Gregory's Server@mcc Did copyleft licenses ever meaningfully restrict the behavior of large corporations? Licenses are effectively a statement of intent with respect to future litigation, and if the copyright holder is not willing or able to actually *perform* that litigation, everyone gradually understands that this is a Mexican standoff where one side's guns aren't loaded.
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45 comments
 @mcc IIRC, Sony did it much earlier. I cannot even find any record of this, but as I recall, Sony distributed a modified version of GCC as part of their early Playstation SDKs, in a way which clearly violated the GPL. FSF found out somehow, and the result was just that Sony said "oops, our bad, we forgot to contractually forbid members of our SDK program from talking to you" and then later switched to LLVM.  @glyph @mcc So the PlayStation thing was basically the way Cygnus did compiler port sales. The Long and short of it is they'd do a gcc target for a given CPU and agree to not release it, then distribute it only to the customer, but still under the GPL, with the caveat that the contracts said they retained all the rights and could use the source code in other ports, and I think it may have also had a timeout. Then, \ @glyph @mcc Sony distributed it to game devlopers, who were under their own contracts and NDAs with Sony and received this compiler as a binary and with no right to distribute it. The contractors didn't receive it under the GPL, but Cygnus still had their own copy that would eventually be upstreamed. This sort of thing has always been part of the business of making and selling GPLed software. And also the dig at Red Hat above is still just plain not what actually happened. @glyph @mcc 2) in terms of software licensing, as I understand it (and let's be sure: IANAL) if you work for a company and they for instance get a copy of Visual Studio and give it to you, Microsoft has given it to them under whatever license, but your employer has more or less just loaned it to you. You don't have that software licensed to you, your employer does. And that's something that can be established through non-employment contracts as well.  @vathpela @glyph This (conveying code from company A to B to C while claiming it was not "distributed") seems to violate the plain language of "copying" or "distribution" as it would have been understood by people who place their code under GPL2, and I doubt a court would sign on with it if this were tested. In GPL3 "distribution" is replaced with a more fine-grained definition of terms concerning copying, and so if this loophole was ever real, it's probably shut now. @mcc @glyph I think that's a fair conclusion. Also worth noting that there are other slightly different ways they could have done it that are even more confusing (and maybe they did, I wasn't ever in that part of the business). Like, what if they only ever gave the customers patches, and then rented them out a consultant who downloaded, patched, and compiled gcc for them? It's exactly the same in the end, but a largely different thing being handed over. @mcc @glyph Well, I don't think lawyers or the courts see it that way, but again I am not a lawyer so I won't belabor that point any more. Maybe as @luis_in_brief, I hear he is a lawyer, just not your lawyer or my lawyer ;)  @luis_in_brief @vathpela @mcc we'd all better stop posting so we can get back to our respective jobs, which are *checks notes* also posting, mostly about the same topics, just with a slightly different emphasis @vathpela @mcc @luis_in_brief ultimately the nature of the debate here just proves the point I was making :). We are arguing over what precise powers that a particular genie would have if it were ever released, but the reality is that the genie gets its power from the tens of millions of dollars that would need to be spent to release it in the first place, and we will never find out so it doesn't matter in any practical sense @mcc @vathpela @glyph I don't know how to conclude whether this article is correct or biased but it talks about the question of whether GPL triggers between e.g. a company and its independent contractors, or when a company is acquired: https://www.jolts.world/index.php/jolts/article/view/66 @vathpela @mcc also not a lawyer, but this sounds novel and bizarre to me. "licensed to" is a shorthand; the license is a limited right to perform copies that would otherwise be considered infringement, which presumably an employee acting on behalf of a company would need in exactly the same way as the company itself would; everybody involved needs the right to make these copies @vathpela @glyph I find in the text of GPL2: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." If Sony [or whoever else] made someone sign an NDA saying they could not distribute the GPLed software they gave them, Sony was violating the GPL, and therefore did not have the right to distribute the modified GPLed code in question.   @mcc @glyph I think that’s a little unfair to red hat (it’s just *more inconveniently* available now) but as a general matter, yeah. In particular: @mcc @glyph like, GPLv2 to lawyers in the late 1990s: THIS IS A BOOGEYMAN THAT WILL EAT YOUR CHILDREN. GPLv2 to lawyers in the present: oh, yeah, I learned that in second-year copyright, including the standard weaknesses/limitations, and I know who to speed-dial if I need to get details on how to exploit it. Exact same text, very different real world impact. @luis_in_brief @mcc bonus, a lot of the "bad actor" stuff in that essay is even funnier in light of xz @glyph @luis_in_brief @mcc I think this is an interesting take, but ~wrongish in two ways. 1) probably the best understanding of how Red Hat conducts business is the parts of "Spacesuit" (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262015202/spacesuit/ ) about sewing patterns as they relate to engineering drawings; 2) the customers' understanding of their relationship with source code varies quite a bit more than that. @chrisjrn @glyph Well, the "complications" I'm referring to were the lawsuit, and the extremely awkward "advertising" clause in the BSD license that was not removed until 1999. Those things were just going to happen over a certain time period either way (you could maybe even argue without Linux blowing up the advertising clause might have stayed in BSD longer…) @glyph Process was a differentiator, but FreeBSD took a similar process approach and got a headstart from a more technically mature initial codebase. @glyph |
@glyph Redhat establishing that its GPLed software is no longer available under the GPL seems to indicate the answer to your question is "no".