Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Licensing
This has been a particular headache for embedded systems manufacturers. If the engineers take advantage of the openness of Linux and make some tweaks to the part that is officially Linux, the company must to distribute their changes too. If they merely create software that works like a regular program, then there's no need to distribute anything. (Notice the ASP in the URL!) I know at least one very sharp businessman who explained to me how he carefully made sure the proprietary code in his system would only be dynamically linked to the GPL-protected code. If he left things statically linked, he would be legally bound to release all of his code and his investors wouldn't allow that.
"You had to work with developers. We had to create a build process that very carefully keeps things separate. If we weren't able to do that, we wouldn't have been acquired," he told me.
Rosen's book is a guide for anyone who's trying to walk that line. It dissects the major (GPL, BSD, Netscape, Apache, etc.) as a lawyer would: this kind of legal writing is always eye opening for me ,because the courts often make decisions differently from programmers. They value abstract issues like damages and pay attention to the often nebulous concept of who "owns" a piece of code. Thanks to the hard work of the lawyers at SCO, the distinctions will continue to be important to everyone experimenting with open source.
There are a surprisingly large number of distinctions, both big and small, between the different licenses. For most of us, the differences don't matter. But it's fascinating to watch a lawyer take them apart and compare and contrast them. The BSD license and the Apache license aren't the same, even though they're close cousins. Who would have known?
This book is a wonderful start on the topic. But by the end, it's clear that it's only just the beginning. There are deep philosophical questions awaiting the movement. The distinction between statically and dynamically linked code was easier to define in the past, long before modern languages like Java and the emergence of the Internet. Are web services specified by a hard-coded WSDL file, an example of dynamic or static linking? Can the DNS service change a static IP address into a dynamic link? Enquiring minds want to know. Rosen's book is a great way to begin the exploration of these topics.
You can purchase Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Thank you for discussing this book. I will be sure to check it out.
p 2004/tc20040922_8372_tc024.htm With that, we can expect to see more and more proprietary software vendors who are feeling the heat of open source competition to stretch the very limits of any contract or license agreement.
I think that in the not-too-distant future, this kind of legal knowledge will be a bit of a prerequisite. This is especially true as awareness of the value of open source continues to spread, and more and more companies and people turn to open source as a cost effective tool. Check out "No More Stock" at this page: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/se
Knowing the legal limits *as a court would interpret them* will be crucial for open source developers world wide.
Get some.
You haven't been on Westlaw or Lexis lately, have you? Those services implement search features that I can only dream about on Google.
John Hancock wuz here.
Under GPL, if you distribute your code outside your own use (ie, internal use), your contributions are given back to the community so someone else may enhace your work, etc.
I think that is more or less right.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I find I prefer to release my latest code as 'free'. When I mean free, it is free for whoever to do whatever they want with it - and totally free of any licence or other restrictions. I dislike everything about the idea of a licence to use software/data (sourcecode is just data to the compiler) and that's why I choose to make my things available free.
Since the courts, congress, bush, and big business are on the controlling side, and those of us that are creative and support GPL (and possibly other nearly fully free licenses) are mainly on the other side, the forces at work are not really in balance. The current SCO vs IBM case is truly indicative of that. There will be many battles, but ultimately, the forces of freedom will have to prevail.
Why, you ask? Because, if the rights to be creative are taken away, then there is no reason for the species known as homo sapiens to exist.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
We have to keep having this conversation as long as there are people and software and licenses.
About a month or two ago I got an interesting email. One particular project wanted to incorporate some of my code into theirs. My code was under the BSD license and theirs under the GPL. No problem, right? Not to them! Their email was to beg me to release my software under the GPL so that they could use it. Needless to say that a short paragraph and a few good links on GPL "compatibility" cleared up the confusion. But this has not been the first time I've received an email like this.
A need for this kind of book exists.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Just because something's properly GPL'd doesn't mean it's sue-proof, and there's a lot more to litigation than just the substantive law at issue.
/*insert bad thing happening here*/, not the terms you released it under.
Well, it will help protect you by helping you become more sue-proof for licensing reasons than you would be by not reading the book. Of course it may not be as effective in a theoretical loss-of-life situation (in a country where someone can successfully sue for spilling hot coffee on their own lap, anything can happen). But in those types of situations, your choice of license is moot; the actual product is being held responsible for
You're right, though, nothing is a substitute for a good lawyer for some things.
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
Seems that OS may have other ramifications!5 0,39131082,00.htm
From http://www.builderau.com.au/program/work/0,390246
"solicitor, Nick Abrahams today revealed he was in pre-court negotiations to defend a legal case in which a large IT company was attempting to use provisions of the open source General Public License to force his client to reveal its proprietary code."
I've submitted this as news (twice) yet it doesn't appear to be getting posted.......
The current SCO mess has nothing to do with the inherent complexity of copyright law or open source licenses. SCO is merely taking advantage of the fact that you can sue anyone for anything regardless of merit. You can indulge in legal harassment just by filing some papers with the local courthouse.
You don't need a convoluted contract.
You don't need convoluted laws.
You don't need confusing caselaw.
You don't need a confusing license.
The SCO shenanigans have gone on long enough simply because that's how long civil cases take to sort themselves out. This gives SCO plenty of time to shoot it's mouth off.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You need the book, because you are wrong. You have stumbled onto a point of major issue with teh GPL, which simply isn't 100% answered yet.
When a peice of code, lets say, libfoo, is under the GPL, that means the structures in memory that libfoo defines, the method signatures, etc, are all peices of libfoo. They are copyrighted works released under the GPL.
Now, lets say you want to write a peice of software to USE libfoo. To write this software, it's required to import some of libfoo's headers. These headers are copyrighted. When you compile your software, even though it links dynamically at runtime, it still retains this copyrighted memory structure information in the final binary image. You're compiled program has just included GPLd code. In fact, if you simply call methods, you're program could arguably be including copyrighted material.
This is a major peice of contention... and I would say this IS how the GPL works, even though most people ignore it. WHy would I say that? Because of the LGPL, which was designed SPECIFICALLY to address the issue by putting in writing that it was OKAY to use LGPL libraries in a non-LGPLed program. Because the FSF found the need to create the LGPL, one can only assume that that GPL really does work th is way. Somebody suing you for using their GPL'd code would most likely bring this up in court, and they'd likely win.
According to a strict interpretation of hte GPL, this is the way it is. It disturbs me greatly that some people have never read the thing, or are willing to ASSUME anything in the face of copyright. That's bogus to me. Don't rewrite the GPL to suit how you wish it was, interpret it as it is and go from there, otherwise you are opening yourself up a can of worms.
You could also make the claim that an operating system or programming language is arbitrarily complex. This is true, but in most cases those systems have been adapted to try and provide the best and simplest possible solutions for their respective problem domains. So it is also with law: the conficts created in modern human communities are complicated, and the law that governs those communities and tries to resolve those conflicts is also complicated.
Your claim that physics is defined by observable natural phenomenon is also only partially true. Physics is also defined by the models used to analyze and predict the behaviour of physical systems. The model has been improved over the years, e.g. with the invention of calculus or topology or other novel mathematical techniques, sometimes making physics simpler than previously thought possible.
The statement that there is no known way to make physics simpler could therefore apply equally well to law, and leads on to my own view on the matter: finding new and better ways to solve problems with formal or semi-formal systems is hard, and maybe impossible in some cases. The parent poster's assertion that law is overly complicated due to malice, incompetence, or recklessness is unjustified on the basis of the evidence he provided to support it.
Your assertion that law could be simpler is just that, an assertion, and you haven't bothered to support it with fact or logic. In respect of some areas of law I agree with it, in others I don't. Convince me.
Tho it has always been hard to explain to the buisiness world the concept of gpl style license agreements.
I never understood why it was hard. The terms are easy.
If you modify or statically use this code that someone else wrote, and distribute it in a compiled form, then you have to distribute the changes that you made and the code that statically uses it in source form under the GPL. If you don't like those terms, then you don't have license to redistribute it in compiled form. The person who originally wrote it only gives you license to use it in this manner.
Tho, i do disagree 100% with the idea that developers do not need to be concerned with the legal side of this argument
I definitely think that they have to know about it. The last project that I worked on heavily used open source components. Most were Apache and BSD style licences. But there was one LGPL that we had to be careful of.
If you're a developer and you are writing some tiered app... why write your own connection pool, logger, encryption layer, application server, XML parser, etc, when you could just plug in someone else's open source stuff. You need to be aware that open source components do exist, and that you need to examine their licenses and be able to understand them.
If you are just some monkey programmer, then you don't need to be aware of these things. A real developer will make the decisions for you.
>Now, lets say you want to write a peice of software
>to USE libfoo.
yes, as i said, in that case you have to respect the license, and keep in mind that it is not your code.
As for the gpl/lgpl thing, i was just answering to the article:
" he carefully made sure the proprietary code in his system would only be dynamically linked to the GPL-protected code. "
>this IS how the GPL works, even though most people ignore it.
an old problem indeed, except for QT i can't think of a library that uses gpl, and trolltech makes it perfectly clear that if you want to develop non-GPL applications you have to buy QT with another license.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
The key point here, especially from a business point of view, is regular. A key principle of legal thought is that law should operate the same for two sets of "the same" circumstances - two people in the same situation situation should have equivalent treatment. This would make life predictable (as opposed to the arbitrary nature of life under previous (i.e. before liberal-democratic) systems). Of course, interpreting exactly what this means in a particular circumstances is no simple task - after all, as was pointed out, how do we treat new technologies like Web Services? Is this static or dynamic linking?
The only practical way to make law "predictable" for the average user (by user I mean non-lawyer) is to understand what the precedents thus far are, to lay out the current "state of play". This means taking a set of principles worked out in different places (contracts, court cases, etc) over a period of time and summarising them in one place for easy reference.
As I said before, expecting law to be simple is like expecting human interactions, or history, to be simple. Its just not going to happen. :)
p.s. another analogy: programs become complex because of the interaction between many rules of action - each might in itself be simple (click this button to run this function), but the result sure as hell isn't. Same thing - programs are defined by humans, and while there are ways to make it simpler, it inevitably gets complex over time. (And remember, legal systems are very rarely refactored - to do so too often would be to introduce arbitrariness, and remove the quality that two people in the same circumstance are treated the same way)
AC: If your program doesn't run without the library, it's clearly a derivative work.
Take Doom3. The only version released (so far) doesn't run without DirectX 9. So is it clearly a derivative work? Does Microsoft(tm) actually own copyright on Doom?
AC: If there is a different library available (like Mesa vs SGI OpenGL
That's senseless. By that theory, I could retro-actively change a program from derived to independent if I re-implement a library previously available from a sole source. (Which would mean that all Windows(r) programs were derived from Microsoft Windows, until Wine wrote an alternative library, at which point they weren't derived anymore).
Sorry, but none of it's that simple.
What the FSF is really doing in this regard is claiming as much as possible, even if it may go a little beyond what's legal (in some countries). The question of whether dynamically linking a library is derivation is a matter for copyright law, which the GPL can't change one way or the other. But IF a court decides dynamic linking is infringing, THEN the GPL wants to restrict that use.
Since this is under "Anonymous Coward," there is a pretty good chance nobody will read this, or nobody will believe me. Oh well.
Derivative work is a legal term, not a technical one. Dynamically linking doesn't protect you from copyright infringement if static linking would be considered copyright infringement.
The best-known case about this is Light House Ministries vs. Intellectual Reserve, Inc. In that case, Intellectual Reserve held the copyright to some work that Light House Ministries posted online without permission. IRI sued, and Lighthouse had to take the work down.
Then Light House posted a link to somebody else who infringed the work, and IRI sued again, and won. If it would have been illegal to post on the site itself, a hyperlink didn't change the legal implications. A pointer in code, or a dynamic link would be the same. Feel free to btich, if you like, but a judge is going to listen to another judge's opinion before listening to yours.
Linus Torvalds, who is not a lawyer, does recognize that if somebody writes code against a standard interface (eg., POSIX, ODBC, etc.), then it is pretty uch impossible to declare that code a derivative work of a particular GPLed program. This becomes an issue on Linux because some kernel modules written for other flavors of UNIX work on Linux without any changes. Since Linux didn't exist when those modules were designed, it would be pretty stupid to declare them derivative works of Linux.
The name 'Linux' is now a (US) registered (by Linus) Trade Mark.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
He didn't. Linux users registered the trademark and gave it to Linus as a gift. Linux himself presumably wouldn't have bothered.
If someone distributes a stand-alone proprietary program that is designed to dynamically link to a GPL'd program, and does not distribute the GPL'd program, then, I think, there is no problem with the GPL.
However, if this same program is distributed in a collection containing the GPL'd program, then there is a problem: the GPL does not give permission to distribute the collection, since it is not a mere aggregation and contains a non-GPL'd program and a GPL'd program.
Read the full story at my web page, http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4l.html.
- Hubert