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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: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:41PM (1 child)
Perhaps, but if you read TFA, there are some troubling aspects. This software is available for you to clone via Git. One file somewhere in the repository is a license. Are you presumed to have accepted this license by cloning? In that sense, it's even worse than a click-through EULA.
Also: The license, or EULA, or whatever it is states that you are free to do whatever you want with the source code, including modifying and redistributing it. But it also contains a clause that prohibits you from using the software to compete with Confluence's online services. That is just a really weird (and possibly contradictory) pair of clauses.
My impression, based on absolutely nothing more than a gut feel, is that Confluence doesn't quite know what they really want to do. They want kudos for being FOSS, but they don't want to actually walk the walk. Possibly a conflict between their lawyers and their management?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday January 13 2019, @10:46AM
EULA - End User License Agreement. If I haven't 'agreed' to it, it has no legal binding whatsoever. Show me where I agreed to it, and someone might have a point, but cloning it from a GIT repo does not constitute an agreement. I would have to download it in order to read it, and I'd have to read it to know whether I intended to 'agree' to its conditions. In Europe, it has absolutely no legal standing whatsoever.