Some thoughts on software copyright licenses -------------------------------------------- Sloum wrote recently[1] about searching for a software license that disallows commercial use of the software, and whether or not such a license could be considered a free software license. This post is not really a response to sloum, as such (I've never heard of such a license before), but rather, since the topic has come up in the phlogosphere it's prompted me to write a few thoughts I've had for quite a long time about the question of software copyright. I've long thought it kind of odd that it is widely acepted that software authors have a legal right to determine what people can and can't do with their software. If the designer and/or manufacturer of a set of carpentry tools, or a soldering iron, or a sewing machine attempted to restrict in any way the kind of items someone could manufacture with those tools, I think most people would instinctively think they were trying to exercise a level of control they were not entitled to at all. It would be just the same if the maker of a pen or a camera tried to dictate what kind of text you could write or what kind of photos you could take. Yet with software, nobody thinks it odd at all that the copyright license can impose seemingly arbitrary restrictions. In fact, I think it's kind of odd that software is copyrightable at all. I think software is perhaps totally unique amongst all other kinds of copyrightable things, in terms of what it fundamentally is. Source code is *very* different from text, music, photographs, videos, etc. because it's a thing which *functions* in some way. A software library is in many ways much closer to the carpenter's tools or other examples above than to anything else you can copyright. Copyright is not supposed to protect ideas, only verbatim expressions of them. You can't copyright a sewing machine - you could copyright the blueprints, but not the machine itself or its design. I don't think this distinction necessarily holds well for copyright. Source code is in some ways like a blueprint, but in some ways very different in that it's a kind of blueprint you can very quickly and easily and cheaply and precisely transform into the actual functioning productive thing. I have to wonder how well the legal/political types who first declared that software was copyrightable understood what they were saying. I think it's very curious that software licenses like the GPL are generally speaking extremely popular amongst a group of people with whom copyright as a principle when applied to just about anything else is often quite unpopular. Plenty of people object quite strongly on philosophical grounds to the idea of copyright, or at least argue quite strongly on practical grounds for things like drastically reduced duration of copyright (see here[2] for some links/discussion). I think there are compelling arguments to be made here, but it seems to me like not many people making thos arguments appreciate the fact that if, say, copyright were limited to a five year term (as advocated by e.g. the Swedish Pirate Party), then licenses like the GPL would "wear off" after five years, and old GPL software would essentially become public domain software. Being simultaneously in favour of "copyleft" and strong copyright reform (or even copyright abolition) seems like a somewhat confused stance to me. This is one of the reasons why, in general, I like to use very permissive licenses like the BSD license where I can. Even if I think that sharing source code and permitting the use and distribution of modifications are fine and upstanding values - and make no mistake, I do - I feel kind of uncomfortable trying to enforce those values on anybody else, even if the law gives me that power. If you take some code I've written and add a little bit more on top, that little bit of code is *yours*. You wrote it, after all. I can certainly encourage you to share it with the world, and I can certainly express disappointment if you don't, but to me that seems about the limit of what's appropriate. I quite like the sentiment expressed in the OpenBSD 4.3 release song: "freedom means you cannot dictate to anyone". I understand not everybody will agree with this, and that's fine. There is a point of view from which having access to the source code of software you use is a natural, unalienable right, and thus the GPL is not forcing people to grant that access but rather preventing them from using the illegitimate power of copyright to withold it. If you believed this, and you advocated for copyright reform or abolition and, simultaneously, some entirely new legislation which gave legal recognition to this natural right, then I guess you would be in a position that was totally internally consistent. [1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~sloum/phlog/20190318-21.txt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_copyright