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posted by martyb on Saturday January 12 2019, @12:03PM   Printer-friendly
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!


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @12:54PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @12:54PM (#785483)

    I will let others weigh in on the Open Source Definition, but this Frankenlicense, as they call it, is certainly not Free-Software-Foundation-style Free Software. It contains this clause

    Licensee is not granted the right to, and Licensee shall not, exercise the License for an Excluded Purpose. For purposes of this Agreement, “Excluded Purpose” means making available any software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service or other similar online service that competes with Confluent products or services that provide the Software.

    Which clearly fails Freedom 0 [gnu.org]

    The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose

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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by HiThere on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:09PM (5 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:09PM (#785583) Journal

    Since the concept of Open Source was split off from Free Software by commercial entities for commercial purposes, I'd say that if you can read the code, it counts as Open Source. I definitely agree that this doesn't make it Free Software. Now you need to parse FOSS. Is it a union of Free Software and Open Software or is it an intersection? I always find the term ambiguous, and avoid it. It often seems to be used by people who either don't want to think about the difference, or are trying to put something over on you. OTOH, some people seem to think it is clearly understood to be either an intersection or clearly understood to be a union. But they seem to disagree about which.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 2) by exaeta on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:24PM (3 children)

      by exaeta (6957) on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:24PM (#785588) Homepage Journal

      Open Source and Free Software are a bit different. Open Source lacks one guarantee of free software: The ability to modify the software on the device it is installed on. Every other freedom of "Free Software" is required to be "Open Source".

      E.g. a device with a signed bootloader which you cannot replace the software, but the software source is available, is "Open Source" because the sources are licensed freely but the software is not "Free Software" as installed because you can't modify it according to your liking.

      In other words, "Open Source" is concerned only with the software license and source code availability, whereas "Free Software" is also concerned with practical issues like signed bootloadeders.

      FOSS is the same as "free software" and is just to avoid confusing people who would interpret "free software" to mean "gratis software" (free as in $0) instead of "libre software" (free as in freedom).

      Some people found that too ambiguous as well, so we got FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software).

      Software which you can view the source code but without the required open source license is called "source available" or "source viewable" software, never "open source". This includes CC-BY-NC et al. which are not open source licenses and can be considered shareware licenses only.

      --
      The Government is a Bird
      • (Score: 2) by exaeta on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:32PM

        by exaeta (6957) on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:32PM (#785590) Homepage Journal
        P.S. The "Open Source" community split from the Free Software community regarding a difference of how to treat locked down devices. In the opinion of Linus Torvalds and other "Open Source" advocates, a device maker should be able to cryptographically sign a software image they make, and create a device which refuses to run anything else. The Free Software community, which is more focused on End User freedom, rather than that of device makers, decided to prohibit this in GPLv3. Thus we got the big split between "Open Source" and "Free Software". But lots of people don't care since for all other purposes they are the same. Both let you use the device for anything you want, both give you source code, the only difference is that "Open Source" doesn't require the disclosure of "installation information".
        --
        The Government is a Bird
      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:11PM (1 child)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:11PM (#785636) Journal

        I agree that "Software which you can view the source code but without the required open source license is called \"source available\" or \"source viewable\" software", but based on experience I disagree with "never \"open source\"". You may feel that the terms *should* be used in the way that you describe, but they often aren't. And I'm not certain that all the groups that split off the term "Open Source" had the same reason for doing so. I accept that *some* of them had the reason that you are saying. I'm rather certain that some members of that group had very different reasons, that they considered not the best publicity to assert publicly.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
        • (Score: 2) by exaeta on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:15PM

          by exaeta (6957) on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:15PM (#785670) Homepage Journal
          I'd also say they're using the term "Open Source" incorrectly. Open Source has a pretty rigid definition. There isn't enough flexibility in the definition to allow you to call a random project open source. Simply put, calling a license like CC-BY-SA-NC 'open source' is straight up lying. Admittedly some people just prefer "open source" because it is less vauge than "free software". Regardless of what reason you call something 'open source' instead of free software, the term is well defined.
          --
          The Government is a Bird
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:09PM (#785605)

      The open source initiative disagrees with you https://opensource.org/ [opensource.org] . Microsoft for a while tried to popularize the software you describe as "shared source" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:58AM

    by Pino P (4721) on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:58AM (#785783) Journal

    The Open Source Definition [opensource.org] is materially identical to the Debian Free Software Guidelines [debian.org] in the Debian Social Contract. Item 6 of these definitions corresponds to item 0 of FSF's definition:

    6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
    The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.