot (at least a public version of it)
* arguably derived code will be used in proprietary programs
>Assuming you can write a license for use in the USA and enforce it the world around is quite foolish.
In this case there is no reason to suspect it (the GPL or any software license) is not enforceable in France, you just have to go about it the right way and sue in the contract law courts.
As a specific wrinkle of the French system, if you sue under one system (copyright or contract), if you fail you can't sue under the other. In most countries you would not face such a restriction.
It's amazing to me that this has not come up before. Has a software license never been litigated as a copyright violation in France before? Strange.
> Open-source software is free to use but that doesn’t mean that it’s in the public domain.
So far so good.
> A lot of open-source software is made available under what is known as a “copyleft” license. The terms are simple: ... if you fork it, you must put the new version of the software—including the parts you developed—in the public domain and make the source code freely available.
Wrong and wrong. The author is an appellate lawyer, and yet he seems unsure about the meaning of "public domain", or just hasn't read the licence (which is ironic, given that he is criticising people for exactly that failing).
Also he hasn't understood the more nuanced point that "copyleft" licences don't necessarily require that you share the source code with people who only interact with the running code via a network service. That extra requirement is a feature of the AGPL beyond being a copyleft licence.
>There are a lot of programs, which cannot use GPL for some of its restrictions, e.g. commercial software.
You mean proprietary software. People that write free software do not want their work used in software that does not guarantee that users will have the same freedoms that they gave to others. I think the thing that a lot of people overlook here is that the proprietary software developers want to impose their own set of restrictions that are incompatible with free software. Let's not pity the poor company that cannot profit off the work of others without sharing back.
> They ensure that software licensed under the GPL (or similar license) grants users the four fundamental freedoms (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en) and that those freedoms cannot be taken away by copies, forks, or derivative works.
Yes, the F.S.F. has decided that those four freedoms are the only fundamental ones to care about and calls it some absolute semantic of freedom.
Anyone can decree that one of those is not important, or add a fifth.
And even within the F.S.F.'s framework there are problems. The G.C.C. had to be given a licence exception for the runtime it links against, otherwise arguably anything compiled with it would become a derivative product of it, and thus subject to the G.P.L.. The argument is that that prohibits the freedom to run the software for any purpose; the F.S.F. has always said that writing a clause in a licence to stop software from being used to make proprietary software would make it nonfree.
So even there, the G.P.L. without such exceptions would create nonfree software if applied to compilers with a runtime.
> 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.
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.
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