Recent Open Source Licensing

While the GPL v3 is a more recognized and established open source license, the recently-released EUPL v1.1 is making waves licensing world. Unique in its encouragement of interoperability, freedom, and lack of license lock-in upon redistribution, the EUPL it represents a divergence from the typical freedoms afforded by GPL and most other OSI-approved licenses.

Remember those New Year’s resolutions? We know, it happens to us every year as well. There’s always next year. Do yourself a big, huge, legal favor this year and read the final article in our three part series on Internet Law. Seriously, don’t get caught messing with the top four major intellectual property laws in the United States.

Broken those New Year’s resolutions yet? Well, we didn’t really care about them anyway, except for the one on Copyright Law we assigned you last month. Do yourself a big, huge, legal favor this year and read the second article in our three part series on Internet Law. Seriously, don’t get caught messing with the top four major intellectual property laws in the United States.

2007 was the one of the most active years for legal developments in the history of free and open source, and 2008 saw a continuation of important legal developments. Here’s our list of the top ten FOSS legal developments in 2008.

The OpenLogic Certified Library includes hundreds of projects and over 225 different licenses, most of which are based — at least loosely — on one of the 18 most commonly used license types. We’ve laid out for you in table form a detailed comparison of the common features of these licenses.

Figuring out the licensing terms of the open source gadget you’d like to use in in the widget you’re prototyping (and hope to offer for sale next quarter) is not as difficult as, say, absorbing the details of evolutionary biology, but neither is it a guaranteed walk in the park. In other words, it’s not dreadfully difficult, but often…

Specifications can be a challenge because often times a specification itself is not open source but a reference implementation is, or vice-versa. In this case, OpenLogic could find no open source license or statements as to whether the project was open source, though a statement was found indicating that the specification is free for commercial use.

The license issue in this case is that Cobertura is dual licensed under the Apache 1.1 and the GPL V2 licenses. The Ant tasks are licensed under the Apache 1.1 license. Because the Ant tasks are loaded directly into the runtime of Ant, and the GPL is incompatible with all versions of the Apache license, Ant tasks can’t be licensed under the GPL.

Multi-licensed projects are a common source of confusion for users of open source software. In this instance, OpenLogic was able to clarify the intent and obligations of the three unique licensing options. As a service to our customers and the community at-large, we’ve added an entry to the OLEX knowledge base which explains the licensing of gSOAP in detail. Perhaps as a result of our input and inquiries, the project has also updated their Web site to explain the license situation more clearly.

During the Certification of Jacl 1.4.1 in May 2008, OpenLogic discovered that versions of Jacl previous to 1.4 were licensed under a proprietary copyright statement. This statement is included as a text file in the distribution as the “Jacl License”. The project Web site offered no additional information on the license….