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SFLC's Legal Guide On Free Software

Posted by kdawson on from the law-for-the-rest-of-us dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last week the Software Freedom Law Center published A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects. The primer, written for developers, has sections on copyrights, trademarks, patents, and organizational structure. Linux-Watch has reviewed the guide, saying 'I think any open-source developer or open-source group administrator must read this paper.'"

3 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The Primer is nice and all... by RobBebop · · Score: 4, Informative

    The authors of this primer are lawyers. Sure, they have biased ties to the FSF, but there isn't a group of men on the planet better qualified to put together a concise explanation of the values, virtues, and gotchas of working with free and open source software.

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  2. Re:I don't like the "you should..." bits by RobBebop · · Score: 4, Informative

    What I object to is the "you should ..." bits which indicate that the authors are suggesting courses of action. I'd rather just have the lawyers unwind the legalese and make it human readable and let me make the decisions as to what I should and should not do. This makes it feel like the authors have an agenda that they are pushing.

    The authors do have an agenda, which is to promote freedom. The authors are also lawyers and the reason they are saying "you should" read it is because it does unwind the legalese jargon in the F/OSS licenses and explains why you would want to use such a license.

    As far as framing it differently... the Software Freedom Law Center team includes a number of prominent individuals who have made strong arguments for Free Software in the past. Included in the board of directors is Lawrence Lessig and Eben Moglen. Maybe you've heard of them, maybe you haven't... but tens of thousands of people are knowledgeable about some of the work of these two men. Maybe you'd trust the word of one commenter that these are two noble, respectable men and my assurances that any concise documentation that they would publish is worth checking out.

    And I guess you have a right to be skeptical because there are tons of "articles" on /. that are just links to technorati or arstechnica or cnet... but this isn't one of them. This is one with authors who more interested in Free Software for Freedom's sake then the sake of steering traffic to their site to get ad revenue. Ya dig?

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  3. Analysis of Affero GPL is missing too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    There are a few areas where I would prefer to see more detail

    Me too. Here is another such area where a key element is missing from the document.

    In the section on the Affero GPL, these not-so-eminent lawyers failed to identify the key conceptual AND LEGAL difference between GPL and Affero GPL: that while all other FOSS licenses trigger at the point of distributing the work (because it's the copying that triggers copyright), the terms of the Affero GPL trigger on ***USAGE*** of the server-side software. Affero GPL is therefore a usage license.

    Since there is no copying involved when users of a service use that server-side software remotely, copyright does not get engaged at all. This means that copyleft doesn't get engaged either (since copyleft is based on copyright), and that means that the Affero GPL is not a copyleft license when it is applied to server-side software. Instead it is a EULA controlling *usage* of a work. This sits extremely badly alongside Eben's common statement that the GPL is not a usage license. That's true for the GPL, but the Affero GPL is precisely that, a usage license by definition.

    That is such a central and fundamental difference in concept with respect to FOSS copyleft licenses that it boggles the mind that the lawyers just glossed over it.