[License-discuss] Thoughts on the subject of ethical licenses

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Grahame Grieve (grahame at healthintersections.com.au):

> The question for me is whether there's some useful middle ground. Is there
> value in having an ethical use license where the creator gives up many but
> not all rights, in a way that respects some core tenets of the open source
> movement, and where the ethical restrictions are careful, and that this
> place, while not proper open source, is still a recognisable benefit with a
> name like Ethical Public Source or something?
> 
> A different phrasing might be, do the managers of opensource.org believe in
> all or nothing?

The implied suggestion of compromise is so common among (us) American
citizens that I had to double-check your top-level domain, Grahame.  ;->

Here in the USA, I long ago parodied that attitude on my 'lexicon' Web
page, a page I maintain in (mostly) the style of Ambrose Bierce for
entertainment purposes.  Before getting to your substantive point, I'll
just quote the lexicon page's entry about 'compromise', in hopes of
getting a smile or two:

   Compromise

   Concept touted by American commentators as an inherently desirable
   approach to solving _other_ people's problems.  (By contrast, all
   disputes touching on those commentators' _own_ interests are exempt
   -- as clearly entailing "important principles" that must be
   defended.)

   This guideline's Solomonic wisdom can be seen in the hypothetical
   example of you, the reader (unless, of course, you're American) being
   attacked by some thug attempting to kill you:  A typical American
   observer might recommend a "fair compromise" of you being left 
   _half-dead_.

http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#compromise
(Before hackles rise, I'll clarify that, despite Commonwealth Engish
orthograpy, I _am_ American.  For my sins.)


Back to the subject at hand:  The problem with implying that OSI might
wish to settle for something, in hopes of avoiding getting nothing, is
that, in my considered view, OSD articulates a _minimum floor_ of what 
licensing criteria are necessary and useful for open source to achieve
what it and the free software movement aimed to do.  Why, you ask?

Because open source / free software is about the right to independently
fork and continue to maintain an existing codebase for any purpose, for
as long as any community with interest in that codebase finds it useful
to do so.

Before open source / free software came along, we all repeatedly went
through the frustration of a valuable codebase getting suddenly either
withdrawn from further availability, or orphaned permanently, or taken
in bizarre directions by the copyright-holder, despite large and
energetic crowds of coders standing ready to correct that situation --
coders who were foiled by never having gotten access to reserved
copyright rights (redistribution and derivative works).  

This leads to the obvious gedankenexperment:  The rights-holder of your
favourite program just announced it will no longer be available and no
more versions of any kind will ever emerge.  Moreover, he/she says that
_if_ a new version emerges, it would be illegal to use in any commercial
context.  The question:  Do you and other existing users now have
recourse?  What is required in the way of conveyed rights for you-plural
to have recourse?  

I submit that what's required for recourse, the ability to fork and
fully maintain a codebase and continue to adapt it for any purpose even
in the face of a malign (or deceased) rights-owner, is exactly the
rights articulated in the OSD (and in the Debian Free Software
Guidelines on which OSD is very closely based).

And, my point:  That infant, if divided Solomonically, isn't viable.

We Linux users have seen what _can_ happen, in real time, when a codebase 
has starts out with less than that set of rights granted -- and where
people make excuses and say 'Surely the whole infant isn't needed':  It 
happened with BitKeeper (specifically the proprietary gratis-usage
edition) over a period of years leading up to its EOLing in 2005.  Over
the years of its availability, BitMover gradually and incrementally
increased restrictions.  I trace these changes here:
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html#bk

And, because at no point was the code under an OSD-compliant licencce, 
there was no migration route away from that gradually developing problem 
short of writing a from-scratch replacement (which is what happened in
April 2005; see: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html#git ).

-- 
Cheers,                                      299792458 meters per second.  Not
Rick Moen                                    just a good idea.  It's the law.
rick at linuxmafia.com                
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