On Friday 07 July 2006 17:07, Pete Krawczyk wrote: > Subject: [Slightly OT] Understanding Software Licences [was Re: Proposal > Suggestion - Test::Run [was Re: [Israel.pm] Fwd: Call for proposals -- Perl > Foundation Grants]] From: Shlomi Fish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2006 16:13:58 +0300 > > }Well, I'm not a lawyer, either, but I still have a good amount of working > }knowledge about software licences and how they relate to each other. > > The former necessarily excludes the latter.
Wrong. You can still be knowledgable about licences while not being a lawyer. And some lawyers are completely ignorant of the fact. For example, someone I know who now studies law in Israel had a friend who wanted to take a GPLed CMS, set it up on his site, and possibly customise it with some minor customisations. My friend told me he had to release his customisations to the public because that's what the GPL says upon any modification. However, the GPL (and any other free software licence) explicitly allows making a use or modification for in-house or internal use without being obliged to release them to the public. (see Freedom 1 in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html ). So he misled his friend, while I was more knowledgable about it. And obviously lawyers who didn't specialise in Copyrights or Software law may not be completely aware of its finer points. (Possibly less so than many clueful programmers who are not lawyers). For the record, it is possible to be interested and knowledgable about law, without having a Law Diploma. This is similar to the fact that you can program without having a B.Sc. in Computer Science or whatever. > Are you familiar with > contract law in America? Finland? Australia? Do you know what other > people with far more expertise than you have said about this issue? "Contract Law"? From what I know FOSS licences are licences, not contracts. See: http://lwn.net/Articles/61292/ I'm not sure even EULAs are contracts. > > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html says: > >License of Perl > > > >This license is the disjunction of the Artistic License and the GNU > >GPL--in other words, you can choose either of those two licenses. It > >qualifies as a free software license, but it may not be a real copyleft. > >It is compatible with the GNU GPL because the GNU GPL is one of the > >alternatives. > > > >We recommend you use this license for any Perl 4 or Perl 5 package you > >write, to promote coherence and uniformity in Perl programming. Outside > >of Perl, we urge you not to use this license; it is better to use just > >the GNU GPL. > > Gee, even the FSF and RMS himself say, "Use the Artistic for Perl code!" > RMS also says it is usually preferable to use the GPL for everything you write. I, however, like to use BSD-style licenses for all the software that I originated: http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/projects/ I can tell you from my experience that one of my projects would not have become half-as-successful as it has been, if it had been released under the GPL instead of the Public Domain. Note that if I did not originate a certain piece of code, I contribute my code under the same terms, and also disclaim any implicit or explicit ownership of my contributions (to facilitate a future re-licensing). Thus I have GPLed modifications in the GIMP, GPL+Artistic modifications for perl*.pod and for CGI.pm, and Apache licence modifications in Subersion. (Along with some smaller patches to many other modules). I'm not saying this because I'm anti-GPL or pro-BSD-licence or whatever. But I prefer to license Perl software under a BSD-style-licence for the same reason I'm licensing my C programs under them. > }It's essential for a developer to have such a knowledge and not be > }completely oblivious of such issues, because for better or for worse - > }legal, ethical and moral issues affect the way we build, distribute, use > }and modify software. > > And as a developer, I defer my less-knowledgeable position to what those > before me have found and discussed. I make all my contributions available > under the license of Perl, and other licenses as appropriate (my 2005 YAPC > talk is also licensed CC at the request of the conference organizers, for > example). I have also signed the form that gives explicit licensing for > any contribution I make to Perl to the TPF under their preferred terms - > have you done the same? > > http://www.perlfoundation.org/legal/licenses/cla.html > All code I originated and which I've decided to distribute as open source is either under the Public Domain or MIT X11. These licences allow anyone to relicense them under any other licence. (While the original will still remain OK.) All of my public creations (articles/essays, humourous stories and bits, photographs, artworks, etc. see http://www.shlomifish.org/ ) are publicly re-distributable. Most of my articles and essays are CC-by, most of my larger scale stories are CC-by-sa, and graphics and photographs are usually Public Domain. Note that I did not assign an explicit Creative Commons copyright to everything I've ever written, because I believe that some of this may be private or personal, or otherwise things I wouldn't want to be abused. But see: http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/copyrights/ > }To battle such ignorance and give people (especially those with some > }non-negligible authority) a quick-and-dirty intro to such issues, I've set > up }the following wiki page: > > ...that anyone can edit. Anyone. Not lawyers, not people knowledgeable > about contracts. Anyone. Right. Everyone can also edit the Wikipedia and almost all other wikis. See: http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html This page is intended as a list of links - nothing more. I do not imply that what I link to is correct or not misleading. Neither does Wikipedia. Still I and others intend to monitor the page, and hopefully it will be correct. If you can get a lawyer or other qualified person to write something about it, I'll gladly want to link to it. Until then, you probably shouldn't dismiss it just on the premises of it being world-editable. You might also want to look at Nupedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia > > I also see on that list that you wrote an article. Just looking at the > "where I stand" portion, you spend more time talking about names and terms > than you do about actual licenses. I don't find it a problem with this section by itself. > So you prefer public domain, do you? > Look at http://zooko.com/license_quick_ref.html and in specific, the > section on "What about Public Domain?" > I read this particular section, and I was well aware of this problem before I read it. When I wrote the essay, I preferred to use the Public Domain for my work, and may not have been too aware or too caring about its legal implications. My more recent work (i.e: most CPAN modules I originated, Latemp, etc.) is distributed under the MIT X11 licence to avoid such legal problems. The "FOSS & Other Beasts" article, BTW, could use a large amount of update. I'd like to keep the original version intact, while working on an improved "2nd edition" of it. Don't hold your breath for this because I have tons of other things to do (including work and helping to organise an Israeli community FOSS conference), and it's just one thing that crossed my mind. But hopefully I can get to it sometime. BTW, some other notable software (not by me) is released under the public domain. The most notable example is probably SQLite, but there's also CMU CL (a complete and popular Common Lisp implementation) and other software: http://freshmeat.net/browse/197/ Regards, Shlomi Fish --------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/ 95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the bottom 5%.
