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I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing. In fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You j

I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing. In fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.

roel_v 6y ago
"I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing." In the same way that it's trivial to write a twitter clone in a weekend, yes. Hundreds of goverments have tried for decades to do what you claim is trivial. Good luck.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  Extending restrictions to affiliates/related bodies corporate is absolute bread and butter commercial legal work. Most lawyers are writing these kind of clauses week in, week out. What you are presumably referring to is transfer pricing, which is a completely different beast.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Writing clauses in a license is one thing, I suspect enforcing them through ultra complex international corporate structures is quite another. Edit: Sadly, I think these kinds of battles are rather one sided.
    - nmfisher 6y ago
      Of course, licence clauses won't physically stop someone who is fine with wilful infringement. But they're not intended to. They're intended to restrict the behaviour of people who, by and large, respect the law. It's practically unthinkable that a company like Apple/Amazon/etc is going to create an expensive, complicated international legal structure to conceal wilful infringement of some open source licence. It's perfectly achievable to write a licence that forbids use or incorporation in products, servers or services from particular companies.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        It’s achievable. You could even just name the companies with a periodic process to update the list. There are all kinds of ways you can write a license that won’t be used popularly but would achieve this specific goal. Do you want to close “your” software off to companies who might seek to be acquired later?
  - roel_v 6y ago
    While I have never practised as a lawyer, I do have a law degree, and I've written several papers on IP and IP licensing when I was in law school. And I will also add that I did not do my degree in the US. Still, I am quite convinced that it is very hard to codify the intention of what the OP wants to do in a generic software license (i.e. one that you do not draft specifically for each client). I do not have the motivation to lay out my full argument as that would take another entire paper, but even if it turns out to be not as hard as I think it is, it certainly isn't as easy as is posited here.
    - nmfisher 6y ago
      I don’t know why you think it’s not possible (or that it’s anything more than trivial). Revenue, affiliated companies, third party service providers, etc are all basic legal concepts. The risk is far more likely to be inadvertently making the licence overly narrow and preventing usage by companies that you would actually intend to allow (or at least contemplate should be allowed). Regardless, the text doesn’t really matter. Most companies will run for the hills as soon as they see anything remotely like the contemplated licence. It’s just not worth the risk for them. Source: former lawyer.
      - roel_v 6y ago
        shrug The Unreal engine mentioned elsewhere in this threat also seems very simple (an order of magnitude more straightforward as what we're talking about here I'd argue), yet if you go on the Id forums you'll find many questions from people in various edge cases that fall under one category in spirit and another in the letter of the license. But hey, I'm just some guy on the internet, what do I know, we'll just have to agree to disagree until someone really tries to find out.
- krageon 6y ago
  Governments don't try very hard. It's in their best interest that this fraud-adjacent activity keeps going on, or at least that's the only reasonable explanation for why they keep cooperating so well with it.
eru 6y ago
If you don't want FAANG employees to use your code, why don't you just forbid them?
- nmfisher 6y ago
  Agreed, this is a perfectly acceptable solution too.
- ganafagol 6y ago
  Exactly. If you feel this is unjust, put a non-commercial clause in you license. And watch everybody avoid your lib. You think you are special? A competing lib will soon show up without that restriction. And that lib will get attention from corporations and they will have thousands of eyes use the lib and test it and beat the hell out of it and fix issues and send them upstream (since maintaining a fork is too much work) and eventually this commercial-permissive alternative will thrive and be 100x as stable and streamlined and your alternative will cease to exist. But you are free to do this. Nobody prevents you from it. But please don't cry later when seeing effects that you don't like.
  - eru 6y ago
    A permissible MIT license might even be the best way to exploit this. Assuming there are network effects for being the 'official' place to contribute to your project, than you can start with an MIT license, and once it gets popular, you take it private with slightly ever less permissible licenses. (GPL wouldn't make this so easy.)
  - tpxl 6y ago
    > fix issues and send them upstream Fat chance. An average programmer will replace the library if the current one has issues, not fix the issues in the library. It is rational to do so (assuming a different lib exists, which it does for most libs).
    - eru 6y ago
      Depends on how deeply the library is integrated into their code, and on what flaws the other alternatives have.
ganafagol 6y ago
How does it help you if they don't use your lib? Why do you publish your work in the first place? To get donations? That's not what open source was invented for. If you don't want people to use your work, don't publish it. Publishing has the totally selfish goal of getting others to help you by trying things out, report bugs and improvements and some of them to contribute those things to you. Don't publish if you don't care and just want mobey out of it. Then open source is not for you. You think Linus Torvalds wanted donations when he published Linux? Or that he was in a particularly philantropic mood? No way. He did it to get other people to work for him. And it turned out great for the project! That he is now making a living with it is just a side effect.
- josteink 6y ago
  > Why do you publish your work in the first place? To get donations? That's not what open source was invented for. I don't know about everyone else, but if I publish something as open-source it's because it's something I made and needed in the first place. Open-sourcing it is just a way to enable other people who have an itch to scratch to be able to do so. More often than not, such scratches comes back benefiting me as the original author. I don't get this fixation on everything having to be profitable, but then again I don't work on any FOSS projects full time. I only do it to scratch an itch, to make the software work for me. And when it works... I go do the actual work I'm paid to work on, using the software I've helped make better.
  - stevekemp 6y ago
    I feel the same way. In the early nineties a corporation got in touch with me, they said they were working on a Java IDE and could they ship some of my source as "example projects". I thought about it for about six seconds and said "Yes please!" I think they even mailed me a CD-ROM at some later point. At the time I was thinking "Yay! I'm famous! My code is good!". Over the years I've seen some of my code, not much of course, end up in other big projects and I'm a little proud, and a little pleased. The fact that the company got the money and not me? Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I write code for me, and if I get bug reports that prove other people used it then I'll try to improve things. Money just isn't a consideration, although I have linked an Amazon wishlist in a few places over the years, and received unexpected books/films which make me smile.

roel_v 6y ago

"I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing." In the same way that it's trivial to write a twitter clone in a weekend, yes. Hundreds of goverments have tried for decades to do what you claim is trivial. Good luck.

nmfisher 6y ago
Extending restrictions to affiliates/related bodies corporate is absolute bread and butter commercial legal work. Most lawyers are writing these kind of clauses week in, week out. What you are presumably referring to is transfer pricing, which is a completely different beast.
- arethuza 6y ago
  Writing clauses in a license is one thing, I suspect enforcing them through ultra complex international corporate structures is quite another. Edit: Sadly, I think these kinds of battles are rather one sided.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    Of course, licence clauses won't physically stop someone who is fine with wilful infringement. But they're not intended to. They're intended to restrict the behaviour of people who, by and large, respect the law. It's practically unthinkable that a company like Apple/Amazon/etc is going to create an expensive, complicated international legal structure to conceal wilful infringement of some open source licence. It's perfectly achievable to write a licence that forbids use or incorporation in products, servers or services from particular companies.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      It’s achievable. You could even just name the companies with a periodic process to update the list. There are all kinds of ways you can write a license that won’t be used popularly but would achieve this specific goal. Do you want to close “your” software off to companies who might seek to be acquired later?
- roel_v 6y ago
  While I have never practised as a lawyer, I do have a law degree, and I've written several papers on IP and IP licensing when I was in law school. And I will also add that I did not do my degree in the US. Still, I am quite convinced that it is very hard to codify the intention of what the OP wants to do in a generic software license (i.e. one that you do not draft specifically for each client). I do not have the motivation to lay out my full argument as that would take another entire paper, but even if it turns out to be not as hard as I think it is, it certainly isn't as easy as is posited here.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    I don’t know why you think it’s not possible (or that it’s anything more than trivial). Revenue, affiliated companies, third party service providers, etc are all basic legal concepts. The risk is far more likely to be inadvertently making the licence overly narrow and preventing usage by companies that you would actually intend to allow (or at least contemplate should be allowed). Regardless, the text doesn’t really matter. Most companies will run for the hills as soon as they see anything remotely like the contemplated licence. It’s just not worth the risk for them. Source: former lawyer.
    - roel_v 6y ago
      shrug The Unreal engine mentioned elsewhere in this threat also seems very simple (an order of magnitude more straightforward as what we're talking about here I'd argue), yet if you go on the Id forums you'll find many questions from people in various edge cases that fall under one category in spirit and another in the letter of the license. But hey, I'm just some guy on the internet, what do I know, we'll just have to agree to disagree until someone really tries to find out.
krageon 6y ago
Governments don't try very hard. It's in their best interest that this fraud-adjacent activity keeps going on, or at least that's the only reasonable explanation for why they keep cooperating so well with it.

eru 6y ago

If you don't want FAANG employees to use your code, why don't you just forbid them?

nmfisher 6y ago
Agreed, this is a perfectly acceptable solution too.
ganafagol 6y ago
Exactly. If you feel this is unjust, put a non-commercial clause in you license. And watch everybody avoid your lib. You think you are special? A competing lib will soon show up without that restriction. And that lib will get attention from corporations and they will have thousands of eyes use the lib and test it and beat the hell out of it and fix issues and send them upstream (since maintaining a fork is too much work) and eventually this commercial-permissive alternative will thrive and be 100x as stable and streamlined and your alternative will cease to exist. But you are free to do this. Nobody prevents you from it. But please don't cry later when seeing effects that you don't like.
- eru 6y ago
  A permissible MIT license might even be the best way to exploit this. Assuming there are network effects for being the 'official' place to contribute to your project, than you can start with an MIT license, and once it gets popular, you take it private with slightly ever less permissible licenses. (GPL wouldn't make this so easy.)
- tpxl 6y ago
  > fix issues and send them upstream Fat chance. An average programmer will replace the library if the current one has issues, not fix the issues in the library. It is rational to do so (assuming a different lib exists, which it does for most libs).
  - eru 6y ago
    Depends on how deeply the library is integrated into their code, and on what flaws the other alternatives have.

ganafagol 6y ago

How does it help you if they don't use your lib? Why do you publish your work in the first place? To get donations? That's not what open source was invented for. If you don't want people to use your work, don't publish it. Publishing has the totally selfish goal of getting others to help you by trying things out, report bugs and improvements and some of them to contribute those things to you. Don't publish if you don't care and just want mobey out of it. Then open source is not for you. You think Linus Torvalds wanted donations when he published Linux? Or that he was in a particularly philantropic mood? No way. He did it to get other people to work for him. And it turned out great for the project! That he is now making a living with it is just a side effect.

josteink 6y ago
> Why do you publish your work in the first place? To get donations? That's not what open source was invented for. I don't know about everyone else, but if I publish something as open-source it's because it's something I made and needed in the first place. Open-sourcing it is just a way to enable other people who have an itch to scratch to be able to do so. More often than not, such scratches comes back benefiting me as the original author. I don't get this fixation on everything having to be profitable, but then again I don't work on any FOSS projects full time. I only do it to scratch an itch, to make the software work for me. And when it works... I go do the actual work I'm paid to work on, using the software I've helped make better.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  I feel the same way. In the early nineties a corporation got in touch with me, they said they were working on a Java IDE and could they ship some of my source as "example projects". I thought about it for about six seconds and said "Yes please!" I think they even mailed me a CD-ROM at some later point. At the time I was thinking "Yay! I'm famous! My code is good!". Over the years I've seen some of my code, not much of course, end up in other big projects and I'm a little proud, and a little pleased. The fact that the company got the money and not me? Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I write code for me, and if I get bug reports that prove other people used it then I'll try to improve things. Money just isn't a consideration, although I have linked an Amazon wishlist in a few places over the years, and received unexpected books/films which make me smile.