Jim Gettys <Jim.Gettys at hp.com> wrote:
> Lex wrotes:
> Thus, I'm much more interested nowadays in what
> > the likes of Lawrence Lessig have to say than in what Debian,
> > OSI, or FSF have to say.  If these latter organizations want to stay 
> > relevant in the area of open-source ideas, then they need to adjust to 
> > the changing times.  Like it or not, real law hacking requires real law
> > hackers, not computer scientists who have taken a class or two on law.
> 
> Hmmm...  I will note that Lawrence Lessig is on the board of directors
> of the FSF.  There is some serious legal talent on board.

Glad to hear, and I hope this goes somewhere.  RMS is great at advocacy,
but Lessig knows law and has a great reputation in intellectual circles.
 It could be a great team if they find a way to work together.

debian-legal is an entirely different story.  The "consensus" agreements
it comes up with are driven by amateurs.

>And at least in the case of the GFDL, I think Debian has made the right
> call (I'm not very familiar with the other cases).  The interaction of
> trademark law with the "invariant sections" part of the GFDL can cause a
> document to become unusable in other contexts, presenting a raft of
> problems, either for reuse of code, or when forking a project, which
> sometimes becomes necessary.  

I agree on a strictly theoretical level, but these differences don't
have enough practical impact that Debian should toss all of that stuff
into its non-free section.   Most people just aren't going to load up
their documents with invariant sections, so Debian's policy means that a
great deal of free documentation is getting tossed into "non-free". 
Similarly, while I agree that all the GNU licenses cause problems with
intermixing, that was an intentional feature that RMS added.

>From a wider perspective, notice that there is a vast difference between
Microsoft-L and any vaguely free license you can name.  Despite this
vast difference, however, groups like FSF, Debian, and OSI are spending
tremendous efforts quibbling about border cases among different
open-source licenses.


> One of the biggest issues right now is the fact that there are too many
> licenses, many/most of which are not well thought through.  The
> combinatorial explosion when mixing code is becoming intractable, and
> many people are working to reduce the number of open source licenses in
> use.


This is truly  a problem.  On the other hand, it is not the end of the
world even in the extreme case that code from different projects cannot
be intermixed at all.  The individual projects can always continue to
move forward.  And usually, it is allowed for components to speak over
socket connections no matter what kind of licenses they have.  While
this is not a nice solution, it means that incompatible licenses are not
usually a complete show stopper.

Thus, I would say a bigger problem is that the *legal systems* aren't
set up to handle open source software.  There is such a thing as public
domain in copyright law, but nothing AFAIK corresponding to open source,
where you have zillions of authors and the goods are given away for
free.  If I want to public-domain something, I can just say it; even if
I say it incorrectly, the courts can figure out what I meant, and I have
a good chance of causing the legal effect I was going for.  For the long
term, we ideally need the same thing for open-source software.

So I think more open-source activists should be working on things like:
publicizing the issues to wide audiences, showing why the general public
should care, and ultimately getting legislators to look at it and move
towards a new international copyright treaty.  Digital copyright is a
hot topic right now around the world, so now is a good time to strike.

In the short term, I have started public-domaining my code and
documentation.   It makes no difference for me in practice to using a
specialized open-source license, and I avoid a lot of headaches and
possible future problems.  Even though open-source licenses have some
nice strings included that I might like to enforce, they make no
practical difference because:

	1. There are loopholes, and I don't know where they are until these
licenses get vetted in court -- which isn't going to happen in the near
future.  Witness the ICS chess software, many branches of which are
closed source despite descending directly from GPL code.

	2. It's all a bluff anyway, because I will never bother to sue. 
Witness Interval's hacking of Squeak without releasing source
code--blatantly illegal (so I'm told) but no one cares enough to sue.


So, I think that hackers may as well avoid open-source licenses all
together for now, and that activists should spend a larger portion of
their time trying to adjust copyright law itself.  Obsessing about our
differences is causing more harm than good at this time.

Lex