Re: What is the "open web" ?

On 6/5/2013 5:08 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org> wrote:
>> EME, for example, might not be implementable in GPLv3.  But I wasn't aware
>> that it was not implementable in other open source licenses such as Apache
>> or MPL (or even GPLv2 for that matter).  What am I missing?
> That Open Source and Free Software are about downstream freedoms.
>
> Some licenses don't account for non-copyright restrictions on those
> freedoms, because the licenses predate the use of other restrictions
> (Tivoization in the case of GPLv2) or because the initial licensor
> holds no patents and the law only applies copyright by default, so the
> initial feels no need to release recipients of patent disadvantages.
> Yet, compatibility with a license that fails to account for
> non-copyright restrictions on downstream freedoms doesn't mean that
> the downstream freedoms associated with Open Source and Free Software
> are there. And many licenses that account for copyright allow
> intermediaries to opt not to grant the same copyright permission
> downstream.
>
> People who say production CDMs are incompatible with Open Source
> observe that they can't come with the downstream freedoms associated
> with Open Source. I.e. they consider what freedoms the recipients of a
> production CDM receive. You seem to be looking at this from the
> perspective "If a CDM vendor receives code under Open Source license
> Foo, can the CDM vendor incorporate that code into a CDM without
> violating the license the code came under?" Obviously, the answer is
> "yes" for Open Source licenses that don't try to ensure that
> intermediaries don't reduce downstream freedoms.
>
Exactly.

Quite apart from the general debate about whether EME is a good idea, 
there is a narrow discussion about license compatibility.

I had asserted that EME was implementable in open source from the 
perspective of the license.

Norbert asserted that if a spec is not implementable in GPL [3] it is 
probably not implementable in open source.

I think we all recognize that this is not accurate, that a spec can be 
implementable in open source but not GPL.

Which does not mean that it is a good idea or provides downstream 
freedom.  That indeed is a different debate.

Received on Wednesday, 5 June 2013 09:39:34 UTC