[License-discuss] Data portability as an obligation under an open source license

[VanL]

Hi Russell,

Thanks for your further explanation. There is a lot in your post to unpack,
but I would like to address one baseline issue first.

On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 1:57 PM Russell McOrmond <russellmcormond at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On Tue, Jul 9, 2019 at 5:36 PM VanL <van.lindberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Russell,
>>
>> You seem to be arguing about a point that no one is making.
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 9, 2019, 11:59 AM Russell McOrmond <russellmcormond at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> If I am a user of landscaping services, and the company providing that
>>> landscaping service happens to use Microsoft Office, I am not through some
>>> transitive property a user of Microsoft Office.
>>>
>>
>> You keep on repeating this point, but it doesn't seem relevant to this
>> discussion. To even attempt to bring this argument into scope, someone
>> responding has to assume a lot of facts not stated.
>>
>
>
> It is an answer to the question of who the user of software is, FLOSS or
> otherwise.  When you talk about third parties interacting with software
> which are not the author and not the person running the software, you are
> talking about interactions via an interface from individuals who are not
> users of the software itself (the software is never communicated to them,
> they don't have a copy, they don't execute it: none of the bundle of rights
> of copyright or patent law are involved).
>

Can you get more specific?

1. In your hypothetical, are you talking about the traditional Microsoft
Office (or similar)? Or are you talking about Office 365?
2. In your hypothetical, do "you" (the third party) directly interact with
the software in any way, including over the web?

Assuming for a moment that your answers are 1) O365, and 2) You (the third
party) *does* interact in some way with the software, such as by
interacting with it online, I believe you are mistaken. Microsoft, for
example, would consider you, the non-adminstrator third party accessing the
website, to be a user.

But who cares about Microsoft? They make their living off proprietary
software. How about the FSF and SFLC?

Since 2008 or 2009 the FSF has considered web applications running
proprietary javascript to be non-free, and they have published as such.
(See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html).

In their most recent FOSDEM keynote (Feb 2019), Bradley Kuhn and Karen
Sandler, also made this point  In their struggle to live a life of all free
software, they consider someone that is "using" a web application, but not
administering it, to be a "user."

In the SFLC guide to GPL compliance, it warns against GPL-non-compliance
due to serving Javascript to a web-based user.

I do believe that a possible distinction can be made between "active"
content, like Javascript and more passive content. But this doesn't appear
to be limited to Javascript. In the public reasons behind the Kallithea
fork from Rhodecode, the forkers objected to the Python and HTML being
GPLv3-licensed, but the CSS and images being proprietary. (
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/07/15/why-kallithea.html)

Thus, it seems that you (among others) are making a strong statement that
non-administrators are not "users" for purposes of open source or free
software, and that considering them as such is contrary to everything FOSS
stands for.

But by my reading, this assertion appears to be inconsistent with the
stated views and actions of many of the principals of the FSF and SFLC.

Can you explain the inconsistency, or how I am getting this wrong?

Thanks,
Van
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