LCA: Cooperative management of package copyright and licensing data
Posted Jan 20, 2010 17:10 UTC (Wed) by
drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to:
LCA: Cooperative management of package copyright and licensing data by iabervon
Parent article:
LCA: Cooperative management of package copyright and licensing data
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?
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