Re: comparison of public licenses?

From: <SSchott[_at_]sglm.com>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 14:25:33 -0500

Some of the public license discussion was forwarded to me and I thought I'd pitch in my knowledge on the subject. I'm currently writing a paper about the GNU General Public License. I am focusing on issues of enforceability though I'd love to hear from anyone with thoughts on open licenses, especially if there are any equivalents anyone can think of throughout history. If anyone has any thoughts about open licenses, I'd love to hear them.

First some additional sources:

Voices from the Open Source Revolution (O'Reilly 1999) is a great source of open source/ free software information. The entire book is a collection of essays and they are all available at
<http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html>. The
Bruce Perens article describes a few of the licenses and compares their differences. Also <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html> compares a wide variety of open licenses but in less detail (including all of the licenses mentioned in the email I saw: Artistic, Apple, Mozilla, etc).

At least a couple articles have been written about the licenses themselves: Heffan, 49 Stan. L. Rev. 1487 COPYLEFT: LICENSING COLLABORATIVE WORKS IN THE DIGITAL AGE is a good review of the GNU General Public License and Gomulkiewicz, 36 Hous. L. Rev. 179 Houston Law Review HOW COPYLEFT USES LICENSE RIGHTS TO SUCCEED IN THE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE REVOLUTION AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR ARTICLE 2B also has some points of interest. There are some other journal articles but these are the two most thorough treatments of the open source licenses in law journals.

The GNU General Public License (GPL) <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>: The GPL is a copyright license. Its terms allow for the modification and distribution of the software by the licensee as long as the Program is always distributed with the license and copyright notice. Any modifications of the original copyright holder's program must be conspicuously noted. The license allows for a licensee to sell the unmodified Program for the cost of making the copy and also allows the licensee to offer warranties on the software (otherwise the software comes with all warranties disclaimed -- this is part of the license).

It does not allow for the licensee to sell the Program for a fee if she made changes to the Program (the licensee can't profit from a derivative work) (there are other conditions but these are the highlights). Any violation of the license terminates the license, thus opening up the licensee to copyright infringement.

Someone suggested that the copyright holder often assigns their rights to an organization like the Free Software Foundation (FSF-
<http://www.fsf.org/fsf/fsf.html>) and that's true. This allows
versions of software to come from one source and more importantly brings together a little more weight when seeking to enforce a license against a party breaching (No breachee has ever made it beyond the letter-writing stage and there is no case law enforcing the GPL yet). In general, the average programmer doesn't have the resources or legal knowledge to deal with infringers and so the FSF, acting as the copyright-holder's assignee, will enforce those rights.

Stephen B. Schott
sschott[_at_]sglm.com
(215) 568-0707 x101

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 Seidel, Gonda, Lavorgna & Monaco PC  Phone: (215) 568-8383
 Fax: (215) 568-5549 Received on Fri Jan 28 2000 - 19:28:28 GMT