Re: comparison of public licenses?

On Sat, Jan 22, 2000, Roger Cloud <rcloud[_at_]surfnetusa.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 21 Jan 2000, Karsten M. Self <kmself[_at_]ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> > >
> > > In a nutshell, GPL says, "if you change it, you have to submit the
> > > diff files back to the author."
> >
> > Not quite.
>

<deletia>
>
> Actually, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) does, as a matter of
> policy and protocol, expect a complete assignment, to FSF, of any
> mods to their GPL'd software. This is not in the license -- it is
> instead a prerequisite, from FSF's perspective and accomplished via
> the Web. This is not a big problem for most contributors of mods
> back to FSF, because they know FSF is going to put out any "blessed"
> mods under the GPL (or LGPL, perhaps).

More specifically, for GNU projects, copyright is assigned to the FSF. For those who are getting confused: GNU is a project, FSF is the sponsoring organization, the GPL and LGPL are licenses written by the FSF, used in GNU projects, and available to others.

Because a large number of free software projects are GNU projects, this means that for a number of commercial free-software organizations, much of the projects copyright IP is assigned to the FSF as well -- Cygnus did and now Red Hat does fall into this camp, for example.

Not all GPL'd software is associated with GNU projects. I believe there may also be a GNU project or two which isn't entirely composed of GPL'd (or LGPLd) software. AFAIK, though I haven't seen the assignment form itself, the obligation of FSF is to continue to license the work under the original terms if the work is licensed as GPL, or under either the LGPL or the GPL if it is licensed under the LGPL. The LGPL allows relicensing under the GPL, but not vice versa.

The copyright assignment itself puts the FSF in an interesting position. One the one hand, it controls the copyright to a large body of software. On the other, it is obligated to the original copyright holder (and possibly their estate if deceased), to both continue to license the work under the terms of the assignment, and to ensure that any modifications to the licenses themselves (which the FSF makes from time to time) be in the same spirit as the original licensing terms. It's a rather interesting position and dynamic.

For more information, see:

  http://www.fsf.org/
  http://www.gnu.org/

-- 
Karsten M. Self (kmself[_at_]ix.netcom.com)
    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

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