Robin Winning <robin.winn...@cyaninc.com> writes: >I am a contracts manager at software company, and in addition to doing >contracts, I now find myself reviewing the licenses associated with >the open source packages my company has acquired. I have become quite >familiar with the GPL/LGPL/AGPL suite of licenses, as well as the >other, permissive licenses: MIT, BSD, etc. Here's my question: quite >frequently, the programmer makes the Free Software Foundation the >copyright holder, but then attaches a license that is not in the GPL >family. Is that a valid combination?
It's technically valid, in that the FSF (as a non-profit corporation) can hold copyrightable assets under any licenses it wants. But it's likely usually a mistake, in the sense that the FSF probably has no idea these works are being "donated" to it under these non-GPL licenses, and because there is usually no need to make the FSF the copyright holder -- except in certain cases where the FSF is actually involved in the development or maintenance of the software, in which case they would have discussed this with the programmer and, in most cases, the FSF would have insisted on one of the GPL family of licenses (though there are some exceptions to that). I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. There are plenty of people who can give you real legal advice if you need; we may be able to help you find those people. >In the case of "ncurses," I was able to research and determine that >when they assigned their copyright to the Free Software Foundation, >the FSF gave ncurses a special carve-out allowing them to use a >permissive license. However, all the rest of the open source packages >I have come across that assert "Copyright Free Software Foundation" >but are accompanied by non-GPL licenses do not seem to have that sort >of special arrangement. Nice researching (re ncurses)! >Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it seems contradictory to me, and I >don't know how to characterize the license in terms of permissive or >restrictive. It's not contradictory, but it's probably often a mistake by a programmer who thinks that putting a license's terms on some software implies that the software's copyright must now be held by whatever entity wrote that license -- which, of course, is not the case and not the norm. -Karl _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
