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Years of open hardware licenses

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

Last in a list of the top 10 free/open source software legal developments in 2011 (emphasis added):

Open Hardware License. The open hardware movement received a boost when CERN published an Open Hardware License (“CERN OHL”). The CERN OHL is drafted as a documentation license which is careful to distinguish between documentation and software (which is not licensed under the CERN OHL) http://www.ohwr.org/documents/88. The license is “copyleft” and, thus, similar to GPLv2 because it requires that all modifications be made available under the terms of the CERN OHL. However, the license to patents, particularly important for hardware products, is ambiguous. This license is likely to the first of a number of open hardware licenses, but, hopefully, the open hardware movement will keep the number low and avoid “license proliferation” which has been such a problem for open source software.

But the CERN OHL isn’t the first “open hardware license”. Or perhaps it is the nth first. Several free software inspired licenses intended specifically for design and documentation have been created over the last decade or so. I recall encountering one dating back to the mid-1990s, but can’t find a reference now. Discussion of open hardware licenses was hot at the turn of the millennium, though most open hardware projects from that time didn’t get far, and I can’t find a license that made it to “1.0″.

People have been wanting to do for hardware what the GNU General Public License has done for software and trying to define open hardware since that timeframe. They keep on wanting (2006) and trying (2007, 2011 comments).

Probably the first arguably “high quality” license drafted specifically for open hardware is the (2007). The CERN OHL might be the second such. There has never been consensus on the best license to use for open hardware. Perhaps this is why CERN saw fit to create yet another (incompatible copyleft at that — incompatible with TAPR OHL, GPL, and BY-SA), but there still isn’t consensus in 2012.

Licenses primarily used for software (usually [L]GPL, occasionally BSD, MIT, or Apache) have also been used for open hardware since at least the late 1990s — and much more so than any license created specifically for open hardware. CC-BY-SA has been used by Arduino since at least 2008 and since 2009.

In 2009 the primary drafter of the TAPR OHL published a paper with a rationale for the license. By my reading of the paper, the case for a license specific to hardware seems pretty thin — hardware design and documentation files, and distribution of printed circuit boards seem a lot like program source and executables, and mostly subject to copyright. It also isn’t clear to me why the things TAPR OHL handles differently than most open source software licenses (disclaims strictly being a copyright license, instead wanting to serve as a clickwrap contract; attempts to describe requirements functionally, instead of legally, to avoid describing explicitly the legal regime underlying requirements; limited patent grant applies to “possessors” not just contributors) might not be interesting for software licenses, if they are interesting at all, nor why features generally rejected for open source software licenses shouldn’t also be rejected for open hardware (email notification to upstream licensors; a noncommercial-only option — thankfully deprecated late last year).

Richard Stallman’s 1999 note about free hardware seems more clear and compelling than the TAPR paper, but I wish I could read it again without knowing the author. Stallman wrote:

What this means is that anyone can legally draw the same circuit topology in a different-looking way, or write a different HDL definition which produces the same circuit. Thus, the strength of copyleft when applied to circuits is limited. However, copylefting HDL definitions and printed circuit layouts may do some good nonetheless.

In a thread from 2007 about yet another proposed open hardware license, three people who generally really know what they’re talking about each wondered why a hardware-specific license is needed: Brian Behlendorf, Chris DiBona, and Simon Phipps. The proposer withdrew and decided to use the MIT license (a popular non-copyleft license for software) for their project.

My bias, as with any project, would be to use a GPL-compatible license. But my bias may be inordinately strong, and I’m not starting a hardware project.

One could plausibly argue that there are still zero quality open hardware specific licenses, as the upstream notification requirement is arguably non-open, and the CERN OHL also contains an upstream notification requirement. Will history repeat?

Addendum: I just notice the existence of an open hardware legal mailing list, probably a good venue to follow if you’re truly interested in these issues. The organizer is Bruce Perens, who is involved with TAPR and is convinced non-copyright mechanisms are absolutely necessary for open hardware. His attempt to bring rigor to the field and his decades of experience with free and open source software are to be much appreciated in any case.

Posted in Computers, Creative Commons, Open Source | 2 Comments »

CSS text overlay image, e.g. for attribution and license notice

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

A commenter called me on providing inadequate credit for an map image I used on this blog. I’ve often seen map credits overlaid on the bottom right of maps, so I decided to try that. I couldn’t find an example of using CSS to overlay text on an image that only showed the absolute minimum needed to achieve the effect, and explained why. Below is my attempt.

Example 1

The above may be a good example of when to not use a text overlay (there is already text at the bottom of the image), but the point is to demonstrate the effect, not to look good. I have an image and I want to overlay «Context+Colophon» at the bottom right of the image. Here’s the minimal code:

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<div style="position:relative;z-index:0;width:510px">
  <img src="http://gondwanaland.com/i/young-obama-pirate-hope.png"/>
  <div style="position:absolute;z-index:1;right:0;bottom:0">
    <a href="http://identi.ca/conversation/69446510">Context</a>+<a href="http://registry.gimp.org/node/14291">Colophon</a>
  </div>
</div>

Explanation

The outer div creates a container which the text overlay will be aligned with. A position is necessary to enable z-index, which specifies how objects will stack. Here position:relative as I want the image and overlay to flow with the rest of the post, z-index:0 as the container is at the bottom of the stack. I specify width:510px as that’s how wide the image is, and without hardcoding the size of the div, the overlay as specified will float off to the right rather than align with the image. There’s nothing special about the img; it inherits from the outer div.

The inner div contains and styles the text I want to overlay. position:absolute as I will specify an absolute offset from the container, right:0;bottom:0, and z-index:1 to place above the image. Finally, I close both divs.

That’s it. I know precious little CSS; please tell me what I got wrong.

Example 2

Above is the image that prompted this post, with added attribution and license notice. Code:

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<div style="z-index:0;position:relative;width:560px"
     xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
     about="http://gondwanaland.com/i/OpenStreetMap-Oakland-980.png">
  <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=37.8134&amp;lon=-122.2776&amp;zoom=14&amp;layers=Q">
    <img src="http://gondwanaland.com/i/OpenStreetMap-Oakland-980.png"/></a>
  <div style="position:absolute;z-index:1;right:0;bottom:0;">
    <small>
      © <a rel="cc:attributionURL"
           property="cc:attributionName"
           href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=37.8134&amp;lon=-122.2776&amp;zoom=14&amp;layers=Q">OpenStreetMap contributors</a>,
        <a rel="license"
           href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC-BY-SA</a>
    </small>
  </div>
</div>

Explanation

With respect to the achieving the text overlay, there’s nothing in this example not in the first. Below I explain annotations added that (but are not required by) fulfillment of OpenStreetMap/CC-BY-SA attribution and license notice.

The xmlns:ccprefix, and even that may be superfluous, given cc: as a default prefix.

about sets the subject of subsequent annotations.

small isn’t an annotation, but does now seem appropriate for legal notices, and is usually rendered nicely.

rel="cc:attributionURL" says that the value of the href property is the link to use for attributing the subject. property="cc:attributionName" says that the text (“OpenStreetMap contributors”) is the name to use for attributing the subject. rel="license" says the value of its href property is the subject’s license.

If you’re bad and not using HTTPS-Everywhere (referrer not sent due to protocol change; actually I’m bad for not serving this blog over https), clicking on BY-SA above might obtain a snippet of HTML with credits for others to use. Or you can copy and paste the above code into RDFa Distiller or checkrdfa to see that the annotations are as I’ve said.

Addendum: If you’re reading this in a feed reader or aggregator, there’s a good chance inline CSS is stripped — text intended to overlay images will appear under rather than overlaying images. Click through to the post in order to see the overlays work.

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Programming, Semantic Web | 2 Comments »

Which counterfactual public domain day?

Sunday, January 1st, 2012

1. Each January 1, many people note a number of interesting works that become free of copyright restrictions in many jurisdictions, but a 1998 act means none will in the U.S. until at least 2019.

2. The Center for the Study of the Public Domain provides another counterfactual, imagining policy not pre-1998, but pre-1976 (act; effective 1978), which at the top states (repeated at Boing Boing, which inspired this post’s title) works from 1955 or before would be free of copyright restrictions.

3. But as the CSPD page points out further down (see “the public domain snatchers”), the pre-1976 policy also would’ve meant many works from 1983 or before would now be free of copyright restrictions, as the policy allowed for 28 years of restriction, with an optional renewal of 28 years. Historically copyright holders did not bother renewing 85% of works.

4. The aforementioned CSPD page doesn’t note, but their FAQ does, that prior to 1989 a copyright notice was required in order for a work to be restricted. The FAQ says “By some estimates, 90% of works did not include this copyright notice and immediately entered the public domain.” A counterfactual taking this into account would have not only a robust January 1, but every day would be public domain day.

(Of course as I noted last year, every day is public domain day to the extent you make it so, no counterfactual required. But defaults really matter.)

5. Any of the above counterfactuals would be tremendous improvements over society’s current malgovernance of the intellectual commons. But they’re all boring. They are much more difficult to conceive, but the counterfactuals I’d prefer to look are not ones with recent rent seeking undone, but ones attempting to characterize worlds with optimal copyright restriction, which is itself under-explored: no extensions? 15 years? 1 year? Maybe 0? The thing about this sort of counterfactual is not the precise duration, nature, or existence of restriction, but in changing how we think about the public domain — not some old works that it is cool that we can now cooperate around to preserve and breathe new life into without legal threat (or uncool if we can’t) — but about how the world would be changed in a dynamic way with much better policy. I bet we wouldn’t even miss that 9-figure Hollywood dreck if such disappeared (I really doubt it would, but here’s to hoping) that most writers in this field must genuflect to and that are used as the excuse to destroy, because whatever would exist would be our culture, and everyone loves their culture (which of course may be subculture built on superficial or even real rejection of such, etc). It would just also be our culture in another way as well, one compatible with free speech and more equal distribution of wealth, in addition to practical things like a non-broken Internet.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Politics, Public Domain, Public Goods | 2 Comments »

End of the 2011 world

Saturday, December 31st, 2011


I took the above photo near the beginning of 2011. It has spent most of the year near the top (currently #2) of my photos hosted at Flickr ranked by their interestingness metric. Every other photo in the 200 they rank (sadly I don’t think anyone not logged in as me can see this list) has some combination of being on other people’s lists of favorites, comments, or large number of views. The above photo has none of that. Prior to this post it has only been viewed 33 times by other people, according to Flickr, and I don’t think that number has changed in some time. Their (not revealed) code must find something about the image itself interesting. Is their algorithm inaccurate? In any case the image is appropriate as the world of 2011 is ending, and in 2012 I absolutely will migrate my personal media hosting to something autonomous, as since last year someone (happens to be a friend and colleague) has taken on the mantle of building media sharing for the federated social web.

My employer’s office moved from San Francisco to Mountain View in April, contributing to a number of people leaving or transitioning out, which has been a bummer. I’ve been working exclusively from home since May. Still, there have been a number of good developments, which I won’t attempt to catalog here. My favorites include agreement with the Free Software Foundation regarding use of CC0 for public domain software, small improvements in the CC legal user interface, the return and great work of a previous colleague, retirement of two substandard licenses, research, and a global summit/launch of a process toward version 4.0 of the CC licenses, which I hope over the next year prove at least a little bit visionary, long-standing, and have some consideration for how they can make the world a better place.

Speaking of which, I’ve spent more time thinking about social science-y stuff in 2011 than I have in at least several years. I’ll probably have plenty to say regarding this on a range of topics next year, but for now I’ll state one narrow “professionally-related” conclusion: free/libre/open software/culture/etc advocates (me included) have done a wholly inadequate job of characterizing why our preferences matter, both to the general public and to specialists in every social science.

Apart from silly peeves, two moderate ideas unrelated to free/libre/open stuff that I first wrote about in 2011 and I expect I’ll continue to push for years to come: increasing the minimum age and education requirement for soldiers and tearing down highway 980.

I haven’t done much programming in several years, and not full time in about a decade. This has been making me feel like my brain is rotting, and contributes to my lack of prototyping various services that I want to exist. Though I’d been fiddling (that may be generous) with Scala for a couple years, I was never really super excited about tying myself to the JVM. I know and deeply respect lots of people who doing great things with Python, and I’ve occasionally used it for scripts over the past several years because of that, but it leaves me totally non-enthused. I’ve done enough programming in languages that are uglier but more or less the same, time for something new. For a couple months I’ve been learning and doing some prototyping using the Yesod web framework (apparently I had heard of Haskell in 2005 but I didn’t look at it closely until last year). I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like, mostly due to unrelated distractions. The biggest substantive hurdle has not been Haskell (and the concepts it stands for), but a lack of Yesod examples and documentation. This seems to be a common complaint. Yesod is rapidly moving to a 1.0 release, documentation is prioritized, and I expect to be really productive with it over the coming year. Thanks to the people who make Yesod and those who have been making Haskell for two decades.

This year I appreciated three music projects that I hadn’t paid much attention to before, much to my detriment: DNA, Moondog, and especially Harry Partch. I also listened a lot again to one of my favorite bands I discovered in college, Violence and the Sacred, which amazingly has released some of its catalog under the CC BY-SA license. Check them out!

Finally, in 2011 I had the pleasure of getting to know just a little bit some people working to make my neighborhood a better place, attending a conference with my sister, seeing one of my brothers start a new job and the other a new gallery, and with my wife of continuing to grow up (in that respect, the “better half” cliche definitely applies). Now for this world to end!

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Music, Oakland, Open Services, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Programming, Public Domain, Public Goods | No Comments »

Namecheap’s savvy anti-SOPA marketing

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

I’m impressed by how much gratis publicity and advertising has gotten via its anti-SOPA marketing (including the Wikipedia article I linked to; it didn’t exist 3 days ago), and completely unimpressed by the failure of approximately every other company to take advantage of the opportunity, which strikes me as easy social media gold. Communications department heads ought roll.

* pro-SOPA marketing failures made Namecheap’s action straightforward relative to companies not directly competing with Go Daddy. However, there are lots of other domain name registrars, none of which has done anything with Namecheap’s marketing savvy. Another registrar, (which I’ve used and recommended for some time, and has supported Creative Commons and other good causes), like Namecheap is donating a portion of domain transfers to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but doesn’t seem to be making a big deal of it, and their anti-SOPA blog post is rather tepid. Compare to Namecheap’s anti-SOPA blog post, which isn’t all that much stronger in terms of substance (contains genuflection to “intellectual property”), it is much more strongly worded and simply more effectively written.

One other company has a support-EFF-against-SOPA tie-in. That company, Zopim, provides website chat services, and doesn’t seem to compete with Go Daddy at all. I’m not interested, but never would have heard of them otherwise. Any company could do that.

(I see that sometime today two other small domain registrars have added support-EFF-against-SOPA deals. Good for Suspicious Networks and Centuric.)

What inspired to me write this post is that Namecheap isn’t only taking gratis publicity. They’re also running presumably paid ads as part of their anti-SOPA marketing campaign:

While trying to get the above ad to load again (noticed out of the corner of my eye but didn’t register until sometime after — I’m oddly trying to recover from ad blindness), I noticed another Namecheap ad, which if you’re already really tuned in, illustrates nicely the imperfect options available from a software freedom perspective for domain registration and other nearly commodity services.

Check out more anti-SOPA and pro-freedom actions.

*Isn’t the name “Go Daddy” ridiculous? That, coupled with a super cheesy website and company logo led me to disregard them long before they started shooting sexy elephants at gladiator events, or whatever got people upset before they supported SOPA.

Posted in Advertising, Creative Commons, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Services, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Wikipedia | 3 Comments »

Mozilla $300m/year for freedom

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

More Mozilla ads by Henrik Moltke / CC BY

Congratulations to Mozilla on their $300m/year deal with Google, which will more than double current annual revenue. I’ve always thought people predicting doom for Mozilla if Google failed to renew were all wrong — others would be happy to pay for the default search position; probably less since Microsoft, Yahoo, and others make less than Google per ad view, but it’d still be a very substantial amount — and the link article hints that a Microsoft bid drove the price up.

There’s always a risk that Mozilla won’t spend the money well, but I’m pretty confident that they will. Firefox is excellent, and in 2011 has gotten more excellent, faster, and I think many of the other projects they’re doing are really important, and on the right track (insofar as I’m qualified to discern, which is not much), for example BrowserID. Even in small and hopelessly annoying things, like licensing, I think Mozilla is doing good. (Bias: Mozilla has donated to my employer.)

I’m no longer enthused about the possibility of huge resources for progress toward Wikimedia’s vision from advertising on Wikipedia. Since I was last on that bandwagon, it has become even less of a possibility in anything but the distant future: Wikimedia’s donation campaigns have gone very well, adequately funding its operating mission, and lack of advertising has become even more part of Wikimedia’s messaging; I’ve also become more concerned (not in particular to Wikimedia) about the institutional corruption risks previously blogged by Peter McCluskey and Timothy B. Lee. (Note these objections don’t apply to Mozilla: its significant revenue has always been advertising-based; very roughly its revenues are already 10x those of Wikimedia’s; and it is also building up an individual donor program, which I agree is often the healthiest revenue for a nonprofit.)

But I still very much think freedom needs massive, ongoing resource infusions, in the right institutional framework. I celebrate the tremendous benefits of the FLOSS community achieves without massive, concentrated, ongoing resource infusions, but I also admit that the web likely would be much worse, much less webby, and much less free without concentrated resources at Mozilla over the last several years.

Thank you Mozillians, and congratulations. I have very high expectations for your contributions over the next years to the web and society, in particular where more freedom and security are obviously needed such as mobile and software services. Such would be just a start. As computation permeates everything, and digital freedom becomes the most important political issue, the resources of many Mozillas are needed. More on that, soon.

Posted in Advertising, Creative Commons, Economics, Open Services, Open Source, Programming, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 1 Comment »

Encyclopedia of Original Research

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

As I’m prone to say that some free/libre/open projects ought strive to not merely recapitulate existing production methods and products (so as to sometimes create something much better), I have to support and critique such strivings.

A proposal for the Encyclopedia of Original Research, besides a name that I find most excellent, seems like just such a project. The idea, if I understand correctly, is to leverage Open Access literature and using both machine- and wiki-techniques, create always-up-to-date reviews of the state of research in any field, broad or narrow. If wildly successful, such a mechanism could nudge the end-product of research from usually instantly stale, inaccessible (multiple ways), unread, untested, singular, and generally useless dead-tree-oriented outputs toward more accessible, exploitable, testable, queryable, consensus outputs. In other words, explode the category of “scientific publication”.

Another name for the project is “Beethoven’s open repository of research” — watch the video.

The project is running a crowdfunding campaign right now. They only have a few hours left and far from their goal, but I’m pretty sure the platform they’re using does not require projects to meet a threshold in order to obtain pledges, and it looks like a small amount would help continue to work and apply for other funding (eminently doable in my estimation; if I can help I will). I encourage kicking in some funds if you read this in the next couple hours, and I’ll update this post with other ways to help in the future if you’re reading later, as in all probability you are.

EoOR is considerably more radical than (and probably complementary to and/or ought consume) AcaWiki, a project I’ve written about previously with the more limited aim to create human-readable summaries of academic papers and reviews. It also looks like, if realized, a platform that projects with more specific aims, like OpenCures, could leverage.

Somehow EoOR escaped my attention (or more likely, my memory) until now. It seems the proposal was developed as part of a class on getting your Creative Commons project funded, which I think I can claim credit for getting funded (Jonas Öberg was very convincing; the idea for and execution of the class are his).

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Open Source, Public Domain, Public Goods, Semantic Web, Wikipedia | No Comments »

A Toolkit for Anti-SOPA Activism: #13 (or #0?)

Monday, December 12th, 2011

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent checklist of 12 things you can do to fight the U.S. Congress’ attack on the Internet. Most of them are tiresome rearguard actions against this particular legislation (though most can have secondary long-term effects of educating policymakers and the public about the harm of attacking the Internet). All this is necessary, please take action now.

Action #12 is long-term: contribute financially to the EFF so they can continue “leading the fight to defend civil liberties online, so that future generations will enjoy an Internet free of censorship.” Indeed, please do this too. I’ve recommended becoming an EFF member in the past, and will continue to do so. Actually I’m even more enthusiastic about donating to the EFF in 2011 than I was in 2005. In addition to playing an absolutely critical role in fighting SOPA, PIPA, and their ilk, the EFF’s small technical staff is working on some of the most important technical challenges to keeping the Internet open and secure. They are awesome!

There’s one more item that needs to be in every responsible digital freedom activist’s toolkit: the digital commons, meaning free and open source software and their analogues in culture, knowledge, and beyond. Using and consuming free software and culture is crucial to maintaining a free society. There are many reasons, some of which I mentioned recently at OWF, and with a bit more focus in a FSCONS 2008 presentation (slideshare, .pdf, .odp), but here’s one: imagine a world in which most software and culture are free as in freedom. Software, culture, and innovation would be abundant, there would be plenty of money in it (just not based on threat of censorship), and there would be no constituency for attacking the Internet. (Well, apart from dictatorships and militarized law enforcement of supposed democracies; that’s a fight intertwined with SOPA, but those aren’t the primary constituencies for the bill.) Now, world dominationliberation by free software and culture isn’t feasible now. But every little bit helps reduce the constituency that wishes to attack the Internet to possibly protect their censorship-based revenue streams, and to increase the constituency whose desire to protect the Internet is perfectly aligned with their business interests and personal expression.

Am I crazy? Seriously, I’d like to make the case for the commons as crucial to the future of free society more compellingly. Or, if I’m wrong, stop making it. Feedback wanted.

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Relatedly, the English Wikipedia community is considering a blackout to protest SOPA. Here’s the comment I left at the request for comment:

Support doing something powerful. I blackout would be that. I do have some reticence though. Making the knowledge in English Wikipedia and maybe other sites inaccessible feels a bit like protestors who destroy their own neighborhood. Sometimes necessary to gain attention and perhaps justice in the long run, but always painful and with collateral victims. Sure, visitors to Wikipedia sites can come back later or find a mirror, but just as surely, the neighborhood will recover. Maybe. Admittedly the analogy is far from perfect, but I wish there were something the Wikimedia movement could do that would have power analogous to a mass physical action, but avoid costs analogous to the same. Long term, I think fulfilling the Wikimedia vision is exactly that. In the short term, maybe a total blackout is necessary, though if there’s a a way to equally powerfully present to viewers what SOPA means, then let them access the knowledge, I’d prefer that. UI challenge? Surely some A:B testing is in order for this important action. I’d hope that at least some messages tested convey not only the threat SOPA poses to Wikimedia, but the long-term threat the Wikimedia movement poses to censorship.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Politics, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »

Mozilla Public License 2.0 and increasing public copyright license compatibility

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Incompatibility among public copyright licenses dampens their potential for reducing underlying friction caused by copyright. Increasing compatibility among public copyright licenses is one of the successes of the free/libre/open source community, or so I think. Without long-term, distributed collaboration among license stewards and projects released under public licenses, it would have been easy to obtain a world in which it usually isn’t legally possible to use code from one project in another. (A shared understanding of what constitutes “free” and “open” really helps — the scope for incompatible-in-spirit licenses is greatly reduced, and distributed collaboration facilitated by everyone sharing broad premises.)

I’ve been watching from afar development of the Mozilla Public License version 2 (going for nearly 2 years, I believe about the right amount of time to version a widely used public license) almost exclusively because I was eager to see it become GPL compatible, and how it would achieve this.

Luis Villa explained most of the “how” three months ago. To make sure I understand, here’s my summary:

  • MPL 1.1 is not GPL-compatible. MPL 2.0 will be, but with a few caveats to ensure that projects released under the MPL won’t become GPL-compatible unintentionally, and that there’s a way for new projects under MPL 2.0 that really, really don’t want to be GPL compatible, don’t have to be.
  • Code from a project is released under MPL 2.0 (and not multi-licensed), it can only be made available under the GPL* when incorporated into a larger project that is already GPL licensed, i.e., there has to be a good reason.
  • The entity doing such incorporation in the point above has to offer the MPL code under the MPL and additionally the GPL. A downstream entity can choose to only use the GPL. In other words, people who want to use the original project’s code line under the MPL have ample opportunity to do so, until it is truly forked into a GPL-only version.
  • MPL 1.1 projects (1.1 has a “future versions” clause) modified and released under MPL 2.0 are not GPL-compatible in the manner above unless the project was already multi-licensed under the MPL and GPL (the most important MPL 1.1 licensed projects are multi-licensed), i.e., the intent to allow for use under the GPL is already established.
  • Projects that want to use MPL 2.0 and really don’t want to be GPL compatible can include an “Incompatible With Secondary Licenses” notice.

I think the last point is an unfortunate complication (such projects could stick with MPL 1.1, for instance), but I trust that there are good stakeholder use cases for it. But that’s a minor nit. Villa and other people who worked on MPL 2.0 did a great job and get congratulations and thanks from me.

One of my dreams for Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 is that it be one-way GPL compatible, as MPL 2.0 will be. MPL 2.0 demonstrates mechanisms for achieving GPL compatibility without upsetting current licensor expectations, which ought be a useful perspective from which to evaluate options for CC BY-SA 4.0. Though CC licenses should not be used for code, it’s easy to see a future in which most “culture” includes “code” and it is an unnecessary pain to keep their licenses separate in all cases. Also, there is some demand for a source-requiring copyleft license for non-software works (BY-SA does not require adaptations to provide source, which is often OK for cultural works, but not always) and it doesn’t make sense to create another source-requiring copyleft license in addition to the GPL.

*Actually LGPL 2.1 or greater, GPL 2.0 or greater, or AGPL 3.0 or greater. MPL has a weaker copyleft than any of the GPL-family licenses — MPL’s copyleft is scoped by file, LGPL’s by library, GPL’s by any linked code, AGPL adds requirement for source distribution to network services.

Addendum 20120103: MPL 2.0 is released today. FSF has added MPL 2.0 to their free licenses page with a GPL compatibility explanation.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source | 7 Comments »

Tiresome rearguard actions

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Watch out 2024!


Incorporates North Korea Mass Games by Peter Crowcroft and Hollywood Sign by Oreos, available under BY-SA (questionably in former case), but I’m claiming fair use. Result dedicated to the public domain.

Posted in Creative Commons, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Politics | 3 Comments »

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