Respecting the Wishes of Software Authors

Software licenses are the constitution for a community. The license a group picks for their software is indicative of how they would like their community to work. GPL-using communities have one set of norms around sharing, BSD or Apache-using communities have another way of working together. That is, of course, as long as everyone using the code plays by the rules.

Basically the only organization attempting to make sure that users of GPL code respect the wishes of the authors of that code is the Software Freedom Conservancy. As well as other excellent work like providing a financial and organizational home for projects, they enforce the GPL – most recently, after five years of fruitless negotiation, in a lawsuit against VMWare, who have taken parts of Linux and put them in their proprietary ESXi product.

Whether you are a keen user of the GPL, or of BSD, or whether you don’t much care about licensing, I hope all my readers are keen that the wishes of authors of software about what happens to it, and the obligations you have if you take advantage of their hard work, are respected. The SFC is a small charity, and corporate donations have suddenly become harder to come by now they are insisting that corporations live up to their responsibilities. (How strange…) I’m proud to say Mozilla has supported SFC in the past, and I hope we will continue to do so. But please would you also consider signing up as a supporter, at the very reasonable cost of US$10 a month.

If people don’t like the terms of the GPL, they are free to write their own software to do whatever they want done. But if they use the hard work of others to save time and effort, they need to respect the wishes of those authors. SFC makes that happen; please give them your support.

2 thoughts on “Respecting the Wishes of Software Authors

  1. Well, personally I’d really rather copyright didn’t exist. This also seems to be using the natural rights argument for copyright which seems even worse than the practical one. However given there are bad laws and not much can be done about that I’m infavor of taking advantage of them when possible. Which means I prefer the GPL and like the SFC, but think the conditions making them necessary is unfortunate.

  2. No, I don’t believe in the natural rights argument for copyright. This is using a combination of the “we should obey the law” argument (see Romans 13:1) and the “do as you would be done by” argument (see Matthew 7:12).

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