Luis Villa wrote at 10:52 (EDT):
But in the world of actually reading and interpreting licenses,
structure matters.... I find reading/interpreting LGPL v3 maddening
for exactly this structural reason, and I am pretty sure I'm in the
majority in this area.
I would guess that by "the majority" here, you mean big law firm and/or
corporate lawyers who want to find the absolute minimum needed to comply
with the license. After almost fifteen years of dealing with such
people, I've no sympathy left for them.
There are two separate and distinct groups who read and interpret
FaiF licenses: those who read them to make sure the policy is right for
advancing software freedom, and those who try to get the bare minimum
reading so they can avoid sharing software with others. These groups
are diametrically opposed to each other. Indeed, it's impossible for
these two groups to be anything but political enemies.
In my experience that majority who are looking for the "how do I
get around this?" reading actually often also work in license drafting
processes with a hidden agenda to thwart it. This likely described
the average GPLv3 process participant, in fact.
Richard Fontana wrote at 12:32 (EDT):
> I'm curious if you have a similar criticism of the GCC
Runtime
> Library Exception (current version 3.1 at
>
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.html) though that is
> much simpler than LGPLv3. Bradley and I were both involved in
> drafting that Exception
In fact, now that Fontana brings that up, it leads directly into a great
example of my last point:
When I was part of the drafting team for the GPLv3 GCC Runtime Library
exception -- which is admittedly a complexly organized and drafted
license (maybe the most in the GPLv3 suite, in fact) -- we had a long
call with a corporate counsel of a large tech company that hates
copyleft. (Fontana, this was after you'd left the team, so you won't
recall this.)
The corporate counsel kept saying: "This exception doesn't give us the
permissions we need. As drafted, it creates risk for us because
permissions we need are missing."
We said: "Oh, we're sorry. Please propose texts that you think should
be there that give you the permissions you think are missing, because
it's likely just be an oversight on our part."
The corporate counsel replied: "The problem is that the permissions we
need aren't there."
We did this pointless loop four times, and hung up. We sent a follow up
email to ask for details, and we were ignored. At the end of the
process, the company commented that the license was unacceptable and was
incredibly risky for their business.
In short, those who are scheming to get around copyleft will say and do
just about anything to disrupt the license EXCEPT give *useful* input on
how things should be structured or stated, because their goal, of
course, is to disrupt the process. Even worse, they'll give seemingly
helpful input that is actually a trojan designed to disarm the
license so it's not really a copyleft in certain places.
In my example, the disruption and attack was pathetically obvious and
easily worked around. Others have better diplomatic skills; we thus
must be constantly vigilant. Although, I *do* think the rule formerly
known as the Harvey Birdman Rule helps on this point.
--
-- bkuhn