Lawrence Rosen, a lawyer specializing in open source, publishes his book and articles on software licensing and intellectual property.
HN commenters call his book "Open Source Licensing" the best work on the subject, and cite him on licensing questions like linking and derivative works.
Downmodded for what I thought was a pretty factual comment posted under my own name. It appears that hackernews is becoming reddit.
So in response:
> b) Creative Commons, which has a staff of lawyers, including very prominent and respected Lawrance Lessig
As I understand it, Larry's position on this is controversial. There is no legal instrument in US copyright law to allow for public domain dedication, and specific parts of US copyright law essentially forbid it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_the_public_domain
Larry Rosen (whom I hope you admit is no slouch when it comes to licensing) has this to say:
http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj16.htm
"Just as there is nothing in the law that permits a person to dump personal property in the public highway, there is nothing that permits the dumping of intellectual property into the public domain — except as happens in due course when any applicable copyrights expire. Until those copyrights expire, there is no mechanism in the law by which an owner of software can simply elect to place it in the public domain."
If you look carefully at the Creative Commons' CC0 license, and its associated documentation, you see that Creative Commons is fully aware that they're being... optimistic. See:
http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ
Some quotes:
"Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not…
You've misinterpreted the license. What it says is that the licensOR (not the licensEE) is a non-profit. That is, by publishing your original software under the NPOSL, you claim that you are a non-profit organisation. That's it.
Nowhere does the license say that you can't use the code outside non-profit orgs. In fact 17.d says very clearly that if you're not a non-profit, you are allowed to distribute your modified works, but under the original OSL license, not the NPOSL. So you can use, modify it and distribute it, only with a complication in the licensing.
The other amendment the NPOSL adds is where the original OSL gives a grant of patents and a warranty of provenance, and the NPOSL explicitly doesn't, because it's designed for non-profit companies, which have no money, so it's intended to reduce legal exposure.
It's a Free Software license in my opinion, and I bet you a drink that Stallman and the FSF would consider one too, even if they would not recommend using it.
Also note that the license's author is Laurence Rosen, who was General Counsel of the OSI, knows more about software licensing than most people, and who explains the details and rationale of the NPOSL in [1]
[1] https://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm
If you have any other license that's OSI-certified and you think is non-free according to the principles of the FSF, I'm interested in learning about it.
One thing to take into account, though, is that the OSI is a certification body, and the FSF…
The author makes the following claims:
> In truth, the terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with. The basic obligations of the AGPL which set it apart from other licenses are as follows:
> - Any derivative works of AGPL-licensed software must also use the AGPL.
> - Any users of such software are entitled to the source code under the terms of the AGPL, including users accessing it over the network such as with their web browser or via an API or internet protocol.
That first claim is debatable at best. Nowhere in the entire document will you find the term "derivative work." Instead, the AGPL forces on the reader a bunch of other terms that may or may not add up to "derivative works."
Other licenses have no problem coming out and using the term. Doing so connects those licenses to a well-understood body of intellectual property law. Not so with AGPL. See the discussion in the book by Rosen (an actual lawyer) for more [1].
So right out of the gate, the AGPL is not easy to comply with.
[1] https://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm
The crux of the disagreement is whether simply calling another library (as opposed to modifying its source code) makes your codebase a derivative work of that library.
The GPL FAQ seems to think the answer is yes [1]. However, other, more legally astute commentators strongly disagree [2][3].
In fact, the GPL FAQ seems to make some rather strange claims, like whether the fact that code is dynamically or statically linked legally determines whether a calling code becomes derivative work. This is an argument has never been tested in court.
IMO, the GPL FAQ basically takes a copyright maximalist position in order to interpret the license as broadly as possible. These are arguments that, in other contexts, most geeks would find completely unacceptable. It's worthwhile to note that the GPL FAQ has no validity as a legal document, only the license itself.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfLibraryIsGPL
[2] http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj19.htm
[3] http://illinoisjltp.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gue.pdf p.124
The problem with React is its patent rider. React.js comes with a BSD license, but has a patent rider that gives you a license to React's patents. This sounds like a good thing, right? But this rider has a "strong retaliation clause" which says that if you make any sort of patent claim against Facebook this patent license automatically terminates. Which means Facebook can now sue you for patent infringement for using React. You may think this is no worse than not having a patent rider at all. But that's not the case. If there is no patent rider then there is an implicit grant which cannot be revoked.
If you work for a software company and your company has patents then keep in mind that by using React you are giving Facebook a free license to your entire patent portfolio.
More info on weak vs strong retaliation clauses: http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj9.htm
IANAL but I don't see how using a BSD license automatically makes code FOSS. According to Lawrence Rosen[1] (who IS a lawyer),
"Since courts are likely to construe implied grants of license narrowly, a licensee should consider obtaining separately from the licensor an explicit grant of patent rights that might be needed for modified versions of BSD-licensed software."
This seems to go against the FOSS[2] freedom 2, the right to distribute modified copies without asking anyone for permission. Now, whether that can be applied in this particular case I don't know, I guess that depends on whether there are patents involved. But in general, BSD does not imply FOSS.
[1]: http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm, chapter 5, p. 79
[2]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html