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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."
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.