Re: [webmin-l] Virtualmin Professional license

[Joe C. <jo...@sw...>]

Hi Barry and all,

I'm going to try this again, and hopefully, it will put this thing to 
bed before the rest of the list gets tired of our legal ranting.

Barry, the crux of your argument is that we, the copyright holders, 
cannot make a commercial variant of something that we have previously 
released under the GPL and that dual-licensing with the GPL and a 
GPL-incompatible license is not legally supportable.  You've stated this 
in dozens of different ways, but it all comes down to whether we have a 
legal right to do so.  As I mentioned before, this is a very common 
misconception about the GPL.  So, let's dispel this myth first with a 
simple question:

Who will sue the copyright holder for not following the letter of the 
license under which they have released their code?

A copyright infringement lawsuit would have to be brought in order for 
any "legal mess" to occur, which is what you believe you're helping us 
avoid with this discussion.

So, who will bring this lawsuit?  You?  The FSF?  Virtualmin, Inc.?

Of these three options, only one has a legal leg to stand on, and I'll 
give you three guesses as to which one it is.  The first two guesses 
don't count.

It ought to be obvious from this simple question, and the obvious 
answer, that there can be no such thing as a license that applies to the 
copyright holder (a license has to be enforceable under the law, and 
thus there has to be someone with greater rights than the license 
grants).  So, there goes the argument that we have to license every line 
of code we write for the rest of our lives under the GPL (whether it is 
part of Virtualmin or not).  We simply don't, and no amount of arguing 
that we do is going to change the legal facts.  I'm just not going to 
argue that point any further.  If you still don't believe me, I'm sorry, 
there's nothing more I'm willing to say on the matter.  Take it up with 
the FSF or an attorney, if you like.  If you believe that we have the 
legal copyright necessary to license it to others under the GPL *despite 
starting out with a different license*, then you must believe we also 
have the legal rights necessary to license it under other terms.

On to the other issues you've raised that are new to the discussion and 
worth covering:


If you believe you have contributed code to Virtualmin that you would 
rather we not include, say the word and show me the code.  Let's not be 
wishy-washy, and say "it may be that others, or even I"...Either you did 
or you didn't.  I don't believe anyone has been misled into contributing 
code to Virtualmin without awareness that there had been a non-GPL 
version in the past and there would be a non-GPL version in the future. 
  But if there is a piece of code that fits that description, point it 
out.  There's no time like the present.  I suspect you greatly 
over-estimate the amount of non-Jamie-authored code in any version of 
Virtualmin.


OpenCountry has nothing to do with Virtualmin, Inc. or Virtualmin 
Professional.  Virtualmin, Inc. is a Texas Corporation with two 
shareholders: Jamie Cameron and me.  OpenCountry are a nice bunch of 
folks who have sponsored Webmin development, and I applaud them for 
their involvement.  There is no need to pester them about licensing of 
Virtualmin...they'll have no clue what you're talking about.


Anyway, the long and short of this issue is that a copyright holder is 
never subject to the license under which they distribute their own code, 
even if that license is the GPL.  I'm out of ways to explain this, and 
until you come to understand this fact, we simply aren't going to end up 
talking about the same problem.

If you don't want to take my word for it, take it up with anyone you 
like.  The FSF won't be particularly happy to hear from you, but they 
might be willing to answer your questions (I am a core developer on 
another large Open Source project that approached the FSF about turning 
the project into a GNU project, and now I know their approach and when 
they have an interest in a project, and I can assure you they don't care 
one whit about Virtualmin).

If you'd like to keep discussing it, let's make it private, as this 
isn't really relevant to Webmin.  I just posted the announcement here as 
I know there are quite a few folks here who in the past had shown an 
interest in the ransom or GPL version of Virtualmin.  Just thought I'd 
fill them in on what we've been working on, and I really didn't intend 
to start a firestorm about licensing.

Regards,
Joe