Dealing with open source software, I regularly encounter many kinds of licenses — MIT, Apache, BSD, GPL being the most prominent — and I’ve taken time out to read them. Of the many, the GNU General Public License (GPL) stands out the most. It reads like a letter to the reader rather than legalese, and feels quite in tune with the spirit of open source and software freedom.
Although GPLv3 is the most current version, I commonly encounter software that makes use of GPLv2. I got curious about the last line in its license notice:
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
Why does this license notice have a physical address, and not a URL? After all, even though the full license doesn’t often get included with software, it’s a simple matter to do a search and find the text of the GPLv2. Do people write to this address, and what happens if you do?
Asking the question on Stack Exchange
I turned to the Open Source Stack Exchange and got a very helpful answer. It’s because the GPLv2 was published in 1991, and most people were not online. Most people would have acquired software through physical media (such as tape or floppies) rather than a download.
Considering the storage constraints back then, it wouldn’t be surprising if developers only included the license notice, and not the entire license. It makes sense that the most common form of communication would have been through post.
The GPLv3, published in 2007, does contain a URL in the license notice since Internet usage was more widespread at the time.
Writing to them
I decided to write to the address to see what would happen. To do that, I would need some stamps and envelopes (I found one at my workplace) to send the request, and a self addressed enveloped with an international reply coupon to cover the cost of the reply.
I was disappointed to find out that the UK’s Royal Mail discontinued international reply co
21 Comments
froh
(2022)
NoboruWataya
Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).
diggan
> The first thing that came to attention, the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm. I completely forgot that the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the US and some other countries decided to do things differently… As a European, I don't think I've ever seen something not A4 or A3/A4 in a professional context in my life, ever. Are US letter sizes what people use instead of A4 in a workplace for documents and such (seems confusing if so), and do printers sold in the US default to US letter sizes when printing? Or just happens to be something FSF only seem to be doing?
PaulRobinson
I'm interested in hearing from someone at FSF (and I used to know someone, but I don't think he's there any more), who can tell us how often this has happened. I can't imagine it's a frequent occurrence.
gwd
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes…
Wow — I mean, sure, I don't use a pen that often, but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month…
WaitWaitWha
This was written in 2022. Do people still know how to postal-mail things? Asking as the acquisition of envelope, paper and stamps read like a new adventure for the author.
I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) was indeed a postcard. Sadly, I often have to buy them at the airport on arrival.
cormorant
Different addresses are stated in different copies of the license. https://opensource.org/license/gpl-2-0 has: "59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA"
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt has no postal address.
https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html has "51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA" in red italics, and says: "
Text in red is replaceable (see Matching Guidelines B.3.4). License or exception text will match to the text for the specified identifier if it includes a permitted variant of this replaceable text. The permitted variants can be found in the corresponding regular expression as shown in title text visible by hovering over the red text."
Which in turn says: "can be replaced with the pattern .{54,64}" (that is, any string between 54-64 characters long).
yapyap
> as I haven’t used a pen in several years
Lol this is a bit ridiculous but a fun blogpost!
pabs3
The FSF has moved address at least once, and more recently, now closed their offices entirely. I wonder if the new owners of their old addresses will or did get confused by copy-of-GPL requests.
bluGill
At least he got a response. Meaning the address didn't change mostly.
A few years back I worked on an embedded linux project. For our first "alpha" release one of the testers read through the license agreement (as opposed to scrolling past all that legalese like most people do) and found the address to write to to get all the GPL source, he then send a letter to the address and it was returned to sender, invalid address. Somehow the lawyers found out about this and the forced us to do a full recall, sending techs to each machine to install an update (the testers installed the original software and were expected to apply updates, but we still had to send someone to install this update and track that everyone got it). Lawyers want to show good faith in courts – they consider it inevitable that someone will violate the GPL and are hoping that by showing good faith attempts to follow the letter and spirit the court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license.
The more important take away is if your automated test process doesn't send letters to your GPL compliance address to verify it works then you need manual testers: not only are you not testing everything, but you didn't even think of everything so you need the assurance of humans looking for something "funny".
terinjokes
A few countries I'll be visiting this summer still sell International Reply Coupons. It might be interesting to pick some up and see how difficult it is to exchange them. Would a PostNL point even know what to do with one?
maxloh
Perhaps the FSF got confused about which license the author was referring to, or perhaps they intentionally mailed back GPL v3 — this isn't the first time they haven't been generous.
In the old days when they released GPL v3, Linus Torvalds considered it "not the same license at all". He felt betrayed because the FSF "try to sneak in these new (tivoization) rules and try to force everybody to upgrade". People could fork the Kernel and relicense the fork in a way that prevented him from merging their improvements upstream. He referred to the FSF's move as "dishonest", "sneaky" and "immoral" and decided he would "never have anything to do with the FSF again".
https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU
roywashere
That reminds me on the time the FSF moved, they changed their address, and the open source product I worked on had to change their address in the license notices in our product:
https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d…
And of course, as happens more often, this issue was raised to us by Debian developers, who care a great deal about 'correctness'
sinuhe69
It would be a perfect story for the "Dull Men Center" or alike :D
martopix
Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years;
Really??
VikingCoder
I think these licenses are incredibly useful.
I have a really, really dumb question.
Why don't we have more licenses and contracts like this? Do we just need to set up a foundation that drafts them and makes them freely available to use?
Like, for instance, "Hi, Mark – we'd like to offer you a job here at our daycare, but first we need you to look over this contract and sign it."
This contract says, roughly, that if there's an accusation of sexual abuse against children that it will go to a mediator who has final say, and if they say it was a credible accusation, that Mark immediately loses his job, and can never work anywhere that uses this same contract, ever again. Sorry, you lost your chance to work with kids. It sucks that it might have been a false accusation, but our kids are just far too important to trust to the existing systems.
Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this.
Another one, "Hi, Greg. We understand we'd like your endorsement from our political party? Sounds good, here's a contract for you…"
It says, among other things, that if Greg switches political parties that he must resign from office. Sorry. He's welcome to run again, but he can't stay in office on our votes.
Like, shouldn't we have more contracts like this?
rietta
I am impressed that the FSF has kept up the same office / mailing address for 32 years at the time the article was written!
yukiAkita
Sure but, on the other hand, this was overly kind of him.
low_tech_punk
Exploring implications of an absolute physical address. FSF basically claimed a physical "domain name" and no future organizations will be able to reside in that address. FSF can move out and ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect.
crmi
> After a few weeks of waiting, I eventually received the ‘African Daisy global forever vert pair’ stamp which was round! I should have noticed that the seller sent me the item using stamps at a much lower denomination that those I had ordered. Oh well.
Wild that so many commenters don't see the satire dripping from the post.
Is it just a UK thing to never take things at face value?
davisr
This is funny because I was the operations assistant (office secretary) at the time we received this letter, and I remember it because of the distinct postage.