… & of course we again ask Microsoft's GitHub to start respecting FOSS licenses, cooperate with the community, & retract their incorrect claim that their behavior is “fair use”.
The only thing I haven't seen said succinctly, although it's been hinted at by many, is this:
There is no one on the planet yet who has agreed that they will run a project under the SS Public License and be themselves bound by the SS Public License.
That really says it all. Whatever your view about copyleft licenses generally: legitimate and well-intentioned copyleft licenses (e.g., CC-BY-SA, GPL, and Affero GPL) have many projects that use the license in an inbound=outbound contributor licensing fashion. All (two of the) SS Public License uses have a strict CLA that give the publishing entity non-SS-Public-Licensed rights to the contributions. We shouldn't take anyone seriously who promulgates a license but won't use it themselves in an inbound=outbound way. Period. I suggest we all try to not give further interest to this clearly risible licensing proposals from MongoDB and Elastic.
If there's energy to focus here, I'd say it's toward figuring out how to handle good governance of forks of these two projects. I hope folks can maintain the discipline to discern and bifricate these two very different issues.
As the author, I can confirm I'm fully aware of the etymology of “A Modest Proposal” — my undergraduate degree included the Honors program in the Humanities and there are many professors who would be aghast if I'd forgotten.
I chose the title because the proposal should be not a big deal — especially given that these companies already demand that copyleft projects grant these 30 days — however, it's ultimately an untenable proposal. Just like the original Modest Proposal, it's made to a ruling class who don't realize their policies are completely unreasonable.
Your life or death scenario is an edge case with its own special complexities which should not be lumped in with discussions of the vastly voluntary choices we can make.
Karen's and my 2019 FOSDEM keynote (and accompanying podcasts) discuss her struggles with the medical device industry and how those struggles relate to the larger set of choices related to technology that we make. This isn't an issue that lends itself well to short-form discussion. The issues are quite complex:
I realize sarcasm is the "way of expressing things on HN", and I did some of it myself in a post upthread, but to get serious on norgie's point for a moment: I picked this specific issue to speak out on for two reasons: (a) as a regular traveler [0] and speaker at FOSS events, this was a great opportunity to draw attention to the problems with airlines, as all of us use them to attend these events and my blog is well read among FOSS folks and (b) as someone who is a frequent traveler, and recognized by Delta as a "good customer", I have a louder voice then most in this debate.
There are indeed a lot of issues that we should be speaking up on, and it can be exhausting to speak up on all of them. I try to target moments when my voice can get a bit more attention than usual for some reason and pounce on the opportunity to make a difference. I think it's a good approach.
(Again, I'm the poster of the ebb.org blog post that was the original article linked to in this thread; as others have mentioned, this article was changed to be about the Washington Post news story that inspired my blog post).
[0] and yes, the fossil fuel impact of that does bother me and I've spoken about that too at FOSS conferences)
I go to great lengths to buy clothes not made in sweatshops, actually. I admit I have some clothes probably made in sweatshops that I go second-hand. BTW, I've often been the only one at FOSS conferences raising the issue that t-shirts given out and/or sold were made by sweatshop labor.
Yes, the X200 I'm typing this on was probably made in a sweatshop, as was the Nexus One I still use as a mobile device. But, I use every piece of hardware I have until it breaks in an unfixable way, and I also only buy used hardware. I've purchased a newly made electronic device since the late 1990s.
As I mentioned in the original post, I've only worked for charities dedicated to causes I support. I'm curious to know which causes you spend your time getting "bent out of shape" to work on. Perhaps making up facts about authors of posts that get HN coverage is your cause? Is that your day job, or just a hobby cause? :)
Oh, and as for commuting, I work from home, which means I don't drive home from work any day. The last day I "drove home from work" was circa early 1997. Did you happen to research and were speaking about the commuting I did in the 1990s?
I wonder how the rest of HN readers cash in on this "guarantee" you gave them about the facts of my life which I can easily disprove you were wrong about.
TL;DR: while vmbrasseur of OSI does say "what's done is done" in comments here, I think the OSI shouldn't accept the proposal as submitted, and should demand that licenses submitted them to have gone through a prior public drafting process. This is particularly important for licenses whose stated goal is to make fundamental changes to how copyleft works. GPLv3 and (even better) copyleft-next made this the standard of how new license drafts are done, and we should follow that standard.
Hey, Tim, I've talked a number of times with GitHub about the issue of lack of nuance in their license monikers on GitHub. I haven't gotten very far, but this change will cause me of course to raise it again.
As others have commented, kragen is jumping to excitement a bit too quick. GitHub's license data is not curated, and I'm quite sure determining a license of software is an undecidable problem; it just requires human judgment, and many self-report their own license incorrectly to GitHub.
GitHub has a lot of problems to solve before the license data they are presenting can be trusted. Even many very common programs have licenses that can't even be described with an SPDX moniker, so the "badge method" just isn't going to work.
Those who wish to learn more about copyleft after reading Ben's article may also want to look at the copyleft guide https://copyleft.org/guide for more information.
Ben is a contributor to the copyleft guide, so we'll likely merge in his article into the Guide.
It seems that most commenting in this thread don't have not actually followed the complex political debate going on in the world of automotive industry adoption of FLOSS.
Specifically, the automotive industry has made a series of arguments that proprietary software is ultimately safer than FLOSS, and all their goals are to lock-down FLOSS in various ways to prevent the nefarious from "hacking" the vehicle.
The vehicles are all still hackable, and many have been modified by people for both reasonable and nefarious purposes. The FLOSS situation won't change anything, and there aren't even any examples yet of hacks where FLOSS made the situation worse. It's an assumption they make without full information because of their inherent pro-proprietary bias.
I say clearly in the blog post that there is danger when you have software handle any life-critical service. The criticism I'm making in the blog post is the arguments by the auto-industry and their providers that FLOSS is inherently more dangerous than proprietary software.
You're conflating a lot of different issues. Anyway, the example you started with would likely work similarly in the USA. You'd have to provide a lot more detail to actually show the the difference that it seems you're trying to show.
There are strong rules of evidences in common law systems as well, and the Court expects the parties to introduce evidence; I don't know of any Court that goes seeking evidence that wasn't provided.
In the USA, we talk of jury's as "fact fiinders", but their job is to only consider the evidence before them (possibly conflicting, as it comes adversarially from both sides), and find what's true. But no one in this process other than the parties in civil litigation bring evidence forward.
So, the specific distinction you're trying to make isn't really a distinction between the two systems. I agree with you that there are huge differences in various ways.
My guess at what you're trying to point out is that there is no discovery process in Germany and elsewhere, which is certainly true and is relevant to this discussion, and makes the evidentiary systems very different in practice.
Interestingly, Richard Fontana just told me today a piece of history I didn't know: the USA didn't have discovery in civil cases until the early 20th century, apparently.
The civil procedure example you're giving here is unrelated to rules of evidence (which are a proper subset of the rules of civil procedure). Also, note that the German courts aren't common-law based, and don't follow the rules of civil procedure of the nature you're talking about.
It's always difficult to intuit what a Court needs ahead of time to understand these complex topics, particularly in a legal system without a discovery process (such as Germany). I prepared the following in that effort:
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-code-si...
Thanks so much for your kind words to Conservancy, martingxx and davexunit. Here's the Conservancy Supporter link for those who can afford to help:
https://sfconservancy.org/supporter#annual
The biggest impact individual developers can make on all the points I raised is to keep their own copyrights on copylefted works and do not sign an employment contract unless it explicitly allows you do to that.
Developers have more leverage in employment negotiation than they realize. Right now, most copylefted codebases that have historically had mostly individuals holding the copyrights are drifting to having companies mostly hold the copyrights. We have to stop this trend.
If individual developers hold copyrights, they make their own decisions about enforcing, and companies who oppose enforcement have less leverage.
I always find it frustrating when people pontificate about how the GPL should work who have never done the hard work to enforce it (BTW, I'm always looking for volunteers who want to help in the really really boring work of enforcing the GPL, but I rarely get any takers once I start describing what the work entails).
I've done and/or led more GPL enforcement than anyone on the planet, for more than a dozen different copylefted projects, and I've done it as a volunteer, as an employee of both FSF and Conservancy, and for GPLv2-only, GPLv3-or-later, and LGPLv2.1 works.
While I love, as a purely intellectual exercise over a nice meal, to talk theory with people who only have a theoretical understanding, real world experience with the licenses is the center of drafting good copyleft licenses. The GPL might as well be the ISC license if its clauses are never enforced, so enforcement is really the litmus test on how the license is working and what changes are needed. If the author or anyone else would like to get involved with "field research" and help in Conservancy's enforcement efforts for Linux, Samba, BusyBox and other projects, I'm easily contactable.
Anyway, I think what Christopher Price and others in this thread are really looking for is the copyleft-next project. It's Richard Fontana's project that's attempting to redo copyleft licensing from first principles and from (initially) a theoretical basis. I'm a fan of the project as I do think a "redrafting from ground up done in a community fashion" is a good idea to try in parallel to the existing functioning copylefts like GPL.
But saying "GPL is broken, therefore we need a GPLv4" is not terribly helpful. GPL is on the verge of collapse not for most of the reasons pundits say it is, but because (a) it's widely violated, (b) few people are willing to enforce, (c) some of those who enforce won't follow community Principles when they do, and (d) there is heavy political opposition from wealthy corporations and trade-associations against those who do enforce, even when they commit to follow published community Principles.
IMO, those are the biggest problems GPL has now, and I work every week to seek to solve those.
Sure, having been involved with copyleft policy since the early 1990s, I keep a private bug list of GPLv3 (i.e., things I'd like to see in GPLv4). But, it's far from my top priority, and it shouldn't be the community's top priority, IMO, either.
Scripts doesn't necessarily mean software scripts; it could be a script as in a script for a play. If the BMW engineers memorized their lines and know how to do them, they have to write out those lines as a requirement of the GPL. The GPL requires "oral tradition" build scripts to be passed along as well.
… & of course we again ask Microsoft's GitHub to start respecting FOSS licenses, cooperate with the community, & retract their incorrect claim that their behavior is “fair use”.
A few more links to our work on this issue:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/feb/03/github-copilot-co... https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/feb/23/committee-ai-assi...