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Professor Lawrence Lessig reports on a ruling that protects “open source licenses.” The opinion was rendered by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (they have the final say on US Intellectual Property disputes). The the provisions outlined by the Artistic License were upheld as legally binding.

The precedent set here should also protect other open licenses (GPL, Creative Commons, BSD, etc). The case is a nice legal affirmation of the values we’ve all been putting into our free and openly licensed works for so long!

Anyone who runs a significant open source project should read this, especially if you don’t currently require your contributors to send in any kind of agreement:

So why have it? Why create the barrier to entry for newcomers who just want to pitch in? I have great sympathy for the impatient potential contributor huffing “why do I need to sign this, anyway?”, so this blog post is an effort to boil it down.
[From “Why Do I need To Sign This?”]

I’ve spoken with Alex a couple of times about open source intellectual property, and he’s definitely given this a lot of thought. For a project the size of Dojo, involving many very large contributors, having something like Dojo’s CLA seems critical for keeping the IP clean.

With TurboGears, from the beginning, I’ve required people to send in a simple contributor agreement and this sums up why: “One of the best aspects of the CLA process is that it gets people who are contributing to think about what it means to contribute.”. Significant open source projects that people depend on need to have contributors that are serious about maintaining the project’s quality and the project’s IP. Making people aware of this responsibility from the get-go is a big positive.

I’m posting this in hopes that more of my friends in open source software will keep these things in mind as their projects grow and the outside code contributions increase.

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Open Source Licensing Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law

the section clearly states that if a program "can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then the GPL does not apply to it"

Some years ago (as penance for working at MySQL during some temporary corporate brain-damage about Free Software licensing) I began volunteering at the Free Software Foundation.

For the most part, I have spent my time providing support on Free Software licensing questions for the FSF Compliance Lab and helping out on the GPL v3 effort.

While both activities are quite rewarding, the work at the compliance lab tends to be most interesting. We serve a wide variety of people and organizations who have a correspondingly wide range of experience, views and questions. This leads to rewarding experiences, as well as experiences that are more educational in nature.

While I don’t discuss the specific details of any particular question sent to the compliance lab, a recent exchance is being made public by the submitter (this isn’t that uncommon) and I don’t mind at least discussing the general issues encountered (and linking to the exchange, if I can find it.)

The submitter (let’s call them “Coyote”, if they decide to not post the messages and don’t want to be identified) has led me on a merry little goose chase where they seemed to work fairly hard to misinterprete most of the rather sloppy answers that I provided. As the mail thread grew and grew, I got more and more irritated (and sloppy).

Finally, at the climax of the exchange, this little gem emerged:

…

Me: Your questions have been less than clear.

Coyote: your answers have been less than forthcoming and offtopic. We can play this game all day, I have what I needed from you, I await Dave’s response.

Coyote: This issue can potentially apply to far more than this particular instance, however it is one that was easy to illustrate this. I will be publishing these emails in whole. Estoppel is a wonderful thing :)

Me: Coyote, stating that we don’t have a formal policy is hardly damning (unless I have a tremendously weak understanding of estoppel)

Coyote: There is more than the fact that you dont have an official policy, there are other things that were said that, as a whole, paint a picture. Estoppel can apply in this case when the whole picture is looked at instead of the individual peices by themselves. Maybe I caught you on a bad day but your responses to me now are less than professional, overreacting and infact somewhat childish. You were the one avoiding the gpl questions all along, and to a point belittling my knowledge a bit from the first reply, even after I explained my knowledge of certain facts you continued through at least 2 more replies continuing to avoid the question asked and belittling my knowledge.

Maybe after you get some sleep, smoke a cigarette, have a drink, or whatever it is that you do to relax things will change. I formally request that until this is done that you dont reply to me anymore except to forward Daves response on the issue.

This definitely raised my blood pressure a few notches. I may even have cursed… It is hard to remember because, as the kids say, I was so completely pwn3d.

However, the last bit of advice provided was rather good - I caught some dinner and had a cold one. Then I came back and wrote new, detailed and professional (or so I think) answers to every issue raised in each of the nine messages in the thread.

If you are working as a community advocate or ombudsman, you can’t give careless answers and you definitely can’t let yourself get suckered into exchanges that don’t help to solve the problem at hand. Your job is to give professional, ethical and considered advice to the communities you are supporting. Even if you write for one person, write as if everyone was watching.

In the end, Coyote didn’t seem to be very impressed by the improved answers - hopefully they will be more useful once he does whatever it is that he does to relax.

However, I felt pretty good about it - while I did get pointlessly upset for a bit, going back to give more considered responses meant that I am now thinking a bit more clearly about the specific issue of how trademarks interact with the GPL and the broad issue of how other mechanisms can limit the freedom of Free Software licenses. Also, I do mean to provide good service to people who write the Compliance Lab - I did a bad job on the first round and doing a better job on the second round gave me a good feeling.

Techworld.com reports:

The European Commission this week appeared to take a step back from its earlier position on the patentability of software, stating that computer programs are not patentable, and that patents on them may be struck down by the courts.

For the full story, see:
http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=6081