---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:20:32 -0400
From: Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa_at_redhat.com>
To: Murray S. Kucherawy <msk_at_blackops.org>
Cc: Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus <stefan_at_seekline.net>
Subject: Re: original BSD license
On 03/17/2010 01:46 PM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Mar 2010, Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus wrote:
>> After some talks on IRC and one at the Fedora legal mailing list [1] it
>> seems to be clear that it will be harder to get a package into Fedora
>> when it is licensed as "BSD with advertising" aka BSD-4-clause [2,4]
>> instead of a BSD-3-clause.
>
> I've Cc'd your Fedora legal contact that took part in the list thread
> you cited.
>
>> Would it be possible to drop the advertising clause (the result would be
>> a BSD-3-clause license [3])? The fourth clause is a relict of the old
>> days and was actually removed in 1999 by the Berkeley university. The
>> clause raised a lot of discussions and raised a lot of trouble. I would
>> really like to provide a Fedora package of OpenDKIM. A three or even two
>> clause BSD license would make things easier.
>
> I'm unclear on what the trouble is, especially when your own license
> matrix lists four-clause BSD as acceptable (i.e. it's on your list of
> "Good" licenses). And as you point out, the portions of the project
> covered by the Sendmail open source license are also good because
> Sendmail, Inc. is still the copyright holder in that case.
>
> Naturally, at least while we're a relatively small project, we'd like to
> ensure that we get appropriate credit when our work is used in larger
> projects, especially commercial ones. So maybe you can provide some
> guidance here: How have other projects done so without these license
> compatibility issues?
Well, to be fair, most other projects (including the original BSD
author, the Regents of the University of California) have dropped the
advertising clause, so that's the main reason that we don't see this
issue very often.
In addition, the clause itself presents a painful burden on distributors
such as Red Hat, wherein, we would have to take extreme care to ensure
that if we happen to mention a feature that a component is in any way
responsible for in "advertising materials", that the "advertising
materials" include the explicit acknowledgement text. I can tell you
from Red Hat's perspective, this actively motivates us to not include
BSD with advertising code in our commercial offerings such as RHEL, not
because we do not wish to give appropriate credit, but because the task
of tracking and auditing all possible scenarios in which this clause may
come into effect is extremely time-consuming and painful, so much so
that it almost always outweighs the benefits provided by the software!
There is also the concern that the FSF has pointed out, which is that as
the BSD with advertising clause proliferates, it leads to an absurd
amount of acknowledgements for advertising. See:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
Still another problem exists in who is mentioned in the "advertising"
clause. In this specific case, your organization is mentioned by name,
but in many situations, people who made changes to the source code often
wanted to have their names added to the acknowledgement. Changing the
license to accommodate this is painful.
In Fedora, since we do very little "advertising", it is less of a
concern from that aspect, so we do permit code under the BSD with
advertising license. The problem for Fedora is really around the GPL
incompatibility. Because the forced advertising requirement is more
restrictive than that of the GPL, when there is a situation where a
combined work (e.g. a GPL binary which utilizes a BSD w/advertising
library), it is not possible for us to be compliant with both licenses
simultaneously for that binary.
(FSF documents this here:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#OrigBSD)
There are a few ways this is resolvable for Fedora (off the top of my head):
A) The copyright holders of the library under BSD w/advertising drop
that clause entirely. Given that in practice, this clause does not
provide any real advertising benefit and may actually discourage others
from using your software in scenarios where you would want to receive
credit, I would posit that perhaps the pain caused by this clause
outweighs the realized benefits of its presence.
B) In your code, the BSD with advertising license is reworded so that in
the advertising clause, the word "must" is replaced with "should". This
makes it a suggestion, and eliminates the additional restriction
conflict with the GPL. (It does also mean that people would not be
required to use the advertising clause, but suggests that you would like
it if they did.)
C) You dual-license the code with something that is GPL compatible,
perhaps with the GPL itself. If you chose to do this, it would mean that
it would not be practical for most proprietary solutions to leverage
your code under the GPL, and they would be forced to choose the BSD with
advertising license, and you'd have them in the position you do today
(with all of the concerns addressed above), but for Linux distributors
and other FOSS projects wishing to leverage your library, they could do
so under the GPL and avoid compatibility concerns.
D) You can do nothing, and the copyright holders of a GPL codebase which
is dependent upon a BSD w/advertising library could add an license
exception that says something like:
Linking ABC statically or dynamically with other modules is making
a combined work based on ABC. Thus, the terms and conditions of
the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.
In addition, as a special exception, the copyright holders of ABC
give you permission to combine ABC program with free software
programs or libraries that are released under otherwise-compatible
licenses with advertising requirements (or modified versions of such
code, with unchanged license). You may copy and distribute such a
system following the terms of the GNU GPL for ABC and the licenses of
the other code concerned, provided that you include the source code
of that other code when and as the GNU GPL requires distribution of
source code.
Note that people who make modified versions of ABC are not obligated
to grant this special exception for their modified versions; it is
their choice whether to do so. The GNU General Public License gives
permission to release a modified version without this exception; this
exception also makes it possible to release a modified version which
carries forward this exception.
*****
I hope this better explains our stance and our concerns. If you have any
questions, please feel free to let me know.
~tom
P.S. I am not a lawyer, nothing in this email should be construed as
legal advice. However, I do consult regularly with Red Hat Legal.
Received on Wed Mar 17 2010 - 19:12:22 PST