On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 12:53 PM Pamela Chestek <pam...@chesteklegal.com> wrote: > > On 7/2/2019 11:25 AM, VanL wrote:
> Van, I agree with everything you say. But that doesn't answer the same > question as "is it open source"? Add to that the interesting possibility that > currently-existing licenses will now reach beyond what everyone thought their > scope was. Do we expand the meaning of "open source" to match? Or do we just > accept it as an unfortunate outcome but not embrace it? This reminds me a little of the policy issue raised by the largely forgotten section 8 of GPLv2: "If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License." Incidentally, this section embeds the FSF's early policy opposition to copyrightability of software interfaces as well as software patents. But leaving that aside, I would argue that this section, if activated by "the original copyright holder", transforms GPLv2 into a non-open-source, and indeed non-free-software, license. (Surely if a copyright holder takes the BSD license and tacks on a geographical distribution limitation we would say that the resulting amended license would fail to satisfy the OSD and fail to provide software freedom; how could we justify treating the GPL differently?) What makes this largely uninteresting is that hardly any GPL licensor has made use of this section, perhaps in part because doing so would obviously clash with basic software freedom norms. (When I looked into the question around ~2006 I found evidence of only one GPL licensor who had done so, a developer based in Germany who had apparently made a deal with a US patent owner to do so.) The non-use of this provision is why it was not carried over into GPLv3. So the mere fact that GPLv2 specifically authorizes a software freedom-inconsistent application of the license -- at least if the underlying legal system provides some justification for doing so -- does not mean that we have to adjust our understanding of software freedom, or the OSD, to take account of this possibility. Richard _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
