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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.
Any kind of legalese could do with such a guide.
Ignore this signature. By order.
GPL compliance need not be an onerous process.
They say at the end of a 15 page document.
By the standards of legal advice, that paper is both terse and clear. Perhaps in the wide world of training webcasts, 30 second commercials, and authoritative voiceovers, 15 pages qualifies as a ponderous tome; but you have to keep that sort of thing in perspective.
The broad concept of the GPL isn't hard; but a quick guide to a few of the unintuitive points is a useful thing. The details of the source distribution requirements are a matter of considerable confusion in some quarters, as are the terms under which one can regain the licence after violation.
Those minutiae aside, though, I am very surprised by how much apparent confusion the GPL and other copyleft type licences inspire. There seem to be two main camps of misinterpretation. The copyleft=no copyright group seems to believe that anybody who doesn't do copyright the exact same way they do doesn't do copyright at all. Hence this group's lack of respect for the terms of the GPL and similar. The other extreme has a fear amounting to mania of the GPL, believing that the GPL is unknowably complicated, and will inevitably lead to having all the code you've ever written forcibly expropriated by armed communist penguins.
I don't understand the confusion because the GPL is a perfectly ordinary licence, from the legal perspective. Its purpose, socially, is quite interesting, and rather unusual; but the form "Copyright law says that you can't copy this without our permission, which we grant if you do foo and bar." is absolutely standard. People seem to go in expecting the legal side to be horribly mysterious, just because the social purpose is unusual. It is rather weird, really.
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.
GPL arguably has more complex goals than BSD, so it really isn't realistic to expect the GPL to be simpler than, or even as simple as, the BSD licence. Making sure that your licence is as short as possible, without compromising your goals, is always good; but compromising your goals just to make your licence simpler is perverse at best.
Complexity isn't the issue with the GPL: it's the legalese. And because of the legalese, I am not confident to use it or any software using that license for commercial use without legal advice; which increases the cost of using GPL software on a commercial level. This extra cost is factored in when evaluating and comparing against software under other licenses.
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
> [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.
I have to wonder if people who complain about the GPL (or, for that matter, most software licenses I've dealt with) being confusing have ever actually read it. I read and understood the GPL when I was in 9th grade. Sure it took me a few reads, but any legal document, or for that matter most any book is like that.
Can you give a specific example of language you find confusing in the GPL?
I think, perhaps, people simply are daunted by the idea of "so much" language that all has meaning to be understood, not the actual quality of that language.
Someone should show this document to Sun's OOo team. If you download the source on any given day and try to compile it, there's about a 75% chance that something is broken on that day.
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