Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/09/11/two-thank-yous.html

I’m well known for being critical when necessary about what happens in
the software freedom community, but occasionally, there’s nothing to do
but thank someone, particularly when they’ve done something I asked
for. 🙂

First, I’d like to
thank Matthew Garrett
for engaging in some
GPL enforcement (as
covered on lwn.net). He’s taking an interesting tack of filing a
complaint with US Customs. I’ve thought about this method in the past,
but never really felt I wanted to go that route (mainly because I’m more
familiar with the traditional GPL enforcement processes). However, it’s
really important that we try lots of different strategies for GPL
enforcement; the path to success is often many methods in parallel. It
looks like
Matthew already
got the attention of the violator. In the end, every GPL
enforcement strategy is primarily to get the violator’s attention so
they take the issue seriously and come into compliance with the
license.

I’ve written
before about how GPL enforcement can be a lonely place, and when I
see someone get serious about doing some — as Matthew has in the
last year or so — it makes GPL enforcement a lot less lonely. I
still think I can count on my hands all the people active regularly in
GPL enforcement efforts, but I am glad to see that’s changing. The
license
stands
for a principle, and we should defend it, despite the great length
the corporate powers in the software freedom world go to in trying to
stop GPL enforcement.

Secondly, I need to thank my
colleague Chris
DiBona. Two years
ago, I
gave him quite a hard time that Google prohibited hosting
of AGPLv3‘d
projects on its FLOSS Project
Hosting site. The interesting part of our debate was that Chris
argued
that license
proliferation was the reason to prohibit AGPLv3. I argued at the
time that Google simply opposed AGPLv3 because many parts of Google’s
business model rely on the fact that the GPL behaves in practice
somewhat like permissive licenses when deployed in a web services
environment.

Honestly, I never had definitive proof at Google’s “real
reasons” for holding the policy it did for two years, but it
doesn’t matter now, because
yesterday Chris
announced that Google Code Hosting now accepts AGPLv3’d
projects⁰. I really
appreciate Chris’ friendly words on AGPLv3, noting that he didn’t
like turning away projects under licenses that serve a truly new
function, like the AGPL.

Google will now accept projects under any license that is
on OSI’s approved
list. I think this is a reasonable outcome. I firmly believe that
acceptable license lists must be the purview of not-for-profit
organizations, not for-profit ones. Personally, I tend to avoid and
distrust any license that fails to appear on both OSI’s
list and
the FSF
Free Software License List. While I obviously favor the FSF list
myself
(having
helped originate it), I generally want to see a license on both
lists before I’m ready to say for sure there are no worries about
it.

There are two other entities that maintain license lists,
namely the Debian
Project and
Red Hat’s Fedora
Project. I wouldn’t say that I find Debian’s list definitive,
mainly because, despite Debian’s generally democratic slant, the
ftp-masters hold a bit too
much power in interpreting
the DFSG.

As for Fedora, that’s ultimately a project controlled by a for-profit
corporation (Red Hat), and therefore I have some trepidation about
trusting their list, just as I had concerns that Google attempted to set
licensing policy by defining an acceptable license list. As it stands
at the moment, I trust Fedora’s list because I know
that Spot
and Fontana
currently have the ultimate say on what does or does not go onto
Fedora’s list. Nevertheless, Red Hat is ultimately in control of
Fedora, so I think its license list can’t be relied on indefinitely
(e.g., in case Spot and/or Fontana ever leave Red Hat at some
point.)

Anyway, I think the best outcome for the community is for
the logical
conjunction of the OSI’s list and the FSF’s list to be considered
the accepted list of licenses. While I often disagree with the OSI, I
think it’s in the best interest of the community to require that two
distinct non-profits with different missions both
approve a license before it’s considered acceptable. (I suppose I’d
have a different view if OSI had
not accepted
the AGPLv3, though. 😉

---

⁰I must point out
that Chris has an error
in his
blog post: namely, FSF’s Code
hosting site, Savannah accepts not
just GPL‘d
projects, but any project that is listed as
“GPL-Compatible” on FSF’s Free Software License List.