
A discussion of Fedora’s legal state - sohkamyung
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/714524/0c495ef932cd49a8/
======
hannob
Some of that reminds me when we tried to clean up the licensing situation in
Gentoo.

There's an incredible amount of self-invented licenses and if there's one
advice I'd like to give to all free and open source devs: Don't do this. It
annoys people in Linux distros who have to decide what to do with your code,
whether it's free and there almost certainly is an existing, widely used
license that does what you want. Choose one of the mainstream licenses like
MIT, GPL (2 or 3, whatever, we know what it means, it's fine), Apache-2 or
even something like WTFPL. It's all fine, we know what it means. But don't
pick three chapters of license A and one of License B to have your unique mix.

I also remember we had a LICENSE as-is, which was supposed to mean something
very specific, but it had a horrible result: Many devs used it as the license
dumpster: "I don't know what license it is, so I'll tag it as 'as-is'." Thanks
to lots of work, mostly done by Ulrich Müller, all of that mess is now cleaned
up.

~~~
viraptor
If you actually want your software used, then a known license is the best. In
a corporate environment, it will be much easier to approve BSD or even GPL
than WTFPL. There's most likely a preapproved list of known licenses and
everything else needs to go through legal.

You want your library used in the next big project? Don't use WTFPL.

~~~
annnnd
Why not? It is basically a public domain license, it just uses more _colorful_
language. IANAL, but I see no problem using such code in corporate
environment. What are the risks?

~~~
viraptor
I don't think there's a problem. The situation I experienced is just that
standard OSI licenses are preapproved. Anything else needs to go via manual
process which takes days/weeks. So even if you say "do whatever you want",
it's not a standard OSI license which means I have to get a confirmation
first. And if I can find/write an alternative quicker, I will.

~~~
kuschku
There actually is a problem: There’s countries where "public domain" is not a
thing, so the WTFPL becomes legally the same as "all rights reserved".

Which is a problem.

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tomcam
Ha! Now I can use Java in my nuclear submarine! Was too busy drinking martinis
in my lair to notice that Sun finally caved. Begone, Perl 6 guidance systems!
Welcome, MissilePrelaunchFactoryInit class!

~~~
simonh
Just be careful translating that 150 character regexp that transforms the
target's GPS co-ordinates into the missile's native co-ordinate projection
system.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
What missiles? He just has a nuke powered fishie observation vessel.

~~~
simonh
So the MissilePrelaunchFactoryInit class is for managing the 'launch' of a
fish observation application called Missile? Got it. My bad.

~~~
Asooka
No, it's supposed to be MissalPrelaunchFactoryInit, but the class name
spellcheck in Eclipse autocorrected it. It's so you can tell the fish about
their lord and saviour Jesus Carp.

------
lmm
Contribution agreements without assigning copyright seem to be a missing part
of FOSS legal infrastructure. Everyone knows the standard open-source
licenses, but there's no standard text you can have contributors sign to say
that they understand that they're irrevocably licensing their contributions to
you under that license. I ended up adapting the text from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Declaration_of_conse...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Declaration_of_consent_for_all_enquiries)
for my own project, but it would be good to have a well-known standardised
statement along these lines.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> there's no standard text you can have contributors sign to say that they
> understand that they're irrevocably licensing their contributions to you
> under that license

If you feel you need something like that, use the Developer Certificate of
Origin: [https://developercertificate.org/](https://developercertificate.org/)

That's what "Signed-off-by:" lines indicate agreement with, and conveniently,
git has built-in support for adding such lines.

~~~
lmm
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. That said I'd prefer something closer to the
Wikipedia language; I'd like it to be clearer that I might not retain
contributions, and that contributions may be modified by subsequent
contributors.

> That's what "Signed-off-by:" lines indicate agreement with

Not to me (I've been using -s for years, assuming it was just a way to include
developer information in the commit message), so I doubt that would hold up in
court.

------
i336_
Nobody's mentioned this, so here you go: the (apparently just 19:38) video.

[https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/fedoras_legal_state/](https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/fedoras_legal_state/)

~~~
kchauhan
Thanks. That what I am looking for.

------
scythe
If I understand the situation correctly, this is actually a rather heavy and
unnoticed albatross hanging around Linux's neck: it's hard for a company to
ship a working Linux distribution on a laptop sold for profit, because
"working" means implementing a number of patented features.

~~~
mjevans
As well as likely distributing firmware which SHOULD just be shipped with the
bloody hardware in a small sliver of ROM, or patches to roms which have bugs
because of lack of testing, etc.

Also many of the WiFi drivers have such crazy firmware because they're
actually (at least partly) software defined radios and thus each country needs
a slightly different flavor and that's related to regulations and testing.

Everything would be much easier if we could just have some part of the UN that
every country agrees to follow manage a universal spectrum allocation and
anyone that disagrees should just expect all of the electronics to break.

~~~
mseebach
No, things would be better if someone (not me, alas, with a nod to the Linus
rant) would design, build and market a wifi chip with FOSS firmware.

Software is great exactly because it allows for infinite flexibility, so you
don't need to involve the UN when allocating wifi spectrum.

~~~
pjc50
Other way round: you need to comply with the (national) spectrum allocation.
I'm not sure it would be even possible to build a FOSS wifi device without
infringing any patents. And, as with other OSHW, how much more are people
prepared to pay for that open-ness? I suspect very little.

------
fencepost
Completely aside from the content of the article, this is the second
subscriber-only LWN.net article I've seen posted in the past week or so, and
I'm sure there have been others. Please be careful with the articles you
choose to post.

While this may indicate that LWN needs to improve (or create) its paywall, if
articles like this lead to new subscriptions they may be able to just chalk it
up to "advertising" without breaking limited sharing of articles.

~~~
jcrawfordor
As an optimistic anecdote, this being the second such article in a week that
I've really enjoyed just pushed me over the edge and I'm now an LWN
subscriber. Hopefully I'm not the only one.

I really wasn't familiar with LWN prior to seeing links to subscriber-only
articles semi-frequently on HN, and honestly these days I'm embarrassed I
didn't know about it sooner as I'm a Linux sysadmin and LWN's weekly edition
is just about exactly the news I want to keep up with my job.

~~~
sohkamyung
Welcome to the lwn.net subscriber gang! I'm an ordinary desktop linux user and
have been a subscriber for many years. It has been, and still is, my go-to
site for in-depth news on linux, whether on kernel matters or on the linux
ecosystem.

I'm the one who posted this article and so far, I have not had any warning
mail from lwn.net about posting subscriber only content. But I do take care to
try to only post content that I believe is of interest to HN.

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stoolpigeon
This is off-topic, please feel free to downvote/delete whatever but I've
really not done well trying to find the answer to this question and there seem
to be knowledgeable people here.

I'm joining in on a project that uses the Zend framework. The Framework is
under the New BSD License.

We'd like our code to be under the same license. Do we just leave things as
they are? Do we add our license to the files we create and leave the Zend
files as they are? Do we need to add our stuff to all the files, even those
that came with Zend?

I apologize if there is an obvious place to go to understand this, I have not
been able to find it.

~~~
lmm
If you're a serious business you need real legal advice.

That said: put the license in the root of your project (as Zend probably
does). Put your own copyright headers on any files that you create. Leave
Zend's copyright headers on any files you don't modify. Add your own copyright
to the a copyright header on any files you do modify.

------
ChuckMcM
My hat is off to this guy! License clearance is a pain. It was the single
biggest task Blekko had to do after being acquired by IBM was to go through
and vet all of the licenses in all of the bits of code and sort them. There
was a bunch of tools to help but I don't think I could sign up for a job that
had me in a meeting with lawyers twice a week discussing the various ways
something ambiguous might be interpreted as the whole job.

------
raymond_goo
Youtube (mirror?)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjflNTd2kho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjflNTd2kho)

