News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on If software companies ran the country (1987). Parent comment

Re:If software companies ran the country (1987) by kmeisthax on Monday November 15, 2021 @09:49AM (#29228026)
Well, assuming this isn't an editorial mistake (as others have mentioned), this isn't entirely ironic. It's entirely reasonable to argue that ordinary copyright on creative works is fine, but software copyright goes too far. I tend to agree: software has several qualities that make it a poor fit for the copyright regime, especially with Disney and Germany pushing for longer and longer terms. In fact, it's where I point to when people ask when and why copyright went from an obscure regulation on publishers to an all-encompassing leviathan.

Remember that even RMS/the FSF[0] follows this logic somewhat[1]. The GFDL is quite possibly one of the worst licenses you can choose for Free Software documentation, specifically because Stallman wanted the ability to force GNU-and-Linux distributions to ship FSF political screeds along with their software documentation. It's very restrictive and the few people distributing actually-Free content with it switched to Creative Commons the moment they could[2]. You can license a document under GFDL without Invariant Sections or Cover Texts, but most people just use CC-BY-SA instead.

[0] Given recent events I consider them synonyms.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.h...

[2] Notably, Wikipedia, who had to beg the FSF for a GFDL update to port their content to Creative Commons.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:If software companies ran the country (1987) by zinekeller on Monday November 15, 2021 @11:59AM (#29229548)
> Notably, Wikipedia, who had to beg the FSF for a GFDL update to port their content to Creative Commons.

This part of GFDL sums it up:

11. RELICENSING

"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.

"CC-BY-SA" means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco, California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.

"Incorporate" means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.

An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.

The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.

[ Parent | on HN ]