Librisme et GPL : liberté, partage, connaissance ? Hypocrisie…

Ce sujet sera rédigé en plusieurs messages plutôt qu’en un seul trop long message, pour faciliter les citations des gens qui voudraient y répondre ou y poser des questions. Citer un message trop long qu’il faudra faire défiler pour y retrouver ce que l’on veut citer, n’est en effet pas pratique.

To be honest, GPL's declining popularity is not entirely surprising, and for a few reasons.

Firstly, as the open source industry has evolved, it has become clear that finding the right balance of community engagement and a business model that … y'know … actually works, is a key decision. There was a misconception in the early days of open source that, “If you build it, they will come.” Sure, they often came to use your software, but in many cases, “If you built it, they wouldn't necessarily give you any money.”

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Pour être honnête, le déclin en popularité de la GPL, n’est pas entièrement une surprise, et il y a des raisons à cela.

Tout d’abord, alors que l’industrie de l’open‑source évoluait, il est devenu évident que trouver l’équilibre entre l’engagement communautaire et un modèle économique … comment dire … qui fonctionne en vrai, est une décision clé. Il y a eu la supposition erronée au début de l’open‑source, que « si vous l’avez conçu, les gens viendront à vous ». C’est sûr, ils viennent souvent pour utiliser votre logiciel, mais dans la plupart des cas, « si vous l’avez conçu, ils ne vont pas nécessairement vous rétribuer ».

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The FUGPL License
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Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software with only one restriction. No part of it may be included in software projects that are solely distributed under strong copyleft restricted licenses. This license is *NOT* GPL compatible, and that is it's only restriction.

There otherwise exists no restrictions in using this software, including without other limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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Le « Librisme » se présente lui‑même comme le courant qui défend La liberté dans la ligne de la GPL. Ce que cela exprime, c’est qu’il est le mouvement philosophique qui accompagne et diffuse la GPL (qui est à son service, si on peut dire), ainsi que d’autres idées qui ne peuvent être strictement écrites dans un texte à valeur plus loin moins légale (*), comme l’est une licence d’utilisation.

(*) Il est possible de montrer que les éléments de la GPL, faisant référence à la liaison dynamique, sont des clauses abusives, qui si elles étaient appliquées s’apparenteraient à des droits de patente, et non‑plus à du droit d’auteur (il ne faut pas confondre les deux, le droit des brevets n’est pas le doit d’auteur). Une partie de la GPL peut être légalement défendue, plusieurs parties de celle‑ci ne le seront probablement jamais légalement.

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[…] In the mouth of the GNU GPL license opponents, such notion of strong copyleft became quickly synonym of “viral licensing”, referring to the hypothesis that any work "touching" a copyleft work (or interfacing with it) via linking becomes a kind of derivative and must preserve the copyleft permissions when distributed. This fear for “viral licensing” has probably generated more doubts and damages than benefits for many free/open source projects. Strange enough, it seems that few lawyers have explored its real validity regarding European law.
This is our purpose now.

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The unauthorised reproduction, translation, adaptation or transformation of the form of the code in which a copy of a computer program has been made available constitutes an infringement of the exclusive rights of the author. Nevertheless, circumstances may exist when such a reproduction of the code and translation of its form are indispensable to obtain the necessary information to achieve the interoperability of an independently created program with other programs. It has therefore to be considered that, in these limited circumstances only, performance of the acts of reproduction and translation by or on behalf of a person having a right to use a copy of the program is legitimate and compatible with fair practice and must therefore be deemed not to require the authorisation of the rightholder. An objective of this exception is to make it possible to connect all components of a computer system, including those of different manufacturers, so that they can work together. Such an exception to the author's exclusive rights may not be used in a way which prejudices the legitimate interests of the rightholder or which conflicts with a normal exploitation of the program.

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As a conclusion, it looks that in most cases, linking two programs or linking an existing software with your own work does not – at least in Europe – produce a derivative or extends the coverage of the linked software licence to your own work.