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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.
Ah. So that's why you pay for sex.
Ignore this signature. By order.
I was expecting to read a biased view toward the GPL, etc. Went straight to the BSD(-style) section and it's exactly what I found. Not about what the BSD(-style) licenses do/do not permit, but a commentary about what features of the GPL aren't in the BSD and how that's "good" "according to some people."
Gotta say that I've read a lot about licenses, etc and have yet to see one that isn't biased in one direction or another. And this is certainly no exception. I'd just love to see a commentary that keeps people's fucking politics out of it.
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".
The PDF is 326,093 bytes. The HTML is 184,296 bytes, and pulls in an additional 74,847 bytes in associated files, leading to a total download of 259,143 bytes. So, you're saving about 20% by going for the malformed, painful to read version. Time to read first page is probably comparable, if you're using a browser with adequate PDF support (which if your browser dates from the same era as your 14.4k modem, it probably doesn't).
Of course, with the HTML you also have the option of throwing away all the formating and reading it in lynx, saving yourself about 43% over the PDF.
Or you could just read the slashdot thread about it, and get the salient points in a mere 50k, plus images, flash ads and so on.
Well, this is /. so it goes without saying that most of us won't bother reading either.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
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
IANAL, so a lot of this is in the context of listening to a lot of other lawyers talk.
I think the document seems to be a reasonable summary of the concensus view in a lot of cases. I think it is a good read.
There are a few areas where I would prefer to see more detail (it is my understanding that prior to pursuing legal action for copyright infringement, one must register the copyrights but this may be different than enforcement as other forms of leverage may be applied in those cases).
One thing I thought was particularly well put forward was the patent section and the question as whether to apply for patents. The key thing I have heard from patent lawyers is that unless you intend to monetize an invention in a major way, it is not worth applying for a patent for the simple reason that patent enforcement is difficult and expensive.
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!)