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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts tagged licensing
Understanding LF's New “Community Bridge”
by on March 13, 2019
Yesterday, the Linux Foundation (LF) launched a new service, called “Community Bridge” — an ambitious platform that promises a self-service system to handle finances, address security issues, manage CLAs and license compliance, and also bring mentorship to projects. These tasks are difficult work that typically require human intervention, so we understand the allure of automating them; we and our peer organizations have long welcomed newcomers to this field and have together sought collaborative assistance for these issues. Indeed, Community Bridge's offerings bear some similarity to the work of organizations like Apache Software Foundation, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the GNOME Foundation (GF), Open Source Initiative (OSI), Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and Conservancy. People have already begun to ask us to compare this initiative to our work and the work of our peer organizations. This blog post hopefully answers those questions and anticipated similar questions.
The first huge difference (and the biggest disappointment for the entire FOSS community) is that LF's Community Bridge is a proprietary software system. §4.2 of their Platform Use Agreement requires those who sign up for this platform to agree to a proprietary software license, and LF has remained silent about the proprietary nature of the platform in its explanatory materials. The LF, as an organization dedicated to Open Source, should release the source for Community Bridge. At Conservancy, we've worked since 2012 on a Non-Profit Accounting Software system, including creating a tagging system for transparently documenting ledger transactions, and various support software around that. We and SPI both now use these methods daily. We also funded the creation of a system to manage mentorship programs, which now runs the Outreachy mentorship program. We believe fundamentally that the infrastructure we provide for FOSS fiscal sponsorship (including accounting, mentorship and license compliance) must itself be FOSS, and developed in public as a FOSS project. LF's own research already shows that transparency is impossible for systems that are not FOSS. More importantly, LF's new software could directly benefit so many organizations in our community, including not only Conservancy but also the many others (listed above) who do some form of fiscal sponsorship. LF shouldn't behave like a proprietary software company like Patreon or Kickstarter, but instead support FOSS development. Generally speaking, all Conservancy's peer organizations (listed above) have been fully dedicated to the idea that any infrastructure developed for fiscal sponsorship should itself be FOSS. LF has deviated here from this community norm by unnecessarily requiring FOSS developers to use proprietary software to receive these services, and also failing to collaborate over a FOSS codebase with the existing community of organizations. LF Executive Director Jim Zemlin has said that he “wants more participation in open source … to advance its sustainability and … wants organizations to share their code for the benefit of their fellow [hu]mankind”; we ask him to apply these principles to his own organization now.
The second difference is that LF is not a charity, but a trade association — designed to serve the common business interest of its paid members, who control its Board of Directors. This means that donations made to projects through their system will not be tax-deductible in the USA, and that the money can be used in ways that do not necessarily benefit the public good. For some projects, this may well be an advantage: not all FOSS projects operate in the public good. We believe charitable commitment remains a huge benefit of joining a fiscal sponsor like Conservancy, FSF, GF, or SPI. While charitable affiliation means there are more constraints on how projects can spend their funds, as the projects must show that their spending serves the public benefit, we believe that such constraints are most valuable. Legal requirements that assure behavior of the organization always benefits the general public are a good thing. However, some projects may indeed prefer to serve the common business interest of LF's member companies rather than the public good, but projects should note such benefit to the common business interest is mandatory on this platform — it's explicitly unauthorized to use LF's platform to engage in activities in conflict with LF’s trade association status). Furthermore, (per the FAQ) only one maintainer can administer a project's account, so the platform currently only supports the “BDFL” FOSS governance model, which has already been widely discredited. No governance check exists to ensure that the project's interests align with spending, or to verify that the maintainer acts with consent of a larger group to implement group decisions. Even worse, (per §2.3 of the Usage Agreement) terminating the relationship means ceasing use of the account; no provision allows transfer of the money somewhere else when projects' needs change.
Finally, the LF offers services that are mainly orthogonal and/or a subset of the services provided by a typical fiscal sponsor. Conservancy, for example, does work to negotiate contracts, assist in active fundraising, deal with legal and licensing issues, and various other hands-on work. LF's system is similar to Patreon and other platforms in that it is a hands-off system that takes a cut of the money and provides minimal financial services. Participants will still need to worry about forming their own organization if they want to sign contracts, have an entity that can engage with lawyers and receive legal advice for the project, work through governance issues, or the many other things that projects often want from a fiscal sponsor.
Historically, fiscal sponsors in FOSS have not treated each other as competitors. Conservancy collaborates often with SPI, FSF, and GF in particular. We refer applicant projects to other entities, including explaining to applicants that a trade association may be a better fit for their project. In some cases, we have even referred such trade-association-appropriate applicants to the LF itself, and the LF then helped them form their own sub-organizations and/or became LF Collaborative Projects. The launch of this platform, as proprietary software, without coordination with the rest of the FOSS organization community, is unnecessarily uncollaborative with our community and we therefore encourage some skepticism here. That said, this new LF system is probably just right for FOSS projects that (a) prefer to use single-point-of-failure, proprietary software rather than FOSS for their infrastructure, (b) do not want to operate in a way that is dedicated to the public good, and (c) have very minimal fiscal sponsorship needs, such as occasional reimbursements of project expenses.
Update on 2019-04-01: Community Bridge was also discussed on episode 0x65 of Free as in Freedom, which is available in mp3 format and ogg format.
Copyleft Conf Venue Announced!
by on December 12, 2018
We are excited to announce the venue we'll be using for Copyleft Conf. The one day event will take place in downtown Brussels at DigitYser, Boulevard d’Anvers 40, 1000 Bruxelles. The venue is a bit northeast of Grande Place. Participants can choose to walk, take the train to the Yser stop or use one of Brussels' many buses.
The first ever Copyleft Conf is happening in Brussels on February 4th, aka the Monday after FOSDEM. This event will provide a friendly and safe place for discussion of all aspects of copyleft -- developers, strategists, enforcement organizations, scholars and critics are all welcome.
The event starts at 9:30am and will finish at 6pm.We'll be providing coffee throughout the day and lunch for those who pre-register for the event. We will accommodate vegetarians and vegans and people with other dietary restrictions should get in touch with us. Registration will open in about a week, which should come pretty close to the date when we hope to have a preliminary schedule to share with you.
If you have questions about Copyleft Conf, including questions about attending, volunteering with or sponsoring, please email copyleftconf@sfconservancy.org
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.
CopyLeft Conf's Call for Presentations is Open!
by on October 11, 2018
The First Annual Copyleft Conference is ready to receive your proposals for twenty-five minute talks and for eighty minute discussions you would be willing to lead. The conference will be held in Brussels, on February 4th (aka the Monday after FOSDEM.)
Participants from throughout the copyleft world — developers, strategists, enforcement organizations, scholars and critics — will be welcomed for an in-depth, high bandwidth, and expert-level discussion about the day-to-day details of using copyleft licensing, obstacles facing copyleft and the future of copyleft as a strategy to advance and defend software freedom for users and developers around the world.
Since this is the very first Copyleft Conf, we are relying heavily on word-of-mouth to attract speakers and participants so we heartily encourage you to share these announcements with your friends and colleagues. We want to make sure we reach everyone who is interested in learning or sharing their knowledge. Thanks in advance for your help!
