> You aren’t prohibited under the license, but you are prohibited under the contract you agreed to, to get that code.
This doesn't make sense to me. MIT is a license to share and modify code. If another license can supersede that and remove rights granted by the actual license, then what prevents any company from releasing their code under MIT and then adding a shrinkwrap EULA that prevents looking at the code or modifying it? The license wouldn't mean anything.
> imagine a company hired you to write a library they want to later release as GPL. They still might have rules that you can’t release that library except under certain conditions.
Before it's released as GPL, sure. But once it's actually released as GPL, that company can't prevent you from looking at the code or modifying it or redistributing it. At best, they can sever their relationship with you over doing so, but they can't legally challenge you doing so.
If that wasn't the case, nothing would prevent a company from taking 3rd-party GPL code, building on top of it, releasing the product as GPL, but then adding additional contractual requirements to get access to their product that prevented anyone from looking at or sharing that code. The GPL wouldn't have any power or enforceability.
Companies do circumvent the GPL a lot and they get called out on it when they don't allow customers to get copies of the source code or to share it online. I've never heard anyone seriously suggest that a valid defense would be for them to say, "okay, yes we're using GPL code but to buy the product you have to sign a contract and that contract legally prevents you from sharing the code." Those restrictions would themselves be a GPL violation.
Do you have free speech? Yes, it's your constitutional right.
But then you become a lawyer and you get some clients. Do you have the freedom to say whatever you want about your client's case, in public? No, you don't. You have given up your right to exercise free speech on those specific issues.
Another example. You have free speech to criticize McDonalds. You can mock them all you like. But let's say, you sign a contract to become a PR Spokesman for them. You then mock them publicly, on their official Twitter account. Can you be sued? Yes you can, and your constitutional right will not defend you.
Contracts are not licenses. Contracts can give licenses, licenses cannot give contracts. In this case, while you are receiving an MIT-licensed work, you are under contract that you will not share this information with anyone. Contracts always supersede licenses. If you do give that information to anyone in violation of your contract, while the license itself means that the creator of the Godot port will not sue you, Nintendo may sue you for the breach because you are under contract with them.
> If that wasn't the case, nothing would prevent a company from taking 3rd-party GPL code, building on top of it, releasing the product as GPL, but then adding additional contractual requirements to get access to their product that prevented anyone from looking at or sharing that code.
Congratulations, that's actually the law right now at a certain level, and what the furor over Red Hat Enterprise Linux was about. Red Hat decided to release open-source code under a contract that prohibits distribution. The initial response was to have companies break that contract, but try to remain anonymous, as the receivers of that GPL code would be theoretically safe. This was later deemed too risky, unworkable, and antagonizing; which is why Alma Linux and others have given up on that approach, and just aim for general bug-for-bug compatibility from scratch.
I'm going to be blunt, reading this comment makes me think you might be theorizing in an area where you don't have the legal expertise to speak confidently.
> Do you have free speech? Yes, it's your constitutional right. But then you become a lawyer and you get some clients. Do you have the freedom to say whatever you want about your client's case, in public? No, you don't. You have given up your right to exercise free speech on those specific issues.
This is not how copyright law works, we should not be analogizing copyright and the 1st amendment.
> But let's say, you sign a contract to become a PR Spokesman for them. You then mock them publicly, on their official Twitter account. Can you be sued? Yes you can, and your constitutional right will not defend you.
I think this is an oversimplification of how that kind of liability would work, but more importantly, once again, 1st Amendment rights and license agreements are not the same thing, this should not be used as a comparison.
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> Congratulations, that's actually the law right now at a certain level, and what the furor over Red Hat Enterprise Linux was about.
No, using this analogy makes me less confident that you know what you're talking about. Red Hat Enterprise Linux could sever relationships with a client, it could even potentially maybe bring charges over a client circumventing controls to access that code in the future, but it could not bring legal cause against people for distributing the code.
This is not me theorizing on this point, multiple people/orgs decided to keep basing their products on RHEL code and distributing that code and Red Hat didn't have or try to make a legal claim against them. The only thing RHEL could do was say "okay, because of that contract violation, we don't want you as a customer anymore."
> This was later deemed too risky, unworkable, and antagonizing; which is why Alma Linux and others have given up on that approach, and just aim for general bug-for-bug compatibility from scratch.
I think this is a gross mischaracterization of what these orgs did. The full extent of legal risk that I heard anyone in these organizations at all worry about was circumvention of the contract to access new versions of the code after Red Hat had banned them as a customer. I'm not aware of anyone who was scared that Red Hat could sue them over distributing GPL code they already had.
And even there, most of the concern I heard was not over lawsuits but over the practical, everyday unreliability of getting access to new versions of RHEL when their accounts could be closed at any time. When Red Hat was called out as violating the GPL, their entire defense was that they were not putting a restriction on what people could do with the code, they were only adding terms around what you could do while still remaining a customer.
If Red Hat had claimed that they were imposing a restriction that violated the GPL, they would have been opening up themselves to lawsuits, because Red Hat doesn't own Linux and their usage of Linux is bound by them respecting the GPL license under which the code is provided to them -- and the GPL bars them from imposing that restriction. Red Hat does not have the legal permission to impose additional restrictions on the GPL, their usage of Linux code is subject to them respecting the terms of the license they agreed to. So under no circumstances would Red Hat ever claim that they were imposing a restriction on the redistribution of source code of RHEL, the company has been extremely adamant that they are not doing that.
Is your claim here that Red Hat has violated the GPL? Red Hat is claiming that they haven't violated the GPL and that they are not interfering with GPL rights. If they are putting a legal barrier in front of redistribution of GPL-licensed kernel code, then great, I hope that kernel devs sue them -- because Red Hat definitely does not have permission to do that with code that they don't own.
what prevents any company from releasing their code under MIT and then adding a shrinkwrap EULA that prevents looking at the code or modifying it? The license wouldn't mean anything.
This has been an intentional feature of MIT/BSD licenses all along. Tons of proprietary products are built on MIT/BSD code.
You can build a proprietary product on top of MIT/BSD code. You can not revoke someone else's license. You CAN put MIT code in a proprietary product and not share it. But you can NOT tell someone else that they are not legally allowed to share code that they have been given under an MIT/BSD license. The MIT license is permission to share the code.
Nothing would prevent this project from building a proprietary product with MIT/BSD code in it and not sharing the code or sharing it under a different license. But if they say, "here's the code it's being given to you under an MIT license" -- then I don't see how they can add on top of that "subject to this NDA". If they give you the code MIT licensed, it's MIT licensed. If they give you the code with a bunch of other licensing restrictions, then they're not giving you an MIT license, they're giving you some other weird hybrid license that is not Open Source.
We don't have a licensing mechanism that I'm aware of for allowing companies to say, "here's a legal document outlining the terms of this license, and also pretend that these terms aren't binding."
This doesn't make sense to me. MIT is a license to share and modify code. If another license can supersede that and remove rights granted by the actual license, then what prevents any company from releasing their code under MIT and then adding a shrinkwrap EULA that prevents looking at the code or modifying it? The license wouldn't mean anything.
> imagine a company hired you to write a library they want to later release as GPL. They still might have rules that you can’t release that library except under certain conditions.
Before it's released as GPL, sure. But once it's actually released as GPL, that company can't prevent you from looking at the code or modifying it or redistributing it. At best, they can sever their relationship with you over doing so, but they can't legally challenge you doing so.
If that wasn't the case, nothing would prevent a company from taking 3rd-party GPL code, building on top of it, releasing the product as GPL, but then adding additional contractual requirements to get access to their product that prevented anyone from looking at or sharing that code. The GPL wouldn't have any power or enforceability.
Companies do circumvent the GPL a lot and they get called out on it when they don't allow customers to get copies of the source code or to share it online. I've never heard anyone seriously suggest that a valid defense would be for them to say, "okay, yes we're using GPL code but to buy the product you have to sign a contract and that contract legally prevents you from sharing the code." Those restrictions would themselves be a GPL violation.