Hi, I'm trying to convince a group of authors (I'm not one of those) to release their software with a free licence (preferable (L)GPL or at least a (L)GPL compatible one).
The project is a (in its community) well known and highly respected piece of software which was initially distributed under a non-free licence, mainly: "Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any non-commercial purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that both the copyright notice and this permission notice and warranty disclaimer appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of the University xxx not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission." Where in the real licence terms, "University xxx" stands for two European Universities.
Today, the copyright situation is somewhat complicated. - the above copyright note seems to be still the intended "main" copyright note, as it is located in a file called "COPYRIGHT" within the top-level directory of the (source) distribution. - Within the source files there are at least three types of copyright headers: 1) // Author: Joe Developer // Copyright: 2003 University xxx
2) // Author: Jim Developer // Copyright: GPL (GNU General Public License)
3) // Author: Fred Developer // Copyright: Fred Developer
Note that one can assume that all authors have written the code "from scratch" for this project, e.g. Jim Developer will argue for changing the licence but would not accuse the project of disrespecting his licence.
At the moment I'm in the brain-storming phase, e.g. I'm collection any thoughts, ideas, arguments, problems which I can use to convince the copyright holder to change the licence. My rather unstructured and unpolished list is as follows: - IMHO the actual licence constellation is highly contradictory and therefore "default copyright" rules come into force, which means (as I understood it) that a user is not allowed to do anything with the software...
- recently they launched a public project where they are collecting examples for their software. They strictly require that the authors of the examples must licence their work under the LGPL. This prohibits code exchange in both directions, using code from the project in the example and also using the submitted examples in the main distribution (I think, this could be a kind of "killer argument").
- releasing the project as free software opens the door to broader publicity, e.g. inclusion of the project into Debian GNU/Linux, which IMHO is a great chance for projects in a non-mainstream area. (After a licence change, I would volunteer to provide Debian packages)
- I plan also an offer to produce a Gnoppix (www.gnoppix.org) setup which provides a bootable demo system which should also be a great gain to the project as system is quite complex to install (at least in some sense).
As I have the suspicion that the important people cannot be conviced on the legal level (the contradiction problem of the actual constellation) I try mainly to argue with the benefits of releasing the software as free software.
Do you have any hints, guidelines, and/or further arguments for me? Any ideas how to start the licence discussion in a friendly way.
What are the modest licence changes needed to get a (L)GPL compatible one?
Thanks, Achim
Achim D. Brucker wrote:
I'm trying to convince a group of authors (I'm not one of those) to release their software with a free licence (preferable (L)GPL or at least a (L)GPL compatible one).
The project is a (in its community) well known and highly respected piece of software which was initially distributed under a non-free licence, mainly: "Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any non-commercial purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that both the copyright notice and this permission notice and warranty disclaimer appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of the University xxx not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission." Where in the real licence terms, "University xxx" stands for two European Universities.
[...]
As I have the suspicion that the important people cannot be conviced on the legal level (the contradiction problem of the actual constellation) I try mainly to argue with the benefits of releasing the software as free software.
Do you have any hints, guidelines, and/or further arguments for me? Any ideas how to start the licence discussion in a friendly way.
I know this answer is very late (I was quite busy recently). Just wanted to mention that your description reminded me a bit of GAP http://www.gap-system.org, a mathematical package for computation in discrete abstract algebra.
Previously GAP was released under a non-free license (non-commercial), but recently it changed to the GPL. The authors also are mostly of two European Universities. I don't know the details and discussions that led to the decision, but if (still) necessary, you could try to contact the responsible people ...
Frank
Hi, On Fri, May 28, 2004 at 11:14:48PM +0200, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
I know this answer is very late (I was quite busy recently). Just wanted to mention that your description reminded me a bit of GAP http://www.gap-system.org, a mathematical package for computation in discrete abstract algebra.
quite a good guess. The project I was talking about is Isabelle http://isabelle.in.tum.de, a generic, interactive theorem prover; or in other wording: a mathematical package for computation in logic :-).
Previously GAP was released under a non-free license (non-commercial), but recently it changed to the GPL. The authors also are mostly of two European Universities. I don't know the details and discussions that led to the decision, but if (still) necessary, you could try to contact the responsible people ...
many thanks for your offer. Fortunately I can already report a success. After a intensive discussion about various licencing details the copyright holder of Isabelle decided to release future versions of Isabelle under the modified BSD license http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php. Further, a new release of the latest Isabelle version (called "Isabelle 2004") reflecting the licencing change will be provided). Understandable, such a new release will take some time as most of the source files have to be modified. But the re-licencing was already confirmed officially on the Isabelle mailing list (see message E1BV5u2-0005Ja-00@mta1.cl.cam.ac.uk in the mailing list archive: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/lcp/archive/isabelle-users.04.gz ).
I'm very glad that Isabelle joins the group of free formal proof tools.
Achim