{"id":1350,"date":"2009-10-26T08:51:52","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T13:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1350"},"modified":"2010-07-18T20:28:50","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T01:28:50","slug":"hacker-superstitions-about-software-licensing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1350","title":{"rendered":"Hacker superstitions about software licensing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hackers have a lot of odd superstitions about software licensing.  I was reminded of this recently when a project maintainer asked me whether he needed to get a sign-off from each and every one of his contributors before switching from Apache v1 to Apache v2.  Here&#8217;s  what I told him:<\/p>\n<p>My opinion is this.  Under U.S. law &#8212; and I believe European codes are not different in this respect, because both are controlled by the Berne convention &#8212; a license change on a collection is grounds for protest or legal action only if the rights of the contributors are materially affected by the change.  That is, a court would have to be persuaded that the change caused a monetary loss or at least damage to a contributor&#8217;s public reputation.  If there is no such possibility, then there is no harm and no grounds for complaint.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>It is clear that there is such a claim when a license is changed from open source to proprietary, or from proprietary to open source, without the author&#8217;s consent (the legal categories that apply are &#8220;unjust enrichment&#8221; and perhaps &#8220;conversion&#8221;). But no such claim can plausibly be made about Apache v1 to v2.  A court would laugh at you if you tried.  The applicable rule in English and American common law is called &#8220;De minimis non curat lex&#8221; &#8211; &#8220;The law does not concern itself with trifles.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I think the closest an open-source license change might come to meeting the &#8220;materially-affected&#8221; test would be a change from an infectious license like GPL to a non-infectious one.  Even that, I think, is doubtful.<\/p>\n<p>Hackers have some weird superstitions in this area &#8211; they behave as though they think modifying a license even trivially is some sort of soul-stealing evil voodoo against the person who attached it, and they think the law treats license attachments as sacred and immutable.  It doesn&#8217;t &#8211; certainly not for collective works.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m telling you that you may have gone beyond what the law requires by asking about the GPL-to-Apache-v1 license change, and you are <em>certainly<\/em> beyond it in worrying about Apache v1 to v2,<\/p>\n<p>I think you did right in respecting hacker customs by going beyond the law in the first case, but to worry about the second would be excessive.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Yes, the maintainer had previously changed the project from GPL to Apache v1.  Then, another project that he wanted to amalgamate code with switched to Apache v2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hackers have a lot of odd superstitions about software licensing. I was reminded of this recently when a project maintainer asked me whether he needed to get a sign-off from each and every one of his contributors before switching from Apache v1 to Apache v2. Here&#8217;s what I told him: My opinion is this. Under&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1350\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Hacker superstitions about software licensing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1350"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2254,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions\/2254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}