[Fedora-legal-list] "Must-read" licenses and their ethical implications. Possible workarounds.

[Christopher Svanefalk]

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[FORWARDED: I noticed my reply to richard didnt get sent to the
list, so im sending it here also]

Richard, thanks for your reply! It was helpful, but I think you
missunderstood me - my primary concern was the ethical aspect, not
only the legal one in this question. I provided some comments
below.

>This is a very interesting issue, about which much could be said.
>Actually, clauses similar to this one are not uncommon in FOSS
>licenses, though they differ in details and degree of
>annoyingness. They are invariably fossils from proprietary
>commercial

I went over a lot of the licenses on the Fedora licensing page,
from what I can see (and contrary to what I believed at first),
clauses like this actually seem pretty uncommon. I have only seen
it, if I remember right, in two really small licenses for bundled
software in OpenOffice and a portion of OpenSolaris (think it was
gPhoto).

>software licensing culture where they originated as (arguably
>quixotic) efforts to establish contractual assent.  I myself would

>say
>that, in theory, as a matter of caution, users should 'pre-
>screen',
>but we cannot deny that, in typical FOSS distribution contexts, no

>one
>generally does this, and it is usually impractical to do so.

Exactly! And it is this issue I was concerned about.

Note that I was not primarily thinking about the LEGAL consequence
here - my general understanding regarding FOSS licenses are that
they are very mild - the chance that you will get into a harmful
contract-relationship with a licensor via an OSI-certified license
seems so miniscule that it could be disregarded alltogether, and
therefore there is no real need or obligation to read the license
if you are just an end-user (whereas, off course, programmers who
want to create derivative works should be checking up on the
terms).

My real concern, therefore, was the ethical aspect - you basically
HAVE to read and understand the license in order to even USE the
software...this is not the case with any other popular FOSS license
I know (GPL, ASL, BSD...), and I think it is unacceptable, due to
the group of people who will be shut out from using the software
because they feel they cannot fulfill this requirement. People
should have peace of mind dowloading packages, knowing that they
have no obligations towards the licensor/author apart from what is
customary in FOSS-licenses.

If this was only a semi-important license, then this problem in
itself would not be so big. The problem is that this license has
nestled its way into important packages like OpenJDK (via the old
JDK) and OpenOffice.org. Man, I wonder if it is not even in the
Firefox codebase.
>
>I would say that the W3C type of clause is generally assumed
>within
>FOSS culture to have no interesting legal meaning and to be purely
>ceremonial.  I believe this explains why, for example, the W3C
>license
>is considered by the FSF to be not only free but GPL-compatible,
>despite the existence of the clause.  However, any such clause has

>to
>be examined carefully; if it appears to be a real enforceable
>condition on the grant of rights, or if the licensor acts in such
>a
>way as to suggest that this is the licensor's view, we might well
>classify the license as non-free; indeed we may have done so in
>some
>past decisions.

I have addressed a mail to W3C (last friday I think, no answer as
of yet) that might give an answer to if that is their intention. I
might post the reply to this list when I get it.

>> this, but does not combining code under a GPL-compatible license
>> with code under the GPL cause the combined work to fall under
>the
>> GPL?

>Often, yes.

>> If this is the case, does that mean that any terms of the GPL-
>> compatible license (such as the W3C) can be ignored after such
>> combination?

>No, not usually, in the sense that the terms generally are assumed

>to
>persist and burden users of the GPL-licensed larger work
>downstream. This is the whole assumption behind GPL compatibility
>theory.

I understood this after researching GPL-compatibility after I
posted this mail...I think it is very unfortunate. It is maybe not
doable, but it is a shame that any licenses being "devoured" by the
GPL cannot simply be turned into copyright-acknowledgements in the
main-GPL license of the combined work, and the whole work be
"purely" only under the GPL (for example, John writes a parser
under the BSD, Doey writes a compiler under the MIT, Sue
incorporates them both into her GPLed IDE. Both the BSD and MIT
licenses dissapear, but instead copyright acknowledgements for each
component are incorporated into the GPL covering the whole work, so
any end user never has to worry about the terms of anything but the
GPL).

>> 3) Ban any
>> licenses that would fall into this category (possible, since for

>now
>> the only license of this type I know off is the W3C).
>
>No, for the reason stated above; we generally don't take such
>clauses
>seriously.

What if the W3C (in this particular case) were to say that they
really mean it?

>Richard Fontana
>Red Hat, Inc.
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