- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@hsivonen.fi>
- Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2013 12:08:54 +0300
- To: Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org>
- Cc: Norbert Bollow <nb@bollow.ch>, public-restrictedmedia@w3.org
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. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@hsivonen.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Wednesday, 5 June 2013 09:09:22 UTC