April 12
Licensing agreements, the trials and tribulations
Posted by Ajay
|Licensing in open source has seen it’s share of trials and tribulations. To start off let me mention some major licenses that are making it’s rounds in the open source community:
- MIT/BSD - this is a very liberal license that allows redistribution even without the source.
- GPL - copy left license. This is a way to negate copyrights to encourage collaborative development. IT essentially grants the following rights - anyone can use the code, anyone can redistribute the code as long as the source is included and distribution license remains GPL, any derivative work created of the code needs to be licensed under GPL.
- LGPL - weaker copy left license, it allows lesser restrictions on making derivative work open source when there is a linking between non GPL and non open source software.
- Apache License
Now the project I work on is a closed source project primarily because thats the way the client wants it. I strongly agree with Paul Ramsey in that open source should be not about the product itself but about the community arranged around them.
The members of the team i belong to have contributed a lot to open source java. But restrictions around our project that is servicing a particular client should not prevent us from having to not use open source. I like the LGPL licensing mainly because it allows us to work around some of the restrictions of GPL. But a lot of open source software these days are focussing more on GPL, which is in a way a good thing to prevent commercial closed source competitors from taking the IP.But I still do wonder, what happened to the real free and open software revolution that started off with Unix.
But is there an end to this licensing dilemma? I dont think so, maybe a dual licensing scheme might help, maybe a dynamic licensing with a lesser restriction in exchange for contribution to the project might help. Only time will tell how this will end.
These are some links that i referred to for this post
- http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/24/a-short-guide-to-open-source-and-similar-licenses/
- http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2010/04/on-road-to-damascus-gpl-to-bsd.html
You may already know this, but since the licenses only apply when you distribute the code, technically you can use a GPL library (and therefore GPL your entire project), but then you only have to release the source of your project to people who get the compiled code. That still may not fly though.
Google uses this tactic to not open source some of their projects (since they only ‘distribute’ the code to their own servers, they don’t have to release the code). This is also why the AGPL was created.