Thanks Paul for your careful read and your objections.
Let me try to explain the resoning and the intended goals inline with them.
- "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).
The GPLv3 says ""The Program" refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this License." "Any copyrightable work" seems much more prone to the interpretation you suggest.
The EUPL says" ‘The Original Work’: the work or software distributed or communicated by the Licensor under this Licence, available as Source Code and also as Executable Code as the case may be." Again it's similar to this license.
Obviously I just intend the specific works that adopt the Hacking License separately: otherwise violating one license would terminate them all. Since I've never heard of this interpretation for the GPL, I suppose it's not a valid interpretation.
To be honest, at a first glance, I'm not against such wide interpretation, but if somebody can brough to my attention unintended side effects for the Users or it turns out that it's incompatible with DFSG, I could change the wording to prevent it.
- "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?
Exactly to avoid this: the Hacking License grants rights only to humans. Whatever restriction of "human" the court would take, it has to include the judge, the humans that created the Hack, the people who wrote the applyed laws and so on. BUT thanks to such definition, it cannot exclude other humans, however weak is their position.
As for any non biological or non human entity "capable of holding or infringing copyrights" they would require an additional license.
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?
This is a great question! :-)
My goal is to give each member of any group of humans that receive or use the software the exact same rights (under the exact same conditions) on my software. A recognised organization can hold or infringe copyright, but cannot use or study the software, only the members of such organization can.
I don't want to prevent members of organizations to use the software, but I don't care much about the organizations themselves.
So maybe it's a good idea add a line to the section §2 to explicitly grants organizations the right to distribute the Hack. Anything else done from an organization (instead of a human) would require an addictional license.
- "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?
Both. This is important to define what wrappers are.
For example it covers all programs in a SaaS that work with the hack Any firmware written to speedup the hack, would be included too.
- "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").
No. I needed to define Runtime to exclude off-the-shelf operating systems, virtual machines, interpreters and so on that the Hack depends upon. I'm thinking of SaaS software running, say, on Linux: there's no need to distribute Linux with the hack, unless such instance of Linux is modified (see 3.4). As always, suggestions to improve the wording are welcome.
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?
Yes I did. One of their honest answer puzzled me a bit: "there is no certainty in international Law enforcement".
- "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?
See above. As currently written, the license is for the human members of the corporate entities, not the corporate entities themselves.
Note: even if provisions will be added to clarify the rights and conditions of organizations, no organization will never qualify as User under this license.
- 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, §3?
This is what section §3 states: "The grants provided by this License are subject to the following conditions".
I assume the Judge is in good faith and he would read the whole license before taking any decision.
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.
This would violate the condition 3.5 terminating any right obtained under the Hacking License.
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).
This would be a pretty risky attempt to workaround the Hacking License. Suppose a user (that is a human according the license) publish anonymously the program somewhere. He has the right to do so. Any other other human who obtains the program, obtain the same rights and can exercise them without any legal constraints. At that point, if the source are not promptly available by reasonable means and with no further restrictions, those who have modified the source have violated the conditions and a Judge could only recognise the termination of their rights over the code got from the Inspiring Hack.
This without affecting the third parties that could at that point obtain the sources of the modified Hack.
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).
I don't like listing exceptions, sounds too fragile. I prefer clearly stated general rules.
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.
If you get a copy of the Hack, you become a user. If you interact, even asyncrously or through a human proxy, with the Hack, you are a User. I think the definition of user is wide enough to minimize the risk of abuses.
OTOH, I think that forcing people to send back patches would disincentivate hacking. The goal of the Hacking License is to maximize the forks of the software it covers, maximizing the experiments and the learnt lessons for the humanity.
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.
No. Condition 3.2 grant access to the sources to every _User_ as defined by the license itself, that is "any human receiving a copy of the Hack or its source and/or performing any action permitted by this License."
So if you interact with the Hack somehow, you are a User.
That set is not the same set as the people on the desert island.
No, it's a subset: all Users in 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.
I think it does, to the widest possible extent that still allow it the Hacking License to pursuit its purposes.
Giacomo