Legal Group Releases Guide To GPL Compliance 141
An anonymous reader brings news that the Software Freedom Law Center has published a guide for compliance with the GNU General Public License. The purpose of the guide is to prevent "common mistakes" the SFLC has encountered during its various GPL violation investigations. Their suggestions include close scrutiny of software acquisitions, more precise tracking of changes and updates, and avoiding "build gurus." They also provide tips for dealing with a violation. The full guide is available at the SFLC's website.
All in all, a good thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Any kind of legalese could do with such a guide.
Pompous, over-long, and bad English (Score:0, Insightful)
1. Way too long to be useful (preaching to the converted---only those in love with the GPL will get to the end, and it will only confirm things they already know)
2. Massively overwritten---about as concise as the Bible.
3. Very partisan; not clear instructions, as one would expect, but more a hidden manifesto on how they think you should run your development team.
4. Bad English in parts (learn how to use an apostrophe).
Guide to GPL compliance (Score:3, Insightful)
Share and share alike.
Re:From the document... (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, 15 pages is nothing to most lawyers.
Re:From the document... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. It kind of makes you think the BSD folk might have a point in insisting on simple, permissive licences (though even those can be open to misinterpretation - see ipfilter in OpenBSD).
Still, this 15 page document is only needed for legal-corporate types, anxious to know the letter of the law and the exact boundaries of what's permitted. For ordinary programmers, RMS has tended to say that the letter of the GPL is less important than its spirit, which is to share your code and give all users the same rights you have. If you stick to that principle you can be pretty sure you are within the letter of the licence as well.
Context people, context. (Score:5, Insightful)
The broad concept of the GPL isn't hard; but a quick guide to a few of the unintuitive points is a useful thing. The details of the source distribution requirements are a matter of considerable confusion in some quarters, as are the terms under which one can regain the licence after violation.
Those minutiae aside, though, I am very surprised by how much apparent confusion the GPL and other copyleft type licences inspire. There seem to be two main camps of misinterpretation. The copyleft=no copyright group seems to believe that anybody who doesn't do copyright the exact same way they do doesn't do copyright at all. Hence this group's lack of respect for the terms of the GPL and similar. The other extreme has a fear amounting to mania of the GPL, believing that the GPL is unknowably complicated, and will inevitably lead to having all the code you've ever written forcibly expropriated by armed communist penguins.
I don't understand the confusion because the GPL is a perfectly ordinary licence, from the legal perspective. Its purpose, socially, is quite interesting, and rather unusual; but the form "Copyright law says that you can't copy this without our permission, which we grant if you do foo and bar." is absolutely standard. People seem to go in expecting the legal side to be horribly mysterious, just because the social purpose is unusual. It is rather weird, really.
Re:From the document... (Score:4, Insightful)
Making sure that your licence is as short as possible, without compromising your goals, is always good; but compromising your goals just to make your licence simpler is perverse at best.
Legalese not complexity is the issue. (Score:3, Insightful)
GPL arguably has more complex goals than BSD, so it really isn't realistic to expect the GPL to be simpler than, or even as simple as, the BSD licence. Making sure that your licence is as short as possible, without compromising your goals, is always good; but compromising your goals just to make your licence simpler is perverse at best.
Complexity isn't the issue with the GPL: it's the legalese. And because of the legalese, I am not confident to use it or any software using that license for commercial use without legal advice; which increases the cost of using GPL software on a commercial level. This extra cost is factored in when evaluating and comparing against software under other licenses.
Re:From the document... (Score:1, Insightful)
Trolls don't have to explain their reasoning. All they have to do is take what (might) be a minor inconvenience in a license such as the GPL, and expand it into a FUD-storm, listing, and not explaining, dubious alternatives.
Source, please? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where would I find Richard Stallman saying this? Where would I find Eben Moglen talking about this? In other words, what's your source?
Confusion? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to wonder if people who complain about the GPL (or, for that matter, most software licenses I've dealt with) being confusing have ever actually read it. I read and understood the GPL when I was in 9th grade. Sure it took me a few reads, but any legal document, or for that matter most any book is like that.
Can you give a specific example of language you find confusing in the GPL?
I think, perhaps, people simply are daunted by the idea of "so much" language that all has meaning to be understood, not the actual quality of that language.
Re:So what if it gets patented? (Score:2, Insightful)
What if someone takes your code and patents a part of it? BSD then says you cannot claim the patent or protect yourself from it.
The BSD license does not mention patents. There is nothing in the BSD license preventing you having patents based on BSD code, nor protecting yourself from others patent claims.
Re:death to GPL (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that copyright itself is contrary to libertarian principles.
BSDL and similar licenses take minimal advantage of copyright themselves, but allow downstream developers to apply as strict a copyright policy as they wish to any derivative works.
The GPL relies more on copyright for enforcement, but is designed to limit the ways in which downstream developers can apply more restrictive copyright and patent policies to GPL-derived works.
Whether you prefer the BSDL or GPL mostly comes down to whether you believe the ends justify the means. The GPL comes much closer to achieving the ultimate goal of undermining copyright restrictions, but at the expense of relying on a means (copyright itself) that the more "public domain"-style advocates find unjustifiable.