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from the click-to-agree-information-wants-to-be-free dept.
Software developer Bryan Cantrill has a second, more detailed, blog post on EULA plus Copyright frankenlicenses. The combination of the two appears to bring in a lot of baggage from both proprietary licensing and EULAs while being dressed up as FOSS. He writes a blog post in response to a longer discussion on HN and blog post from the CEO of Confluent. He discusses the situation, raises quite a few questions (three are quoted below), and concludes with an assessment on the seriousness of the problem and a call to action.
This prompts the following questions, which I also asked Jay via Twitter:
1. If I git clone software covered under the Confluent Community License, who owns that copy of the software?
2. Do you consider the Confluent Community License to be a contract?
3. Do you consider the Confluent Community License to be a EULA?
[...] To foundations concerned with software liberties, including the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Software Freedom Conservancy: the open source community needs your legal review on this! I don’t think I’m being too alarmist when I say that this is potentially a dangerous new precedent being set; it would be very helpful to have your lawyers offer their perspectives on this, even if they disagree with one another. We seem to be in some terrible new era of frankenlicenses, where the worst of proprietary licenses are bolted on to the goodwill created by open source licenses; we need your legal voices before these creatures destroy the village!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Dr Spin on Saturday January 12 2019, @12:48PM (6 children)
Who is Bryan Cantrell, what is HN, who is merging EULAs and what is a copyright Frankenlicense?
Anyone can produce software with any license they like, if I don't use the software, it has no impact
on me. If, in this case, I might be using the software, then it could be worth telling me what software
is involved here. Is it an arcane version of Slashdot or the whole of Linux? Is it a Perl fork? Is it
Fortnite? Is it a twister? Who knows? Does anyone really care?
AFAICT, this is piece of worthless clickbait, and I refuse to go to the original article to find out if there is a story.
The whole point of editors is to make sure there is actually a story behind the headlines, and then present it in an intelligible form.
This is not that!
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @01:08PM
Bryan Cantrell is the author of the linked article. He is apparently some sort of software developer, but that seems largely irrelevant. HN is an abbreviation for HackerNews, a well known and popular software and technology discussion site (in case that question was not rhetorical). The summary makes it obvious that Confluent is the one "merging" EULA and Copyright licenses, which the author has dubbed a "frankenlicense", however a that should have been more clearly stated. It reads as though there were an earlier submission that was missed or not posted. The article is as much about a potentially worrying development in the FOSS ecosystem as any piece of software itself. Having read the article I still do not know what Confluent makes or which software packages are covered by this "Community License", but this is still something I am glad was posted just so that I am aware of the potential issues being raised.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday January 12 2019, @01:25PM (1 child)
In the journal of ~fyngyrz there's the very special cyber for, someone writes "WTF, EULA FOSS HN AFAICT" and you don't know what it means. But, you touch it and this cyber tells you.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Gaaark on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:27PM
"But, you touch it and this cyber tells you."
Or, "But, you touch it and you have to defend yourself in court."
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday January 12 2019, @02:38PM
While of course I haven't read TFA the issue at hand is not a simple Free or Open Source License, but a freedom-preventing license that _claims_ to be a Free or Open Source license but is not.
You can't go far wrong if you use a license picked _specifically_ from the OSI approved ones, or the FSF's list of Free Software License. To claim that a turd is a rose doesn't make it smell nice.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by rleigh on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:00PM
Bryan Cantrill is an ex-employee of Sun microsystems, one of the primary authors of dtrace and one of the people responsible for getting Solaris open-sourced as OpenSolaris. He's one of the giants of the free software world, has done far more than most for championing free software, and is a highly-skilled developer as well as an excellent and entertaining public speaker. Check out some of his talks about dtrace and ZFS on youtube as well as conferences like Usenix.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:35PM
This is a pretty naive statement, much like "since I don't use Failbook it has no impact on me" or "because I'm not the owner of this boxing glove, it has no impact on me" etc. The network effect is sadly very real and the choices other people make (often horrible) have very real impact on the whole society.