Re: comparison of public licenses?

On Thu, Jan 20, 2000, Nate Puri <natepuri[_at_]office.ompages.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2000, Terry Carroll <carroll[_at_]tjc.com> wrote:
> >
> > Does anyone know of any comparison of the features of the major open
> > source licenses (e.g., the Gnu Public License, the Artistic License,
> > Netscape's and Apple's public licenses, etc.)?
>
> I would look at <http://www.opensource.org/>. All the licenses are
> present there and Bruce Perens, the webmaster, should have some good
> HOWTO type documents on the license features. You can email him
> directly as well and he is a very good source of information. I don't
> think anyone has written a law review yet on the topic; it's just too
> new. I could be wrong about that though. I plan to write something
> after the bar exam, as I have studied this pretty intensively.

"Open Source" is now deprecated: "Free Software" is the current mot a la mode. (Hint: religious battles.)

Observe that this type of licensing is founded on a copyright of the source. An alternative, "public domain," is not approved of for software by the "open source" advocates. Nor is patenting of software (the GPL cannot override that, but it simply states that if patent restrictions prevent free reuse, then there can be no reuse at all).

www.opensource.org attempts to extrapolate from software to other digital domains, somewhat unsuccessfully IMHO. O'Reilly and Associates has attempted to bring some discussors together to derive a similar license for print works; the online references are out of date except at www.ora.com. Other publishers such as New Riders have come out with their own "open" print licenses.

But even opensource.org and Perens are not very liberal at including other "open" licenses. There are too many of those to consider, since it is allowed under the GPL for the copyright holder to provide new terms at will for the license, and anyone may make further changes when relicensing their own work, as long as the changes are not "more restrictive" than in the original.

The significant differences are between those that attempt to prevent code from becoming "proprietary" (different somehow from "commercial"), and those that don't. For example, the "Lesser (formerly Library) GPL" allows code to be embedded in a commercial work and sold without making the source available. As another example, see the very liberal license at www.python.org.

AFAIK, none of these licenses have been interpreted by a judge, although Free Software Foundation lawyers have reportedly negotiated with some who have tried to reinterpret the GPL in ways that the FSF didn't approve of. For example, RMS doesn't see the GPL as a shrinkwrap license; some lawyers do. We don't know how this will be interpreted under contract law in many countries; RMS isn't worried about that, though--since the work is copyrighted, if the license doesn't hold up, the feeling is that then the copyrighted work can't be copied or reused.

A law review article would be extremely useful, though any kind of new ideas in this realm are likely to provoke angry controversy from the non-lawyers who adopt religious views on the subject.

-- 
"Eric"  Eric Eldred  Eldritch Press
mailto:Eldred[_at_]EldritchPress.org
http://www.eldritchpress.org/EricEldred.vcf