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Seminar On Details Of The GPL And Related Licenses
bkuhn writes "Given the recent confusion about LGPL on slashdot, and the concern it
raised for those convincing corporate legal departments to adopt to Free
Software, perhaps your readers might be interested in FSF's legal seminar on
the GPL and related licenses. The first one is in Silicon Valley, and
if it is successful, we hope to hold others in the next 8 months in New
York City and Tokyo." Since the FSF and the GNU project have long created and fought for software that's shareable, Free, and Not UNIX, what's taught at these seminars will probably differ sharply from what you can hear at next Monday's SCO conference call on the "IBM lawsuit, UNIX Ownership and Copyrights."
Do Editors Moderate?
The Slashdot Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using them. Our moderations represent about 3% of all moderation, and according to Meta Moderation, the fairness of these moderations are either statistically indistinguishable from non-admin users, or substantially better. The raw numbers are: 95.1% of non-admin upmods are fair, and 94.7% of admin upmods are fair. 79.1% of non-admin downmods are fair, and 83.6% of admin downmods are fair.
The editors tend to find crapfloods and moderate them down: a single malicious user can post dozens of comments, which would require several users to moderate them down, but a single admin can take care of it in seconds. This tends to remove the obvious garbage from the discussion so that the general population can use their mod points to determine good. Otherwise, a few crapfloods could suck a lot of moderator points out of the system and throw things out of whack.
You can argue that allowing admins unlimited moderation is somehow inherently unfair, but one of the goals of Slashdot is to produce readable content for a variety of readers with a variety of reading habits. I believe this process improves discussions for the vast majority of Slashdot Readers, so it will stay this way. If you don't like it, well, I don't care. This is my sandbox, those are my rules, and until someone takes this site away from me, what you see is, ultimately, what I want you to see.
Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 4/12/03
Those who follow discussions concerning the arguments being prepared for the SCO lawsuit are betting right now that the GPL will be among the targets of that action. They may be right, they may be wrong, but references to that action are relevant to any discussion about software licensing these days.
The best way to do is to be.
Did you miss the Java thing over the last few days? The assumption was that when developing java stuff, you could link to something that's LGPL'd without *GPL'ing your project. But the linking timeline is pretty convoluted, and it resulted in some people getting a bit of a surprise when they discovered the projects they're working on would be *GPL'd, which they had thought not the case.
So some clarification is a good thing.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Actually, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which monitors the scene and enforces the GPL, says a Mountain View company has been violating the GPL for more than a year. The foundation calls the violations serious and is threatening a lawsuit.
The specifics of the FSF's beef with OpenTV have to do with the company's policies in sending source code to licensees of OpenTV software tools created under the GPL. According to the foundation, OpenTV has either refused to provide the code, or has attached improper conditions on providing it, to several programmers who have every right to it.
OpenTV's intellectual property lawyer, Scott Doyle, says there's been missed communications on both sides but that the company has no intention of violating any legal agreements. He says the company plans to post the code in question online.
But if the FSF is right that OpenTV is violating the GPL, and if this behavior is found to be legal by the courts, the entire free-software and open-source movements could be derailed. Agreeing to share the improvements you make in the GPL-licensed software you've used is an essential part of the larger ecosystem.
Some people I respect say the GPL is a bad idea, period. They say it's too restrictive of programmers' rights, in the sense of forcing them to open what they've done to the world. Fine: If you don't like the GPL, don't create software from code that used it in the first place. Then put different licensing terms on what you've done.
But legal agreements are supposed to matter in our system. Just because the GPL turns the idea of intellectual property somewhat around doesn't make it less valid.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
In a nutshell: If you distribute a program that uses a LGPL library, you must provide a way for a user to use your program with the LGPL library.
-If the LGPL library is dynamically linked, the user can do this automatically.
-If the LGPL library is statically linked, you must provide object files so that the program can be re-linked by the user.
-If you're using Java with a LGPL library, you have to provide
-If you're including code from a LGPL library, that explicitly does NOT make the including source file LGPL.
All of the examples given are covered by this text:
That sentence quite clearly defines what an executable is, and quite clearly separates the process of linking, whenever it happens, from the definition of an executable. This makes the LGPL clearly and easily cover something like a completely interpreted language that would be distributed in a text form consisting of an LGPL library, and a proprietary program that uses the library (in obfuscated source perhaps).
When you distribute your program, ask yourself this question: "With the files that I have included on my program CD, can the user download the next version of the LGPL library and use it with my program that they are getting on the CD? And if they recompile the same version of the LGPL library, can they reproduce a program that works just like the one they are getting on the CD?"
If the answers are both yes, you are compliant with the LGPL.
BTW, IANAL.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Yes, I do. And it is a mistake to relicense GPLed software under a more restrictive license than the GPL, even if the additional restriction seems minor. The "fiasco" that created the KDE dispute was that the KDE code had incorporated GPLed code but was also subject to an additional restriction imposed by the QPL. The GPL explicitly forbids applying additional restrictions to GPLed code in section 6:The QPL adds an additional restriction by requiring persons who incorporate QPLed code in thier programs, but do not distribute them (as in an in-house application), they must make the source code available to the initial developer of the incorporated QPLed code, as stated in section 6 subsection c of the QPL:Thus there was an incompatibility issue that was both real and a problem for the validity of both licenses. The problem was publicized by Debian when they decided to not distribute KDE until the license issues were worked out It was suggested that KDE either remove the GPLed code from thier programs (no-one really wanted that), or ask for special dispensation from the originating copyright holders to link the incorporated GPLed code to the QPLed qt libraries (difficult, but theoretically possible). TrollTech eventually (pleasantly) surprised everyone by releasing the qt libraries under a dual license which allowed the GPL to be applied to programs that incorporated qt without the additional restriction required by the QPL alone. Every one went away happy, except for those who didn't understand the issue in the first place.
To understand how these two Free licenses are incompatible read this and this.
For an understanding of some of the other issues involved and how it worked out read this and this
Then there was the Corel LinuxOS fiasco. They had a "private" beta, and everyone jumped all over them.
The Corel situation was brought up by the beta testers, as they were refused copies of the source code to the GPLed binaries that were distributed to them. Ther was nothing "private" about thier beta, you could download it off of thier website.
By the way, IANAL, but I do no how to read the source material before I shoot my mouth off. I'm not going to argue with your post being rated "interesting", as it certainly piqued my interest, but whoever it was that modded it insightful needs to do thier homework before they use up all thier points.
Read, L