To: License-Discuss@ [This email is CC-BY.]
The California Association of Voting Officials (CAVO) asked me to help them evaluate FOSS licenses for election software. Below is my article for the CAVO newsletter. You can read the entire CAVO newsletter at http://www.cavo-us.org/Newsletter/newsletter1.html. Please direct any comments or questions or support to cavocont...@gmail.com <mailto:cavocont...@gmail.com> . /Larry ************************** "Why CAVO Recommends GPLv3" by Lawrence Rosen There are many ways to distribute software. Valuable software nowadays is usually distributed under a free and open source license ("FOSS" license, in short), both because it is usually "free of cost" software but also "free of restrictions" on copying, making changes, and redistributing that software. There are various open source licenses to choose from. They are listed at the www.opensource.org <http://www.opensource.org> website. Unless a license is listed at that website, most developers and potential customers won't call it FOSS software. The OSET Foundation Public License ("OPL"), a license recently proposed for an election software project, is not a FOSS license. [1] FOSS licenses offer several distinct ways to give software away. Choosing among those licenses for software is not an arbitrary game of darts. For open source election software that can be trusted and always free, the choice of license is particularly important. That is why CAVO recommends the General Public License version 3.0 ("GPLv3") as the best license to use. This article gives several important reasons why. * Among the many FOSS licenses, GPLv3 is the most modern, widely accepted, and best understood license available today. Its predecessor license, GPLv2, is historically far and away the most used worldwide; GPLv3 is replacing it in the rate of license adoption for new FOSS software. * GPLv3 is a reciprocal license. Once a project or distributor releases election software under the GPLv3, it will remain FOSS software in perpetuity under the GPLv3 license. Modifications to that FOSS software will also be distributed in perpetuity under the GPLv3. This guarantees that our election software won't ever be taken under commercial covers and turned into proprietary software with unacceptable lock-in and source code restrictions that make voting untrustworthy. * The GPLv3 license promotes open and shared development efforts. While it is possible to create excellent open source software under more permissive FOSS licenses, those licenses allow commercial fragmentation of the software. That isn't appropriate for widely used election software. * The GPLv3 encourages trustworthy software. There is a law of software development named in honor of Linus Torvalds stating that "given enough eyeballs, all <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug> bugs are shallow"; or more formally: "Given a large enough <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_test> beta-tester and co- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer> developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone." [2] GPLv3 software projects invite eyeballs on all distributed versions of the software to identify bugs and security issues; other licenses don't always do that. * Although GPLv3 will specifically encourage FOSS development practices for the election code base and its derivative works, that GPLv3 license is nevertheless compatible with successful commercial software and support business as well. One need only refer to the robust Linux ecosystem and its contribution to diverse commercial technology worldwide, whose basic software is entirely under the GPLv2 and GPLv3 licenses. The GPL licenses made that possible. * GPLv3 will encourage innovation because GPLv3 source code is open to view and change. For these reasons, CAVO recommends that election software be distributed under GPLv3. This will inevitably create a diverse, worldwide, and enthusiastic community of software developers to create election systems we can all trust. Footnotes: [1] The OSET Foundation claim on their website that their license is "an open source software license" is simply untrue. They can try to make it so by submitting their license to www.opensource.org <http://www.opensource.org> and following OSI's published license review process. While I am merely an observer nowadays of that license review and approval process, as former general counsel for OSI I am confident that certain provisions in that license make it incompatible with the GPLv3 despite the assertion on OSET's own website that it is. http://static.squarespace.com/static/528d46a2e4b059766439fa8b/t/53558db1e4b0 191d0dc6912c/1398115761233/OPL_FAQ_Apr14.pdf [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus's_Law Lawrence Rosen Rosenlaw & Einschlag (www.rosenlaw.com <http://www.rosenlaw.com/> ) (C) 2014 Lawrence Rosen. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/> .
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