GPL is a license that courts have already recognized in many cases.

Not that they have much of a choice

A license is basically a contract and contracts are legally binding as long as acceptance can be proved for both sides.

As a lawyer I would not advise any client to try to challenge GPL on two grounds:

a) Infringement of contract makes you liable to compensation and gives the legal right to the other party to have a court decisions�� that forbids you to keep selling / distributing your software. If you violate the court decision that entitles the opposing party for further litigation and compensation. In some cases comes with the gift of prison time depending on national law

b) Its also an infringement on copyright which is even more litigation and much more compensations

Also from a practical point of view GPL is the only license that can really protect open source software on the premise when you have a permitting license like MIT what you do is open the door to countless of companies that want to do business with you for selling their closed source but also countless of threats. A company could easily for example take Pharo close source it and heavily upgrade , as a result many Pharo users could migrate to this heavily improved new close source Pharo essentially killing or shrinking substantially the MIT Pharo. This is actually what Pharo did for Squeak with the big difference that Pharo is still open source.

Of course MIT license is what most companies would prefer for using your code , though LGPL is also a favored choice. You can also have modified GPL license that allows its usage on closed source system which is basically what LGPL is , but with the difference you can put any term you want in it. Most popular languages come with their own license anyway.

If what you claimed was true even slightly that would mean that the law would not protect GPL, which in extension would mean no protection for licenses which in extension would mean no protection for contracts which as you can imagine is just not practical and would through the entire global commerce into a chaos, legal or non legal.

In case of Europe things are better on the legal protection front because EU law has done an excellent job at harmonizing national legislation and protecting basic legal rights.

On Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 10:27 AM stepharo <stepharo@free.fr> wrote:



Le 7/9/16 �� 08:53, Offray Vladimir Luna C��rdenas a ��crit��:

Hi,

Nice to see more diversity on license choice and projects in this community. We have the permissive MIT license by default in almost all Pharo and related project, but seeing GPL and AGPL in projects like Spec and now Territorial increase the sense of choice and engagement.

No sorry I cannot let you say such stupid statement.
Spec is not GPL. And GPL is really dangerous for image based system. It is a plague.

We do not want to force nice people (the one that could follow a license) to have to decide to use another language
just because they do not want to give their work for free.
Open source

Second you do not know what the mess it can be.

In my case as a freelancer, having such licenses as base for the code of my works has helped me against big institutions that have aggressive practices regarding "Intelectual Property" and want everything for them all the time. Even in this community we have seen some interesting work that can not be contributed back to the community until the community makes something open by default (something related Java support comes to mind).

You do not know the story behind. And all Moose is BSD and Pharo ecosystem is MIT. So you can run away with them and get rich.
Now none of them force people to open source what they are doing

Having a license that enforce reciprocity by default (GPL, AGPL) instead of "do what you want" ones (MIT, BSD) helps to keep the commons protected against predatory enclosure,

No it does not protect anything. It binds nice people to act nicely but does not do anything against assholes. So this is a lose / lose situation.

even if you're a small freelancer and the ones really interested in such enclosure can still contact the author and pay the extra price that comes with not reciprocity to the wider community.

You dream. Such license will not protect anyone.
There are millions companies out there using GPL code and not opening their work.
Any code in GPL will not be considered for anything in our community.



Thanks Hern��n,

Offray��


On 07/09/16 06:48, phil@highoctane.be wrote:
In Tiki, there has been such discussions as well.


But yeah, MIT license is the best thing :-)

Phil




On Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 12:25 AM, Hern��n Morales Durand <hernan.morales@gmail.com> wrote:

I thought for a while about the license.

Fixing the ASP loophole means trying to escape from companies using a trick to avoid returning changes to the code back to the community[1]. I agree with such position. GNU AGPL is free, copyleft, approved by OSI, FSF, and used by successful projects : MongoDB, SugarCRM, OTRS, etc. If anyone want to discuss collaboration or re-licensing, for example to monetize library services, feel free to contact me privately.

Hern��n

2016-09-06 18:03 GMT-03:00 Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com>:
Hi Hern��n,

I believe Stef was asking about the choice of picking a viral license vs the permissive MIT one that we use in code that gets into Pharo (and several other larger related projects).

Cheers,
Doru


> On Sep 6, 2016, at 10:28 PM, Hern��n Morales Durand <hernan.morales@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Stef,
>
> I used the License Differentiator tool at http://oss-watch.ac.uk/apps/licdiff/
>
> I like it because it fixes the 'ASP (application service provider) loophole' or 'privacy loophole' problem (See Choice Six in the tool)
>
> Hern��n
>
>
> 2016-09-06 16:47 GMT-03:00 stepharo <stepharo@free.fr>:
> Hi hernan
>
> why do you picked AGPL? We try to protect our community against license hell.
> Stef
> Le 6/9/16 �� 11:40, Hern��n Morales Durand a ��crit :
>>
>> Hi Stephan,
>>
>> 2016-09-06 2:52 GMT-03:00 Stephan Eggermont <stephan@stack.nl>:
>> On 06/09/16 06:24, Hern��n Morales Durand wrote:
>>
>> I am happy to announce the release of Territorial, a new Smalltalk
>> library for Geographical Information Retrieval in geopolitical objects.
>>
>> Nice. Please tell us about your license choice
>>
>>
>> License of the library is AGPL v3 (it is in the Notes and disclaimers of the manual)
>> License of the documentation is CC BY-SA 3.0
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Hern��n
>>
>> Stephan
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>

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