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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts tagged GPL
Do You Know Where Your Code Came From? If You Don't Have Source You Aren't Secure
by on April 4, 2019
I sometimes work for Conservancy assisting in their compliance work. Conservancy follows the Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement, enforcement principles published by Conservancy and the Free Software Foundation. As the process goes, Conservancy receives complaints from users about products whose sellers aren't meeting their GPL license obligations and Conservancy may investigate. Many of these complaints are for hardware devices with embedded code. The complaints are almost always are that there is free software on the device but that the source code is not available.
Conservancy will purchase the complained-of device and independently determine whether or not there is a GPL violation, including requesting the source code. This is where the rubber meets the road, particularly for embedded devices. In phone calls with the hardware manufacturer, the manufacturer will almost always say that they don't have the code on hand and need to get it from their factory or vendor.
When I hear this, I want to gasp out loud. I'm not gasping because I find the non-compliance so surprising (it's not), but that a manufacturer is shipping a device that it has not independently confirmed was manufactured as spec'd. A manufacturer designs a device, say a home security camera, and has outsourced the manufacturing to a factory. The factory may have subcontracted with someone else for the component, who may have contracted with yet another company for the firmware. Yet despite the length and opaqueness of the supply chain, the companies we buy from are not doing any due dligence on the products they are selling. When a company tells me they don't have the source code available, I add them to the list in my head of brands I will not buy.
This is not a trivial oversight. Doorbell cameras, security cameras, televisions, baby monitors, and home audio equipment have a view into the most intimate parts of our lives, and yet the manufacturers are not doing everything they can to ensure that our private lives stay private. The component manufacturer, the firmware manufacturer, the factory, or all of them, could be adding malicious code to the device and the vendor has not taken the simplest step of verifying the software on the device does only what it is supposed to do and nothing more.
And it's an easy problem to solve. All the company needs is the source code. There is now even a free software project, Reproducible Builds, that can be used to verify that the source code provided compiles to exactly the object code found on the device.
And guess what? By performing the far more critical task of ensuring that a manufactured device has not been compromised, the source code compliance problem has been solved too.
Thoughts on IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat
by on October 31, 2018
There’s been quite a stir in our communities following the announcement that IBM is acquiring Red Hat. As I considered the announcement, one part of the email to employees by Jim Whitehurst posted on the Red Hat blog really struck me:
I appreciate that everyone will experience a range of emotions as a result of this news. Excited, anxious, surprised, fear of the unknown, including new challenges and working relationships - these are all ways I would describe my emotions. What I know is that we will continue to focus on growing our culture as part of a new organization. We will continue to focus on the success of our customers. We will continue to nurture our relationships with partners. Collaboration, transparency, participation, and meritocracy - these values make us Red Hat and they are not changing. In fact, I hope we will help bring this culture across all of IBM.
In addition to the normal anxiety, surprise and fear experienced by employees of companies in the wake of an announcement of a merger, takeover or ordinary reorganization, this transaction will also reverberate through the community outside of the company. Free software contributors across many communities and industries are feeling some of the same apprehension and unease that ordinarily would be reserved for employees.
I wish IBM and Red Hat luck, and I’m optimistic that the partnership will yield good things for both companies and their employees. I hope that following the acquisition, Red Hat is able to maintain its special relationship to the free and open source communities it shepherds, and that its employees continue to feel empowered to support critical free software solutions in a community-focused way. I also hope that in its announcement to keep Red Hat its own unit within IBM is an indication of IBM’s support of Red Hat’s unique business and that the deal does wind up bringing that culture to more of IBM. While some folks at IBM are important contributors to free software, IBM’s is primarily a culture of proprietary software and Red Hat’s is one of open source, so in my view this solution is likely to yield the most success anyway.
I’ve heard people imagining the best from this deal, and also people imagining the worst. The one thing everyone can agree on is that there’s a lot of uncertainty, despite whatever reassurances are contained in corporate messaging. Because of this, I think it’s a good time to remind everyone of the ways we can protect ourselves now and in the future from these kinds of uncertainties related to changes in ownership, structure or motivations of corporate players in free and open source software:
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Use copyleft. Quite a lot of the software projects that Red Hat plays a critical role in are licensed under a version of the GPL. When we use strong copyleft we set the ground rules for corporate actors to participate with each other and with the public. We get a level playing field and assurance that companies will be less incentivized to go their own way. (We also get other good benefits like the right to the source code, allowing us to be in control of the technology we rely on.)
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Support strong charities. Nonprofits, and in particular charitable nonprofits, keep the community’s interests at the forefront. They can serve as copyright aggregators in a more trusted way, facilitate cooperation of different stakeholders and function in a variety of ways to forward the long term interest of software freedom. The more we invest in our critical foundations, the less vulnerable we are to changes in corporate actors. The stronger foundations like GNOME, Conservancy and the FSF are, the easier it is for communities to weather a new direction from a prominent company.
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Encourage diversely held interests. Making sure that interests are not aggregated in single for-profit actors insulates communities against a change in ownership of a company. For effective success in using copyleft, copyrights must not only be with for-profit companies but have substantial copyright holding from charities and individuals. Also, technical leadership should include actors from different types of entities. When copyrights are held by many actors in the field (or by charitable nonprofits), it’s much harder to relicense projects as proprietary or on otherwise less ideal terms, and copyleft enforcement is a community-driven rather than for-profit activity. When care of the technical direction of a project isn’t significantly concentrated in one company, free software projects are more robust. Development may be slower with community-led contribution, but we can have greater confidence about the stability of the project and the community.
The interests of companies are not always aligned with the free software community or the public. Companies that seem to be in one stable condition today may change dramatically tomorrow. While I expect Red Hat to flourish under IBM ownership, the acquisition is a good example of the kinds of changes we must be prepared for down the road, whether it be with Red Hat or any of the other companies on which we’ve come to rely.
Toward Community-Oriented, Public & Transparent Copyleft Policy Planning
by on October 16, 2018
More than 15 years ago, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community activists successfully argued that licensing proliferation was a serious threat to the viability of FOSS. We convinced companies to end the era of “vanity” licenses. Different charities — from the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to the Apache Software Foundation — all agreed we were better off with fewer FOSS licenses. We de-facto instituted what my colleague Richard Fontana once called the “Rule of Three” — assuring that any potential FOSS license should be met with suspicion unless (a) the OSI declares that it meets their Open Source Definition, (b) the FSF declares that it meets their Free Software Definition, and (c) the Debian Project declares that it meets their Debian Free Software Guidelines. The work for those organizations quelled license proliferation from radioactive threat to safe background noise. Everyone thought the problem was solved. Pointless license drafting had become a rare practice, and updated versions of established licenses were handled with public engagement and close discussion with the OSI and other license evaluation experts.
Sadly, the age of license proliferation has returned. It's harder to stop this time, because this isn't merely about corporate vanity licenses. Companies now have complex FOSS policy agendas, and those agendas are not to guarantee software freedom for all. While it is annoying that our community must again confront an old threat, we are fortunate the problem is not hidden: companies proposing their own licenses are now straightforward about their new FOSS licenses' purposes: to maximize profits.
Open-in-name-only licenses are now common, but seem like FOSS licenses only to the most casual of readers. We've succeeded in convincing everyone to “check the OSI license list before you buy”. We can therefore easily dismiss licenses like Common Clause merely by stating they are non-free/non-open-source and urging the community to avoid them. But, the next stage of tactics have begun, and they are harder to combat. What happens when for-profit companies promulgate their own hyper-aggressive (quasi-)copyleft licenses that seek to pursue the key policy goal of “selling proprietary licenses” over “defending software freedom”? We're about to find out, because, yesterday, MongoDB declared themselves the arbiter of what “strong copyleft” means.
Understanding MongoDB's Business Model
To understand the policy threat inherent in MongoDB's so-called “Server Side Public License, Version 1”, one must first understand the fundamental business model for MongoDB and companies like them. These companies use copyleft for profit-making rather than freedom-protecting. First, they require full control (either via ©AA or CLA) of all copyrights in the work, and second, they offer two independent lines of licensing. Publicly, they provide the software under the strongest copyleft license available. Privately, the same (or secretly improved) versions of the software are available under fully proprietary terms. In theory, this could be merely selling exceptions: a benign manner of funding more Free Software code — giving the proprietary option only to those who request it. In practice — in all examples that have been even mildly successful (such as MongoDB and MySQL) — this mechanism serves as a warped proprietary licensing shake-down: “Gee, it looks like you're violating the copyleft license. That's a shame. I guess you just need to abandon the copyleft version and buy a proprietary license from us to get yourself out of this jam, since we don't plan to reinstate any lost rights and permissions under the copyleft license.” In other words, this structure grants exclusive and dictatorial power to a for-profit company as the arbiter of copyleft compliance. Indeed, we have never seen any of these companies follow or endorse the Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement. While it has made me unpopular with some, I still make no apologies that I have since 2004 consistently criticized this “proprietary relicensing” business model as “nefarious”, once I started hearing regular reports that MySQL AB (now Oracle) asserts GPL violations against compliant uses merely to scare users into becoming “customers”. Other companies, including MongoDB, have since emulated this activity.
Why Seek Even Stronger Copyleft?
The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) has done a wonderful job defending the software freedom of community-developed projects like Mastodon and Mediagoblin. So, we should answer with skepticism a solitary for-profit company coming forward to claim that “Affero GPL has not resulted in sufficient legal incentives for some of the largest users of infrastructure software … to participate in the community. Many open source developers are struggling with a similar reality”. If the last sentence were on Wikipedia, I'd edit it to add a Citation Needed tag, as I know of no multi-copyright-held or charity-based AGPL'd project that has “struggled with this reality”. In fact, it's only a “reality” for those that engage in proprietary relicensing. Eliot Horowitz, co-founder of MongoDB and promulgator of their new license, neglects to mention that.
The most glaring problem with this license, which Horowitz admits in his OSI license-review list post, is that there was no community drafting process. Instead, a for-profit company, whose primary goal is to use copyleft as a weapon against the software-sharing community for the purpose of converting that “community” into paying customers, published this license as a fait accompli without prior public discussion of the license text.
If this action were an isolated incident by one company, ignoring it is surely the best response. Indeed, I urged everyone to simply ignore the Commons Clause. Now, we see a repackaging of the Commons Clause into a copyleft-like box (with reuse of Commons Clause's text such as “whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software”). Since both licenses were drafted in secret, we cannot know if the reuse of text was simply because the same lawyer was employed to write both, or if MongoDB has joined a broader and more significant industry-wide strategy to replace existing FOSS licensing with alternatives that favor businesses over individuals.
The Community Creation Process Matters
Admittedly, the history of copyleft has been one of slowly evolving community-orientation. GPLv1 and GPLv2 were drafted in private, too, by Richard Stallman and FSF's (then) law firm lawyer, Jerry Cohen. However, from the start, the license steward was not Stallman himself, nor the law firm, but the FSF, a 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to serve the public good. As such, the FSF made substantial efforts in the GPLv3 process to reorient the drafting of copyleft licenses as a public policy and legislative process. Like all legislative processes, GPLv3 was not ideal — and I was even personally miffed to be relegated to the oft-ignored “GPLv3 Discussion Committee D” — but the GPLv3 process was undoubtedly a step forward in FOSS community license drafting. Mozilla Corporation made efforts for community collaboration in redrafting the MPL, and specifically included the OSI and the FSF (arbiters of the Open Source Definition and Free Software Definition (respectively)) in MPL's drafting deliberations. The modern acceptable standard is a leap rather than a step forward: a fully public, transparent drafting process with a fully public draft repository, as the copyleft-next project has done. I think we should now meet with utmost suspicion any license that does not use copyleft-next's approach of “running licensing drafting as a Free Software project”.
I was admittedly skeptical of that approach at first. What I have seen six years since Richard Fontana started copyleft-next is that, simply put, the key people who are impacted most fundamentally by a software license are mostly likely to be aware of, and engage in, a process if it is fully public, community-oriented, and uses community tools, like Git.
Like legislation, the policies outlined in copyleft licenses impact the general public, so the general public should be welcomed to the drafting. At Conservancy, we don't draft our own licenses0, so our contracts with software developers and agreements with member projects state that the licenses be both “OSI-approved Open Source” and “FSF-approved GPL-compatible Free Software”. However, you can imagine that Conservancy has a serious vested interest in what licenses are ultimately approved by the OSI and the FSF. Indeed, with so much money flowing to software developers bound by those licenses, our very charitable mission could be at stake if OSI and the FSF began approving proprietary licenses as Open, Free, and/or GPL-compatible. I want to therefore see license stewards work, as Mozilla did, to make the vetting process easier, not harder, for these organizations.
A community drafting process allows everyone to vet the license text early and often, to investigate the community and industry impact of the license, and to probe the license drafter's intent through the acceptance and rejection of proposed modified text (ideally through a DVCS). With for-profit actors seeking to gain policy control of fundamental questions such as “what is strong copyleft?”, we must demand full drafting transparency and frank public discourse.
The Challenge Licensing Arbiters Face
OSI, FSF, and Debian have a huge challenge before them. Historically, the FSF was the only organization who sought to push the boundary of strong copyleft. (Full disclosure: I created the Affero clause while working for the FSF in 2002, inspired by Henry Poole's useful and timely demands for a true network services copyleft.) Yet, the Affero clause was itself controversial. Many complained that it changed the fundamental rules of copyleft. While “triggered only on distribution, not modification” was a fundamental rule of the regular GPL, we as a community — over time and much public debate — decided the Affero clause is a legitimate copyleft, and AGPL was declared Open Source by OSI and DFSG-free by Debian.
That debate was obviously framed by the FSF. The FSF, due to public pressure, compromised by leaving the AGPL as an indefinite fork of the GPL (i.e., the FSF did not include the Affero clause in plain GPL. While I personally lobbied (from GPLv3 Discussion Committee D and elsewhere) for the merger of AGPL and GPL during the GPLv3 drafting process, I respect the decision of the FSF, which was informed not by my one voice, but the voices of the entire community.
Furthermore, the FSF is a charity, chartered to serve the public good and the advancement of software freedom for users and developers. MongoDB is a for-profit company, chartered to serve the wallets of its owners. While MongoDB employees1 (like those of any other company) should be welcomed on equal footing to the other unaffiliated individuals, and representatives of companies, charities, and trade-associations to the debate about the future of copyleft, we should not accept their active framing of that debate. By submitting this license to OSI for approval without any public community discussion, and without any discussion whatsoever with the key charities in the community, is unacceptable. The OSI should now adopt a new requirement for license approval — namely, that licenses without a community-oriented drafting process should be rejected for the meta-reason of “non-transparent drafting”, regardless of their actual text. This will have the added benefit of forcing future license drafters to come to OSI, on their public mailing lists, before the license is finalized. That will save OSI the painstaking work of walking back bad license drafts, which has in recent years consumed much expert time by OSI's volunteers.
Welcoming All To Public Discussion
Earlier this year, Conservancy announced our plans to host and organize the first annual CopyleftConf. We decided to do this because we seek to create a truly neutral, open, friendly, and welcoming forum for discussion about the past and future of copyleft as a strategy for defending software freedom. We had no idea when we first mentioned the possibility of running CopyleftConf (during the Organizers' Panel at the end of the Legal and Policy DevRoom at FOSDEM 2018 in February 2018) that multiple companies would come forward and seek to control the microphone on the future of copyleft. Now that MongoDB has done so, I'm very glad that the conference is already organized and on the calendar before they did so.
Despite my criticisms of MongoDB, I welcome Eliot Horowitz, Heather Meeker (the law firm lawyer who drafted MongoDB's new license and the Commons Clause), or anyone else who was involved in the creation of MongoDB's new license to submit a talk. Conservancy will be announcing soon the independent group of copyleft experts (and critics!) who will make up the Program Committee and will independently evaluate the submissions. Even if a talk is rejected, I welcome rejected proposers to attend and speak about their views in the hallway track and the breakout sessions.
One of the most important principles in copyleft policy that our community has learned is that commercial, non-commercial, and hobbyist activity3 should have equal footing with regard to rights assured by the copyleft licenses themselves. There is no debate about that; we all agree that copyleft codebases become meeting places for hobbyists, companies, charities, and trade associations to work together toward common goals and in harmony and software freedom. With this blog post, I call on everyone to continue on the long road to applying that same principle to the meta-level of how these licenses are drafted and how they are enforced. While we have done some work recently on the latter, not enough has been done on the former. MongoDB's actions today give us an opportunity to begin that work anew.
0 While Conservancy does not draft any main FOSS license texts, Conservancy does help with the drafting of additional permissions upon the request of our member projects. Note that additional permissions (sometimes called license exceptions) grant permission to engage in activities that the main license would otherwise prohibit. As such, by default, additional permissions can only make a copyleft license weaker, never stronger.
1, 3 I originally had “individual actors” here instead of “hobbyist activity”, and additionally had expressed poorly the idea of welcoming individuals representing all types of entities to the discussion. The miscommunication in my earlier text gave one person the wrong impression that I believe the rights of companies should be equal to the rights of individuals. I fundamentally believe that companies and organizations should not have rights of personhood and I've updated the text in an effort to avoid such confusions.
Software Freedom Ensures the True Software Commons
by on August 22, 2018
Update (2023-11-14): Not long after publication of the post below about the so-called “Commons Clause”, Neo4j utilized that Clause to add a “further restriction” to the Affero General Public License, Version 3 (“AGPLv3”). When John Mark Suhy tried to remove it, as permitted and encouraged by AGPLv3 itself, Neo4j sued John Mark and his small company (PureThink). That case sadly resulted in multiple ill-informed judgments forbidding such removal. As SFC's Policy Fellow, I filed an expert report on the case — explaining my first-hand knowledge about the drafting of the relevant “further restriction” removal clause, but, alas, the Court has not changed its view. The case is, however, ongoing, so please watch SFC's website for updates.
The SFC remains dismayed that the proprietary “AGPLv3-only WITH Commons-Clause” has been allowed to stand as valid since 2018. If the SFC were the copyright holder of the text of the AGPLv3, or the trademark holder of the license's name, we would have intervened in this case to clarify these matters for the Court. Since the SFC did not create the AGPLv3 (my personal involvement with AGPLv3 drafting was not as an SFC employee), filing the expert report was the only action that SFC could take to assist in this matter. However, going forward, we do encourage anyone facing a “further restrictions” issue with copyleft license to contact us for support — so that those who care about the future of copyleft can coordinate a response together.
(Original post follows:)
Proprietary software has always been about a power relationship. Copyright and other legal systems give authors the power to decide what license to choose, and usually, they choose a license that favors themselves and takes rights and permissions away from others.
The so-called “Commons Clause” purposely confuses and conflates many issues. The initiative is backed by FOSSA, a company that sells materiel in the proprietary compliance industrial complex. This clause recently made news again since other parties have now adopted this same license.
This proprietary software license, which is not Open Source and does not
respect the four freedoms of Free Software, seeks to hide a power imbalance
ironically behind the guise “Open Source sustainability”. Their
argument, once you look past their assertion that the only way to save Open
Source is to not do open source
, is quite plain: If we can't make money as
quickly and as easily as we'd like with this software, then we have to make
sure no one else can as well
.
These observations are not new. Software freedom advocates have always admitted that if your primary goal is to make money, proprietary software is a better option. It's not that you can't earn a living writing only Free Software; it's that proprietary software makes it easier because you have monopolistic power, granted to you by a legal system ill-equipped to deal with modern technology. In my view, it's a power which you don't deserve — that allows you to restrict others.
Of course, we all want software freedom to exist and survive sustainably. But the environmental movement has already taught us that unbridled commerce and conspicuous consumption is not sustainable. Yet, companies still adopt strategies like this Commons Clause to prioritize rapid growth and revenue that the proprietary software industry expects, claiming these strategies bolster the Commons (even if it is a “partial commons in name only”). The two goals are often just incompatible.
Here at Conservancy, we ask our projects to be realistic about revenue. We don't typically see Conservancy projects grow at rapid rates. They grow at slow and steady rates, but they grow better, stronger, and more diverse because they take the time to invite everyone to get involved. The software takes longer to mature, but when it does it's more robust and survives longer.
I'll take a bet with anyone who'd like. Let's pick five projects under the Affero GPL and five projects under the Commons Clause, and then let's see which ones survive longer as vibrant communities with active codebases and diverse contributors.
Finally, it's not surprising that the authors chose the name “Commons”. Sadly, “commons” has for many years been a compromised term, often used by those who want to promote licenses or organizational models that do not guarantee all four freedoms inherent in software freedom. Proprietary software is the ultimate tragedy of the software commons, and while it's clever rhetoric for our opposition to claim that they can make FOSS sustainable by proprietarizing it, such an argument is also sophistry.
