Slashdot Mirror
Legal Group Releases Guide To GPL Compliance
An anonymous reader brings news that the Software Freedom Law Center has published a guide for compliance with the GNU General Public License. The purpose of the guide is to prevent "common mistakes" the SFLC has encountered during its various GPL violation investigations. Their suggestions include close scrutiny of software acquisitions, more precise tracking of changes and updates, and avoiding "build gurus." They also provide tips for dealing with a violation. The full guide is available at the SFLC's website.
The term is defined within the text: "build guru" is their term for a team member who handles the firmware build process for your product, given a situation where the knowledge of how to do so exists in his head, rather than in documentation or shared knowledge.
I don't think that the term is a standard one in the broader sense; but it is clear enough for the purposes of their discussion. Relying on one person's personal knowledge for a vital step in your process is never ideal, especially if you have a legal obligation to provide your customers with some of that knowledge, if they ask for it. Simple enough, really.
The GPL requires you to include the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. It does not require you to provide the knowledge needed to use those scripts, if it's all in someone's head. So having "build gurus" doesn't necessarily put you out of compliance, though it might make it hard to demonstrate you are in compliance.
No, since you are not distributing the software.
Large corporations (which probably do way more business than you or whomever you're speaking for) don't have that problem. Reasonable business operators recognize that you should not be "confident to use" any software without complete understanding of the terms of the relevant licenses. This goes for any software license. In this way the new BSD license is deceptively simple and framing this issue as though it only affected the GPL is unfair.
Digital Citizen
You don't mean a "commercial" license. The GPL is a commercial license. Commerce is done with software licensed under the GPL. You mean something else, perhaps "proprietary".
In any event you haven't explained what is so bad about the GPL or that you understand the licenses you deal with (any of them) to warrant such trust in these other more permissive licenses or licenses you erroneously referred to as "commercial".
Digital Citizen
If software was written in English instead of programming languages, I think there would be less confusion.
The folks who should be concerned with software are ordinary folks; not programmers.
But of course, in reality, both of these matters are too complex to accurately express in standard English.
The GPL is a hack of the legal system with the goal of turning copyright upside down. That hack only works because it's written in legalese.
Unfortunately, writing legal documents in English isn't really an option. The law, like math, natural science, or computer programming, has an evolved set of vocabulary, logical rules, stylistic conventions, etc. Some of this is definitely unnecessary cruft, or even deliberately hostile and obscure; but not all of it is. Some legalese is much closer to English than other legalese, just as some programming languages are pretty close to pseudocode; but the two aren't identical.
I agree that licences(and law in general) ought always to strive for clarity; but(as I'm sure you know from explaining tech stuff to non techies) real clarity often demands a certain amount of jargon. Concepts, whether they be "JIT Compiler", "Special Relativity", or "Derivative Work", can be glossed in English; but they cannot be fully described without reference to the technical terminology of their fields.
The GPL does pretty well, comparatively speaking, in being precise without being incomprehensible. Unfortunately, it has been forced to become more complex(the difference between version 2 and version 3 is striking) by factors outside of its control, mostly related to software patents, DRM/Tivoization, and technological advances that make the aggregation/derivative work boundary fuzzier.
> [as a user] would I be under any obligation to release the source code to the software I wrote?
No, as a user of GPL software, as opposed to a (re)developer or distributor, you do not engage any of the relevant conditions of the GPL with respect to provision of the source code.
As the ex-FSF's Eben Moglen has said on many occasions (paraphrased but close), "The GPL is not a usage license, but a distribution license". That's a very clearcut distinction, and Eben has written the book in this area.
There is a small corner case to watch out for, however, and that's static linking with GPL libraries --- a few people call this "derivation" despite the fact that you're only an end user and are only aggregating the GPL library functions statically with your code, so the issue is slightly grey. However, most linkage with GPL libraries is dynamic, and even Richard Stallman has conceded that legally, dynamic linking cannot ever be derivation but only mere usage. No doubt Eben put him straight on that. "Aggregation is not derivation" appears in the FSF's own explanatory materials.
On the whole then, the answer is "No, you're safe", unless you go out of your way to use static linking, which would open you up to the possibility of occasional arguments within the community, although probably not legal ones.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
What if someone takes your code and patents a part of it? BSD then says you cannot claim the patent or protect yourself from it.
And patent law says you can't use your BSD code.
It therefore doesn't matter if you feel confident in obeying the BSD. Your feelings will not make a hill of beans difference. And you will be disallowed.