SCALE: Advocating FOSS at the DoD

Posted Mar 8, 2013 12:05 UTC (Fri) by njwhite (guest, #51848)
Parent article: SCALE: Advocating FOSS at the DoD

> That last point was where Obejas said that publishing more legal case studies and clearer guidelines on license compliance—in particular on how to combine proprietary and free software components in a single product—would attract more contractors to open source.

I'm not sure I understand why this is a big deal to contractors. If they want to use 3rd party proprietary software, can't they just negotiate a deal with the 3rd party to get a GPL license, with the proviso that they won't distribute it outside of the DOD. The 3rd party doesn't "lose" their precious source code except to the DOD, who won't be redistributing it, except potentially to another contractor if the original contract goes sour. And it's obviously in the DOD's interest, as they ensure that anybody who needs to work on the code can do so.

Or am I missing something?

SCALE: Advocating FOSS at the DoD

Posted Mar 11, 2013 17:55 UTC (Mon) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]

You're missing the case where the contractor wants to combine a GPL-licensed component with a component that the contractor authors in-house (and wants to keep proprietary).

However, I also think the answer to "can't they just negotiate a deal with the 3rd party to get a GPL license" is "perhaps, but rarely, and then only at a significantly higher price." The dollars are big in defense contracting; nevertheless nobody is keen to reduce their own margins if there is some alternative approach that would spare them expenses.

Nate

SCALE: Advocating FOSS at the DoD

Posted Mar 19, 2013 17:41 UTC (Tue) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] (3 responses)

In my understanding as an interested layman...

What you might be missing is that the GPL doesn't allow such restrictions. The user is free to use, to modify and to redistribute modified or unmodified versions, provided that if they redistribute binaries, they offer the sources as well. AND, the GPL doesn't allow restrictions beyond that in the GPL itself. Thus, if someone (the contractor in this case) were able to get code under your negotiated GPL, they CANNOT be subject to limitations on redistribution and satisfy the GPL (whether they WANTED to redistribute further or not isn't the issue, besides, company officers and objectives can change, see what became known as SCOG), which would then invalidate the negotiated contract, which would make it an impossible contract from the beginning, because the conditions of it getting a somehow limited in ways the GPL strictly forbids GPL, are not possible to fulfill.

So the contractor cannot negotiate such a deal.

OTOH, if the third party in question (that would be providing the otherwise GPLed software) is sole copyright holder (or has otherwise procured relicensing rights from all contributors) on that software, then they could sell a proprietary license to it to the contractor -- not negotiating a GPL that's somehow not the GPL, but because they're sole copyright holder, negotiating terms different than the standard GPL entirely... for the right price... and indeed, this is or has been one of the funding models for ordinarily GPLed software -- see for instance MySQL and then Trolltech's GPLed Qt.

But that only works if that third party has full relicensing rights. Some projects (including the kernel) deliberately do NOT require such agreements, partly as a form of assurance to the community that they will always be freedomware -- guarding against the "Oraclizing" of MySQL, for instance. (Of course in that case, some of the people most loudly complaining about what Oracle is doing now, were the folks most loudly defending and insisting on the model when THEY were in charge -- before they sold out to... the Oracle they're now complaining about using the same tactics they used and defended!) For these projects, no third party could negotiate away the code freedom of the project.

That's my understanding as definite NON-lawyer but an interested community member, FWIW.

Duncan

SCALE: Advocating FOSS at the DoD

Posted Mar 19, 2013 23:47 UTC (Tue) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (2 responses)

Ah, thank you for that. I was wondering whether the "no additional restrictions" provision would come into play for such a contract, but as I had only seen it discussed regarding compatibility with other copyright licenses I wasn't sure.

But what you say makes good sense. Thank you.

SCALE: Advocating FOSS at the DoD

Posted Mar 20, 2013 4:14 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

so how does Red Hat get away with distributing GPL patches to support subscribers but prohibit them from re-distributing the broken out patches to others under pain of loosing their paid-for support contract?

SCALE: Advocating FOSS at the DoD

Posted Mar 20, 2013 7:35 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

They simply can't prohibit them from doing that.

Whether or not any "If you do stuff allowed by the GPL, we will stop doing business with you" clause in RedHats' support contract(s) is a restriction on the GPL is another question. No one has sued them yet.

Anyone distributing such patches is fully licensed to do so, however.

Another question is whether RedHats' distribution of collapsed sources (sources with all patches folded in, and very hard to separate back out) is in violation of the GPL, when the GPL clearly says that the sources that must be distributed are that form which is preferred for making modifications, and when RedHat clearly prefer working on the pristine-upstream+patches sources (as with any sane distributor). There's been long discussions on that subject on LWN before - best to read those.