On Saturday, 17 August 2013, Richard Stallman wrote: Suppose developer Ds give the code to organization O, and signs a contract with O giving O the right to distribute that code under the GNU GPL starting at a future date F. Is that something O can rely on? Is there any way for D to retract that?
Yes, that's the alternative I originally recommended and that we have been discussing Larry Rosen's objection to. The agreement between D and O might be one designed to create a fiduciary relationship, of special trust and accountability, to which the legal system applies uniquely high standards of responsibility. It's this fiduciary relationship with a third party which entitles you to the intervention of mandatory orders to perform promises. Another alternative in the relationship with a trusted third party is a copyright assignment on condition, where the property passing to the trusted third party is "impressed with a trust" to perform the condition, which is free release. The FSF copyright assignment agreements that you and I manage, and with which most lawyers in the trade are somewhat familiar, are an example of this form. Where the conditional assignment isn't useful, as in some European copyright systems, the fiduciary relationship design becomes paramount, as Axel Metzger showed in his architecture of the Fiduciary License Agreement for FSF Europe. The structural similarity is the trusted third party as transactional facilitator and intermediary. Organizations as various as FSF, the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, SFLC, and the Software Freedom Conservancy serve in different ways as transactional intermediaries. Although their roles are little thought about in typical discussion, they serve crucial strengthening purposes in the legal structure of free software commerce. The incorrect architectural ambition to replace the legal role of the intermediaries with "better" licenses or contribution agreements leads to numerous confusions, of which the present conversation is just a minor one. Eben -- Eben Moglen v: 212-461-1901 Professor of Law, Columbia Law School f: 212-580-0898 moglen@ Founding Director, Software Freedom Law Center columbia.edu 1995 Broadway (68th Street), fl #17, NYC 10023 softwarefreedom.org _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
