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An EULA in FOSS clothing?

posted by martyb on Saturday January 12 2019, @12:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the click-to-agree-information-wants-to-be-free dept.

canopic jug writes:

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 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
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