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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.'"
Does the GNU FDL (Free documentation license) fit under the GPL in that case?
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
What about LGPL and CreativeCommons licenses? Libraries and artwork (books, websites, etc) still ought to have their open-source licenses available...
My Systems
The LGPL will be covered by the Commercial GPL? Many of the protocol implementations come with it. Anyway, after RTFA it seems that maybe it is not so important, the OSI does not decide which licenses are valid, it just enforces some of them, so those approved by the OSI would still be in use (Or at least this is what I understood from it)
Why can't
The usual response to that is that if you aren't willing to play the OSS game, you aren't allowed to use OSS code.
I think it's a juvenile attitude. "I willfully don't profit off my stuff so nobody else should either."
Of course, people are free to license things as they wish. I just think it's elitist to redefine the meaning of Open Source on a whim so that people who choose to release their code without restriction are no longer creating "open source."
The LGPL is a good compromise between the GPL and BSD licenses, although it's a little too wordy for my tastes.
If you want no restrictions on your work at all, you put it in the public domain. Doing so would allow anybody to do anything with your work. It wouldn't allow them to claim copyright on your work because you were the creator.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I think they're going to run into the same problem that DRM manufacturers have: there's no benefit to the people who are untimately in charge.
In this case, it isn't the 'paying customers', it's the developing free software engineers. The proliferation of licenses comes directly from the fact that developers have found some aspect of the GPL or LGPL to be too onerous to release under. And there is no way you're going to get them to alter their license just because Stallman thinks they should.
So here's a different idea. Instead of trying to reduce the number of Open Source licenses, people should instead come up with a comparison chart. Much like the Unix rosetta stone except for legalese, identifying general contract features in common (or different) between them.
That way developers can see the difference in a single place, and pick the best license for their particular purpose.
I don't know if you comment is a troll or not.
It's fairly well established that some people believe something is more free if it has a license that restricts users ability to make versions of the software non-free whilst some people believe that software is more free if you have the right to make non-free versions.
I think regardless of how you define "free" both the BSD and GPL style licenses have different purposes.
When you say that if something was 100% free it wouldn't need a license that might be true if the world had no laws or commercial interests. That extra waft in the GPL that makes it longer than the BSD license is to make it clear that the software can't be moved from the category of "free" software to the category of "non-free" software by commercial interests.
Imagine another world (as Stallman problably does) where the law by default rather than supporting commercial interests supported freedom of software. In this world the GPL would be short and the BSD license long because the BSD license would need to explain that future versions of the software could be taken by private companies and changes withheld unlike "normal software" where future versions of the free software must remain free by default.
Matt.
If your game truly has little to do with LibSDL, it is not a derivative work, and therefore doesn't have to be GPL'ed. I doubt you could sucessfully argue that a game isn't a derivative work of the rendering library it depends upon, though.
The question of whether linking a library into an application makes the result a derivative work is an open one. The FSF has it's opionion, but as they note, "[it] is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide."
But want to make a derivative work, the cost is making it GPL'ed.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Sam Greenblatt, a member of the OSDL board, was quoted as saying something very unclear: "Eventually there should be three licenses: The GPL, a commercial version of the GPL...". The GNU General Public License (GPL) allows one to distribute copies of covered works for a fee. Many people have turned GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection), one noteworthy GPL-covered program, into a commercial work by distributing copies of it for a fee, some have also based for-hire consulting services on GCC. These consultants develop GCC as a business activity.
Most of the time when people say "commercial" in this context, they don't mean that. That word was just a poor choice which may stem from not fully understanding what software freedom entails. What they really meant to say was "proprietary", which is something different. In this case, I don't know what that other meaning would be; a proprietary GPL would not be the GPL, it would be a perverse opposite of what the GPL stands for and accomplished long before the open source movement existed. Thus I'm left thinking Greenblatt's statement is at best unclear, non-sensical at worst.
Digital Citizen
BSD and GPL have a *very* different spirit. The first one is strongly academic (making the source available with no strings attached, just requiring the user to give credits where they're due), the latter is strongly political (anti-proprietary, and openly communistic since it aims to abolish private property as far as software is concerned).
I don't know about Sam Greenblatt, but the fact that you can't get rid of BSD makes most professional developers very happy.
--
Requiem for the FUD
The freedom to see, modify and share the code I use.
Why should you have a right to see code that somebody else wrote [and is a derivative of some third party's Libre code, and is being distributed to me] unless they want you to?
Why in the world should I not? The idea that you should be able to take and never have to give (as MS does with BSD code, for example) seems very odd. Notice my interjections to your quote. If the software is all yours, it's a different matter entirely. We're talking about derivative works, where you're adding something to someone else's code.
Your idea seems to be that it's ok for you to take something someone else made, and have a monopoly, not only on your additions to the other person's work (which the LGPL allows), but the portions of the original you incorporated with them. Yes, that doesn't give you a monopoly on the other person's original, but it still seems really rude.
Then there's the practical problem the BSD license opens up by allowing embrace-and-extend, but let's not chase that rabbit.
As I said, the extra freedom that the BSD license gives you comes at my expense. It's not more free, it's differently free. If it's more free for you, it's less free for me.
See what I've been reading.
BSD isn't that great an example of a truly free license, as it requires credit. The BOOST license is a bit better for that.
I think you've got a very good list, though.
I'd like to see a commercial GPL that only required modifications or extensions (a new method in a GPLed class for example) to the GPL code to be contributed back rather than try to force the opening of any software it's embedded in.
It depends on your perspective. If you consider the right to freely view, modify, and redistribute source code as a natural right, then ANY infringement of that right is "restriction."
You're looking at it from a the perspective that such things AREN'T a natural right, and therefore allowing them is granting rights.
In other words, it's the difference between a philosophical and legal view. Legally, according to US Copyright, you're granting them rights. Philosophically, according to copyleft, you're restricting their rights. You're both right, so there's no reason to keep arguing about it.
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
I don't look down the pipe that direction. To me, it's about being generous and not being hung-up about whether other people might benefit from something I've done. I honestly don't expect anything in return. For me, the mere fact that somebody else found my code useful enough to incorporate into a product is thanks enough.
In other words, free work for for-profit companies. By all means, be so altruistic, but don't count on a large following. If you're making a profit of my work, I'd like some kick-back. Buy a license (dual licenses), provide some code in return (LGPL in lesser degree, GPL in greater degree), an acknowledgement (old-style BSD) or something. If I wanted to do free work I'd do it for a non-profit or charity. Not to fund stock-holders.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If there's nothing copyrightable the combined work is still (for copyright purposes) the same work as it was before, so there's no basis for an infringment complaint. A typo correction in a large body of text is one example of such a change which is ineligible for copyright coverage. Some bug fixes may also qualify, depending on significance to the work as a whole.
A public domain (rather than ineligible for copyright) change would be more interesting but that's completely free, even more so than the license-restricted GPL, so it's not very useful to take any legal action. What copyright law basis would you use for arguing that a linked component dedicated to the public domain was a license infringment? Take care that you don't end up accidentally arguing that you can't use public domain pieces in GPL programs.
The lawyers would also need to consider whether the change was either de minimis or fair use.
I know I wouldn't want to argue that a bug fix or security flaw closing modification wasn't fair use.:)
Consider the Linux kernel. That uses headers with substantially the same functionality as those of Unix. It's conceivable that you can build under Linux a program using those headers which will function correctly on a Unix system. Does that make it a derived work of Unix?
The question here is the difference between linking and compatibility. Linux can use those Unix values without infringing the copyright of Unix. Otherwise Linux is greatly threatened by the SCO action. Similarly, it's conceivable to produce a Linux-compatible program which isn't a derivative work of Linux.
Whether you're doing so depends on the details of what is happening. If it's just the facts of an interface, it's going to be tough to argue that it's linked when that's contrary to the specific laws regarding reverse engineering for compatibility being legal. Someone may try anyway, of course.
Very great care is needed here, lest you end up using arguments which in effect make every Windows program and the WINE project derivative works of Windows because they are compatible with it or programs which work with it.