Freelance Propaganda

Copyright exchange is financial gain (or Linus reads the law)

Over on the ‘receiving mad props’ Groklaw, they quote Linus on reading US Copyright law,

And note how copyright law expressly includes ‘the expectation of receipt’ of anything of value, and expressly mentions ‘receipt of other copyrighted works’ as such a thing of value. And that’s the definition of ‘financial gain’ as far as copyright law is concerned. And guess what the GPL is all about? Maybe you can explain to Darl how the GPL is designed so that people receive the value of other peoples copyrighted works in return for having made their own contributions. That is the fundamental idea of the whole license - everything else is just legal fluff.

I think that sums up the difference between the BSD type open source licences and the Free Software GPL style licences: Somebody releasing under the GPL expects something in return—-that people that use their code in turn release that code.

If US Copyright law wants to define that as “financial gain” then great. I expect the Lawyer was well aware of this when he and RMS wrote the GPL. Linus continues:

“[the] … notion that the GPL has of ‘exchange of receipt of copyrighted works’ is actually EXPLICITLY ENCODED in the US copyright law. It’s not just a crazy idea that some lefty commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor.

The thought of Eben as a hippy in a drug induced stupor is hilarious…