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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.
His Trademark law article and his explanation of fair use seem particularly useful.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
I disagree. Developers, more and more, need to be conscious of licensing, patent, copyright and IP issues. It sucks, because it takes time away from writing code, but I see it getting worse before it gets better.
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.
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
As soon as you use that phrase, you are assuming a specific interpretation of the 3 legal constructs. Those of us who reject that particular interpretation are automatically locked out of the discussion, which I suspect is the purpose of the phrase.
What Copyright, Patents, and Trademarks do is impose a 'temporary monopoly' onto something intellectual that otherwise would not have limits. The nature of the monopoly may be different (Is it for an exact 'copyable' work of art such as an audio/visual work, or writing....is is a process where the words/diagrams used to describe the process are not critical, but the process is ... or is it part of a virtual identity), and
the time limits may be different, but the phrase "temporary monopoly" is
the essence of these legal structures.
If we can't start from that basis, then there is no way to have the discussion without quickly breaking down. The metaphor of property just does not make sense outside of physical objects as ideas are infinitely copyable, and can be spontaneously created ("thought of") in different places and time in isolation from each other. With physical objects there is a natural monopoly: the land, animal, person, object or whatever physical object can only exist in one place at any given time, and in the world outside of science fiction and magic do not just "appear out of thin air".
Creating an arbitrary legal limit on how something can be copied is clearly government intervention in the natural world to create a monopoly. Who benefits from that monopoly, and what the costs are, and how these things have changed over time can be brought up to interpretation and debate, but the basic concept behind the government granted temporary monopoly cannot be debated.
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"For most open source software users, there are few things as easy to understand or follow as an open source license.
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When I read this, I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my chair. Just consider, if you will, how many completely misguided and contradictory views of the GPL you've seen/heard recently, even right here on
Most open source users have no friggin' clue what the exact rights and restrictions are under the GPL or other popular OSI-listed licences (the BSD/MIT variants being a possible exception, since they contain almost no restrictions to begin with). That doesn't keep them from having an opinion and loudly expressing it, of course...