Re: Hacking License
On December 18, 2018 9:48:26 PM UTC, Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org> wrote:
>Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it> writes:
>
>> On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 at 17:22, Ian Jackson
>> <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>> > Perhaps you don't care about encouraging, into contributing to your
>> > project, people who are short of time and who are picky about what
>> > they spend time evaluating.
>>
>> Well, actually this is true.
>> I'm not looking for contributors, I'm trying to contribute.
>
>Then it seems you have no more need for us to evaluate your custom
>license text.
What I was trying to contribute was the library to interact with Jehanne from Debian.
I can obviously install it on Debian from sources or create a deb myself.
But since it's free software I hoped to let Debian distribute it.
This offer is still open, and will remain open in the future.
Unfortunately, once the code will be shipped and other will have contributed to it, it might become impossible to fix any issue in the Hacking License that make it incompatible with Debian.
That's why I annoyed you here: to identify issues in the text of the license to make it clearly compatible with Debian values and needs.
Obviously, if you don't care... I understand and accept it.
After all, it's an OS nobody uses, isn't it?
> If you have no interest in contributors to your work, you
>have no interest in the conditions for that contribution.
I said that I'm not looking for contributors, not that I don’t want them.
Also, a license does rules only contributions, it rules distribution, modification, forks...
In particular, the right to modify the software is what qualify Free Software, as the right to use is usually assumed as implicit and the right to distribute would not be very useful if it didn't included derived works.
>If, on the other hand, you actually want to welcome contributors to
>collaborate on the work you release, you have received good advice in
>this discussion on how better to do that.
I don't care if people "give back".
I want my software to stay in the Commons and inspire the creation of more Commons because I want everybody to have access to the knowledge expressed by such software.
Commons is from Latin /cum munis/ that used to mean co-obliged: when a resource is in common is owned by a community whose members are mutually obliged to work together with it and share the benefits of such resource.
The opposite is what nobody own, what is abandoned, thrown away, what can be freely taken, privatised and exploited for whatever purpose.
Copylefts move resources from the Void to the Commons (exploiting Copyright laws designed to move resources from the Void to the control of an owner, by basically setting the owner to a Community).
The Hacking License set the owner to the whole humanity.
All the permissive licenses that have been suggested here (all were permissive compared to the Hacking License) either for adoption or for double licensing or for a relicensing clause, would basically turn what I want to donate to everybody into something I would throw away for everybody to exploit (potentially against everybody else).
The difference is so deep that it basically invalidates all of the suggestion I received here (except those that were related to the text of the license, obviously).
I don't want to throw away my hacks.
I want to donate them.
I don't just want Jehanne born free.
I want Jehanne to stay free and to generate more freedom.
No license I've read so far (not even AGPLv3 or copyleft-next or SSPL or Prosperity... none!) achieve this simple goal effectively.
That's why, despite welcome and carefully considered, the suggestions you are talking about weren't remotely as useful as discussing about the name issue or as asking for clarifications.
Because I can get the wording wrong or something, but after months of study, the boundaries of my options are pretty clear.
Giacomo
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