4 ms·

Stallman is saying he's surprised-- probably in the same way many on HN always are-- that a judge would, you know, use judgment. I.e., one program that would tr

Stallman is saying he's surprised-- probably in the same way many on HN always are-- that a judge would, you know, use judgment. I.e., one program that would trip the GPL chopped into two in an attempt to not trip the GPL part of the program which is still there! His lawyers are telling him the judge would a) see the part with the license the person wants to avoid, b) see the subterfuge to do an end run around it (in both cases they are asking Stallman directly abou it), and c) judge harshly as a result. I don't know if his lawyers were right, but that's the argument. With Google vs. Oracle, part 'a' doesn't exist. Google did a clean room implementation under the Apache license-- there's no Oracle-licensed software behind the curtain of the headers. So Oracle's only chance was to claim that an API is copyrightable. If it's not, that's the ballgame. But in the examples you gave wrt Stallman, API copyright doesn't matter-- it'd still be subterfuge to avoid triggering a license for the 2nd part of the program (at least according to his lawyers). Edit: clarification

p_l 6y ago
Funnily enough, the current state of the art in understanding GPLv2 is completely opposite (albeit disputed, see SFC vs Canonical on ZFS in Linux). The critical part is whether the software is derived, as that is the language used by GPL, and it can be hard to claim that optional line editor - as many other lisp implementations showed, you can really go far with dumb (loop (print (eval (read)))) However, RMS had an obvious agenda involved, and libreadline was one of the major cugels used by FSF for significant part of 1990s. There's a reason why the term "GPL virality" stuck.
- temac 6y ago
  I would not say this is "the current state of the art in understanding GPLv2", merely disputed (implying by a minority). A better representation would IMO to say that there is no concensus.
  - p_l 6y ago
    It's big enough for major projects like FreeBSD and Illumos - and for Linux itself (although due to no copyright assignment other than enforcing GPLv2 instead of "GPLv2 or newer" individual developers can and will dispute it). But ultimately there's no ruling to fall back on, as far as I know all cases ended up without actually getting a court ruling.
kmeisthax 6y ago
Part A does exist: it's the J2ME license that Google did not want to follow, since doing so would require not being Android. Sun was entirely uninterested in Java being the programming language of other people's platforms, as Macromedia found out when they tried to license Java for ActionScript 3. They wanted to be a platform that subsumed everything else - "write once, run anywhere". The entire point of using Apache Harmony was to evade a licensing regime, and in fact, Apache even avoided collaboration with other Free Java implementations specifically because they did not want to be covered by GPL. In fact, when the Apache Harmony team went to Sun to ask for a license to the Java 5 TCK (the thing you need to pass in order for Sun to license your JVM), Sun's response was to specifically announce the GPL-licensed OpenJDK and TCK terms that only extended to GPL-licensed JVMs. They specifically selected a license to exclude Harmony. So this case starts to look a lot more like readline! Furthermore, I feel like the particularities of GPL copyleft might be confusing. The reason why the GPL is able to demand source code conveyance is because copyright law grants it exclusive ownership over derivative works. The GPL can't just say "you agree to release all software you ever write under GPL forever" - it can only talk about cases in which copies or derivative works are made of the software the GPL covers. Same with Java; Oracle only has a valid claim if a derivative work has actually been made - not merely that licensing compliance was demanded. If you change your program in such a way as to not make a derivative work, then you aren't engaging in subterfuge, you're just stopping the infringement! What Bruno Haible was arguing, was that, if he wrote his own library implementing the same functions as readline, then he would be able to distribute CLISP with his own readline workalike library only. Then users would be able to take either library, with the caveat that distributing the combination of CLISP and GNU readline is forbidden by the GPL. The only way that RMS can be right is if some element of copyright extends beyond the implementation of GNU readline and into it's interface, such that anything that uses the interface can be reasonably expected to comprise a derivative work of the implementation. If RMS doesn't own the readline API, then he has no claim against CLISP. The main difference between readline and Java would be the direction in which derivation flows: RMS is arguing that users of his interfaces are derivatives, while Oracle is arguing that providers of it's interface are derivatives. However, there is nothing stopping Oracle from also arguing that all Java-language programs are derivative works that need to now worry about license compliance. That's the Java trap, at it's most extreme!

p_l 6y ago

Funnily enough, the current state of the art in understanding GPLv2 is completely opposite (albeit disputed, see SFC vs Canonical on ZFS in Linux). The critical part is whether the software is derived, as that is the language used by GPL, and it can be hard to claim that optional line editor - as many other lisp implementations showed, you can really go far with dumb (loop (print (eval (read)))) However, RMS had an obvious agenda involved, and libreadline was one of the major cugels used by FSF for significant part of 1990s. There's a reason why the term "GPL virality" stuck.

temac 6y ago
I would not say this is "the current state of the art in understanding GPLv2", merely disputed (implying by a minority). A better representation would IMO to say that there is no concensus.
- p_l 6y ago
  It's big enough for major projects like FreeBSD and Illumos - and for Linux itself (although due to no copyright assignment other than enforcing GPLv2 instead of "GPLv2 or newer" individual developers can and will dispute it). But ultimately there's no ruling to fall back on, as far as I know all cases ended up without actually getting a court ruling.

kmeisthax 6y ago

Part A does exist: it's the J2ME license that Google did not want to follow, since doing so would require not being Android. Sun was entirely uninterested in Java being the programming language of other people's platforms, as Macromedia found out when they tried to license Java for ActionScript 3. They wanted to be a platform that subsumed everything else - "write once, run anywhere". The entire point of using Apache Harmony was to evade a licensing regime, and in fact, Apache even avoided collaboration with other Free Java implementations specifically because they did not want to be covered by GPL. In fact, when the Apache Harmony team went to Sun to ask for a license to the Java 5 TCK (the thing you need to pass in order for Sun to license your JVM), Sun's response was to specifically announce the GPL-licensed OpenJDK and TCK terms that only extended to GPL-licensed JVMs. They specifically selected a license to exclude Harmony. So this case starts to look a lot more like readline! Furthermore, I feel like the particularities of GPL copyleft might be confusing. The reason why the GPL is able to demand source code conveyance is because copyright law grants it exclusive ownership over derivative works. The GPL can't just say "you agree to release all software you ever write under GPL forever" - it can only talk about cases in which copies or derivative works are made of the software the GPL covers. Same with Java; Oracle only has a valid claim if a derivative work has actually been made - not merely that licensing compliance was demanded. If you change your program in such a way as to not make a derivative work, then you aren't engaging in subterfuge, you're just stopping the infringement! What Bruno Haible was arguing, was that, if he wrote his own library implementing the same functions as readline, then he would be able to distribute CLISP with his own readline workalike library only. Then users would be able to take either library, with the caveat that distributing the combination of CLISP and GNU readline is forbidden by the GPL. The only way that RMS can be right is if some element of copyright extends beyond the implementation of GNU readline and into it's interface, such that anything that uses the interface can be reasonably expected to comprise a derivative work of the implementation. If RMS doesn't own the readline API, then he has no claim against CLISP. The main difference between readline and Java would be the direction in which derivation flows: RMS is arguing that users of his interfaces are derivatives, while Oracle is arguing that providers of it's interface are derivatives. However, there is nothing stopping Oracle from also arguing that all Java-language programs are derivative works that need to now worry about license compliance. That's the Java trap, at it's most extreme!