[License-discuss] Why CAVO Recommends GPLv3

Fri Nov 14 19:55:26 UTC 2014

Larry,

Interesting article, and timely since I am in the process of determining if GPL V3 is the proper license to recommend for some work we are doing.

I’m not certain that I would agree that GPL V3 is the right license to advocate for CAVO given that the original copyright holder retains immense competitive advantage.  It can provide proprietary extensions and no one else can without a commercial license it is not obligated to provide.  If the project is managed so that modifications to the official code base must go through a CLA that provides the original company world-wide non-exclusive perpetual right to use, copy, modify, etc then GPL V3 is no more protective than Apache from the original copyright holder.  If the proprietary extensions from that company are compelling then vendor lock-in remains.   Especially if their version is the most advanced and active.

To make this work CAVO members would have to require that all election solutions have no proprietary extensions from anyone.  In which case the strong copyleft nature of a license is irrelevant.

An MPL derived license like OPL (if it really is MPL derived, I did not look closely at it) all companies are on a more equal footing and you retain the benefits of a common open source core platform for electronic voting software while permitting all companies the opportunity to provide some competitive advantages to the customer.

In our case the majority of the software being evaluated for open sourcing is framework and utility functions that we believe would provide value to our community.  We wish to insure that this framework remains open source and commonly used but that all entities involved (including us) are free to make proprietary plugins to extend the functionality.  Whether GPL V3 with a plugin exception or LGPL or MPL is the right answer remains to be seen.

I have the same goals from the perspective of valuing broad adoption while minimizing the risk of “being forked wholesale and appropriated into proprietary systems”.  It appears to me that OPL would fit in the same category as NOSA and EPL v2 if it’s a MPL derivative with special clauses for government procurement.  Maybe there is something sinister hidden in there but conceptually it seems reasonable.  Especially if it retains the MPL 2.0 compatibility clauses.

I’m curious, do you know why they haven’t submitted it for approval?

Regards,

Nigel

From: Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com<mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com>>
Reply-To: "lrosen at rosenlaw.com<mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com>" <lrosen at rosenlaw.com<mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com>>, License Discuss <license-discuss at opensource.org<mailto:license-discuss at opensource.org>>
Date: Friday, November 14, 2014 at 11:06 AM
To: License Discuss <license-discuss at opensource.org<mailto:license-discuss at opensource.org>>
Subject: [License-discuss] Why CAVO Recommends GPLv3

To: License-Discuss@  [This email is CC-BY.]

The California Association of Voting Officials (CAVO) asked me to help them evaluate FOSS licenses for election software. Below is my article for the CAVO newsletter.

You can read the entire CAVO newsletter at http://www.cavo-us.org/Newsletter/newsletter1.html. Please direct any comments or questions or support to cavocontact at gmail.com<mailto:cavocontact at gmail.com>.

/Larry

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"Why CAVO Recommends GPLv3" by Lawrence Rosen

There are many ways to distribute software. Valuable software nowadays is usually distributed under a free and open source license ("FOSS" license, in short), both because it is usually "free of cost" software but also "free of restrictions" on copying, making changes, and redistributing that software.

There are various open source licenses to choose from. They are listed at the www.opensource.org<http://www.opensource.org> website. Unless a license is listed at that website, most developers and potential customers won't call it FOSS software. The OSET Foundation Public License ("OPL"), a license recently proposed for an election software project, is not a FOSS license. [1]

FOSS licenses offer several distinct ways to give software away.

Choosing among those licenses for software is not an arbitrary game of darts. For open source election software that can be trusted and always free, the choice of license is particularly important. That is why CAVO recommends the General Public License version 3.0 ("GPLv3") as the best license to use. This article gives several important reasons why.

·         Among the many FOSS licenses, GPLv3 is the most modern, widely accepted, and best understood license available today. Its predecessor license, GPLv2, is historically far and away the most used worldwide; GPLv3 is replacing it in the rate of license adoption for new FOSS software.

·         GPLv3 is a reciprocal license. Once a project or distributor releases election software under the GPLv3, it will remain FOSS software in perpetuity under the GPLv3 license. Modifications to that FOSS software will also be distributed in perpetuity under the GPLv3. This guarantees that our election software won't ever be taken under commercial covers and turned into proprietary software with unacceptable lock-in and source code restrictions that make voting untrustworthy.

·         The GPLv3 license promotes open and shared development efforts. While it is possible to create excellent open source software under more permissive FOSS licenses, those licenses allow commercial fragmentation of the software. That isn't appropriate for widely used election software.

·         The GPLv3 encourages trustworthy software. There is a law of software development named in honor of Linus Torvalds stating that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug> are shallow"; or more formally: "Given a large enough beta-tester<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_test> and co-developer<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer> base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone." [2]  GPLv3 software projects invite eyeballs on all distributed versions of the software to identify bugs and security issues; other licenses don't always do that.

·         Although GPLv3 will specifically encourage FOSS development practices for the election code base and its derivative works, that GPLv3 license is nevertheless compatible with successful commercial software and support business as well. One need only refer to the robust Linux ecosystem and its contribution to diverse commercial technology worldwide, whose basic software is entirely under the GPLv2 and GPLv3 licenses. The GPL licenses made that possible.

·         GPLv3 will encourage innovation because GPLv3 source code is open to view and change.

For these reasons, CAVO recommends that election software be distributed under GPLv3. This will inevitably create a diverse, worldwide, and enthusiastic community of software developers to create election systems we can all trust.

Footnotes:

[1] The OSET Foundation claim on their website that their license is "an open source software license" is simply untrue. They can try to make it so by submitting their license to www.opensource.org<http://www.opensource.org> and following OSI's published license review process. While I am merely an observer nowadays of that license review and approval process, as former general counsel for OSI I am confident that certain provisions in that license make it incompatible with the GPLv3 despite the assertion on OSET's own website that it is. http://static.squarespace.com/static/528d46a2e4b059766439fa8b/t/53558db1e4b0191d0dc6912c/1398115761233/OPL_FAQ_Apr14.pdf

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus's_Law

Lawrence Rosen
Rosenlaw & Einschlag (www.rosenlaw.com<http://www.rosenlaw.com/>)
(C) 2014 Lawrence Rosen. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>.

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