Licence violations and incompatibilities

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Re: Licence violations and incompatibilities

Postby Deledrius » Fri Aug 05, 2011 7:22 pm

Tsar Hoikas wrote:Some interesting reading regarding the 3ds Max plugin.

That's a pretty direct answer, if unsurprising.
> It is a good example on how dependency to non free software can
> paralyze a Free Software :-( We should always stay away from proprietary
> products.
It is a good example of how you can't pretend to use the GPL as the
best license for everything, in my opinion.

I like this. They're both right. :D
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Re: Licence violations and incompatibilities

Postby Stucuk » Fri Aug 05, 2011 11:22 pm

Deledrius wrote:I like this. They're both right. :D

First guy is wrong. Its got nothing to do with non-free software and why its the root of all evil. In that example the creators of the plugin never added an exception clause to allow 3dsMax to link to it. So its the misuse of a restrictive license which is the problem in that case.
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Re: Licence violations and incompatibilities

Postby diafero » Sat Aug 06, 2011 5:10 am

Okay, I was not aware that the GPL is *so* viral is both directions. Looks like I stand corrected. However, I can't really say I blame the GPL for it - I still like it. NVidia (and possibly 3ds max, if they got a similar clause) suck for such a stupid license clause that does not give them any more protection - nobody could GPL their code anyway - but just directly (and probably intentionally) hurts free software. So I'd rather not say the first guy is wrong, I whole-heartedly agree.
One reason more to move away from that crap.

For the matter, you are free to re-license any code I contribute to CWE under GPL with PhysX/3ds Max exception.
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Re: Licence violations and incompatibilities

Postby Stucuk » Sat Aug 06, 2011 10:09 am

diafero wrote:NVidia (and possibly 3ds max, if they got a similar clause) suck for such a stupid license clause that does not give them any more protection - nobody could GPL their code anyway - but just directly (and probably intentionally) hurts free software.

NVidia's clause does not hurt free software in any way shape or form. All it does is protect there proprietary code from being covered by a GPL like license. With the GPL, source of anything which is covered by a GPL can be requested by anyone. So technically as far as i understand someone could try and sue NVidia if they refused to give them PhysX's source code if they never had that clause(If they would succeed in suing them is another matter). You can use PhysX perfectly fine with Free software if you use a decent license which is not viral or you add an exception clause to a viral one.

According to what Hoikas Linked to earlier, they consider anything which an application links to as part of that application(Which is a stupid idea as they are completely separate things) which as far as i understand means that the GPL would cover PhysX if they didn't have that clause because of the GPL's view that PhysX would become a part of the application.
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Re: Licence violations and incompatibilities

Postby Deledrius » Sat Aug 06, 2011 12:42 pm

Stucuk wrote:
diafero wrote:NVidia (and possibly 3ds max, if they got a similar clause) suck for such a stupid license clause that does not give them any more protection - nobody could GPL their code anyway - but just directly (and probably intentionally) hurts free software.

So technically as far as i understand someone could try and sue NVidia if they refused to give them PhysX's source code if they never had that clause

No, because in this hypothetical whoever attempted to relicense nVidia's PhysX didn't have the right to do so in the first place. Only the copyright holder is legally able to dictate the terms of distribution. This third party would be the one committing infringement of nVidia's copyright by attempting to presume they could alter the terms under which the copyright holder distributes the software, not to mention violating the GPL by failing to distribute the PhysX code (which they have no access to anyway) and would be subject to whatever consequences apply to that as well.

which as far as i understand means that the GPL would cover PhysX if they didn't have that clause because of the GPL's view that PhysX would become a part of the application.

Incorrect. Cyan, who chooses the terms under which they license the code to us, can create a custom GPL derivative which states that the GPL clause which causes the issue doesn't apply under that specific usage. They are not bound by the GPL. They are binding us to the GPL when they release the code to us under that license. They can choose their own license, a premade one like the GPL, MIT, Apache, etc. where someone has done most of the work for them, or any variant in between. Typically it's easier to choose a premade one, but it is entirely within their rights to pick and choose which parts they want to apply and when should they desire to do so. In this case, they chose one that may have appeared to have all of the features they wanted, but conflicts with some obvious usage patterns in its current state.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that a custom license makes questions of compatibility with other standard licenses (including pure-GPL) a bit muddier. In theory this shouldn't be a problem if the exceptions are kept extremely limited, but it is worth considering.
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Re: Licence violations and incompatibilities

Postby Branan » Sat Aug 06, 2011 5:24 pm

I believe in order for compatibility with pure-GPL, you have to explicitly state in your custom license mods that the code can also be licensed under the standard GPL.
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Re: Licence violations and incompatibilities

Postby Deledrius » Sat Aug 06, 2011 11:29 pm

Branan wrote:I believe in order for compatibility with pure-GPL, you have to explicitly state in your custom license mods that the code can also be licensed under the standard GPL.


Heh, a sort of re-GPL GPL exception? :)
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Re: Licence violations and incompatibilities

Postby Branan » Mon Aug 08, 2011 1:29 pm

GPL-with-exception is not GPL-compatible, so I think you'd need that. Someone should ping the FSF to be sure, though. There might already be some clause in the license that handles that.
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Re: Licence violations and incompatibilities

Postby JWPlatt » Thu Sep 22, 2011 5:15 pm

JWPlatt wrote:I would appreciate it if anyone from the GoW could, before I work on it this weekend, summarize the libraries you believe need GPLv3 exceptions to distribute the client and plugin builds to make sure we're including them.

Thanks.

Reposted from:
http://forums.openuru.org/viewtopic.php?p=4846#p4846

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Re: Licence violations and incompatibilities

Postby Paradox » Thu Sep 22, 2011 8:30 pm

JWPlatt wrote:
JWPlatt wrote:I would appreciate it if anyone from the GoW could, before I work on it this weekend, summarize the libraries you believe need GPLv3 exceptions to distribute the client and plugin builds to make sure we're including them.

Thanks.

Reposted from:
http://forums.openuru.org/viewtopic.php?p=4846#p4846

Please post your contributions to the OU thread.


My apologies for sounding rude, but shouldn't you know this?

You're the people supposed to be acting as shepherds for open-source; you're the people through whom Cyan has made it clear they will be exclusively pulling fixes; you're the people that are managing all of this open-source stuff... and you don't know what the dependencies of your project are? You don't know which ones are GPL-compatible and which ones aren't?
Have any of you actually built Plasma, or have you been more interested in setting up enterprise managerial tools that most developers hate and see as a waste of time?

I realize this is a hobby, everyone is busy, etc... that includes all of us too.
I'm not sure why you seem to think "out-sourcing" things to us is a good use of our time, rather that you actually learning something about the project you're in charge of.



Not to be entirely unhelpful, the 3 big issues are:
- PhysX cannot be linked against the GPL (any version of it) with an exclusion
- Bink cannot be linked against the GPL without an exclusion
- It is impossible to have a GPL-licensed 3DS Max plugin without an exception, because it would force all of Max to be GPL

A lesser issue is OpenSSL, which only poses problems on Windows (on Linux it's considered a system library, I think Mac too but I'm not entirely sure). It's probably best to explicitly add an exception allowing linking against OpenSSL just to prevent any issues from cropping up.
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