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The FSF doesn't choose what license my work is under. If I decide to use one of their templates such as AGPL and then I add more terms and conditions, it is cle

The FSF doesn't choose what license my work is under. If I decide to use one of their templates such as AGPL and then I add more terms and conditions, it is clear I'm trying to add restrictions. The FSF has no authority on my copyrighted code and what terms I want to license it under. But the FSF seems to assert that in fact, it was trying to sneakily prevent a copyright author from adding additional clauses if they chose the AGPL as a template for their license, by tricking them into not realizing that any additional clauses they'd add could simply be removed by the users. This is what I find very preposterous. Luckily the Judge ruled against that, and asserted the rights of the copyright authors to be in control of their own license terms. It's one thing to licence my code in a way that says, no one else can add more conditions to the use of my code, which is fine and what the judge said applied here, but it is another to license my code in a way that says that my own additional terms are dismissabble and non enforceable, which sounds from the OSI article like this was the intent from FSF. There could be a question of are you allowed to reuse the AGPL license template if you are to add additional terms? Are there copyright on license templates themselves? But that's a very different debate, and it would be pretty crazy to need a license for the use of a license text. No license template currently provide such a license to my knowledge.

webmobdev 5y ago
> If I decide to use one of their templates such as AGPL and then I add more terms and conditions, it is clear I'm trying to add restrictions. And you are free to do that. But you cannot call it an AGPL license any more, especially if it clashes with the original intent of the AGPL license - to provide users the right to the source of the software, to modify it, and to redistribute it commercially or non-commercially under the same license directly or indirectly (SaaS). The court also partly endorsed this position by asserting that Neo4j was doing false advertising by claiming its software was "free and opensource" because the changes made to the license invalidated this. > Are there copyright on license templates themselves? Some commenters have claimed here that they do, but they are also "open source". I don't know about that. But I am sure FSF has valid grounds to argue that if one of their license is changed to invalidate their original intent, such license shouldn't be referred to as an FSF license (like GPL or AGPL). That's what Neo4j was doing - they were calling their license "AGPL with Commons Clause". And even the judge pointed out that this was false advertising. Which makes sense - Firefox is opensource, but if you modify it to include malware and redistribute it as Firefox, Mozilla will obviously not like that as you are damaging their brand. (Ofcourse, that would be a trademark dispute, not a copyright one).

webmobdev 5y ago

> If I decide to use one of their templates such as AGPL and then I add more terms and conditions, it is clear I'm trying to add restrictions. And you are free to do that. But you cannot call it an AGPL license any more, especially if it clashes with the original intent of the AGPL license - to provide users the right to the source of the software, to modify it, and to redistribute it commercially or non-commercially under the same license directly or indirectly (SaaS). The court also partly endorsed this position by asserting that Neo4j was doing false advertising by claiming its software was "free and opensource" because the changes made to the license invalidated this. > Are there copyright on license templates themselves? Some commenters have claimed here that they do, but they are also "open source". I don't know about that. But I am sure FSF has valid grounds to argue that if one of their license is changed to invalidate their original intent, such license shouldn't be referred to as an FSF license (like GPL or AGPL). That's what Neo4j was doing - they were calling their license "AGPL with Commons Clause". And even the judge pointed out that this was false advertising. Which makes sense - Firefox is opensource, but if you modify it to include malware and redistribute it as Firefox, Mozilla will obviously not like that as you are damaging their brand. (Ofcourse, that would be a trademark dispute, not a copyright one).