OT: Using collective-work copyright to upgrade from GPL v2 to v3

[Donovan Hawkins]

On Sun, 9 Sep 2007, Rick Moen wrote:

> Quoting Donovan Hawkins (hawkins at cephira.com):
>
>> What other injury does the "GPL partisan" suffer besides the ideological?
>
> Economic.  Continued issuance of a copyleft licence prevents, for good
> or ill, third parties from creating proprietary forks in competition.

If the contributor is your typical open-source developer then they aren't 
making money off the project in the first place. There is no actual 
monetary loss in going from 5 million users to 500 users if you charged 
$0 for each copy.

If the contributor is a company or someone making money off distribution 
or support then you might be right, but then they might suffer actual 
losses when you switch to GPL v3 too if they depend on the "loopholes" of 
GPL v2. Chris Travers gave a good example of Tivo as a potential 
contributor to the Linux kernel, but I concede that it is probably not a 
common occurance.

My only point here is that taking the project to GPL v3 is not as 
risk-free as you make it seem.


>> ...if you aren't willing to take the risk then why should the project
>> leader?
>
> I can turn that around and ask why should the project leader take the
> risk of not using the licence that best protects the interests of
> his/her contributors.

That is a strawman...the alternative is to get permission from your 
contributors, not stick with an inferior license. That is a reasonable 
price to pay for covering your ass, and the fact that your contributors 
will appreciate the respect is a bonus.


> However, the merits of my analysis, or yours, do not hinge on whether I 
> (or you) are willing to volunteer to stake our personal savings to make 
> good random strangers' misfortune that they argue resulted from 
> variously implementing our recommendations.

It acknowledges that there is at least some risk involved in following 
your advice, which justifies the choice of a project leader to secure 
permissions from his contributors as insurance.


>> You chose to remove the quote from you that I was replying to. If 
>> you'll take the time to look at it, you'll see I was replying to 
>> whether or not it was ethical.
>
> If you'll bother to read my reply, you'll note that I rejected that
> line of rhetoric explicitly, as well, and stated my reason why.

If you mean the same post, the only thing I see is your "non sequitur" 
comment directed towards another related point I made. In a previous post 
you used the strawman I pointed out above to claim it was not ethical to 
remain under the inferior license. If I've missed another mention then 
please correct me.

Obviously neither of us can logically prove what is ethical. I stand by my 
claim that changing to a license which is philosophically different 
without asking your contributors is unethical and will earn you their 
justified anger. I offer Linus Torvalds as an example of someone who 
appears to respect that ethic in his own project...his "benevolent 
dictatorship" recognizes the copyrights retained by the contributors and 
grants them rights that the law may or may not grant.

I don't know of any other meaningful way to assert the existence of an 
ethic besides showing examples of the ethic in practice.

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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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