On Fri, Dec 16, 2011, at 10:51 PM, Bruce Perens wrote: > The author should back up and state a list of goals, > rather than present the argument as pseudo-legal drafting.
Bruce, My primary objective is that software ported to provide compatibility with proprietary platforms be done in such a manner that the free software emulators of those platforms become sufficiently good to run the ported work. I think this would increase the willingness of authors to contribute their works as free software; at the same time I think it would provide a motivator to ensure that free software emulations of proprietary platforms (like Wine) are fully functional replacements. Why do I think so? The value of a platform isn't intrinsic, it is rather proportional to the software that runs on it. Hence, when free software is ported to a proprietary platform, the author of the free software is unwittingly contributing to the financial value of the proprietary platform's vendor without any equivalent value exchange. Since I realize it is not in the spirit of "free software" to explicitly ban the use of a proprietary platform, I think the next best thing that you could ask for in return is proper emulation. A previous attempt at accomplishing this objective used a modified GPLv3 less the system library exception. However, I don't think this neatly encapsulated the idea and might not even be strong enough to accomplish the objective. My secondary objective (tightly related) is to somehow address the well known "work around" to the GPL where you wrap your proprietary functionality as a web service API and then call it from a derived work. To me this fails since it doesn't license the "the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged". For an example of this "work around" please see an example of this approach [1]. The informal consultation of two intellectual property attorneys seem to concur with the response to this question -- that even if the GPL linking affects shared libraries, it certainly does not extend to web services; Web API "work around" is simple & effective. This second attempt at a license takes a different approach from the GPL, implicitly not exempting system libraries but also making a test (and license name) that I hope would render useless these sort of application topology copyleft work-around. I think the opening of the license itself nicely encapsulates both of these goals in a succinct way: This software is licensed for any purpose excepting the right to make publicly available derived works which depend exclusively upon non-free components. I hope this expresses my intent clearly. I had presented an earlier proposal on debian-legal [2] that was much less well developed. I expressly omitted my objective here so that the license idea itself would be taken up on its merits without diving into a discussion if my goals are worthy. I think there are lots of reasons to disagree with my objective, however, the question for me is if this general approach is acceptable pathway to an open source license. Best, Clark [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4351119/if-i-use-gnu-gpl-code-with-my-own-server-side-code-do-i-need-to-open-my-server/ [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2011/11/msg00025.html _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
