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Novell License Draft 1.0 Submitted for Review
Bruce Perens writes "Novell has submitted its Open Source license for review. You can find it, and a few details about license-review, here. "
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Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Actually, I thought this was funny. Why did you down-moderate it?
Hey!
What?
Hey!
Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!...
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
2. Not every attorney agrees with yours on that issue.
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Bruce
Bruce Perens.
During it's meglomanical phase, Novell bought Unix from AT+T, and for a brief period sold a x86 Unix called UnixWare. (If only this product was marketed properly...)
They've since sold Unix and UnixWare to SCO and turned the UNIX trademark over to The Open Group (?). So they don't currently have any vested interest in Unix other than the fact that Linux/BSD is competition for NetWare.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
glibc already allows exactly this kind of plugins by the means of Name Service Switch (NSS). It is all there and working on a linuxbox near you. Read all about it @ System Databases and Name Service Switch
That's not how they do it, though. They ship with the GPL, and the authors even frequently think that it's GPL software. But it's not, and this is done without changing a word of the GPL--the actions override the text.
This usually happens because the GPL was a poor choice for the project, and that the developers didn't fully understand the consequences of the viral nature of the license. That is, it usually happens in projects that can't possibly be GPL'd.
The solution is not editing the text, but another file that explains what the text means in light of what really happened. Alternatively, a LICENSE file could state that the terms in the file in the directory GPL apply save as follows. Either way, the copyright isn't violated.
hawk, esq.
I don't see that this restricts what you can do with your own work at all.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
When I contribute code, I do it to increase the problem space covered by free software. Not only am I not interested in helping proprietary software developers, I would object to their incorporating my code without negociating a commercial license. My code is not a gift to them, it's something I share with the free software community.
Regarding Java, if the copyright holder doesn't want to prosecute your use of a non-free run-time, that is the copyright holder's choice. See also the GPL provisions for code that is a standard component of your system, which may apply to the Java run-time.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I've got to take comments on these issues back to Novell. Please think them through, folks.
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Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Perhaps, since these companies are apparently trying to appiese free software types somewhat, Novell might at least give us a rationale for lack of GPL compatibility? I get the feeling that, all else aside, these companies don't actually understand how important GPL compat is to a lot of people - an "open source" stamp isn't enough for a lot of people/purposes.
There is a working group on license convergence that has not yet officialy invited me on board but I think I will get in to their next meeting. Hopefully at that time they will see that I am not an ogre and will invite me to be a regular participant.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
What makes this newsworthy is that another really big company has decided that they can play by the community's rules. I am just as bothered by you by the proliferation of licenses, but lawyers need time to develop their opinions just as we need time to develop code, and we are working on a convergence to fewer licenses.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
...if Open Source was really open.
Apparently, true openness is going out of fashion. GPL "Thou shalt have no other license" is killing all diversity.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I found an article on Eactivism called Democratizing Technology through Open Source. It really goes off on the SCSL saying the it fails to democratize the design process which undermines the democratic principles of Free Software. According to the article this is a major problem. They say something like "without democratization of design democracy throughout society will be subverted." Ouch. On the other hand it is a serious arguement for why the software industry needs to go true Open Source. It's kind of the activist bent. Interesting arguement though. I wonder if the Novell license will have similiar problems.
Hi all!
Wasn't there an outstanding copyright-court-case with some people from the open-source-community?
Why should we (the open source community) trust Novell ? Why should we trust Novell while court case 9704-339 (4th Judicial District Court) is still outstanding ?
For those of you who don't know, this court case
alleges (using the evidence of contractors who
worked for Novell as well as internal Novell
documents), that much of Novell's BorderManager
product (a closed source product) was based on the Squid proxy server (a GPL product).
Why should we trust a company who thinks the following of us :
"..... Once again we must balance the costs in-house development of "comparable code" against the costs and risks of simply taking their code and using it... this last group of copyright holders could be particularly troublesome for Novell to deal with.... "
If Novell now also favours the open-source-method, this could mean a view things:
1.) It's "we too" (marketing!)
2.) They really fear, that Micros~1 and their
Active-Directory could make Novell obsolete. So
they use coopetition-tactics to hurt them
(so they are Linux-friendly as long as it's favorable for them)
We'll see. Currently Novell might be ally, but who know's what they'll do in the near future? The license is a bit loose on prohibiting mayor changes to the license. They could (IMHO! I'm no lawyer) in the next version of the licence change it to their very own rules...
Hi, Bruce,
don't you think the Novell folks are actually reading these already? I know the NetWare specialist very well (I am a MCNE myself) and they are all Linux enthusiasts, too, and some of them read Slashdot. I don't know for Novell employees, but I guess some might be lurking right now.
And maybe some of those who worked on the NCL are interested in the feedback on Slashdot. It's quite interesting how Novell showed respect for the OSS community. Maybe it's only for the money, but it's nice to know a company believes it is possible to make money with OSS!
Sigged!
So that means I can't change the licence to something else, even if I am the original copyright owner.
5. If you fail to cure a material breach of this Agreement within sixty (60) days of receipt of written notice from a Contributor, you and the Contributor shall immediately submit to binding arbitration to be completed within six (6) months in compliance with the rules of the American Arbitration Association before an arbitrator competent in the field of computer law.
What about codes from other countries? I don't live in the US and AAA has no jurisdiction elsewhere.
Bruce,
I think the problems with the license can pretty much be summarized into the following three points (two of which you mention above):
If you look at this from Novell's point of view, this is a perfect spot to be in. They get all the good karma that comes with being a supporter of true "open source," but have put it under a license where none but the most mercenarial coders (i.e. those who will contribute to anything regardless of license) will even touch the code. On top of that, nobody from either of the other license camps can touch the code--the NCL will "infect" BSD programs, and NCL's "you can't relicense" clause prevents GPL programs from incorporating the code.
In short, it's good as far as being "open source," but it seems to have been purposely designed not to play well with existing OSS licenses. Interoperability among licences should be a higher priority for the OSS community in general, and this is a great example.
Nathan StrongI offer an alternative: Give us differential licenses! People like to refer to licenses using phrases like "GPL but you can't fork" or "BSD but you need to advertise in Playboy" or whatnot. If there's a pressing freedom or restriction that needs to be embedded in the license, ship the GPL with a patch. There will be some noise made, and your license should not include GPL in the name, but at leaast it would be simple to derive what specific changes you desired.
There is a slight problem with that. The GPL is copyrighted. The copyright does not say that the document itself falls under it's own copyright, so the GPL has not been GPLd. Hence you are not allowed to change or make modifications to the GPL (and hence not allowed to redistribute such changes either) for your own use.
Which is probably a good idea.
Imagine if someone forked a version of the GPL in such a way as it no longer forced the software it applied to to be free. Although the original GPL would have to still apply to the license itself, the license could be marketed as 'a GPL derivative' or 'an extension of the GPL'. If this were the case, the percieved 'power' of the GPL would be significantly weakened IMHO.
(IANAL)
K.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
And it states that the costs incured in any legal battle will be payed by the "losing" side.
I guess people in the US won't be used to this, but its normal practice in many other places - it helps stop frivolous (sp?) lawsuits by people who know they'd lose but want to make a quick buck by getting an out-of-court settlement.
Note that you get 60 days following receipt of written notice to correct any incompliance, which means you can't get rolled on "just like that".
In the case where you're sure you're right, some large company throwing its weight around would have to foot the entire bill and you'd be protected against being rolled on at all.
-- Steve
Female Prison Rape in NY
Now that shared libraries and distributed objects are commonplace, we need a GPL-like license with just enough restrictions on use (the GPL was devised with none, which is now the problem) to prevent our work from subsidizing proprietary software vendors.
I think that open source should have been copyrighted, int he last 6 months more companies than ever are tryin to go open source, can u imagine how profitable it would have been to just copyright it from the get go (the whole idea of open source - in software anyway) As more and more companies go open source, it seems to be taking away from the original enthusiasm of linux, and how powerful its future is. People are confused spending time making other products better.
I'd rather see more technological innovation instead of more legal/licensing innovations. In the end, that's the only thing that matters
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Seriously, it looks pretty good to me. Of course, IANAL. But I have read my fair share of software licenses (a boring hobby, I know). Only one thing bugs me. It doesn't specify whether code re-use (borrowing code) is allowed or disallowed.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
This is an interesting license. I don't see any immediate showstoppers which would prevent this from being a free software license.
As far as I can see there are very few differences between the GPL and NCL. There are no "hidden" details that would give Novell any rights to your work. Like the GPL dirivitive works get put under the NCL.
Unlike the GPL the NCL doesn't specificly mention what would happen in the event of a patent dispute or other restrictions such as export laws.
The NCL has one last interesting feature. By agreeing to it you also agree to how any breaches of the agreement will be handled. In paragraph 5 the NCL specificly states how any breaches shall be handled. And it states that the costs incured in any legal battle will be payed by the "losing" side. Interesting...
It seems to have basically the same requirements as the GNU GPL, only expressed differently. However, code under this licence will not be compatible with GPLed code. I wonder why, therefore, they are not using a GPL-compatible licence.
I can understand the need for about three versions of Open Source license
a) a BSD type license
b) a GPL type licence
c) a "commercial" license which allows the originator some rights over how his code is used to prevent forking and 'embrace & extend' by rivals. i.e. a sort of you can see the source, propose modifications and fixes, but we retain control over distribution license.
Why do people keep coming up with their own variations on a theme ?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The licenses that are coming out are innovative they let people share ideas and contribute to existing technologies. I'm glad that there are people like Bruce taking care of getting these licenses properly reviewed by peers so that when I get around to releasing my own killer app or start contributing to a project myself,I know that my cvscommit will stand on solid legal ground!
thanks Bruce.
Do you think we should buy Novell stock in case they get associated with the L-word by the press and public?
But that's not new. We had that for a long time with BSD, GPL and MPL (ok that is more recent but it covers both bases pretty nicely). Do we really want to deal with 5 zillion licenses?
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Considering that the proposed NCL shows the same transitive property on derived work as the GPL, this would create another disjoint set of OSS incompatible with anything else. In the case of Novel, this is esp. problematic, since - considering their business - they probably won't use the NCL for mere end-user applications, but for low-level stuff with will require massive kernel-interaction.
If this trend to incompatible OSS licences continues, the resulting balkanisation will negate the greatest advantage of OSS, the possibility to freely share code.
Anybody noticed that anytime company is in trouble and specially as a result of direct competition with MS, they think that embracing OS will somehow help them... I don't think so...
They are commercial company and have to play by commercial rules. We are yet to see OS company make the kind of money to become significant player in the computer industry...
I'm beginning to wonder about the proliferation of licenses in a slightly new light:
What if it's not merely a problem to have new licenses pop up that are more complex, more restrictive, more Gotcha-Source(where users presume rights that some small clause shoved into five words restrict) than the standard, rather simple to generally understand but well defined and heavily thought out GPL, LGPL, and BSD licenses?
What if it's a significant worry to have licenses that aren't complex enough?
After all, we talk alot about the benefits of Open Source turning the copyright system inside out upon itself, protecting situations where others restrict further usage of code beyond what the original authors ever intended. I like the Novell License for its simplicity and its lack of Gotchas for the user, but I have to wonder if there's not some small aspect of a ticking time bomb for Novell built into it?
There's a reason for every single clause in the GPL. The arguments are publically available and quite searchable. (Is there an annotated GPL out there, incidentally?) Novell's license isn't nearly as extensive, which could create a situation where *cough* a certain devious company sets up a front startup to Embrace and Extend Novell's code in a manner so as to make them anexample to the industry.
The GPL closes loopholes. It almost feels like the only reasons for this Novell license to exist are to leave them open.
There's a dark side to that. As far as I know, copyright law is set up such that one has no rights to the content beyond that which is explicitly granted. It is not inconcievable that Novell could be forced(or has individuals counting on being able to) to go to court to try to reclose a loophole that never should have been there in the first place, making a whole bunch of noise about the inadequacy of Open Source in the process.
It's a Media War, and all that.
Now, I doubt this is what Novell is up to. They've been doing some pretty cool stuff for Linux. (Windows 9x is another matter.) But they're going down a dangerous road.
I offer an alternative: Give us differential licenses! People like to refer to licenses using phrases like "GPL but you can't fork" or "BSD but you need to advertise in Playboy" or whatnot. If there's a pressing freedom or restriction that needs to be embedded in the license, ship the GPL with a patch. There will be some noise made, and your license should not include GPL in the name, but at leaast it would be simple to derive what specific changes you desired.
It's just not clear from the Novell license why, say, they didn't just go with BSD. And that's a problem.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I think the worst enemy of free software is not software forking, but license splintering. As much as I think the BSDL is too lax, it is at least compatible with the GPL, so we, as open-source programmers, can share our code between projects.
What we really need is for OSI (or the FSF, or SPI - someone we trust) to make a list of open-source licenses, with their standing in `restrictiveness'. Then any open source project can include the clause:
"This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the , or (at your option) and license of equal or greater restrictiveness, as deemed by the Open Source Initiative (see http://www.opensource.org/)."
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Novell part of the lawsuit against the BSD folks a decade ago? I think Novell had some vested interest in AT&T Unix.
If so, that doesn't show very well for Novell's track record.
Why does everyone use the term Open Source now? May Free Software live on.
WorldServe Consulting http://www.worldserve.net
i dont doubt it but novell employees dont influence management much anyway. its the management which makes the decisions not the coders...anyway, i hope they include a GPL relicense clause in their license instead of adding it to the general license pool of shit..which grows bigger every day. We ought to make it a clause in the dfsg..only licenses which allow GPL relicensing qualify as open source/free software licenses.
read the NCL. its more GPL than BSD.
I'm sad that people are picking on Novell, the first company that came out with a non-half-assed license, but I'm also sad about the license fragmentation. It's really the only major obstacle standing in the way of world domination...
Exactly. The commercial licence that is proposed is very similar to the SCSL. So can we term it as open source without the right to fork? But that is what SUN is claiming the SCSL is (approximately).
So the third point must necessarily imply a license like the SCSL.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Well?
Deleted
From the draft licence:
/. and BP if this is redundant, but I spent a while pondering the license before I posted (which is also odd).)
2. [...]you may distribute the Distributions in binary code form only under the NCL or a license agreement containing a prominent notice informing recipients how to obtain the Distributions in source code form under the NCL;
3. If the Distributions contain derivative works created by you, you must place a Notice in the source code of the derivative works stating that your derivative works are being made available under the NCL;
Unquote.
What this seems to me to say is that (2.) non-NCL licensing (a work containing?) an unaltered Novell binary is allowed so long as notice of said binary having originally been NCLed is kept (which keeps it from being GPLed, BSDed, &c.), but that (3.) derivative works would be NCLed "virally." Which is odd.
I assume that my reading doesn't reflect Novell's intent, and I'm neither a lawyer nor a potential developer of Novell-derivative works, so I might be wrong and it doesn't matter if I am; but, some clarification here might be helpful/needed before the NCL goes official.
(And apologies to
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
notice i said relicense not be compatible with.
The only licenses I see a need for are:
1) LGPL/MPL style license
2) NPL-style license to allow big corps and such that want to open-source some existing products that share code with closed-source projects.
The GPL is just plain nasty and immoral.
I am a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice. If you need legal advice, see a laywer licensed in your jurisdiction.
Reality is that there are plenty of GPL-derived, or Quasi-GPL (QGPL) licenses already out there.
*Every* time someone purports to release something under the GPL but codes to a non-GPL library (KDE & QT, lyx & xforms, etc.), the result is not GPL, simply by the way the law works.
These products *do not* violate their own license; this is legally impossible. Instead, the actions taken by the authors amend to purported license. With LyX, we made the qualifications explicit a couple of releases ago; KDE may be too far into flamewar for this to be possible.
Doesn't the third licence sound like the SCSL?
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
After reading the NCL, I am still confused as to how it deals with "linking" issues. I truely hope that this isn't another schism license that only plays well with its self (like the GPL)... I have been seeing a trend of late of more and more OS projects moving to providing more library-like functionality, rather than being complete and separate programs, and I am always depressed when I see these pieces of code released under the GPL. I am an MPL advocate and I find it quite frusterating that OS developers aren't willing to work together and allow free linking against their libraries. So my plea is this, to all OS developers who have portions of your project that have utility as a library, PLEASE release these libraries under a freely linkable license such as the LGPL... How can a library be actualized if it it isn't able to be linked against?
I think we should give credit to where it's due :)
Thanks
--
they should simply have a clause which sez code can be relicensed under the GPL if desired. unfortunately they dont. anyone want to propose it as a modification ?
The liscense looks good, however the lawspeak words like "hereto", "thereof" etc. are annoying. I want a liscense agreement written in C or PERL. Then we'll know what we're agreeing to. Also, why are parts of the agreement IN CAPS? The lawyers are hurting my ears.
There's nothing about the GPL that would make NDS access for Linux impossible, because integrated access to a directory tree wouldn't go in the kernel. The proper place for it is in libc, which is LGPL'd. This is where NIS client-side code went, and it's where NDS client-side code would logically be placed. Problem solved.
/etc/passwd, but with an NDS plug-in installed, it would check the directory tree instead.
Now that I think about it, I think it would make sense if the glibc were modified to allow plug-ins to change the behavior of various library calls. For example, on a vanilla glibc you call getpwnam() and it checks in
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As I said in another thread (sorry to dup, but didn't want this point missed), allowing a clause for relicensing would allow an escape for people trying to dodge the legal requirements of the NCL. Loopholes suck.
The SCSL is not an Open Source license, so it doesn't qualify.
The reason that companies are coming up with their own "Open Source" lisence is so that their code will still be "branded" with the company name.
If Novell decides to release said code under the GPL, it looks to the casual observer that we have another piece of software coming from the GNU project. By releasing it under their own lisence, any derivative of the work will still have the Novell name attacted to it.
It might seem like a pain to all of us who have to carefully read through the lawyer speak, but I think it is a small price to pay for having a new source of Open Source projects. Novell gets some name recognition and we get access to the code.
Seems like a win win situation to me...
- Cees
Be Afraid, be very afraid .... The NSA knows you ;)