For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License
Donovan Hawkins
hawkins at cephira.com
Sun Sep 9 16:07:27 UTC 2007
On Sun, 9 Sep 2007, Eugene Wee wrote (quoting Licensing HOWTO):
> In practical terms, this means that some license upgrades are legally safe.
...
> Note, however, that an `upgrade' from a copyleft license to a non-copyleft
> license (or vice-versa) would be a different matter. If you are a GPL
> partisan, you would be injured by a move to a non-GPL license, and
> vice-versa.
In other words, you can add restrictions but not remove them...you can
move only to a compatible license. That is not the case with GPL v2 -> v3.
> These changes are not safe and could be causes of legal action
> for copyright infringement by a holder of registered copyright (who therefore
> does not have to meet the actual-damages test). Holders of unregistered
> copyright would have no standung except by registering the copyright after
> the fact of infringement, and then would have to meet the difficult
> actual-damages standard.
So they might be unable to win in court if they didn't register the
copyright on their contributions because they can't show damages. Of
course, if they somehow gained legal exposure and got sued because the new
license had a faulty disclaimer, you could be sued because then they have
ACTUAL damages.
I can't speak for every open source developer, but there is no way in heck
I'm getting myself on the hook based on the advice of Internet IANAL's
(and the occasional real lawyer), none of whom I can sue for incompetance
if they are wrong. I'm not converting licenses to ones which are logically
incompatible just because someone thinks they are "close enough", any more
than I would rely on implicit rights grants to convert to a license with
explicit rights grants.
On top of all that, it's not ethically right to change license terms in a
way that you were not granted permission for without asking (especially
if you'd like to keep getting contributions). I suspect that is the reason
Linus Torvalds would give you for why he has said he would have to get
permission.
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Donovan Hawkins, PhD "The study of physics will always be
Software Engineer safer than biology, for while the
hawkins at cephira.com hazards of physics drop off as 1/r^2,
http://www.cephira.com biological ones grow exponentially."
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