Greetings.
I have a colleague who wishes to release a program under a free software licence. However, he and/or our company wishes to reserve the right to use and relicense any third-party contributions under another (possibly non-free) licence. I therefore suggested using the following licence:
Gnomovision is released under the GNU General Public License, with the additional proviso that for any modifications to the source code which you publish, you agree to grant Vice, Inc. a perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicence, and distribute said modifications (or portions thereof) either on an unmodified basis, or with other modifications, as source code or binary code or as part of a larger work.
However, I believe that such a licence would break compatibility with the GPL (and probably most other free software licences). Am I correct? If so, I suppose this might discourage people from contributing to the project, and would also preclude the inclusion of or linking to GPL-covered third-party code.
If anyone has comments on this licence or ideas for modifications or for some alternative licence which could be used, please let me know and I'll pass them along to my colleague.
Regards, Tristan
On 2005-01-25 15:27 +0100, psychonaut@nothingisreal.com wrote:
Gnomovision is released under the GNU General Public License, with the additional proviso that for any modifications to the source code which you publish, you agree to grant Vice, Inc. a perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicence, and distribute said modifications (or portions thereof) either on an unmodified basis, or with other modifications, as source code or binary code or as part of a larger work.
IANAL & Co, but isn't this essentially what the GPL already says?
Greetings.
On Tuesday 25 January 2005 16:04, Michael Kjorling wrote:
On 2005-01-25 15:27 +0100, psychonaut@nothingisreal.com wrote:
Gnomovision is released under the GNU General Public License, with the additional proviso that for any modifications to the source code which you publish, you agree to grant Vice, Inc. a perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicence, and distribute said modifications (or portions thereof) either on an unmodified basis, or with other modifications, as source code or binary code or as part of a larger work.
IANAL & Co, but isn't this essentially what the GPL already says?
No, the proviso grants a general licence for Vice, Inc. to use the contributions as it sees fit, whereas the GPL grants Vice, Inc. a restricted licence which allows it to republish the contributions only if the source code is made available.
In essence I'm trying to come up with a simpler version of the Netscape Public Licence without having to rewrite it.
Regards, Tristan
On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 16:04 +0100, Michael Kjorling wrote:
On 2005-01-25 15:27 +0100, psychonaut@nothingisreal.com wrote:
Gnomovision is released under the GNU General Public License, with the additional proviso that for any modifications to the source code which you publish, you agree to grant Vice, Inc. a perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicence, and distribute said modifications (or portions thereof) either on an unmodified basis, or with other modifications, as source code or binary code or as part of a larger work.
IANAL & Co, but isn't this essentially what the GPL already says?
No, it's not - he's asking for the ability to relicence the work in the future under a non-free licence. The copyleft aspect of the GPL specifically prevents this.
The proviso above is definitely not GPL-compatible, so in that sense the poster is correct (I would say it's an extra restriction to the GPL). I *suspect* some might even treat it as a non-free licence - for example, the QPL does roughly what you want (#3.b) and although the FSF consider it a free licence, others don't.
I tend to agree with the FSF point of view, but just to make you aware that others might not agree.
Cheers,
Alex.
Alex wrote: The proviso above is definitely not GPL-compatible, so in that sense the poster is correct (I would say it's an extra restriction to the GPL). I *suspect* some might even treat it as a non-free licence - for example, the QPL does roughly what you want (#3.b) and although the FSF consider it a free licence, others don't.
I think you might be referring to debian? Well, there are a few nasties in how the QPL interacts with some contract law and there's the ability of the copyright holder to make licensees spend a lot of money defending themselves in court, but fortunately most use of the QPL is scuppered by misapplication of it or other practical problems. There's also a strong argument for dual licensing, which is what QPL author Trolltech
On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 03:10 +0000, MJR wrote:
Alex wrote: The proviso above is definitely not GPL-compatible, so in that sense the poster is correct (I would say it's an extra restriction to the GPL). I *suspect* some might even treat it as a non-free licence - for example, the QPL does roughly what you want (#3.b) and although the FSF consider it a free licence, others don't.
I think you might be referring to debian?
I didn't think Debian had made up its mind on the issue.
Well, there are a few nasties in how the QPL interacts with some contract law and there's the ability of the copyright holder to make licensees spend a lot of money defending themselves in court, but fortunately most use of the QPL is scuppered by misapplication of it or other practical problems.
These are all different problems to the #3b clause. I'm talking about a clause which requires modifications to be distributed under a certain licence. If it requires you to use the same licence as you received the software, most people generally recognise that as being free. If it requires you to use a different free licence, some smaller proportion would see that as being free. If it required you to use a non-free licence, most would probably think that it was non-free (since you no longer have the right to share modifications, freedom 3).
I don't think any distribution has thought this issue through sufficiently to have any policy on it, esp. where the effect of selecting different licence effect is done via subclause - for example, while the DFSG#3 says 'must be under same terms as original licence', it doesn't say that similar clauses should be active also. Arguably, DFSG#3 was intended to block restriction on modification, which isn't necessarily the case where you're being asked to make you derivations available under a different free licence.
That said, it wouldn't surprise me if Debian or someone else decided that different treatment clauses like that were not "free" at some point, which was why I was warning the original poster that such a clause might cause trouble later.
Cheers,
Alex.
Tristan Miller wrote:
Greetings.
I have a colleague who wishes to release a program under a free software licence. However, he and/or our company wishes to reserve the right to use and relicense any third-party contributions under another (possibly non-free) licence. I therefore suggested using the following licence:
Gnomovision is released under the GNU General Public License, with the additional proviso that for any modifications to the source code which you publish, you agree to grant Vice, Inc. a perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicence, and distribute said modifications (or portions thereof) either on an unmodified basis, or with other modifications, as source code or binary code or as part of a larger work.
However, I believe that such a licence would break compatibility with the GPL (and probably most other free software licences). Am I correct? If so, I suppose this might discourage people from contributing to the project, and would also preclude the inclusion of or linking to GPL-covered third-party code.
If anyone has comments on this licence or ideas for modifications or for some alternative licence which could be used, please let me know and I'll pass them along to my colleague.
Possibly they want to do something similar to what mysql do, something like: changes submitted to them for incorporation into their official (GPL'd) source tree become their own property and thus also re-licensable by them independantly of the GPL.
However that would remove authors rights over their own code when they became part of the standard source tree, but it would not remove rights that author had granted to other users by distributing under the GPL first, so I don't know if transfer of ownership that was is possible, or if instead the company would just receive no exclusive rights to make use of contributions.
Sam