Thursday, April 15, 2004
OS Licences 101
Unfortunately I couldn't get all the details down (and we skipped a few slides) -- will ask for a copy of the slides I think. Overall one of best presentations so far; David, understandably, made a point of stating he's not a lawyer, but presented the topic in a concise, laymans view of the OS licencing world. As he mentioned, there are a lot of opinions, strongly held, about specific styles of licence (the GPL / non-GPL-type divide being the biggest) -- however, many especially small, projects seem to chose a licence arbitrarily without understanding the consequences, better FAQs about this topic need to be publicised.
- Licensing models are driven by desire to share, not profit
- terms
- OS developer creates IP
- Owner of IP has Copyright
- People orgs can use IP
- Businesses wants to use UP as part of a distributed
- Dev chooses licence
- ... some discussions of what motivates devs and businesses and what businesses fear ...
- 4 groups of licences
- copyleft (gpl)
- lib copyleft (lgpl)
- liberal (bsd, mozilla, apache)
- corporate (nokia , netscape etc)
- FSF freedoms -- freedom to run, distribute, change (need the source)
- GPL -- if you use, derivatives must be gpl, explicit tool against proprietary software
- LGPL -- viral to changes in libs, doesn't spread to using code, lib must be replaceable
- rights
- extremes: public domain (no (c), TM, patent OR (c) All rights reserved, TM, patents
- menu: retain ownership, reciprocity,
- reciprocity: if you modify and redistm must publish the chages to the commons, only applies to redistributed works (internal use ok, because not "displayed")
Unfortunately I couldn't get all the details down (and we skipped a few slides) -- will ask for a copy of the slides I think. Overall one of best presentations so far; David, understandably, made a point of stating he's not a lawyer, but presented the topic in a concise, laymans view of the OS licencing world. As he mentioned, there are a lot of opinions, strongly held, about specific styles of licence (the GPL / non-GPL-type divide being the biggest) -- however, many especially small, projects seem to chose a licence arbitrarily without understanding the consequences, better FAQs about this topic need to be publicised.
