Some thoughts on software copyright licenses
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Sloum wrote recently[1] about searching for a software license that
disallows commercial use of the software, and whether or not such a
license could be considered a free software license. This post is
not really a response to sloum, as such (I've never heard of such
a license before), but rather, since the topic has come up in the
phlogosphere it's prompted me to write a few thoughts I've had for
quite a long time about the question of software copyright.
I've long thought it kind of odd that it is widely acepted that
software authors have a legal right to determine what people
can and can't do with their software. If the designer and/or
manufacturer of a set of carpentry tools, or a soldering iron, or a
sewing machine attempted to restrict in any way the kind of items
someone could manufacture with those tools, I think most people
would instinctively think they were trying to exercise a level of
control they were not entitled to at all. It would be just the
same if the maker of a pen or a camera tried to dictate what kind
of text you could write or what kind of photos you could take.
Yet with software, nobody thinks it odd at all that the copyright
license can impose seemingly arbitrary restrictions.
In fact, I think it's kind of odd that software is copyrightable
at all. I think software is perhaps totally unique amongst
all other kinds of copyrightable things, in terms of what it
fundamentally is. Source code is *very* different from text, music,
photographs, videos, etc. because it's a thing which *functions*
in some way. A software library is in many ways much closer to the
carpenter's tools or other examples above than to anything else
you can copyright. Copyright is not supposed to protect ideas,
only verbatim expressions of them. You can't copyright a sewing
machine - you could copyright the blueprints, but not the machine
itself or its design. I don't think this distinction necessarily
holds well for copyright. Source code is in some ways like a
blueprint, but in some ways very different in that it's a kind of
blueprint you can very quickly and easily and cheaply and precisely
transform into the actual functioning productive thing. I have to
wonder how well the legal/political types who first declared that
software was copyrightable understood what they were saying.
I think it's very curious that software licenses like the GPL are
generally speaking extremely popular amongst a group of people
with whom copyright as a principle when applied to just about
anything else is often quite unpopular. Plenty of people object
quite strongly on philosophical grounds to the idea of copyright,
or at least argue quite strongly on practical grounds for things
like drastically reduced duration of copyright (see here[2] for
some links/discussion). I think there are compelling arguments to
be made here, but it seems to me like not many people making thos
arguments appreciate the fact that if, say, copyright were limited
to a five year term (as advocated by e.g. the Swedish Pirate Party),
then licenses like the GPL would "wear off" after five years, and
old GPL software would essentially become public domain software.
Being simultaneously in favour of "copyleft" and strong copyright
reform (or even copyright abolition) seems like a somewhat confused
stance to me.
This is one of the reasons why, in general, I like to use very
permissive licenses like the BSD license where I can. Even if
I think that sharing source code and permitting the use and
distribution of modifications are fine and upstanding values -
and make no mistake, I do - I feel kind of uncomfortable trying
to enforce those values on anybody else, even if the law gives me
that power. If you take some code I've written and add a little
bit more on top, that little bit of code is *yours*. You wrote
it, after all. I can certainly encourage you to share it with the
world, and I can certainly express disappointment if you don't, but
to me that seems about the limit of what's appropriate. I quite
like the sentiment expressed in the OpenBSD 4.3 release song:
"freedom means you cannot dictate to anyone".
I understand not everybody will agree with this, and that's fine.
There is a point of view from which having access to the source code
of software you use is a natural, unalienable right, and thus the
GPL is not forcing people to grant that access but rather preventing
them from using the illegitimate power of copyright to withold it.
If you believed this, and you advocated for copyright reform or
abolition and, simultaneously, some entirely new legislation which
gave legal recognition to this natural right, then I guess you
would be in a position that was totally internally consistent.
[1]
gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~sloum/phlog/20190318-21.txt
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_copyright
