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SFLC's Legal Guide On Free Software
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.'"
Surely the more information is available and easily-accessible (from an introduction point of view) the better, right?
I'm happy to see more resources aimed at educating developers. Particularly new ones.
But, legally speaking, you should read the license you pick. Don't just assume any summary is correct. I am not saying this summary is not accurate, I am just reminding you that you actually need to read what you "sign".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In this case, the politics are the indirect reason. I think the writers (which were all part of the "FSF" cadre) are simply more knowledgeable about the GPL-style licensing than about BSD-style licensing. They have considerable experience and expertise drafting and enforcing the GPL and LGPL, but they have not been, for example, part of the AT&T-Berkeley BSD litigation. The discussion of copyright enforcement would have been more interesting if it included examples of successful enforcement of both the types of licenses.
The discussion of "copyright assignment" falls under the same heading: that's what the FSF does, and they are telling us what they learned about this kind of setup. Better they share their knowledge than leaving others to rediscover it.
I think the best way to view this document is as follows: "we are laywers, who have been helping FOSS projects. Here are some lessons we learned, in non-technical language. Read this before talking to your lawyer and you'll get more mileage out of him/her".
Can you expand on the pieces you view as biased? Most of it looks rather straight forward. They explained that bsd style licenses grants a freedom, explained why this freedom can be beneficial, and explained what you lost by (downstream openness) by selecting the license.
That seems like a pretty simple and blunt explaination. Each license has pros and cons depending on need.
Just because they're not evangelising the BSD license doesn't make them bias. They just spent time describing how the GPL works first so of course they're just going to expend on that and just show how GPL and BSD are practically the same apart from the following differences.
Some licenses (particularly long ones like the GPL v3) may need to be read many times, argued with many lawyers, etc. before one can even hope to have even a partial understanding of it....
IANALE
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I haven't read it (YET!), but as legal issues mentioned on Slashdot tend to have a very US-centric perspective, and as I live outside the US, I'm curious as to how much of it will be applicable to me.
To be honest, I would say that all developers, even those who are firmly based in the US, need to be considering international law in this regard -- you may be based in the US, but your software will almost certainly end up all over the world.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)