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Legal Group Releases Guide To GPL Compliance

Posted by Soulskill on from the information-wants-to-be-free-and-legal dept.

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.

6 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. From the document... by BitterOldGUy · · Score: 5, Funny

    GPL compliance need not be an onerous process.

    They say at the end of a 15 page document.

    1. Re:From the document... by Ed+Avis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly. It kind of makes you think the BSD folk might have a point in insisting on simple, permissive licences (though even those can be open to misinterpretation - see ipfilter in OpenBSD).

      Still, this 15 page document is only needed for legal-corporate types, anxious to know the letter of the law and the exact boundaries of what's permitted. For ordinary programmers, RMS has tended to say that the letter of the GPL is less important than its spirit, which is to share your code and give all users the same rights you have. If you stick to that principle you can be pretty sure you are within the letter of the licence as well.

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    2. Re:From the document... by jbn-o · · Score: 4, Informative

      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
  2. Context people, context. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Context people, context. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  3. Re:Build Guru by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.