On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Giacomo wrote:
Il December 2, 2018 9:46:06 AM UTC, Paul Jakma paul@jakma.org ha scritto:
On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
Hacking License
Our Curiosity serves Humanity through Freedom, Candor and Communion.
This license grants you the right to hack with us, to learn what we ignore and to challenge our assumptions by teaching us what you will learn.
- Definitions
For the purpose of this License:
- "License" refers to this License.
- "Copyright" means copyright-like laws that apply to other literary works.
- "Hack" refers to the software, the documentation and the contents distributed under this License.
"the software... distributed under this licence" reads like it could be interpreted/misunderstood as /all/ software under this licence. I guess you mean to refer to a specific work and modifications and other derived works, but that's not clear (to me).
- "Hacker" refers to any Copyright holder of the Hack.
- "Human" is every live being with humans among its genetic ancestors.
Why specify this? This seems like something the courts can handle. And who's to say that one day we will not consider other entities to be capable of holding or infringing copyrights? Also, how does this interact with legal entities that are deemed equivalent to persons, for some things, and can hold or infringe on copyright, like corporations?
- "Application" refers to a set of software exchanging data.
Is this meant to cover software communicating over a network? Or software and firmware communicating by exchanging data?
- "Runtime" refers to any runtime system, any operating system, any virtual machine and/or any interpreter that is required to run the Hack.
AFAICT, you're taking the tack of trying to scope the licence in terms of technical definitions ("Runtime" and operating systems and what not), rather than more abstract legal terms (e.g., "Derived Work").
I wonder about how well that can future-proof this licence, as well as unintended consequences, e.g. through technicalities you havn't thought of.
Have you spoken with legal professionals on that?
- "Source" refers to the human-readable form of a software which is the most convenient for people to study and modify, and that can be used to generate a new identical copy of the software itself.
- "User" refers to any human receiving a copy of the Hack or its source and/or performing any action permitted by this License.
So what about corporate entities?
- To "study" a software means to perform any activity that could help the User to deeply understand it, to understand how to modify it or to explain its usage and inner working to other Users.
- To "copy" means to create an new exact copy of a software, for any purpose and on any medium, even after applying one or more lossless transformations to the software, including, but not limited to, compression or encryption.
- To "distribute" means any action that enable a human or organization to perform any of the activities permitted by this License.
- To "use" a software means to generate a new copy of the software from its source, to run it for any purpose, to install it, to interact with it through any medium or proxy (even asynchronously), to provide data for its input or to consume its output (or any part of it), and/or to store and use a Derived Work in place of the software itself.
- To "wrap" a software means to integrate it into an Application. The programs that collect, store, transform and/or transfer data for the User or between the User and the Hack are called "Wrappers". Wrappers do not include any program or library that Users can find in off-the-shelf distributions of the required Runtime, but include any modified version of such programs, libraries, Runtime that are required to run the Application. The license of a Wrapper is compatible with this License if it grants to the Users access to its source and the right to study, copy, use, wrap, modify and/or distribute the Wrapper and/or the Application and/or any modified version of them, in any form.
- To "modify" a software means to perform any action that would require Copyright permission, except for studying, copying, using, wrapping and distributing the software, including, but not limited to, to adapt all or part of the software, to translate all or part of it to a different language or form, to create or modify its documentation, to refactor its source, or to combine the software or parts of it with other works. The resulting work is called a "Derived Work", whereas "Inspiring Hack" is the original work modified to create it.
- Grants ---------
Permission is hereby granted to any User of the Hack to study, copy, use, wrap, modify and/or distribute the Hack, and to distribute any Derived Work under this License but with a different name and logo.
IANAL, but should the grant section that these grants are conditional upon the terms still to be introduced in the next section, ยง3?
Furthermore, if the Hack is a Derived Work, the Hackers grant to the copyright holders of the Inspiring Hack all rights, title and interests in any copyright the Hackers have in the Hack.
Finally, a patent License to perform any of the actions permitted above is granted to any User under the Hackers' essential patent claims.
These grants are free of charge, non-exclusive, valid everywhere in the Universe, irrevocable (provided the stated conditions are met), royalty-free and can be transferred to third parties with the Hack, its source or any Derived Work but for no charge.
This License does not grant any rights in the names, trade names, trademarks, service marks, or logos of the Hackers, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Hack and reproducing the content of the copyright notice.
- Conditions
The grants provided by this License are subject to the following conditions:
- The Hackers' copyright notice and this License shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Hack and of any Derived Work.
- The source of the Hack shall be made available with the Hack and/or by other reasonable means to every User, according to this License and without additional constraints or requirements, such as further agreements, any royalty or other fee.
- All Wrappers used to integrate the Hack into an Application shall be made available (either with the Hack and/or by other reasonable means) to every User under either this License or compatible ones, so that Users can modify and/or run the whole Application on their own hardware.
- The tools, dependencies and know-how required to perform any of the activities permitted by this License shall be made available to the User with the source of the Hack (except for those tools and dependencies that are already available to every User either free of charge or in off-the-shelf distributions of the Runtime) and without additional constraints or requirements, such as further agreements, any royalty or other fee.
- No restriction or impediment, neither technical, legal or otherwise, shall prevent, hinder or inhibit the fruition of the rights provided by this License to any User of both the Hack and any Derived Work.
- No patent infringement litigation claim (excluding counterclaims and cross-claims) alleging that all or part of the Hack directly or indirectly infringes a patent shall be initialized by the User.
- The User has never violated any of the previous conditions.
- All of these conditions shall be valid and enforceable under the jurisdiction of the User.
- Termination
Failing to comply to the conditions of this License shall automatically terminate the grants provided, without affecting other parties who have received copies or rights from the User under this License.
- Severability
The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this License does not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of this License. Such provision is to be reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make it valid and enforceable.
- No Warranty and Limitation of Liability
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENTSHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
- Use and distribution of the Hacking License
This version of the Hacking License was written on December 01, 2018.
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed.
Copyright (C) 2018 Giacomo Tesio
The Hacking License addresses these issues but in a different way:
- the User is any human who study or interacts with the Hack, even indirectly, providing data or receiving data elaborated from it
- every User have the right provided by the license
- condition 3.2 impose to makes sources available to every User
- condition 3.5 forbids any legal or technical impediment.
A violation of 3.5 (or any other condition) terminates the grants, with no forgive provision.
Well, the GPL doesn't allow other restrictions either.
Yet, there are businesses who offer services around GPL software, where the contracts for the continuation of those services depend on the recipient of the GPL software not exercising their GPL rights.
Is that right or wrong, I don't know. Even if it's wrong, it's very hard to do anything about it: The recipient has no standing to sue. The copyright holder may never receive the specifics from any of the recipients involved, and even if they do none of those recipients may be willing to be involved in any enforcement action - for fear of crossing the entity offering the tied-service (who may be much more powerful than any of the copyright holders, or whose favour may be far more valuable to the recipients than any of the copyright holders).
The only solution I see to that is to require source distribution to all, with minimal conditions (except to meet desert island and dissident tests).
Yet, people who are not users (as per definition) have no right on the hack.
Right, that is an issue, given my experience (as a copyright holder) with parasitical, abusive entities and side-contracts.
In an isolated island all users must have access to the modified source but there's no need to send them outside. If the isolation ends, though, all new users have the righr to access the sources.
No, this licence restricts source distribution to the /recipients/, rooted at those Humans the original distributor chose.
That set is not the same set as the people on the desert island.
Same for the dissident: all users have right to access the modified source code they use, but there is no need to send it upstream.
Maybe, but it doesn't seem to address the practicalities of the restrictive side-contract, and making it harder for abusive entities to get away with that.
regards,