Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

https://hackaday.com/2017/12/13/accident-forgiveness-comes-to-gplv2/

by szczys • 9 years ago

91 41 9 years ago

Ok, I understand that this is trying to be decent and reasonable people here, in cases where it's truly an accident of including some GPL code. Shit happens, clean it up.

If I were to do this with commercial code or assets, would they be so flexible in working with me, or do they go straight to shakedown? I'll give ye all a hint: go look at the MPAA and RIAA's views on that.

I remembered when friends were back in the Napster times shook down for a few grand. Same with Bittorrent's earlier years. There was no amicable "Plz quit this and were good". In fact, they've lobbied multiple times for laws to permanently disconnect after X copyright claims.

So, why should the Open Source community be so damned forgiving when we're surrounded by entities who'd eat every last one of us for lunch if we so much as accidentally used a copyrighted resource?

(I'm thinking no further than Netflix ripping off a photographer https://petapixel.com/2017/11/27/netflix-stole-vhs-cassette-... . Good luck for an Australian citizen to navigate international copyright law to become whole in this regard. )

sigzero2• 9 years ago

I agree. This is a slide down a bad slope as people will now expect a hand slap the first time (at least).

crankylinuxuser3• 9 years ago

I really think it matters in what context.

If someone was hacking on a BSD based license, and included code they mistakenly mis-identified the license, I get that. It was an accident. Mention it to them as an issue or email. It's an oversight, accidents do indeed happen.

It reminds me of the recent issue where nVidia copied some dev's code from their GH repo. The repo was unlicensed, but whomever did the copying included it as BSD license. After the dev contacted the repo owner, they fixed it (to my understanding).

These cases are accidents and oversights. And the key here is they're corrected quickly after being brought attention to.

Then you have the other class: habitual intentional infringers. Theyd lift all of Linux, and do. You like those illegal binary dumps with closed source in a release of Linux kernel? Or how about found in countless firmwares on consumer devices? Yeah, its all there, closed source badness and all. And the law allows up to $135k per violation. Ok, times 1 million devices sold. Please pay 135 billion USD.

jordigh• 9 years ago

So, why should the Open Source community be so damned forgiving

Because the point of free software isn't to shake down anyone. Because we're better than that. We want to make sure software stays free, and punishing people doesn't often help. Almost all copyleft enforcement is done without judges and courts, and that's how it should be. We want more friends, not less.

This is not to mean we're pushovers. It just means we enforce free software as gently as possible. Once the software is free, there is no more conflict to resolve.

geofft2• 9 years ago

One strategic reason is that it removes a disincentive to use GPL'd software. If I believe that screwing up an image build once is enough to permanently revoke my entire company's license to use Linux, the strategic thing to do is to not use Linux for anything.

(I think people can legitimately disagree as to whether this disincentive is a thing people actually take into account)

crankylinuxuser3• 9 years ago

I get where you're going with that line of argument.

But lets take the counterpoint. How many times has Legal been introduced to go over Microsoft Windows contract/EULA? How about each other piece of software in your installation?

Are you guaranteed any sort of amnesty or accident forgiveness with the BSA if they catch "incorrectly licensed software" on your network? Is the company guaranteed any sort of "fitness" if the software creators decide to remotely turn off their software?

The GPL is cleanly written. And even to a non-legal person like me, seems pretty straight forward. The Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Oracle contracts and EULAs are most certainly not.

rmmm• 9 years ago

So, why should the Open Source community be so damned forgiving when we're surrounded by entities who'd eat every last one of us for lunch if we so much as accidentally used a copyrighted resource?

For a few reasons.

0. Because not only profitable large companies accidentally infringe on copyright (or copyleft). If for example OpenZFS somehow violated the GPL with the CDDL, you don't want someone using that to extort money from another free software project.

1. Because people using the GPL to extort money has already happened and it makes the GPL seem toxic. I love the GPL (GPLv2 or later), but it took me quite a bit of legwork to get it approved for use at my dayjob. The objections are based on FUD, and moves like this remove some of the FUD.

2. GPLv3 already has this clause. The FSF et al understood that it was good for the community AND good for the GPL. Extending this to GPLv2 brings the same good faith to projects that can't or won't re-license.

I understand the desire to be as punitive as the bad guys, but the FOSS community is too small to get away with tactics like that. Besides, you shouldn't even if you could. Free Software is fundamentally about community, and attacking people is anti-community.

smhenderson• 9 years ago

(I'm thinking no further than Netflix ripping off a photographer https://petapixel.com/2017/11/27/netflix-stole-vhs-cassette-.... . Good luck for an Australian citizen to navigate international copyright law to become whole in this regard. )

In all fairness to Netflix it took longer than it should have (for which they apologized) but they ended up compensating the guy to his satisfaction. Now perhaps that's just because of how publicly he stated his case but in the end Netflix did do the right thing.

Edit: As for the rest of your post, you make a good point!

mikeash• 9 years ago

Why do we open source software in the first place?

For most of us, I think it's because we want people to use it. And, yes, we want people to use it under certain conditions, it's not a free-for-all, but using it is an important part. If it wasn't, we'd just keep it closed.

Going straight to harsh enforcement for a violation isn't going to help with that. There are already a lot of people unwilling to consider open source for anything because they misunderstand it and think that they'll automatically open source all of their own stuff if they do. Imagine if open source copyright owners had a reputation for going immediately for a lawsuit and statutory damages upon discovering a violation!

Figure out what your goal is, then do whatever helps accomplish that goal. The behavior of organizations like the MPAA and RIAA probably doesn't enter into it.

belorn2• 9 years ago

When people work on a volunteer basis, I would actually guess that people get more emotional when the social contract is broken by a profit seeking company. Going straight to harsh enforcement in order to strengthen the social contracts might sound illogical, but I would bet that its common through out history. Just look at historical societies that operated on a honor bound system and see how harsh enforcement were, even when the punishment has a cost to that society.

There is multiple strategies to keep social contracts. Forgiveness is good, but so is enforcement. Site like HN do ban people, but also warn people. I am uncertain if any singular tactic is best.

forespacemou• 9 years ago

A lot of GPL violators are probably well-meaning individual hobbyists, not corporations.

I am not a lawyer, but the language as I read it does not appear to give knowing abusers a big opening. They still have to correct license violations within 1-2 months, unless they're just hoping no one does anything about the violation.

bluGill• 9 years ago

Depends. Lawyers often do send cease and desist letters and nothing more. If a company discovers an infringement because of the letter they will stop as quickly as they can going to court probably isn't worth the lawyer fees so it most likely will end there.

MPAA and RIAA are not a good example - they were willing to lose a lot of money enforcing their legal rights because they believed that would send an example and in turn stop everybody else. That is they were willing to spend $100,000 to get your to pay a $1,000 fine.

This return on investment is generally something most companies are not willing for. Most companies would rather spend $200 and get nothing in return (other than the infringement stopped), then spend $100,000 or more to win $1,000. I think the reasons are obvious.

Also, you don't want to be seen as a jerk. Many companies pay people to contribute to open source in some way. Some are full time, some are just as needed. Any large project that is seen as a jerk to companies is likely to find less contributors.

tzs2• 9 years ago

I remembered when friends were back in the Napster times shook down for a few grand.

RIAA asked infringers for about $2 per infringed song. That seems a pretty fair price--it's only about twice what it would have cost for the people to legitimately purchase copies of the music.

yebyen• 9 years ago

Really? CNN said it was closer to $80,000 when the Napster cases were breaking.[1]

Maybe they offered $2/song for the settlement, but according to this article the settlement offer was $5000 for 24 songs. The 2009 article says the statutory penalties were between $750 and $150,000 per willful infringement. I don't know where you're getting $2 from.

[1] http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/19/downloading-mom-fine...

belorn2• 9 years ago

I am pretty sure RIAA do not ask for $2 per infringed song when a company is the one doing the infringement. Maybe per copy, but then that will likely count up to millions in the end, like with the pirate bay case in Sweden. The founders did get charge for infringement of specific films, games and music, and the cost where no where near $2 per work.

As far as I have heard several lawyers doing GPL enforcement, no person has ever been sued over GPL infringement. It has always been companies that sells millions of copies. The $2 figure has no relevance since it don't cover commercial infringement done for profit.

wildmusings• 9 years ago

I remembered when friends were back in the Napster times shook down for a few grand. Same with Bittorrent's earlier years. There was no amicable "Plz quit this and were good".

The recording industry did offer an amnesty at the start of their campaign. It required you to promise to delete all existing illegally-downloaded content and promise not to engage of file sharing of copyrighted works in the future. It was called Clean Slate and very few people signed up for it, and it was criticized for various reasons, but they did offer it.

jerf• 9 years ago

Lotta philosophical reasons as siblings to my reply here, and many of them are very fine. But let me give you a practical reason this forgiveness works out well: If you want to leap straight to aggressive compliance, you're gonna need a lawyer. That will cost you. So in a world where the choices are "ignore the infringement" or "aggressively enforce it", you've got the choice of either ponying up the dough up front, or losing your licensed rights. Now, sometimes reality hands you a bum deal and there's not much you can do about it, but that's a bum deal.

If you add a third choice of "politely ask for them to comply first", then you've got a free option, that is likely (albeit not guaranteed) to produce good results, and as an added bonus, if the company blows you off you are helping your eventual lawyer-involving case when it comes time to prove they knew and infringed anyhow.

So unless you've got bored lawyers sitting around who are going to charge you no matter what you do, there is a reason to be a bit gracious first, even for you, the programmer of the GPL'ed work.

(And yes, this RedHat effort does not create this result; this has always been an option and IIRC most historical enforcement efforts that went to lawsuit first used this. But it answers the question, in very programmer-centric terms.)

yarrel• 9 years ago

Alternate title: doubling down on not just doing the right thing and using GPLv3.

__s• 9 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU Torvalds on GPLv2 vs GPLv3

mempko• 9 years ago

I found his arguments either dishonest or ignorant. He basically said "Look, I don't have an ideology to push, I chose the license because it served MY needs, FSF is pushing an ideology is GPLv3 and I don't like that.". However, he certainly has an ideology which I call "The roman conception of freedom". It is favored by laze-faire free market types. This is not an "ideology-free" argument.

He is pushing an ideology just as much as the FSF is. At least the FSF is honest and clear about what that ideology is.

yuhong• 9 years ago

The fun thing is that many projects are already GPLv2 or later.

carussell• 9 years ago

For anyone wondering about the image in the header with a stylized Stallman as a Vishnu-like being, it's from Hackaday staff artist Joe Kim.

http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/

Blazespinnaker• 9 years ago

The funny thing is that gpl is mostly used by per profit companies creating a two licensing system. Gpl is great to test drive before buying a commercial license, but other than it’s pretty much ignored except maybe in academia.

comatose• 9 years ago

well, safari, chrome, osx, iphone, iPad, amazon, android, appletv, and a large number of routers and car systems all use gpl under that license singly. the fact that it's mostly due to linux and khtml seem unimportant when you say so much gpl is dual licensed ( all of those contain software that is gpl only) but, yes, dual licensing is popular too, ie the immense popularity of qt

racer-v3• 9 years ago

Eh, what? Safari and Chrome are not GPL - they're Apple / Google freeware built on BSD and LGPL. OSX is proprietary based on BSD. Android is notable for refusing to include GPL components other than Linux. Not sure what you're trying to say here.

racer-v3• 9 years ago

The GPL ship has sailed. It used to be every free license could be converted to GPL, so it became the "universal recipient" license. Then Stallman forked it and created two incompatible GPL's, effectively killing his own dream of a copyleft ecosystem. So the only sane thing now is "universal donor" licenses like MIT - or straight public domain. I'm stealing all of this from Rob Landley.

https://ia601008.us.archive.org/7/items/OhioLinuxfest2013/24...

geokon• 9 years ago

Doesn't this clause seems not backwards compatible with GPLv2?

At face value GPLv3 seems more constrained - so it's easy to relicense an existing v2 project. You just tell everyone working on it, okay, now every addition we make has extra requirements (if you want the looser version, you can grab an older copy of our project from when we switched licenses)

Loosening the license on pre-existing code is sorta like if you wanted to make the project (like the Linux kernel) BSD. You'd have to have everyone who has already contributed to agree to loosen the license on their work. If one person thinks "Hell no! I want people to be severely punished" then you're in for a headache.

So then GPLv3 isn't a "superset" and compatible GPLv2? Or did am I misunderstanding something?

racer-v3• 9 years ago

No, GPLv3 and v2 have always been incompatible. v2 forbids placing additional restrictions on distribution, whereas v3 adds more requirements (e.g. patent grants). So if you receive code under v2, you can't distribute it under v3, nor can you distribute v3 under v2, nor can you combine them.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1778

Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

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