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From the Editors: Read your licenses

By SD Times News Team

September 15, 2008 — (Page 1 of 2)
As any attorney will tell you, licenses matter. If you don’t like the license terms for software or services, don’t use the product. If you do use the product, make sure you obey the license terms. That applies to commercial software—and to software that you receive for free.

Licenses are controversial in the free software world, whether you’re using code that’s governed by a version of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License, the Apache license, the Eclipse license, Microsoft’s shared source license or any of the many other legal documents attached to source code and binary bits.

The onus is on the consumer—be it a development manager or corporate counsel—to examine and read licenses before, not after, using the software.

The Software Freedom Law Center’s guidelines, "A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance," will further developers’ understanding of their obligations under the GNU GPL—obligations that GPL violators should already have known upfront.

The spirit of the license does not provide for companies to raid GPL code for the sole purpose of lowering their own development costs. According to the terms of the GPL, if you modify or improve any GPL-licensed code, you may be compelled to share the new source code. If you don’t want to do that, don’t use GPL-licensed code.

If you feel that sharing source code is a Faustian bargain, there are plenty of other licenses and open-source projects to choose from. Or you could simply write your own code.

It would be unheard of to take code licensed by a big commercial vendor and to violate that license; developers know better, in no uncertain terms. But a license is a license is a license, whether the software is free or not. There is simply no justification for violating the GPL or any other license.

The GNU community has begun a grassroots effort to preserve the integrity of its license against past and present infringement. The FSF has even set up a Web page for the public to report any such violation—in multiple languages.

Related Search Term(s): open source, virtualization, Microsoft

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