On Fri, 06 Jul 2007 10:05:22 -0700, Christopher Barker wrote: > Sorry to spam this list with this, but it came up here... > > Carl, you have clearly thought this out a lot, and have a real > experience with this, so I have a issue that you may have some insights > into:
Yes, I have thought about licensing a lot. And I'll gladly share my opinions, (but no legal advice, of course, etc. etc.). > I work for the US federal government, and we are not allowed to > copyright our work, so be definition, any code we write is in the public > domain. Fantastic! And that's just as government work should be. (I used to work for a University research lab doing mostly government-funded project. Sadly, I saw lots of government funds getting poured down the drain to fund projects that resulted in proprietary software that wen nowhere.) > This means that we can not release code under the GPL, as you > have to hold copyright to do that. This makes our managers nervous about > using GPL'd libs (LGPL is fine, I'm a big fan of LGPL) You don't have to release code under the GPL. As you said, you can't. Just keep publishing that public domain code. > The FSF has unfortunately only ALMOST addressed these issues in their FAQ: > > http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLUSGov > http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLUSGov The FSF answer looks remarkably clear to me. I don't see the "almost" at all. > From the answers to these FAQs, it's clear that we can release our code > into the public domain, and it can then be combined with GPL code in a > GPL project, so we can contribute to GPL and LGPL projects. Yes, definitely. > However, it still looks like we can't actually release a program > ourselves under the GPL, and if a given program contains GPL code, then > IIUC, it MUST be released under the GPL, so we've got a problem. Oops. I think you made a mistake here. Read the answer from the FSF again: Can the US Government release improvements to a GPL-covered program? Yes. If the improvements are written by US government employees in the course of their employment, then the improvements are in the public domain. However, the improved version, as a whole, is still covered by the GNU GPL. There is no problem in this situation. And keep rereading that until the part that says "There is no problem in this situation" really sinks in. I don't know how I could word the reply more clearly than the FSF did. And if you think there's specific text in the GPL that contradicts this advice from the FSF, I'd suggest you contact the FSF about it, (but frankly, I can't find any such text). So if I were in your situation, I would contribute to GPL projects by sending public-domain contributions. I would also start any new projects by releasing public-domain code, (which others could then take and modify and release their modifications under the GPL if desired). > Anyway, what all this means is that so far we've avoided GPL code for > our projects -- something to keep in mind, the US gov't is a major user > of Open Source Projects. Please reconsider this, (or invite your lawyers to, or write to the Free Software Foundation as needed). > PS: Google is remarkably unhelpful to me in figuring all this out. If > anyone has useful references about the US Federal gov't developed and > released software an the GPL -- please send me the links! A quick scan through the Linux kernel source code, (obviously one of the most popular GPL-released projects), shows plenty of contributions from people with .gov email addresses, (both NSA and LLNL feature prominently). So you might find some helpful people to contact there who are more directly in circumstances similar to yours, (feel free to contact me off-list if you've got any questions about how to track down some potentially helpful email addresses there). -Carl
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