Re:We Love GPLv3, but Are Switching License to Apache 2.0
by kmeisthax on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @01:37AM
(#25355960)
You have the market forces backwards. People don't avoid the lockouts, the lockouts shape people into a particular behavior. For example, look at Apple's ridiculous levels of anti-repair nonsense - it is designed specifically to make it harder for non-Apple technicians to properly repair a device. These lockouts have legal force thanks to... rather prevalent misreadings of DMCA 1201 that make large companies unwilling to design circumvention tools for these sorts of things.
Granted, all of these are legal problems that need to be remedied with judicious case law and acts of Congress. However, so is the concept of software copyrightability itself. (CONTU fucked up, software should have been sui generis.) The whole point of the GPL was to legally construct something like a public domain dedication that subsequent derivative works couldn't reverse. The idea was that software would always serve the user (or be modifiable to do so). If you look at the GPL in that light, TiVoization is a clear circumvention of licensing intent.
Given that the FSF came first, I'm not entirely sure I'm OK with calling anti-TiVo a "short-term" concern. It's more like protecting the users of the software and ensuring developers are able to collaborate under equitable terms are both long-term concerns that are occasionally in conflict with one another.
(FWIW, most of those lockouts wouldn't actually qualify for 1201 protection in isolation. However, they often are tied to systems that would. Nobody builds a separate repair lockout and DRM system - they build one system that prohibits both use cases. Even when the law agrees that you're allowed to break the part of the lock that keeps you from swapping parts on a tractor, it doesn't let you distribute the tools to do so if that lockout also enforces a copyright owner's licensing intent. So, for example, it's legal to jailbreak a phone to make Touch ID work, but that jailbreaking tool you used is still illegal because someone might use it to pirate iOS games.)
Granted, all of these are legal problems that need to be remedied with judicious case law and acts of Congress. However, so is the concept of software copyrightability itself. (CONTU fucked up, software should have been sui generis.) The whole point of the GPL was to legally construct something like a public domain dedication that subsequent derivative works couldn't reverse. The idea was that software would always serve the user (or be modifiable to do so). If you look at the GPL in that light, TiVoization is a clear circumvention of licensing intent.
Given that the FSF came first, I'm not entirely sure I'm OK with calling anti-TiVo a "short-term" concern. It's more like protecting the users of the software and ensuring developers are able to collaborate under equitable terms are both long-term concerns that are occasionally in conflict with one another.
(FWIW, most of those lockouts wouldn't actually qualify for 1201 protection in isolation. However, they often are tied to systems that would. Nobody builds a separate repair lockout and DRM system - they build one system that prohibits both use cases. Even when the law agrees that you're allowed to break the part of the lock that keeps you from swapping parts on a tractor, it doesn't let you distribute the tools to do so if that lockout also enforces a copyright owner's licensing intent. So, for example, it's legal to jailbreak a phone to make Touch ID work, but that jailbreaking tool you used is still illegal because someone might use it to pirate iOS games.)