Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: What if GPLv3 were non-free
Recent discussions within Debian that make a noticeable detachment from the FSF point of view toward freeness, mainly about the GNU Free Documentation License and other documentation licenses, have induced me to wonder whether this is a symptom of a deeper difference of opinion between Debian and FSF.
FSF is supposed to be developing the next generation GPL. One of the rumours about potential changes involve a requirement to post sources of GPL'd software that is used to power a website. If GPLv3 really included such a requirement, then I believe it would fail the DFSG (no restrictions on usage). It is also possible that the same difference of opinion between Debian and FSF that is now manifesting itself in the GFDL debate would end up causing us to reject GPLv3, even if it didn't include that particular restriction. It is likely that many free software authors, certainly all FSF projects, would eventually start licensing their software under GPLv3 (or, at your option, any later version).
Then we would be in real deep shit.
Update 2004-05-18: I seem to have been a little sloppy writing the above. I do not claim that a GPLv3 of the kind I indicate above necessarily fails the DFSG (such a claim would be nonsensical before an actual draft of GPLv3 is published). I intended to say that I expect to see such arguments if and when such a GPL is released, and I would not be surprised if such an attitude were to win the eventual argument. The point of this post is to show where that would lead us.
I'll reprint here a comment I posted to this entry earlier:I have no particular wish to see Debian and FSF disagree about the freeness of GPL, for the reasons I gave in the post.
2004-05-14T22:03+0300 - /en/debian
Trackback url: http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.info/blog/en/debian/gpl-dfsg.trackback (trackback on rikki / trackback is broken)
Re: What if GPLv3 were non-free
Certain Debian people seem to be headed in a philosophical direction that will eventually require them to reject copyleft and join the BSD camp. These people are also rejecting the views of their founders. If you declare GPLv3 non-free because it uses the "public performance" aspect of copyright to require people to make sources available if they use GPL software to deliver web services, you are going against Bruce Perens, the author of the DFSG, who has written about the web services "loophole".
If a GPLv3 were to require that someone using GPLv3 software to power a web service make it possible somehow to obtain the software that provides the service, how would this be a restriction on usage? If you want to go to war with the FSF over this, you might also find yourself at war with Bruce Perens, who has advocated doing just this.
- Joe Buck, la, 15 touko 2004 02:17
Re: What if GPLv3 were non-free
I have no particular wish to see Debian and FSF disagree about the freeness of GPL, for the reasons I gave in the post.
- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, la, 15 touko 2004 16:03
Re: What if GPLv3 were non-free
"If a GPLv3 were to require that someone using GPLv3 software to power a web service make it possible somehow to obtain the software that provides the service, how would this be a restriction on usage?"
Because, uh, it would restrict use? It could be an acceptable restriction, of course, if it was written carefully.
If it wasn't written carefully, it could easily require that anyone using a particular web site be sent a complete copy of every GPL'ed program running on the machine. Perhaps whether or not they were using the web site legitimately.
Fuzzy, meaningless phrases like "powering" a "web service" don't help the discussion. (It's "powered" by electricity, you know.)
- x, ke, 19 touko 2004 22:41
Re: What if GPLv3 were non-free
Why are we talking about "require [...] be sent a complete copy"? The GPL doesn't *require* anyone to send anything, unless the user requests it.
It requires that the distributor satisfy the recipient's right for source code somehow; sending the source code at the same time is only one of those ways. Making a written offer valid for three years is another way.
I'm no more privy to the draft GPLv3 than anyone else, but I don't see why this couldn't be done with a simple re-definition of "distribute". i.e.: If a user is using a web service, they've as much right to the source code as someone who receives a bunch of executable bits. That would require only that the source code be *available* to that user, not that they *must* be sent the source.
- bignose, la, 22 touko 2004 13:41
Re: What if GPLv3 were non-free
Requiring source code availability is not a "restriction on use", unless you consider it to be so in the current GPL (v2); that requires the distributor to make source code available, but since that right was extended to them, it's hardly a "restriction on use" of the program. They merely have to give the same rights to anyone else to whom they make the program available.
- bignose, la, 22 touko 2004 13:44
Re: What if GPLv3 were non-free
"Requiring source code availability is not a "restriction on use", unless you consider it to be so in the current GPL (v2)"
The current GPL does not require that source code be available to users. What it does require is roughly that if I get a GPL'd binary from you, I can get from you also the corresponding sources.
- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, la, 22 touko 2004 23:50
Re: What if GPLv3 were non-free
More to the point, the current GPL places no requirements for the users of the code. However, a requirement to put the sources available if you happen to use the program in a particular way (namely, to provide a web-based service), is a requirement for users.
- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, la, 22 touko 2004 23:53
Re: What if GPLv3 were non-free
I'm all for the GPL2, but I think this has potentially dangerous implications if adopted for GPL3.
(Somewhat hypothetical story follows.) Suppose I want to start a business, and run my servers on Linux. Then I want to hook up my servers to the web so my customers can see what I'm up to. I write some quick-n-dirty scripts (never to be released) to tie together Apache (BSD license) and some internal data. These scripts (like practically every script) will call on some basic shell utilities on the system -- head, tail, sort, grep, sed, ... These utilities, on a Linux system, are typically the GNU implementations, available under the GPL.
Now, if I had to distribute the source code for each GPL utility that my server uses, this seems to mean to me that I have to basically become a GNU mirror -- because my scripts use them, so visitors to my web page use them. (Can I afford the bandwidth for mirroring a bunch of source code I didn't even write, or modify?)
Now, true, GPL3 is still free, so even if GNU started updating utilities under GPL3, I could still use the current version under GPL2, and even backport fixes and improvements to the old GPL2 version. (Do I really want to maintain alternate versions of GNU utilities just to keep them under GPL2? Can I afford to spend time doing that?)
(In either of these situations, I could download something like NetBSD and do pretty much everything I could do with Linux/GNU without having to spend extra money to comply with the license, even though I'm never "hoarding" software, which is what GNU set out to stop.)
Granted, getting a bunch of business owners to do either of those (mirror GNU utils, maintain a pre-GPL3 fork) don't seem terribly likely. What I'm afraid of is a third possibility that seems more likely to me: people will continue using the latest GNU programs, which are licensed under the GPL3, and simply treating them as GPL2 (or less) programs.
The GPL today seems (to me) to be enforced largely by people and reputation, not by law. You don't dare violate the GPL (openly and significantly, at least) because you incur the wrath of millions of hackers, and you don't want every early-adopter on the planet blacklisting you from day 1. The actual legal threat is somewhat more distant.
As a GPL supporter, the last thing I want to do right now is give a bunch of people a reason to start ignoring the terms of the GPL. (Well, or to split the FSF into GPL2 and GPL3 factions. That wouldn't be fun, either.)
- Ken, ma, 24 touko 2004 08:26
Re: What if GPLv3 were non-free
Personally, I think that a requirement to distribute the source of an application used to provide a web service on the request of a user of that service is a reasonable requirement. However, the wording of the requirement given in the Affero GPL (which the FSF applauded, with an indication that the GPLv3 would do something similar) is definitely non-free, because it requires a specific method for providing the source: a link in the web application to retrieve the source via HTTP. This requirement makes it impossible to reuse the source for a non-web applicaion, or a web application that doesn't use HTTP, or an embedded web server without the space for the full code. If the requirement instead just stated _intent_, which is that you must provide some method of getting the source code, I personally would consider that requirement Free (although I don't know if it would pass the DFSG).
- Josh Triplett, ti, 25 touko 2004 09:56
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