Is this really OpenSource? [LWN.net]

Is this really OpenSource?

Posted Oct 23, 2003 20:27 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
Parent article: Alias-i Goes Open Source with LingPipe Natural Language Processing Tools

4.Whether you distribute the Software or not, if you distribute any computer program that is not the Software, but that (a) is distributed in connection with the Software or contains any part of the Software, (b) causes the Software to be copied or modified (i.e., ran, used, or executed), such as through an API call, or (c) uses any output of the Software, then you must distribute that other computer program under a license defined as a Free Software License by the Free Software Foundation or an Approved Open Source License by the Open Source Initiative

Can a license really claim jurisdiction over other programs that run the software or use output from the software?

So if GNU grep was under this license, my shell scripts that call grep would have to comply with this license? and even worse, if I saved the output from grep into a file, and a program made use of that file, the using program would have to comply with this license?

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Is this really OpenSource?

Posted Oct 24, 2003 8:32 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link]

Clause c) seems to be more troublesome, b) is more of the "thou shalt not link" discussion. I don't believe that they really meant that any output cannot be used by another program unless it is licensed in a particular way, since it is obviously ridiculous; it could mean that you're not even allowed to just view it on a Windows machine. ;-)

But of course, since it's in the license many users will probably not use this software (I wouldn't) -- which is a shame since it all sounds promising.

Is this really OpenSource?

Posted Oct 24, 2003 9:27 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

I wouldn't use this software either.

I'll drop them a mail suggesting they adopt a standard license.

Is this really OpenSource?

Posted Oct 24, 2003 9:22 UTC (Fri) by TeeJay (guest, #16239) [Link]

Yes its open source

its pretty reasonable that the data generated by it remains open source as well as just the code.

Why do people moan they can't use OSS or OSS data in proprietary projects - if you doing a proprietary project you can always (god forbid) negotiate a reasonable license based on what you use.

Dual licensing allows proprietary software developers to actually pay for stuff they will be selling while at the same time letting everybody else benefit.

This kind of deal is becoming popular and allows funding to come into companies like MySQL.

quit whinging

Is this really OpenSource?

Posted Oct 24, 2003 9:40 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link]

I think you've missed the point, big time.

The question is: can this software be called open source (or free, let's not get into _that_ discussion ;-) software if it contains a clause like this?

This has nothing to do with not being reasonable, whining and complaining. I am all for all of those but in this case I'll just stick to reading the license.

Is this really OpenSource?

Posted Oct 25, 2003 10:07 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

GCC is open source. But I can compile it with an non-open source compiler, I can edit it in Visual Studio and play it through Dragon NaturalSpeaking. You can't do that with the data, so it's not open source.

Is this really OpenSource?

Posted Oct 27, 2003 4:10 UTC (Mon) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

>>its pretty reasonable that the data generated by it remains open source as well as just the code.

It's rare for open source products to affect the data generated. The only example I know of is ancient Bison. Bison is a program that generates C code. At one point, the generated code included bits of GPL code and thus could only be used under the terms of the GPL. Bison was changed in version 1.24 and the generated code is no longer automatically GPL licensed.

I can see why LingPipe added paragraph 4 to their license. The GPL is not clear about what meaning of "linking" is. For example, is piping linking? The LingPipe license makes it clear that it is.

GCC faced a similar problem when Micheal Dupont wrote his GCC Introspector. The introspector allowed people to save internal GCC information to a file. While the feature would be usefull for debugging, but it would also let someone write a non-Free machine code generator using GCC as a base. In the end, GCC decided that the benefits were not worth the cost.

Unfortunately for LingPipe, I'm not sure that their license is legally binding. Theoretically, I could write a program that "uses any output of [LingPipe]" without ever using LingPipe or agreeing to the license. At that point, I would be violating their license but they couldn't do anything about it. Compare that to the GPL where you can't violate the GPL without also violating copyright laws.

My feeling is that the should have just released the code under the GPL. The GPL is a little ambigous about linking but it would cover most of the situations they care about. The situations that the GPL doesn't cover are not worth the pain of using an unconventional license.