LCA: Cooperative management of package copyright and licensing data [LWN.net]

LCA: Cooperative management of package copyright and licensing data

Posted Jan 20, 2010 16:16 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: LCA: Cooperative management of package copyright and licensing data

One thing to consider is that not all files in a project will be licensed under the same license, and, where the files are not derived from each other, may not be under compatible licenses (so the distributor can't say that they're using relicensing rights to standardize the license of files in the package, for the purposes of the package).

For example, it's extremely common for projects where all of the code is licensed under the GPL to contain a file (named "COPYING") under a "freely-distributable, no derivatives" license. Of course, packages will often also contain data files and documents under other licenses, as well as, in some cases, software which is separated licensed any meant to be used together across a protocol layer. (Including such things as software modem drivers that handle configuring the hardware as a phone-line audio device and directing data to a closed-source program which converts between character data and audio; while nobody's written an free replacement, it's entirely specified, independently of the driver, what such a program would do.)

(Log in to post comments)

LCA: Cooperative management of package copyright and licensing data

Posted Jan 20, 2010 17:10 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

This is one of the nice things about the 'viral' nature (or copyleft) of the GPL.

By having that as the 'standard' license and requiring that everything works with it then it makes it the lowest common denominator. That will be the 'least free' license you have to deal with. Meaning that as long as you comply by the requirements of the GPL then you should be safe.

Also this is why it's very important for distributions like Debian to be very anal about licensing issues.

It's when you get into licenses that allow a mixing and matching of copyright restrictions.. like the Mozilla license, is when you start getting down to the point were you are requiring end users to start to examine individual files for different restrictions on use.

The legal overhead of having to do that for something as large as a operating system can be very significant. You can see that for major commercial software products, also, which is probably a much worse problem. Look at Java, for example, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars and man hours have gone into Sun examining and auditing it's own source code in order to try to open source java?