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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: 2) by HiThere on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:14PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:14PM (#785585) Journal

    "Public domain" has become rather iffy as copyright laws have changed. I don't think you can explicitly put things into public domain, at least not reliably in all jurisdictions. That's the reason things like the "artistic license" and the "MIT license" were developed.

    One thing that public domain requires is that there be no attribution of risk for use. But this seems to currently require either successfully anonymous creation or an insulating license. Or waiting until the copyright term runs out.

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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:07PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:07PM (#785651) Journal

    I don't think you can explicitly put things into public domain, at least not reliably in all jurisdictions.

    If a legal jurisdiction does not correctly handle public domain, then the citizens of that legal jurisdiction need to get after fighting it and fixing it. It's their responsibility.

    There's an excellent case here for civil disobedience, one which has been clearly stated for a very long time:

    …in so far as [law] deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.

    --Thomas Aquinas

    I've written a bit about civil disobedience here, [fyngyrz.com] most of which is relevant to this issue.

    TL;DR: It's not the concept of public domain that's broken. It's the law. It's up to us to refuse to obey the evil bus driver and the system he is goose-stepping to. [wikipedia.org]

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