Hi! I've given my response to your questions - but do note that I'm not a lawyer.
Constantinos - could you double-check my answers and fill in any blanks..? On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 10:44, Steffen Neumann<[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > a few questions on licensing here, since we're checking > whether we can sign the corporate CLA. > > A comment upfront: I could not easily find the LGPL licensing > for taverna, Michael had to point me to the release notes. > A few more LICENSE files throughout the CVS/SVN repositories > might be a good idea. http://code.google.com/p/taverna/source/browse/taverna/products/net.sf.taverna.t2.taverna-workbench/trunk/workbench-distro/src/main/resources/LICENCE.txt is the license file that is included in the top level of the binary distributions - it's the LGPL 2.1 and should be identical to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.txt - if there's a binary distribution that does not contain the LICENSE file - please let us know which one so we can update it. http://code.google.com/p/taverna/ says: Code license: GNU Lesser General Public License with a link to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html (which to be fair is LGPL 3 and not 2.1 - but the license does implicitly permit an upgrade to LGPL 3, GPL 2 and GPL 3) http://www.mygrid.org.uk/tools/taverna/taverna-licence/ also links to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html Most or all source code files should also have this header: /******************************************************************************* * Copyright (C) 2007 The University of Manchester * * Modifications to the initial code base are copyright of their * respective authors, or their employers as appropriate. * * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or * modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License * as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of * the License, or (at your option) any later version. * * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but * WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU * Lesser General Public License for more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public * License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software * Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 ******************************************************************************/ For instance in: http://code.google.com/p/taverna/source/browse/taverna/engine/net.sf.taverna.t2.core/trunk/workflowmodel-api/src/main/java/net/sf/taverna/t2/workflowmodel/Dataflow.java > 1) Taverna is LGPL, and our web player might get the same license. That sounds good! :-) > 2) What does > 2. Grant of Copyright License .... grant to the University ... > sublicense Your contribution" > mean ? Is the distribution/download process sublicensing ? No, this has nothing to do with the distribution license for users who download the product - but a copyright license that means that we would be allowed to distribute and manage your work without having to ask you for permission. The distribution license of the product (to the users) would still be LGPL - however you would not be giving your code to *us* under LGPL when you are contributing - but under the copyright sublicense agreement. > 3) This sublicensing can not change the LGPL license, is that correct ? The sublicensing does not change the LGPL license, but it does give the University of Manchester a copyright license, meaning that if in the future we see a need to change the license to something else (and it's likely that if that is the case, it would be something more BSD/MIT like) - we could do this without having to trace down and get permission from every contributor to the code base. The copyright license is a way to give us a 'joint' copyright - you would still keep your original copyright, and would be free to say also sell your original code to Microsoft under whatever terms you decide. Likewise we would be in a stronger position than if we just got the code under LGPL, because we would not be locked into keeping that particular license (or what it permits upgrading to) - almost as if we had written the code. We have no intention of changing the license to a non-free or non-open license. So far the LGPL license has worked for Taverna, and it has enabled both community involvement and for commercial actors to use Taverna as a starting point for their own customization, but we can't be 100% sure that this will be the case in the future. In your case your contribution is more of a 'side' project than say a patch to the core Taverna code, so this is not really that relevant in this case - but that's the policy we have decided on to apply for any code in our Subversion repository to avoid any future issues. > 4) Why is "selling" part of the "3. Patent License" ? I am incluined > to remove that prior to signing. I believe this is just a standard thing put in by Apache (the whole document is very much based on their contributors license - http://www.apache.org/licenses/#clas and http://www.apache.org/licenses/cla-corporate.txt ) to avoid companies 'giving' code to the Apache foundation, just to come slashing back with some patent claims later. In short, if people are not granted the permission to sell the product you would be limitting the LGPL license as well - anyone is for instance allowed to sell Linux, as it's under GPL that specifically permits this. We do not have any intention of selling your product, but if you are not willing to grant everyone this right, then I believe that is a restriction that few, if any, open source licences would allow for. I believe the Apache foundation put this in to avoid patent court cases, and the GPL 3 and LGPL 3 has added similar protections. An open source license would not be of much value if the originator could 5 years down the line come waving with some patents and say that users and developers were infringing on their patents. > These are just my points, there might be more when the text > comes back from our administration. Thanks for commenting, this is the first new 'outside' contribution since we started with this contributors license, so it's also a learning experience for us! :-) -- Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team School of Computer Science The University of Manchester ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensing option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ taverna-hackers mailing list [email protected] Web site: http://www.taverna.org.uk Mailing lists: http://www.taverna.org.uk/taverna-mailing-lists/ Developers Guide: http://www.mygrid.org.uk/tools/developer-information
