224 lines
5.1 KiB
HTML
224 lines
5.1 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
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<HTML
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>Good licensing and copyright practice: the practice</TITLE
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>Software Release Practice HOWTO</TH
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WIDTH="10%"
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><DIV
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CLASS="sect1"
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><H1
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CLASS="sect1"
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><A
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NAME="licensepractice"
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></A
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>5. Good licensing and copyright practice: the practice</H1
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><P
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>Here's how to translate the theory above into practice:</P
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><DIV
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CLASS="sect2"
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><H2
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CLASS="sect2"
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><A
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NAME="holder"
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></A
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>5.1. Make yourself or the FSF the copyright holder</H2
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><P
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>In some cases, if you have a sponsoring organization behind you with
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lawyers, you might wish to give copyright to that organization.</P
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></DIV
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><DIV
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CLASS="sect2"
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><H2
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CLASS="sect2"
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><A
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NAME="osd"
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></A
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>5.2. Use a license conformant to the Open Source Definition</H2
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><P
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>The Open Source Definition is the community gold standard for
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licenses. The OSD is not a license itself; rather, it defines a
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minimum set of rights that a license must guarantee in order to be
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considered an open-source license. The OSD, and supporting materials,
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may be found at the web site of the <A
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HREF="http://www.opensource.org"
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TARGET="_top"
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>Open Source Initiative</A
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>.</P
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></DIV
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><DIV
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CLASS="sect2"
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><H2
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CLASS="sect2"
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><A
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NAME="unoriginal"
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></A
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>5.3. Don't write your own license if you can possibly avoid it.</H2
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><P
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>The widely-known OSD-conformant licenses have well-established
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interpretive traditions. Developers (and, to the extent they care, users)
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know what they imply, and have a reasonable take on the risks and tradeoffs
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they involve. Therefore, use one of the standard licenses carried on the
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OSI site if at all possible.</P
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><P
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>If you must write your own license, be sure to have it certified
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by OSI. This will avoid a lot of argument and overhead. Unless
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you've been through it, you have no idea how nasty a licensing
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flamewar can get; people become passionate because the licenses are
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regarded as almost-sacred covenants touching the core values of the
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open-source community.</P
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><P
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>Furthermore, the presence of an established interpretive tradition may
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prove important if your license is ever tested in court. At time of
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writing (early 2002) there is no case law either supporting or invalidating
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any open-source license. However, it is a legal doctrine (at least in
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the U.S., and probably in other common-law countries such as England
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and the rest of the British Commonwealth) that courts are supposed to
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interpret licenses and contracts according to the expectations and
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practices of the community in which they originated.</P
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></DIV
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><DIV
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CLASS="sect2"
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><H2
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CLASS="sect2"
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><A
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NAME="visible"
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></A
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>5.4. Make your license visible in a standard place.</H2
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><P
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>As larger and larger volumes of open-source software are deployed,
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the problem of auditing these volumes for which licenses cover them become
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nontrivial — in fact, it becomes larger than an unaided human being
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can perform. Therefore, it is valuable to have conventions that support
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mechanized querying of the licensing information. Fortunately, existing
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community practise already tends in this direction.</P
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><P
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>As a beginning, the license information for your software should
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live in a file named either COPYING or LICENSE in the top-level directory
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of your source distribution. If a single license applies to the entire
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distribution, that file should include a copy of the license. If multiple
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licenses apply, that file should list the applicable licenses and
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indicate to which files and subdirectories they apply.</P
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></DIV
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></DIV
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CLASS="NAVFOOTER"
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HREF="licensetheory.html"
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>Prev</A
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HREF="develpractice.html"
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>Next</A
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WIDTH="33%"
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VALIGN="top"
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>Good licensing and copyright practice: the theory</TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="34%"
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ALIGN="center"
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VALIGN="top"
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> </TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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ALIGN="right"
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VALIGN="top"
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>Good development practice</TD
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