Open Source Hypocrisy: Tag gpl

XOOPS Has Left the Building

Spacemonkey — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:53:00 +0000

I was just pointed to this forum thread over in the land of XOOPS.

(As a side note, at a previous Joomla core summit Jean Marie-Simonet and I were joking about how all the open source content management systems named themselves after noises. Take the following sentence:

(NAME)! I just slipped and stepped in some (NAME)!

You can do this for about any FOSS CMS out there and it is absolutely hysterical.

Joomla! I just slipped and stepped in some joomla!

Or maybe…

XOOPS! I just slipped and stepped in some XOOPS!

Ok, back to the topic at hand)

The forum thread in question has a pretty alarming tone, as well as overall meaning. Without getting drawn into the fight, can someone explain what is going on over there?

BSD->GPL Relicense Follow Up

Spacemonkey — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:06:00 +0000

In a previous article I mentioned a spat between some BSD developers and some GPL developers, with the SFLC getting pulled in to find a resolution.

It does appear that a resolution has been found, and it looks like the right thing was done.

Logic Prevailed.

In an excellent follow-up article at Linux-Watch by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, the SFLC asked for a quiet period to finish their research and analysis of the situation.

This of course allowed tempers to cool off (I’ve seen Eben do that before, because it was me and it worked) and provided minimal distraction for the SFLC to investigate and collect the data needed for their findings:

There the matter has sat until now. According to the SFLC, “All the copyright holders of the Linux ath5k-driver code, derived from ar5k, have been contacted and have agreed to license their changes under the ISC license, thus allowing improvements to be re-incorporated into OpenBSD. One of the three historical branches of the code reviewed by SFLC, however, included portions that are only licensed under the GPL, and SFLC has determined that it would be very difficult to re-incorporate that code into OpenBSD.”

You can read the analysys of the wireless driver’s development history at the SFLC site directly. Talk about transparency!

Ath5k-driver (discussed in Section 2) currently carried by Linville represents a clear and documented line of descent from ar5k to an ath5k driver for Linux. In addition, all new copyright holders in ath5k-driver code have been contacted and have agreed to license their changes to the ar5k-derived files under the ISC license.9 SFLC has provided a patch to Linville that provides correct attributions for all copyright holders in question. Therefore, SFLC recommends that development under the ISC license continue from what is currently in Linville’s commit c1928199c27de433d1e81b78e3178be4f0e978d2 in his ath5k branch of the wireless-legacy git repository.

I was unsure if the SFLC would take this course, and it is a pleasant read for me, as the SFLC demonstrates an understanding and cooperative approach to non-GPL projects.

Perhaps the most useful of this all is their article about originality requirements which discusses what they believe are reasonable and logical guidelines for determining the copyright status of software.

As well, they have published a guideline for developers who wish to maintain permissive-licensed files in a GPL project.

These last two documents are of great importance to the open source developer community, and I recommend every single one of you take the time to read these. They have thoughtfully been provided in PDF and PS formats for reading offline or printing.

Excellent, excellent work done by the SFLC.

SFLC on the Offensive

Spacemonkey — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:58:00 +0000

Monsoon Media has been caught in clear violation of the restrictions of the GPL license with one of their products, which appears to be running Linux and other GPL software, and Monsoon not making the source available to customers at their request.

The Software Freedom Law Center(SFLC) was called in to get these knuckleheads to play fair ball, and at that point Monsoon threw in the towel and sent out press releases that they would come into compliance.

So far, so good. So what?

Well, the SFLC isn’t happy with that. They are going to take them to court anyway.

As reported by C|Net:

“Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance,” Ravicher said, though he declined to say what other actions the SFLC is seeking.

And the SFLC doesn’t want to be a pushover. “If you start getting a reputation for being a pansy, then people are going to conclude they don’t have to do anything,” he said.

On a personal note: There is absolutely no possibility of pansies in the SFLC offices. When you get instructed by an attorney how to reset your DHCP client from the command line, you better know your GNU, punk! Shoulders up! Get that stomach in, boy!

Let me get it clear that I agree 100% that the GPL must be taken for real by everyone, even those that don’t agree with some of the restrictions of the GPL. Whether you like the GPL or not, whether you agree with the tenets of the GPL or not, it is still a license, and must be complied with and respected. Without someone like the SFLC willing to bring litigation on those unwilling to comply with the license, the GPL is lost.

And in that case, where does that leave us with all the other open/free/libre licenses? Oops.

On the flipside, the SFLC is now on the offensive. To me this is curious as the whole purpose (I thought, at least) was to protect open source projects. That would be defense.

Sometimes Offense is the Best Defense

This is the approach the SFLC is taking, and I sure hope it works out for them. Because it would be a pretty ugly loss if it didn’t, and they already made their point IMHO.

If you violate the GPL and we are made aware, we’ll come to you and make sure you comply. That is what the message should be. However this is taking it one step further, which of course raises the bar.

Glass Houses

The approach Monsoon took is a common one: Continue until someone actually bothers to haul you into court, because 999 times out of 1,000 nobody will.

Some of the projects that the SFLC represents are practicing that same philosophy, by willingly violating copyright in some instances. It is the assumption that nobody wants to fight the SFLC in court over a copyright violation (me included, as I simply don’t have the resources).

So bullying the bully is okay, until you are outed as another bully. Then bully on you. It may only be a matter of time before one of the bullied parties decides to help one of the parties on the receiving end of the bullying, as long as the SFLC is the eventual target.

This puts the SFLC in the crosshairs of some folks. Maybe that is the intent behind the SFLC, as they plan on the legal enforcement of the GPL and so expect to have some folks that aren’t exactly fans.

I sincerely wish them luck, and watch from the sidelines on this one.

BSD-to-GPL Relicense Stirs Controversy Between F/OSS Camps

Spacemonkey — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:12:00 +0000

I read an article on Slashdot (ok, actually a RSS feed) about a public spat about a wireless driver getting relicensed without respecting the original copyright or license. Basically the argument is brought public by a mailing list post by Theo de Raadt, founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH efforts. There’s also a public request for an explanation by the original writer (and copyright holder), Reyk Floeter.

I’m not sure where to start on this one. There are both legal and ethical issues involved here, and I’m personally more intrigued by the ethical ones. Since I’m not an attorney I’ll leave the legal debate to folks that, well, know a heck of a lot more about copyright law than I.

However, that leaves the ethical issues as fair game.

Summary

Reyk wrote the driver for OpenBSD and ported it to several operating systems, and released it under the BSD license. It was clearly his desire to port his driver to work for linux, and release it under the BSD license for that platform as well.

The developers working on the port to linux allegedly took Reyk’s work, removed the BSD license in the header, added their names, and wrapped the code in the GPL license.

Problem: Copyright Violation

The act of taking someone else’s work, making minimal modifications and adding your names above the original authors is illegal. It is called copyright violation, and has become part of a growing, disturbing trend in F/OSS circles.

If you want to place your name on someone else’s software, you at least have to make significant contributions to it – and you cannot take the name of the creator away, as it will always be considered a derivative work. You can, however, release the additions that you made separately under your own copyright and license. This apparently was not done.

Another example is Joomla, a frequent topic on this site :-) As a co-founder, my name used to be in the COPYRIGHT.php file distributed with the work. I contributed to this software for a three-year period, and was much more active early – as when we rebranded from Mambo to Joomla I became busy with legal and administrative issues; and also focused my time on evangelism of the technology to both developers and enterprises.

Now, however, you will not find my name in there anywhere. Nor will you find the name of the guy that came up with the name “Joomla”. When I asked about this happening, the excuse was more or less “we’re removing the names of people that didn’t contribute directly to the 1.5 effort, which you didn’t really do that much work on.” Technically, they are correct in saying I wasn’t an active 1.5 contributor; but they completely failed to accept the fact that I was a copyright holder of the first release of that work, called Joomla 1.0. As such, my name should always be there if that work is called Joomla, as it will always be a derivative work, even if it is completely refactored – the name is the same, the terminology is the same, even the API calls are there for the most part.

Call it Open Source or Free Software, whatever – but the whole impetus behind this is sharing. And I never knew that sharing would turn into taking, and violating people’s copyright by removing their names sure sounds like taking to me.

Finally, let me remind everyone that the only currency in open source development is recognition for your efforts. I put three years of my life into this project, including a lot of code, and a lot of design; and having that erased invalidates all of my efforts, and completely devalues my involvement in the development of that software.

If you’re a young, budding developer and would like to get involved then take these words to heart: There are folks out there that are happy to take your contributions and intentionally fail to give you proper credit or attribution. Think carefully about the project that you are going to donate your energy and time to, as an unpaid volunteer you at least deserve credit for your efforts.

Problem: License Change Without Permission

There’s a legal angle to this – the developers took a BSD work and relicensed it as GPL, without the permission of the copyright holder. This is a simple no-no and shouldn’t require an attorney to understand.

The ethical issue here is best stated by Reyk, who points out that by releasing their modifications in a license that is incompatible with the BSD license, he cannot incorporate their changes; but they were able to take all his work, which is the basis for their work.

“Some time ago, I got repeated requests to change the license of the code to GPL or to dual-license it but I always rejected these requests. I clearly explained my reasons against dual-licensing in the past. It needed some time, but it had seemed to me that the involved people had finally accepted my decision.

I do like to idea to port the free Atheros driver to other operating systems in addition to OpenBSD, because it is a clear sign against hardware companies attacking the free software “community” by releasing binary-only driver objects instead of free code or hardware documentation. I used to cooperate with the people working on the madwifi port of “OpenHAL”; we exchanged ideas, bug fixes, and small code snippets. They sent me some bug reports and I also looked at their changes and reported some functional problems. This was possible because they kept the license in place.

But now the Linux code is almost ready and somebody wants to cancel any options to cooperate by locking me out with a prepended GPL and an invalid copyright on top of it. I hope that this was not caused by the same people.”

When he says locking me out, he’s talking about the GPL stuff being off-limits to the upstream developer (himself). So the changes made and released under the GPL will never make their way back to the original work, which fundamentally goes against the base tenets of open source and free software.

If something is released under an open source license, and you make modifications to it, and the license it was originally under is compatible with the license that you want to use, then why do you even need to change it in the first place? If you feel that strongly about the differences in licenses then you need to take the initiative to write your own software and license it as you wish.

The BSD license doesn’t mean you can take someone’s work and insert your name, change the license and pretend like this is your version of the work. The BSD license means you can use and redistribute the software as you see fit, as long as you respect the copyright and license header. So the developers were not acting in good faith by taking an open source work and relicensing it under another open source license – especially without a clear explanation as to why they were doing it, despite Theo’s accusations that the developers were being counseled by attorneys that should know better in the first place. He clearly requested that the changes be made to the original work, or at least be released under a compatible license so there wouldn’t be forks confusing everybody.

This is a tough subject for me to cover as I know quite a lot of people on the GPL side of the fence, and also many people on the non-GPL side of the fence (that would be MIT, BSD and many others). And I don’t want to be beating up on individuals, either.

But to take software that someone else wrote, and released under an OSI-approved license, and then change the license to one that is incompatible (knowing full well that the original author cannot accept your contributions), and add your name to something when your contributions are less-than-significant, this is just wrong.

Conclusion

It looks like things are going to get cleared up, however for some time the software was released with an incorrect license and improper attribution to copyright. Something tells me this is more about developers not realizing that committing to their repositories makes their software available immediately to the general public, and less about malicious intent to harm the original author.

However it’s bizarre to see one developer’s software get slightly modified and released under a different license without his permission. And I will tee off on the removing the names of copyright holders issue in another article (which needs more work).

Hopefully this issue gets resolved to Reyk’s satisfaction, and I don’t find myself writing similar articles :-)

Products and Open Source, Revisited

Spacemonkey — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:59:00 +0000

We’ve written before on the suspicion that products and open source software don’t mix all that well.

TechCrunch writes an article titled How Grey Is Your Valley: Making Money From Open Source where they question the motives of Matt Mullenweg.

Matt owns a company, and also is a lead contributor to an open source project. The issue stated by TechCrunch is that the main product provided by Matt’s company depends on the open source project – or more importantly, the lack of a competitor provided in the open source project.

There are some loud protests at the accusations, one of which titled TechCrunch Questions Matt Mullenweg’s Ethics at OpenSourceCommunity.org.

I remember several core developers on some open source projects I once contributed to coming under fire with the same allegations. While I defended them at the time – as my own understanding of the logic made sense, as the things that were turned into products were not multi-purpose and had deployment requirements that just didn’t fit being default – I cannot really defend Matt’s predicament as spam filtering to me seems like an obviously stock thing that needs to be done.

On the flip side, Akismet is more than a product, it is a service, and providing that service carries a cost. How can such a service be provided for free?

It is my belief that anyone that plays a major role on an open source project cannot really profit from that effort, lest they have thick enough skin to tolerate the backlash of accusations and so on. This isn’t new, folks.

The MySQL Dramarama

Spacemonkey — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 17:48:00 +0000

Ok, so MySQL.com moves their enterprise tarballs to the paid-only enterprise downloads section on the site, and makes a few other changes.

Pandemonium.

Now, is this reaction really justified, or just a whole lotta whooey? (Thanks Eben)

The Register’s Developer section has a good overview, and MySQL’s own Kaj Arnö explains on his own blog.

*spacemonkey pats himself on the back for remembering the HTML entity for that last letter in Kaj’s last name

Gavin Clarke hits the nail on the head in the Register article when he says:

“There is concern that restricted access to source will harm the quality of the final product while leaving the community straddled with a second-class database that slips out of touch with MySQL’s development cycles.”

This was the same concern many had with RedHat when they split RedHat Linux into Fedora and RedHat Enterprise. Personally, I couldn’t keep up with the pace of Fedora (seemed I needed to erase all my machines and start over every 6 months) so I switched all my servers to Debian. Problem solved. :-)

Maybe the better question here is this:

Can an open source project be solely sponsored by a corporate entity that’s sole means of income is based on that project?

Something tells me this is a lot harder balance to find than is commonly believed. In fact I suspect it’s just not really a combination that will work, like oil and water.

PostgreSQL is another FOSS database that instead of having only one corporate sponsor, has many. The biggest sponsors seem to have no commercial interest in the project, as they use the technology internally. Of course this seems to be a much more optimal scenario, but how can other FOSS projects find that balance? Or is corporate sponsorship just a bad idea for FOSS?

Eben Gets Testy

Spacemonkey — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:53:00 +0000

Man oh man, am I sad to have missed this one. By this I am talking about the O’Reilly Radar: The Executive Briefing at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference( in Oregon, titled “Licensing in the Web 2.0 Era”.

The topic of the talk, between Tim O’Reilly and Eben Moglen, was to be:

“How does open source licensing need to adapt to the realities of software delivered as a service? We’ll talk with Eben Moglen about GPLv3’s and the AGPLv3’s attempt to deal with this issue.”

Instead it apparently turned into a lopsided smackdown, where Eben pretty much let loose with some direct (and arguably harsh) criticism of Tim.

By reading the most excellent blog post by Stephen Walli titled Tim O’Reilly, Eben Moglen, and Jane Jacobs, you will find links to the conference pages, as well as additional posts on other blogs about the event. As expected there are some pretty strong emotions and varied interpretations of what happened, however it is critical to note who actually attended the event, and who claims to know what happened but wasn’t actually there…

As I didn’t attend the event, I have little to say, other than the fact that I’m a little surprised that Eben would make such personal attacks in such a public fashion – however he might have been upset about a lot of things, as some of his comments make it sound that he’s been waiting for this opportunity for a while. Maybe Tim saw this coming, as his response was supposedly quite muted. Ok, maybe he was speechless. I have no idea, and wished I’d been there to see for myself.

For the record, I love Eben Moglen. He’s fought tirelessly for a worthy cause for a loooooong time, and has always been the source of a few good zingers, which of course I appreciate :-) I’ve met him several times, and have tremendous respect for him, as well as the causes for which he fights. It’s hard for me to criticize his actions when I wasn’t there, and have no context to interpret what happened.

On the flipside, one thing he said that brings me into a ~~good~~ great mood was about the GPLv3 and the desire by some to add verbage to restrict SaaS(Software as a Service). Ultimately, the debate rages, and one side says that companies that take GPL software and just host it on their servers should not be exempt from the restrictions of the GPL. They say the GPLv3 should be amended to include those scenarios, so your typical Web2.0 company (such as Facebook) is compelled to share their modifications to existing GPL works with the public.

Eben responded (and I quote from another blog post by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier for Linux.com, for fair attribution):

“Moglen also took several questions from the audience. One attendee asked how we could take Moglen seriously when the GPLv3 didn’t close the software-as-a-service loophole. Moglen says that the GPLv3 could have closed the “loophole” but then it would have violated two of the fundamental freedoms: the freedom to run code for any purpose, and the right to private modifications. Moglen says that he’s not interested in legal work that removes people’s rights, but that he is more interested in doing work that finds a way to support the rights of both parties. When rights are in conflict, he says that lawyers need to find ways to protect the rights of both parties.”

There are a lot of people out there supposedly fighting for open source and free software and they clearly don’t care about both parties. I am relieved to hear that someone with the stature of Eben Moglen still remembers that there are several pieces in this puzzle that need to be put in the right place.

It is in fact that fear of rampant one-sided zealotry run amok that I’ve started this very website. I’m working on a new post that outlines one event that triggered the creation of this blog titled “Standing On The Shoulders Of…DELETE”. A tornado and a couple concerts are keeping me from getting it done, but all things in good time :-)

Back on topic, I’m elated to see Eben using the correct definition of freedom. Now to work on the rest of the group! ;-)

Thumbs Up for Plone

Spacemonkey — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 12:58:00 +0000

Here’s a really refreshing take on the GPL license from the Plone CMS, as quoted from their License FAQ:

You suck! The GPL sucks! The contract is unacceptable! Everything should be license X! Et cetera.

Blind ideological wars are tiresome and will simply damage Plone. We have chosen the GPL as our license, and are sticking with that for now.

Since the majority of the blind ideological wars usually come from GPL extremists, this is a really fresh take on the use of the GPL. They basically say “We’re using the GPL because that’s our choice, that is all.”

Yes, normal people use the GPL too! ;-)

SugarCRM to Switch to GPLv3

Spacemonkey — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:42:00 +0000

ComputerWorld in Australia reports that SugarCRM will switch from the Sugar Public License to GPLv3.

To be honest, I’m torn as to whether I see these things as advancements or setbacks – as sometimes a particular typo of software deserves special treatment from a license perspective. Maybe due to the purpose of the software, or how the software is used or distributed, but one-size-fits-all doesn’t really work here.

What I find most interesting is that most companies that release open source products use their own license (or a modified GPL or License of Guile), as the GPL doesn’t condone commercial third party development due to overzealous interpretation of derivative works.

SugarCRM is going to go the other way however, and it will be interesting to see if this was a good move or not.

Homesteading the Noosphere

Spacemonkey — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:17:00 +0000

Eric S. Raymond is a rather high-profile personality in the industry. His involvement in open source started decades ago, and you could say that he’s been a primary participant from the beginning.

He’s written a fascinating essay on the topic that I’m starting this site over, called Homesteading the Noosphere.

Some of the most appropriate quotes for this website:

“Historically, the most visible and best-organized part of the hacker culture has been both very zealous and very anticommercial. The Free Software Foundation founded by Richard M. Stallman (RMS) supported a great deal of open-source development from the early 1980s forward, including tools like Emacs and GCC which are still basic to the Internet open-source world, and seem likely to remain so for the forseeable future.”

“For many years the FSF was the single most important focus of open-source hacking, producing a huge number of tools still critical to the culture. The FSF was also long the only sponsor of open source with an institutional identity visible to outside observers of the hacker culture. They effectively defined the term `free software’, deliberately giving it a confrontational weight (which the newer label `open source’ just as deliberately avoids).”

“Thus, perceptions of the hacker culture from both within and without it tended to identify the culture with the FSF’s zealous attitude and perceived anticommercial aims. RMS himself denies he is anticommercial, but his program has been so read by most people, including many of his most vocal partisans. The FSF’s vigorous and explicit drive to ``Stamp Out Software Hoarding!’’ became the closest thing to a hacker ideology, and RMS the closest thing to a leader of the hacker culture.”

“The FSF’s license terms, the ``General Public License’’ (GPL), expresses the FSF’s attitudes. It is very widely used in the open-source world. North Carolina’s Metalab (formerly Sunsite) is the largest and most popular software archive in the Linux world. In July 1997 about half the Sunsite software packages with explicit license terms used GPL.”

Ok, so that explains the one group. But there is another…

“But the FSF was never the only game in town. There was always a quieter, less confrontational and more market-friendly strain in the hacker culture. The pragmatists were loyal not so much to an ideology as to a group of engineering traditions founded on early open-source efforts which predated the FSF. These traditions included, most importantly, the intertwined technical cultures of Unix and the pre-commercial Internet.”

“The typical pragmatist attitude is only moderately anticommercial, and its major grievance against the corporate world is not `hoarding’ per se. Rather it is that world’s perverse refusal to adopt superior approaches incorporating Unix and open standards and open-source software. If the pragmatist hates anything, it is less likely to be `hoarders’ in general than the current King Log of the software establishment; formerly IBM, now Microsoft.”

“To pragmatists the GPL is important as a tool, rather than as an end in itself. Its main value is not as a weapon against `hoarding’, but as a tool for encouraging software sharing and the growth of bazaar-modebazaar-mode development communities. The pragmatist values having good tools and toys more than he dislikes commercialism, and may use high-quality commercial software without ideological discomfort. At the same time, his open-source experience has taught him standards of technical quality that very little closed software can meet.”

Excellent reading, as the piece goes on to explain how the pragmatists gained a foothold with the introduction of linux and Linus Torvalds, who has always been a pragmatist and takes occasional potshots at the zealots.

“Increasingly it was the anticommercial purists who found themselves in a minority. How much things had changed would not become apparent until the Netscape announcement in February 1998 that it would distribute Navigator 5.0 in source. This excited more interest in `free software’ within the corporate world. The subsequent call to the hacker culture to exploit this unprecedented opportunity and to re-label its product from `free software’ to `open source’ was met with a level of instant approval that surprised everybody involved.”

“In a reinforcing development, the pragmatist part of the culture was itself becoming polycentric by the mid-1990s. Other semi-independent communities with their own self-consciousness and charismatic leaders began to bud from the Unix/Internet root stock. Of these, the most important after Linux was the Perl culture under Larry Wall. Smaller, but still significant, were the traditions building up around John Osterhout’s Tcl and Guido van Rossum’s Python languages. All three of these communities expressed their ideological independence by devising their own, non-GPL licensing schemes.”

I’ll leave the rest of the reading for you as a literary exercise :-)

Pragmatists, unite!