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OSI Hopes To Decrease Number of Licenses
Noksagt writes "Various outlets report that the OSI may cut down the increasing number of Open Source licenses. Right now there are about 50 approved licenses; incompatible licenses confuse and impede developers and end users alike. The OSDL has been pushing hard for this at LinuxWorld. Sam Greenblatt, a member of the OSDL board, said 'Eventually there should be three licenses: The GPL, a commercial version of the GPL, and, of course, there will be the BSD because you can't rid of it.'"
Doesn't that [commercial GPL] kind of go against the grain and nature of the GPL?
Uh no. The GPL is not about giving away software for free. It's about the sharing of information in the form of source code, without restrictions.
If GPL doesn't have some sort of commercial counterpart, the company I work for will never use it -- after all, we're a company like any other, we exist to make money and earn a decent living.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
He was talking about software licenses. Not licenses in general.
You're free to write whatever license you want; they are free to refuse to certify it.
The problem with the proliferation of licenses is that you can't mix and match software. Right now there are basically three types of open source (or free software) licenses:
These licenses differ from each other on technicalities, and on what happens with patents, or because someone wants to tweak a boundary case. Some of them give a privileged position to the original contributor, some don't.
The community would be better off if we could just get down to three basic license choices, and the use of "special exception" clauses where needed. For companies that want special privilege (like the ability to use code plus fixes using other licenses), they can ask for copyright assignment of contributions, and treat contributors well enough that they actually get it.
This won't be easy - tearing people away from their, "but I need this clause" licenses.....
How about taking the 3 or so licenses as mentioned, but allowing each (or some) to have a number of options that could be opted for on a case by case basis? Rather than a one-size-fits-all, perhaps an aproach like the various Creative Commons licenses would be better for the entire community?
Find some common elements from a large number licenses from the "Approved" Open Source License Collection and make some of the most common language available as "plug-ins" to some sort of meta-license that encompasses a large cross-section of what's currently being used.
Rather than chooing a particular license just because it has some sort of attribution or distribution clause the author is interested in, bring consistency to the community but still allow individuals to apply special clauses to the documents that protect (or ensure the freedom of) their work.
Just an idea...
The BSD license does more than purely dedicate code to the public domain. The license also disclaims tort and contract liability for any problems resulting from the code.
So, for example, if someone uses your code library as part of the software in a dialysis machine, and a bug in your code winds up crashing the machine, and killing the patient, you theoretically cannot be sued for wrongful death. However, no one, to my knowledge, has actually tested the legal validity of the disclaimer in court at this point.
IANAL (yet).
From one of the articles:
So it sounds like the list under discussion includes LGPL.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
LGPL is what lets me use things like libPNG or ZLib in my commercial application
Neither libpng nor zlib is LGPL-licensed. Both use a unique, BSD-like license. Seeing you claim to develop commercial application, I would have hoped you were more careful with licenses.
Am I missing something? This definitely does not appear to be the case.
Public Domain has no restrictions whatsoever.
The BSD/MIT style licenses have no restrictions other than the fact that you must give credit where credit is due.
GPL has an important restriction -- you MUST give your changes back to the community if you want to distribute them.
Now, this may be a noble and community-minded goal, but it's still a significant restriction on the programmer's freedom to license HIS contributions as HE sees fit.
GPL uses property law to force property to be public instead of private -- instead of locking the code up behind closed doors, it's locking the code up on the village green.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
So, again, what would you change about the GPL to make it "commercial", since you can already make the receipt of sources and binaries contingent on purchase?
The fact that once someone purchases your software, he is given the right to distribute his derived work for free. Quote from the FSF:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
Copy code, slightly modify, provide for free. Not a term commercial software companies would agree with.
<disclaimer type="IANAL">
Nope. The GPL says nothing about giving changes back to some "community". It does say that when you distribute a binary to someone, you must make the source code for that binary avilable to them (either as part of the distribution of the binary, or on request within a limited period of time.)
Practially speaking, this does mean that changes can and do make it back to "the community" in a lot of instances. However, it isn't required by the GPL.
To use your own analogy - the GPL doesn't force you to put your changes on the village green. It allows you to put them on the village green, and it also allows anyone who receives them from you (directly or indirectly) to put them on the village green. That allowance greatly increases the chance that someone will put your changes on the village green, but it doesn't make it a requirement.
</disclaimer>
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
GPL has an important restriction -- you MUST give your changes back to the community if you want to distribute them.
No, it does not. You have to give the rights under the GPL to anyone to who you give the program. But, you can be as selective as you like about who gets your code; you don't ever have to give it back, and you can give it only to the people you want to give it to.
Of course, those people are free to do with it what they want...
No. You can sell the binaries, but everyone who gets binaries must have access to the source upon request.
Technically, it is possible to charge for the source, but only to cover media and shipping expenses. It would be more sensible to provide online access to source for registered users. Or include the source on the same media with the binary.
This is the main requirement of GPL, and you could sell upgrades as well, provided source access is similarly granted.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This is totally false. The clause you quoted is about endorsement and promotion, it has *nothing* to do with giving credits.
If you use any BSD code in your software, you MUST give credit to the author by distributing the BSD license along with your software, because that license is *still* covering the code you imported.
This is a widespread misconception in the GPL world - that you can "relicense" the BSD code. No, you can't.
This misunderstanding is often used by some people who, like religious zealots, are out to "convert" the BSD code into GPL code. The latest case I saw was the arrogant (and anonymous..) creator of the GPL'd g4l project, who included code from the BSD'd g4u project but stripped away the original license. The copyright infringement is documented here by the g4u author.
For the record: the creator of the g4l project "disappeared" and a new (also anonymous..) maintainer "appeared". This guy now claims that the current version of the g4l project doesn't infringe any copyrights. Even if this were the case, no public acknowledgement and no public apologies were ever made by the g4l maintainer(s) for what has been an episode of blatant code theft.
--
Requiem for the FUD
Anyone, yes, but only for the first generation. They can modify it and release it closed-source... so the second generation doesn't get to use the modified code.
The GPL is designed specifically to mandate that it is not only available to the first generation, but that it is also available to the second generation, and to the third generation, and continues ever on. The only restriction is on those who want to stop this continuation, i.e. restrict it from future generations. It might be said that the GPL's restrictions are "meta-restrictions".
So, the BSD license is "fairer" for first-generation modifications only; future generations are subject to the whims of those who perform modifications. The GPL's restrictions on a given generation are from those who would restrict it from the next.