jehanne.io
3 votes c/freepost Posted by Shamar — 3 votes, 13 commentsSource
  1. Organizations may copy and/or convey the Hack and its Source on behalf of
    their members and under this License. No other permission is granted
    to organizations.

Is the license non-free then?

Is there anything that a member of the organization cannot do to benefit the organization?
To me, if the answer is “no”, the license is free. And it’s “no”.

The intent of that provision was to balance the power between corporations and hackers that work for them while not blocking organizations like Debian to distribute the software.
However after a long discussion on Debian Legal, it has been clarified that whatever the text, Debian wouldn’t accept it.

Thus, I’m considering to completely remove organizations in the license because of this: there’s no real advantage for hackers to give rights to organizations since members can always do everything for them but their conscience can keep leaders in check.

But I don’t understand what your goal is with this license. If they took your code without attribution, it’s not any GPL shortcoming. In fact, they violated the terms by not giving attribution (and perhaps also by changing license as well). How can a new license fix this?

it’s not any GPL shortcoming

In a way it is: afaik, I would have to sue Google instead of the engineer that did the violation because he was working for them.

The Hacking License does not grant many permissions to organizations and for sure not the right to modify the software. If the Hacking License was the license of Harvey, I would have to sue the engineer and Google couldn’t modify the software without clearly violating the license. With GPL this is entirely a different matter.

I’ve never heard of HarveyOS.

This was a blatant violation of the GNU GPL (version 2) from a member of Software Freedom Conservancy

Who violated the license? SFC or Google?

A Google engineer removed my name from the project (the attribution) without removing the code. AFAIK this means I should have sued Google.

As described in the article on medium, SFC was informed soon.

Harvey git rebased the repository to completely remove my contributions (while, when they said they prefer to remove my contribution instead of restoring my copyright, I asked for a simpler and more transparent git revert-based process) but ultimately some of my patches ended in the repository anyway.

we can’t trust GNU licenses, as it’s violated by SFC members without any issue

GNU, SFC, and SFC members are all completely separated organizations. “we can’t trust GNU licenses” is a very bold statement: if somebody used your code without attribution is their fault, it’s not a defect of the GPL. Since Harvey is one of their members, has the SFC looked into the issue and what is their conclusion?

It is a very bold statement, GPL has also been tried in court. Even if they are violating it knowingly that doesn’t delegitimize the GPL itself.

It has been tried in court by SFC, which looks often quite patient with big corporations.

For example Google is a Platinum sponsor of the CopyleftConf: even if they didn’t know about all of this (and they know, as I informed them personally back when the violation occurred), it’s like if Malboro was Platinum sponsor on a conference about tobacco regulations or NRA was a Platinum sponsor on a conference about gun regulation.
Google is structurally incompatible with strong copylefts: to gain data they need to control (and execute) the software.

So if we cannot trust SFC, the main advantage of the GPL (the fact that it has been tried in court) stop to be relevant and it becomes concretely unenforceable against big corporations.

What kernel is Jehanne using?

Its own kernel.

Right now, it’s a fork of Charles Forsyth’s Plan9-9k, but this might change in the future.

Well, the way Harvey managed this affair taught me a valuable lesson.

There is no such thing like FLOSS.

Free Software and Open Source Software are completely different things.

Free Software feels proud of each person that contributes.
Whatever the license, a Free Software community will be very happy to add your name to their code base. Because you studied and changed the code.
You made it useful. You are a sign of honor.
They trust you. And respect you.

On the other hand, Open Source managers are eager to take your code.
But while your code becomes their asset, your copyright is a liability.

I like this passage. But is a new (not free?) license the the right way of coping with this disappointment?

Why “not free”?
It matches all DFSG and even the three corner-case tests. It also matches the OSD (but I don’t care much about OSI, actually).

But is a new [..] license the the right way of coping with this disappointment?

The Hacking License was inspired by this incident, but it has a wider goal and different advantages/trade offs over all other copyleft licenses.