OsLib licence

[Tom Hughes]

In message <19bf22c34b.colin at colin/granville.gmx.co.uk> you wrote:

> I've been looking into oslib and am totally confused by your GPL
> with exclusion clause.

Right... I didn't think it was that complicated...

> As I understand it any modifying/copying/distributing of oslib are
> under the GPL but using it is not.

That;s right.

> What I don't understand is how you can say that. As I see it,
> although you say oslib is copyright Jonathon Coxhead (JC) is this
> strictly true?
> 
>    * JC released the software under GPL with the exclusion clause
>      for using it. This made all files at that point copyright JC
>      and include the exclusion clause. Having released oslib under
>      GPL JC can only add exclusions to the GPL to files for which
>      he has copyright

All true.

>    * At this point other people (including you) added files to
>      oslib. These files are copyright the person who wrote them,
>      not JC or you for that matter, and would be added to oslib
>      under the terms of the GPL. So unless they explicitly licenced
>      their files otherwise their files are GPL'd without the
>      exclusion clause.

Certainly anything that I have added can be assumed to have the same
licence as the rest of OSLib. I would guess that the same is true of
Tony but you'd have to check with him.

In addition I would expect that anybody who submitted code to OSLib
would expect it to be released subject to the same licence conditions
as the rest of the library. That's what I assume when I submit code
to an open source project anyway.

We should probably make that rather more clear - to be honest I don't
think there is much that came from anybody other than me or Tony at
the moment. A few patches, but not many whole files.

>    * To the user this now means that the whole of oslib is GPL'd so
>      the user must release the source code, though they can extract
>      the files covered by the exclusion clause and just recompile a
>      version of oslib using them.

See above.

> Are you *absolutely* sure that the exclusion clause applies to the
> whole of oslib ie that all the contributors have agreed to it?

Well we haven't made them sign legal documents or anything, but then
neither do 99.99% of open source projects.

> I can't understand why oslib was released with GPL. The exclusion is
> an attempt to get around the source code distribution requirements
> of GPL - I'm not certain it succeeds and this ambiguity makes it
> useless for me. As the GPL would allows me to distribute a subset
> of oslib I can't see any benefit in using a modified GPL version
> over say a BSD licence but I dare say you have your reasons.

That's a question for Jonathan I'm afraid - the licence was his
choice.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/