Re: [ECOS] Licensing of OpenSource code and eCos

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>]

Peter Vandenabeele wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 09:43:51PM +0200, Iztok Zupet wrote:
>
> > OK, let's start a new thread (who's maintaining CVS).
> I am not sure there is a lot of enthousiasm for that, but anyway.
Yeah, we should draw this to a close. I'll snip most of this stuff. Peter 
makes accurate observations in his reply.

> > There can be a workaround if all the original authors of the GPL-ed
> > code agree to publish it under the eCos GPL. As far as I know they have
> > been granted that right when they assigned the copyright to FSF.
> It is very impractical to trace back all authors and ask them to republish
> the work under another license. This why the holder of centralized 
> Copyright of GPL-style licenses (including the ECOS license) has a large 
> advantage over the spread-out group of individuals that Assigned Copyright 
> to a central Copyright holder. We could argue if that advantage for the 
> central Copyright holder is a fair advantage or not. It may be a fair 
> advantage to compensate for the development effort that the central 
> Copyright holder has invested in the project to publish Free Software, 
> but then again, this advantage can only be valorized into money, by 
> making a version of the program that is (at least temporarily) 
> proprietary or non-Copyleft. While the money that is recouped by 
> selling/developing a non-Free version helps the centralized Copyright 
> holder to further develop the Free Software code base, the specific 
> code that was written for the customer or by the customer itself is 
> not available for the Free Software community and this is a pity.
True, but in many cases:

a) the customer _is_ willing to contribute stuff back that isn't itself 
proprietary (e.g. useless without proprietary hardware or covered by some 
intellectual property restriction such as NDA or patent). Red Hat has done 
a good job of convincing customers of the merits of open source.

b) almost all the time so far, customers have not been explicitly wanting 
an alternative licence to a contributed bit of code (ignoring bug fixes) - 
most times the large scale features they are interested in have been new 
ones, which then get released publically.

> > BSD: It seems OK to publish the BSD code under the eCos public license,
> > as long as the original BSD license is also in-there.
> This is what I believe personally. Am I correct that there could be two
> possible implementations ?
>
> - what was originally mod-BSD is "upgraded" to the ECOS license
>   (this is a one way path, because the ECOS license is Copyleft 
>    and mod-BSD is not)
>   
> - mod-BSD code is included in the project as separate files, retaining 
>   the mod-BSD license
>   (I believe this is allowed since the ECOS exactly limits the scope of 
>    the Copyleft to the work itself and excludes other works that together
>    form the "whole").
>
> Jonathan, I did not understand exactly under which of these option the
> inclusion of the lwIP as established mod-BSD licensed work could occur
> in the eCos tree.
The first by preference so that any subsequent enhancements are copyleft. 
There would have to be a good reason to advocate the right.

> > PS.: Am I wrong? According to the copyright law, if the original code is
> > modified by more than 20%, the one who modified it that way can claim
> > copyright.
> I am not aware of that.
I can say with a high degree of confidence that there is no such absolute 
figure like "20%". What matters is whether the modification is a 
substantive work in its own right - something that comes under the 
copyright definitions of being novel and non-obvious.

A large patch of simple obvious changes (e.g. simple text substitutions) 
may be acceptable without copyright implications despite the size; whereas 
a cunning optimization of 10 lines of assembler in just one part of a vast 
file may not. Size isn't everything ;-).

Jifl
--
--[ "You can complain because roses have thorns, or you ]--
--[  can rejoice because thorns have roses." -Lincoln   ]-- Opinions==mine


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