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What to Protect in Open Source Software
eldavojohn writes "I found a brief blog by Marc Fleury on something that seems to almost be an oxymoron — what you need to legally protect in Open Source Software. The short of it is that you should trademark your name and brand it. Which might explain Xen's stance on the use of the brand 'Xen'. Another short blog notes that you should also maintain control of your distribution channels. Fleury also states this interesting tidbit on protecting intellectual property in OSS, 'Short of filing patents, there isn't much you can do in OSS. Let's face it the IP is there for everyone to see. If you are in a mode where a lot of the value is the code itself then open sourcing under GPL or equivalent reciprocal license may be a good choice for you. At least you will make sure that ISV's that re-use your license get in contact with you and many of them will pursue dual-licensing, a strategy that is known to work to monetize an OSS user base (mySQL).' Is there anything else you should take measures to protect in open source software? Is it possible to maintain control of a project under the GPL or are you constantly faced with forks?"
You protect anything that is truly new and creative. Which is rare in most technology.
Didn't Red Hat already demonstrate this principle, years ago? Hopefully for his sake, they didn't trademark it too, pfft...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Otherwise... protect it from what? If somebody swipes the code and locks it down under proprietary license, you can go after them for violating copyright terms. Otherwise, the whole stinkin' point of Open Source is to share the code. Can the author of TFA say "duh" for us?
If what you're licensing as open source code is covered by software patents (blecch), then it's already covered under patent law.
If you're that worried about distribution, do what RH and nearly every other distro maker does - have official mirrors. Anything outside of that and you don't have to take responsibility for it.
Otherwise, unless you fully grok what it is you're getting into by doing so, maybe you shouldn't open the license on your source code? This ain't rocket science here...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Why even "protect" it? First off, the most you should do is trademark your name or possibly your logo, the problem is, if you have a large enough base of people using your software, and you go out of your way to make it "protected" chances are someone is going to fork it into a more free version such as what happed with Firefox and Debian. As for forks, very, very, very few people are going to fork your code unless either there is a leadership disagreement, your work is not free enough, there is serious problems with the code or it is unmaintained, those are just about the only cases where it actually "forks" now if it is big enough of a project, there is going to be forks, however probably 80% die out within the first year and the 20% that remains are either lagging behind the main version or have very limited appeal. People will be quick to point out such things such as Cent OS and Red Hat Linux, however Cent OS is aimed for hobbyists or small businesses who don't need commercial support. Red Hat sells support, not Red Hat Linux. So moral to this post is, don't over "protect" your work, its no big deal if someone forks it, in Open Source, may the best code win.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
The only two songs that I've been able to remember word for word in their entirety for my whole life have been the national anthem and the MST3K theme song.
Does it contain a subliminal message?
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Is there anything else you should take measures to protect in open source software? Is it possible to maintain control of a project under the GPL or are you constantly faced with forks?"
:) have a nice day
FORK!! FORK!! there, run scared... haha
It is really funny how open source developers are so afraid of a fork. It seems that it would be the worst thing that can happen to their precious software/idea... imagine some forking Linux and making it so good that Linus does not matter any more? or what about apache, or any other project.
Recently, I was in a talk given by the founder of Moodle, and when asked which where the treats of his project, he named, maybe competitors, lack of interest and almost as if he did not want do acknowledge it, with a very weak voice, he said "forks".
Of course a fork would mean that the oh great lords and owners of the source (Linus, Theo, Miguel, etc...) would be put aside and they could end as simple coders...
Sorry for the flame
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Free/libre and open-source software is a product of freedom natives, people who regard freedom as a fundamental non-negotiable human value. Many freedom natives have been born in environments where they were in interaction with lots of other freedom natives.
A freedom native will make money with free software by offering great user support.
Now people who believe in control (control freaks) have learnt about the free software community and try to monetise by building upon its spectacular success. But being freedom immigrants, and keep being in interaction with other control freaks, they cannot comprehend how you can make money without using control. They think that the essence of capitalism is to squeeze the customer, lock users in proprietary platforms, etc. Thus, even though they adopt the free software insignia (they may use the GPL and place wikis on their sites), their mindset is still that of a control freak (they use their trademarks abusively, etc). They aren't true freedom natives.
So, a freedom immigrant will try to make money with free software by maintaining a dual-licensing scheme for corporate clients, by maximising as much as possible their grip on their trade marks, by making shadow deals with distributors, etc. And if they succeed to create a cash flow with these methods, their user support may suck.
When I evaluate a free software application for use in my personal and business machines, I try to understand whether it is made by a freedom native or a freedom immigrant. I prefer software written and supported by freedom natives, even if the freedom immigrants use the same licence.
being GPL means, most of all, that there is no protection against forks. after all, GPL _is_ the ability to fork (ignore RMS's politics and all the other noise.)
how do you avoid forks? by being on the right side - everyone pulls in slightly different directions, and any project would be a mess if it accepted all of them. it's also not just a matter of choosing - ideally, if a fork is threatened, the mainstream would trump the fork. that is, instead of some little feature X, develop a bigger, more general thing that is a superset of X. turn the fork into a trivial an unappealing, limited special case. I'm not advocating hyper-featurism, but to embrace big-picture generalizations.
It's either missing the point or is 100% targeted at the "how to exploit open source for personal gain" crowd.
In the ear. With a rake. Sideways.
No. It is utterly impossible. That's why Linux and the GNU project had to close up shop.
JTF: In your heart, you know we're right.
over distribution.
However, I think that projects should try to position their official site as the primary point of distribution (i.e. have the project actually manage getting packages for main distros up), and control main distribution points through the project. This doesn't mean you can control secondary distribution points, but it does mean you should try to influence and coordinate the distribution channels so that new updates get pushed out fast.
This is a major issue with licenses like Mr Rosen's OSL and the AGPL. Forced distribution makes it more difficult to protect your trademark and ensure that people are getting the most secure versions from you.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
...the comments. They get bullied by the rest of the code because they're "different". Even the compiler excludes them, the poor little buggers.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
One of the selling points of open source is, I'm afraid, precisely that the creator doesn't have final control over it. This is what gives users assurance that they'll be able to maintain the software even when the creator's interests diverge from theirs. If adding a particular feature or fixing a particular bug wouldn't be of any benefit to the creator, or worse might actually go counter to the creator's plans for the software, but would be of major benefit to me as a user it's a good thing for me when the creator can't assert control and prevent me from adding that feature or fixing that bug.
Patent, trademark, copyright and hex everything you can that's even vaguely unique, then sue the stuffing out of anyone who dares make a fortune with it. Regular Slashdot trolls have nothing on the patent trolls, who not only offend everyone but also get paid for it!
Ubuntu is an exception that proves the point. It went off in a very different direction than Debian. -- as such, I don't consider it as much a parallel fork as a symbiotic tangent.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Wasn't it demonstrated well enough by debian forking firefox a couple of months ago that trying to play stupid games with trademarks in OSS is well... stupid?
..some mental exercise out of the 90's
The guy that was busted for trolling Java sites? That's about all I have to contribute to this 'debate'; says it all really!
Maison Fleury glosses over patent protection too glibly. The Open Source Software community has been aware of the threats from software patents for years, yet has done little more than argue that software should not be patentable. During this time, OSS developers have created countless innovations. Had some of these innovations been patented, software patents would not pose as much of a risk because the OSS community would have powerful leverage. Even the risk from patent trolls would be somewhat mitigated because OSS developers could withhold licenses for key innovations from potential licensors of the patent trolls' technologies, drying up all streams of revenue. OSS would also have greater political leverage because it would be easier for groups like the FSF and the OSI to point to the patents as evidence that OSS spurs innovation, not just high-quality craftsmanship.
Patent protection is known to be expensive. But, a lot of money has been invested in OSS. Some of that money could go to paying the costs of securing and maintaining patent rights for OSS innovations. Furthermore, many law firms encourage pro bono work. The OSS community could probably leverage those free legal hours as easily as it leverages developers' hours. The real obstacle to securing patent protection for OSS is political: OSS developers tend to boycott the entire patent system and hope that it will just go away. Unfortunately, ignoring the value of this form of intellectual property protection is a mistake.
Some of the rights that can be secured through software patents are much better suited to OSS goals than copyrights or trademarks. Some OSS developers try to bend copyright and trademark protection in ways that, if accepted, would be harmful to the OSS community, if not the entire software industry. For example, "[s]ome have claimed that an application program that needs a library for its operation is a derivative work of that library." This line of thinking would make Gimp for Windows a derivative work of the Win32 API, making Gimp a product that is ultimately owned by Microsoft. Using patent rights to exclude use of a library by non-OSS would produce the desired result of encouraging the development of OSS without distorting copyright law in such a self-destructive manner.
The trademark can be used to label versions approved by the trademark holder. That's about all there is. Can you protect against forks? Not with the GPL or many of the other open source licenses. That's a good thing. Someone forks the code, adds in the stuff that scratches their particular itch, and throws their own trademark on it. That's what open source is all about. If you want to control your code, then don't open source it.
I've been involved in more than one project where the original code was orphaned, held by a control freak, or through lack of control had turned into bug ridden spaghetti. The solution was always to grab it, fork it, and then (if possible) merge back into the original code base.
The funny thing is that this is exactly what trademarks are intended to do. They differentiate similar goods and services. If you really think your fork is the best one, protect that trademark and watch the other forks for stuff you can merge.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
First thing that comes to my mind when I try to think of good usage for trademarks, is OOXML. If Open Office was made by any proprietary company, they would have sued microsoft's ass off for trying to mix up OO and their own format by misleading naming.
The GNU GPL actively prevents forks by removing the point of forking. Nobody forks the linux kernel because it's too much work and you generally get the same benefits by making your own patchsets and applying them to the code in the main tree.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
After all, SCO seemed to think that they could make a buck or two this way! ;)
To grow markets for new products as quickly as possible, giving away all the key elements may be the best strategy. Keeping prices at zero means the barriers to adoption and marketing through personal networks are negated. Money can be made from selling distributions, instructions, and customizations, and this approach is also competitive from the start. Instead of creating a kind of dam for intellectual properties where flow is controlled and limited, letting innovations flow free while taking fractional advantage of them might have better yields. Future competition is likely to be more about rate of innovation, sustaining relevance, and having a trustworthy reputation than holding keys and keeping doors locked.
The very point of debian is free software. If they can't use the firefox name on their own build then using something else is fine.
/usr/games/fortune?)
Why is iceweasel bad?
Do you know the Matt Groening quote about iceweasels? (Have you been reading your
Where's the insult?
It's not schoolyard politics. Debian has a philosophy and criticising them for sticking to it is the childish thing.
The only thing that needs protection is the right to use and distribute. There is a need for protection against those who would lock up the code in their own IP that could prevent the original creator from using his/her own work. But only complete abolishment can provide that. Everything else? Meh... Just sounds like control freaks with fat egos.
What?
Keep your test suites to yourself. That's a significant advantage over anyone else when it comes to maintenance of the codebase.
Is it possible to maintain control of a project under the GPL or are you constantly faced with forks?
It isn't truly open source until it's been forked.
In my experience oss is treated like abandonware - businesses could care less about the licensing agreements and modify and redistribute oss code at will regardless of what the authors intended.
We live in europe (where all the real OSS happens), and we don't have time to look through all patents. If we did we would not have time to write any code. Sw patents are a scam by some US lobbies. They cannot compete with OSS at a technical level and they have turned ideas into property of a few corporations, and as a result this DOES NOT ALLOW A SINGLE DEVELOPER to work on something if he is not PATRONIZED by a corporation that will take care of his patent protection (and consequently hold the copyrights of the work).
But the "fuck you", is about this: Patent trolls NEVER mention that there is a mass stream of developers that deny software patents. They pretend this does not exist. On the other hand, and anti-patent people talk about software patents all the time. This switches the middle point of balance of the issue to the SW PATENTS ARE A REALITY side. So, no. Not only developers should not protect against sw patents, but they should also COMPLETELY ignore the us patent system and let it die.
difficult at best. I am involved in the LedgerSMB project and in fact I helped to found the fork (we split off from SQL-Ledger because the author was not interested in fixing security holes). Since then we have found that the codebase is ACID compliant only in the Timothy Leary sense (i.e. the code reminds you of code one might write while on LSD)....
LedgerSMB is a rare fork because we are still around 1+ years later. This occurred only because the community was, as a whole, dissatisfied with the way SQL-Ledger was founded and we made sure we had enough resources to sustain development before we started. Now a year later we are finally taking it to the next level, have a new architecture/framework in place and are starting to move the code over to it.
Nearly all forks fail and most of those that succeed do so by being absorbed back into the main project. We actually encourage collaborative forking in LedgerSMB where the idea is to build different solutions on a common framework. THe only way a fork succeeds is if the core developer(s) don't meet the needs of the community and if a fork comes along that can (a number of dead forks of SQL-Ledger also exist). If you do this, why worry about forks?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
My business is based on the premise of helping people and businesses use FOSS. Why is that disgusting?
Note that all my code is released FOSS, and I actively promote projects where my business is not the only vendor.
I do find the principle of one entity controlling development for financial gain to be distasteful. Hence the protection is to ensure that one has a broader core team which represents a more diverse set of interests.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
However you will have little protection against thieves that want to copy what you have done without letting you know and put it under different licenses, I have seen it done, such is the nature of the beast.
He means copyright INFRINGEMENT, which should not even be a crime, right? Don't law enforcement officers have better things to do than to enforce this legal boondoggle for greedy businessmen like Marc.
I'm sure eveyone who posts here caught that glaring mistake right away.
I wouldn't go as far as that, but really if it can't be forked, it's not open source.
The GNU GPL actively prevents forks by removing the point of forking.
The point of forking is to deal with a project that is going a direction you don't like, or that has an absentee maintainer. The goal of a fork may be to become a new trunk, to create a new project with different goals, or to apply pressure to the trunk to become responsive to your goals. The GPL has little to do with this, and as evidence I'll note that GCC itself has had at least one major fork and a couple of minor ones.
Nobody forks the Linux kernel because the Linux team, lead by Linus, are responsive and responsible enough to remove the need for forking. That's what prevents forks, not the license.
Forks can also be used to convince the main trunk of a project to change direction, or to kick a stalled project into gear again. When Tcl was stagnating at one point, we started working on a fork... and Ousterhout started developing and releasing new code again, and we ended up turning the fork into an extensions package. Which was a good thing, Ousterhout's one of the best programmers I know, his code is a pure joy to work on.
I'm not sure what the point of this is.
If the project is truly open source, then there's nothing to protect it from.
In case anyone missed that reference, it is exactly what the FSF claims in the GPL FAQ.