www-commits
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

www/licenses gplv3-the-program.html


From: Brett Smith
Subject: www/licenses gplv3-the-program.html
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:59:53 +0000

CVSROOT:        /web/www
Module name:    www
Changes by:     Brett Smith <brett>     08/01/15 20:59:53

Added files:
        licenses       : gplv3-the-program.html 

Log message:
        New statement about GPLv3 interpretation.  This was inspired by 
questions
        from a number of different lawyers, written mostly by Fontana with 
edits by
        RMS and I.

CVSWeb URLs:
http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/licenses/gplv3-the-program.html?cvsroot=www&rev=1.1

Patches:
Index: gplv3-the-program.html
===================================================================
RCS file: gplv3-the-program.html
diff -N gplv3-the-program.html
--- /dev/null   1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 -0000
+++ gplv3-the-program.html      15 Jan 2008 20:59:40 -0000      1.1
@@ -0,0 +1,284 @@
+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<title>What does &quot;the Program&quot; mean in GPLv3?</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+<h2>What does &quot;the Program&quot; mean in GPLv3?</h2>
+
+<h3>Summary</h3>
+
+<p>In version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), the term &quot;the
+Program&quot; means one particular work that is licensed under GPLv3 and is
+received by a particular licensee from an upstream licensor or
+distributor.  The Program is the particular work of software that you
+received in a given instance of GPLv3 licensing, as you received it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Program&quot; cannot mean &quot;all the works ever licensed
+under GPLv3&quot;; that interpretation makes no sense, because &quot;the
+Program&quot; is singular: those many different programs do not constitute
+one program.</p>
+
+<p>In particular, this applies to the clause in section 10, paragraph 3
+of GPLv3 which states</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>[Y]ou may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or
+  counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is
+  infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing
+  the Program or any portion of it.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>This is a condition that limits the ability of a GPLv3 licensee to
+bring a lawsuit accusing the particular GPLv3-covered software
+received by the licensee of patent infringement.  It does not speak to
+the situation in which a party who is a licensee of GPLv3-covered
+program A, but not of unrelated GPLv3-covered program B, initiates
+litigation accusing program B of patent infringement.  If the party is
+a licensee of both A and B, that party would potentially lose rights
+to B, but not to A.</p>
+
+<p>Since software patents pose an unjust threat to all software
+developers, all software distributors, and all software users, we
+would abolish them if we could.  Indeed, we campaign to do so.  But we
+think it would have been self-defeating to make the license conditions
+for any one GPL-covered program go so far as to require a promise
+to never attack any GPL-covered program.</p>
+
+<h3>Further analysis</h3>
+
+<p>GPLv3 defines &quot;the Program&quot; as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&quot;The Program&quot; refers to any copyrightable work
+  licensed under this License.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Some have contended that this definition can be read to mean all
+GPLv3-licensed works, rather than the one particular GPLv3-licensed
+work received by a licensee in a given licensing context.  These
+readers have expressed particular concern about the consequences of
+such an interpretation for the new patent provisions of GPLv3,
+especially the patent termination condition found in the third
+paragraph 10 and the express patent license grant made by upstream
+contributors under the third paragraph of section 11.  This overbroad
+reading of &quot;the Program&quot; is incorrect, and contrary to our intent as
+the drafters of GPLv3.</p>
+
+<p>The word &quot;any&quot; is susceptible to multiple, subtly different
+shades of meaning in English.  In some contexts, &quot;any&quot; means
+&quot;every&quot; or &quot;all&quot;; in others, including the definition
+of &quot;the Program&quot; in GPLv3, it suggests &quot;one particular
+instance of, selected from many possibilities&quot;.  This variability has
+to be resolved by the context.  This context resolves it, but it requires
+some thought.</p>
+
+<p>We could have worded the definition of &quot;the Program&quot;
+differently, such as by using &quot;a particular&quot; instead of
+&quot;any&quot;, but that would not have eliminated the need for thought.
+The phrase &quot;a particular work licensed under this License&quot;,
+regarded in isolation, would not necessarily signify *the* particular work
+received by a particular &quot;you&quot; in a particular act of licensing
+or distribution.  Our review of other free software licenses shows that
+they raise similar issues of interpretation, with words of general
+reference used in order to facilitate license reuse.</p>
+
+<p>Given that no choice is so clear that all other candidate meanings
+must be rejected, &quot;any&quot; has certain advantages.  It is a somewhat
+more informal and less legalistic usage than the possible
+alternatives, an appropriate register for the developers reading
+and applying the license.  Moreover, the usage of &quot;any&quot;, through
+its suggestion of selection out of many qualifying possibilities,
+has the effect of emphasizing the reusability of GPLv3 for
+multiple works of software and in multiple licensing situations.
+The GNU GPL is intended to be used by many developers on their programs
+and that too needs to be clear.</p>
+
+<p>The same use of &quot;any&quot; that has given rise to interpretive
+concerns under GPLv3 exists in GPLv2, in its corresponding definition.
+Section 0 of GPLv2 states:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>This License applies to any program or other work which
+  contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be
+  distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The
+  &quot;Program&quot;, below, refers to any such program or work, and a
+  &quot;work based on the Program&quot; means either the Program or any
+  derivative work under copyright law ....</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>However, it has always been the understanding of the FSF and others in
+the GPL-using community that &quot;the Program&quot; in GPLv2 means the
+particular GPL-covered work that you receive, before you make any
+possible modifications to it.  The definition of &quot;the Program&quot; in
+GPLv3 is intended to preserve this meaning.</p>
+
+<p>We can find no clause in GPLv3 in which applying the suggested broad
+interpretation of &quot;the Program&quot; (and the superset term
+&quot;covered work&quot;) would make sense or have any practical
+significance, consistent with the wording of the clause and its drafting
+history.  The patent provisions of GPLv3 are a case in point.</p>
+
+<p>The third paragraph of section 11 states:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide,
+  royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent
+  claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run,
+  modify and propagate the contents of its contributor
+  version.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>A &quot;contributor&quot; is defined as &quot;a copyright holder who
+authorizes use under this License of the Program or a work on which the
+Program is based.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The broad reading of &quot;the Program&quot;, it has been suggested,
+gives rise to an unreasonably broad patent license grant.  The reasoning is
+that, for a given GPLv3 licensee, the set of contributors granting patent
+licenses becomes all GPLv3 licensors of all GPLv3-covered works in the
+world, and not merely licensors of the specific work received by that
+licensee in a particular act of licensing.</p>
+
+<p>Close attention to the wording of the patent license grant, however,
+shows that these concerns are unfounded.  In order to exercise the
+permissions of the patent license grant, a GPLv3 licensee must have
+&quot;the contents of [the contributor's] contributor version&quot; in his
+possession.  If he does, then he is necessarily a recipient of that
+material, licensed to him under GPLv3.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, contributors are always the actual copyright licensors of the
+material that is the subject of the patent license grant.  The user
+benefiting from the patent license grant has ultimately received the
+material covered by the grant from those contributors.  If it were
+otherwise, the patent license grant would be meaningless, because the
+exercise of its permissions is tied to the contributor's &quot;contributor
+version&quot;.  The contributors and the section 11 patent licensee stand
+in a direct or indirect distribution relationship. Therefore, section 11,
+paragraph 3 does not require you to grant a patent license to anyone who is
+not also your copyright licensee.  (Non-contributor redistributors remain
+subject to applicable implied patent license doctrine and to the special
+&quot;automatic extension&quot; provision of section 11, paragraph 6.)</p>
+
+<p>There is similarly no basis for the broad reading of &quot;the
+Program&quot; when one considers the patent-related clause in the third
+paragraph of section 10.  This clause provides:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>[Y]ou may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim
+  or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed
+  by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or
+  any portion of it.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Coupled with the patent license grant of section 11, paragraph 3, and
+the termination clause of section 8, this section 10 clause gives rise
+to a patent termination condition similar in scope to that contained
+in the Apache License version 2.0.</p>
+
+<p>The FSF sympathizes with the intent of broad patent retaliation
+clauses in some free software licenses, since the abolition of
+software patents is greatly to be desired.  However, we think that
+broad patent retaliation provisions in software licenses are unlikely
+to benefit the community, especially those clauses which can be
+triggered by patent litigation concerning other programs unrelated to
+the software whose license permissions are being terminated.  We were
+very cautious in taking steps to incorporate patent retaliation into
+GPLv3, and the section 10, paragraph 3 clause is intended to be
+narrower than patent retaliation clauses in several other well-known
+licenses, notably the Mozilla Public License version 1.1, with respect
+to termination of patent licenses.</p>
+
+<p>If the suggested interpretation of &quot;the Program&quot; applied to the
+section 10, paragraph 3 clause, the result would be a radical
+departure from our consistent past statements and policies concerning
+patent retaliation, which we clearly did not intend.</p>
+
+<p>Other text in GPL version 3 shows the same policy.  The patent
+litigation clause in section 10 was added to Draft 3 of GPLv3 as a
+replacement for part of the previous clause 7(b)(5) (in Draft 2).
+Clause 7(b)(5) permitted the placement of two categories of patent
+termination provisions on GPLv3-licensed works:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>terms that wholly or partially terminate, or allow
+  termination of, permission for use of the material they cover, for a user
+  who files a software patent lawsuit (that is, a lawsuit alleging that
+  some software infringes a patent) not filed in retaliation or defense
+  against the earlier filing of another software patent lawsuit, or in
+  which the allegedly infringing software includes some of the covered
+  material, possibly in combination with other software
+  ....</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Section 7 does not state the GPL's own policy; instead it says how far
+other compatible licenses can go.  Thus, that text in section 7 would
+not have established broad patent relatiation; it only would have
+permitted combining GPL-covered code with other licenses that do such
+broad patent relatiation.</p>
+
+<p>Nonetheless, as explained in the Rationale for Draft 3, such broad
+retaliation was criticized because it could apply to software patent
+lawsuits in which the accused software was unrelated to the software
+that was the subject of the license.  Seeing that there were no widely
+used licenses with which this would provide compatibility, in draft 3
+we dropped broad patent retaliation from the range of GPL
+compatibility.</p>
+
+<p>We did so by replacing 7(b)(5) with text in section 10, in which we
+kept only what corresponded to the second category.  The first
+category therefore reverted to being a GPL-incompatible &quot;further
+restriction&quot; in Draft 3, and likewise in GPL version 3 as actually
+published.
+</p>
+
+<p><a href="/licenses/gpl-faq.html">Return to the FAQ</a></p>
+
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+
+<p>
+Please send FSF &amp; GNU inquiries to 
+<a href="mailto:address@hidden";><em>address@hidden</em></a>.
+There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a> 
+the FSF.
+<br />
+Please send broken links and other corrections or suggestions to
+<a href="mailto:address@hidden";><em>address@hidden</em></a>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Please see the 
+<a href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting
+translations of this article.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Copyright &copy; 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
+</p>
+<address>51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110, USA</address>
+<p>Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are
+permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this
+notice, and the copyright notice, are preserved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2008/01/15 20:59:40 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div id="translations">
+<h4>Translations of this page</h4>
+
+<!-- Please keep this list alphabetical. -->
+<!-- Comment what the language is for each type, i.e. de is German. -->
+<!-- Write the language name in its own language (Deutsch) in the text. -->
+<!-- If you add a new language here, please -->
+<!-- advise address@hidden and add it to -->
+<!--  - /home/www/bin/nightly-vars either TAGSLANG or WEBLANG -->
+<!--  - /home/www/html/server/standards/README.translations.html -->
+<!--  - one of the lists under the section "Translations Underway" -->
+<!--  - if there is a translation team, you also have to add an alias -->
+<!--  to mail.gnu.org:/com/mailer/aliases -->
+<!-- Please also check you have the 2 letter language code right, cf. -->
+<!-- <URL:http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/ert/iso639.htm> -->
+<!-- Please use W3C normative character entities. -->
+
+<ul class="translations-list">
+<!-- English -->
+<li><a href="/licenses/gplv3-the-program.html">English</a>&nbsp;[en]</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]