[Sussex] GPL and copyright

[Geoff Teale]

On Wednesday 06 July 2005 23:22, Paul Tansom wrote:
> Kind of figured you'd dive in here. Probably the reason I chose this
> list to post to :)

I'd dive in two footed to tackle any discussion that concerns copyright, the 
GPL and the FSF - it's where I live, if you know what I mean :-)

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> CUPS is a bit of disappointment to me, and this could be the reason.
> When I was first looking at it a few years back it seemed that you could
> make use of it only if you purchased the drivers to go with it as the
> most useful ones weren't available for free. I've not actually been to
> the site for a long time now, just installed the Debian packages.
> Drivers still seem to be an issue though since the ones recommended by
> Red Hat when you install it have not yet proved to be particularly good
> - invariably there are better ones! From the Debian point of view it is
> a case of trundling off to linuxprinting.org to get suitable driver
> files.

There is pretty good printer support through GPL'd CUPS code these days, and 
the likes of Epson and HP now routinely supply GPL'd CUPS driver code on 
their website.

The problems that i know of in terms of the quality of drivers compared to the 
windows counterparts are mostly to do with the architecture of CUPS, not the 
desire to sell the commercial version.

Of course your mileage may differ greatly, partly because Debian's packages 
might have lagged behind until recently, and partly because you will no doubt 
be using a printer I haven't tried.

> Fair enough, but out of interest how many GPL based projects actually
> assign copyright to the FSF? 

I can't give you a figure, but I know that it now runs into thousands of 
projects that have assigned copyright for the original authors code.  There 
is no way to tell how many modifications and derived works are made from any 
GPL'd project (simply because nothing stops people from doing this and there 
are very few restrictions on their behaviour regarding the code).  In terms 
of that last statement I would make a very rough guess that the number of 
projects whose copyright is _entirely_ owned by the FSF is at most a few 
hundred.

> I've not noted whether it is the norm or an 
> exception to the rule. 

I would say that major projects undertaken by people who really believe in 
Free Software (as opposed to OSS) and who understand the issues would tend to 
consider this as important as following the GNU coding style, for example.  
For other projects that just get GPL'd by default I imagine that the authors 
aren't even aware that the FSF encourages this.

> In the case of the Linux kernel I understood that 
> the copyright tended to remain with the original coder, hence a while
> back when someone offered money to re-license the code it couldn't have
> been taken up even if this had been wanted, since you'd have so many
> people to track down and get agreement from!

Well, yes, although this would probably be the case with something as active 
as the kernel even if the core developers assigned all their copyright to the 
FSF there would still be hundreds of fixes and changes made by people who 
weren't prepared to do that - to not accept their patches would be legally 
difficult (because having had sight of a patch it would be very hard to claim 
that a very similar change was entirely your own copyright).   

Notably Linus is part of the Open Source Initiative and their views on 
software are more "flexible" than the views of the FSF.  Indeed  Linus falls 
into that category of people who, when he chose the GPL, did so because it 
was a way of fulfilling his practical need to let other people hack the code 
without getting ripped off by some wanna-be Bill Gates.  I genuinely believe 
that Linus doesn't care very much about F/L/OSS beyond it's practical 
benefits to collaborative coding.

> I wasn't actually thinking of dual licensing, although as you say this
> would not be possible. What was in my mind was that having assigned
> copyright to the third party you then have to obtain permission from
> them to use your own code. It sort of parallels the fact that Paul
> McCartney has to pay Michael Jackson to perform his old Beatles numbers
> - if my memory is serving me correctly :)

Well, if you assign copyright to the FSF then it will be licensed under the 
GPL a license that explicitly allows _anyone_ to use the software so long as 
they comply with the terms.  Effectively all you give up is the right to do 
non-GPL compatible things with the code.  I'm fairly certain you won't have 
to pay RMS for the right to use your code in order that he can defend himself 
from claims of sexual abuse - although there was that whole 
rhinophytonecrophilia  thing (Google it).  

Though I would stress that donations to the FSF are always  appreciated as we 
spend a lot of money defending open software in court and lobbying people 
(like the European Parliament for example) to support Free Software and stop 
the march of ideas like software patents.

> I'm asking :) In this case there has been some discussion about joining
> the dev team, although I may have annoyed them with my questions :)

Well, ultimately it comes down to how much you care about your code, and what 
their motivations are.  Keep questioning.

> Perfectly safe in current motives, would anyone guarantee that this will
> continue. 

Well no one can tell the future, but the FSF becoming an evil manipulative 
force would meet with resistance from more than just the likes of you and me.  
Bear in mind that there is a board at the head of the FSF, it's  not just run 
at RMS's whim.  The current board are:
 
Geoffrey Knauth, Senior Software Engineer at SFA, Inc.
Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University
Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University
Henri Poole, Founder of CivicActions, a grassroots campaign technology 
consulting firm
Richard M. Stallman, Founder of FSF and the GNU Project and author of the GNU 
GPL
Gerald J. Sussman, Professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology

We have defined relationships with the UN, the EU, WIPO and other 
organisations like the EFF (indeed one of the board members is also a founder 
of the EFF).          

> I'll accept that it is phenomenally unlikely, but I've not 
> actually read up on the structure of the FSF. 

See above.

> Could it be that in the 
> future enough of the key players could have a change of heart? 

Yes, but if it differed from the overriding view of the board then they would 
probably just leave the FSF.

> Not 
> saying that they would go proprietary, but they could make some other
> change that some may not agree with. 

That's already happened.  Google for the GFDL, a controversial license.  I 
don't want to open a discussion about it (we've been there), but it is a good 
example of where the FSF have to deal with the realities of the law and the 
idealism of the community (which is to be saluted) comes into conflict with 
it.

> I'll repeat though, this is more 
> theoretical than likely - although I know a local sailing club that
> suddenly found itself taken over by an influx of non-local members
> getting committee positions and changing the club to the point where
> they left en-mass and formed a new club!

Indeed.  GPL v3 is scaring a lot of people right now, mainly because they are 
comfortable with v2 and the text involved in moving toward a more legally 
sound document give most IT people the same feeling that we  see in other 
people when we try to explain why an 80GB hard drive isn't the same size as 
80GB of RAM...

> I'll disagree here, assigning copyright to the FSF avoids complexity
> only if there is legal action taken that you need to defend against.

Yup.

> When it comes to the freedom of the code it is easier to retain the
> copyright yourself since you can then use it for any purpose with the
> freedom to license it as appropriate. I take your point though :)

Well.. yeah.  As I said, if you really want your code to be Free Software then 
this shouldn't be an issue, but if you want to use it for some non-GPL 
compatible purpose then obviously, don't do this.

> Looking at it like that yes, it is simple, but that can be over
> simplifying reality. If you have a project that is good and you would
> like to improve, and the developers would like to accept the code things
> will become complicated if you run into this issue.  One either backs
> down or the code never gets used. Still, that is life and applies to
> many aspects of it!

Indeed.

-- 
Geoff Teale
Free Software Foundation