FAQ: Copyright issues

Are mixed copyrights allowed?

When someone says "package X is distributed under the A license" this doesn't mean that a single file inside X as license A - it means that the sum of all files (or the layout, the compilation, however you call it) in the package is of copyright A. The only restriction is that no two copyrights of the package and it's parts must not be incompatible.

The question whether two licenses are incompatible isn't easily answered. Read them carefully and ask a lawyer - if you need to care at all.

A special case is the unclear license of ftpparse.c in the ftpcopy package, there _may_ be a conflict with the GPL ("commercial use is fine, if you let me know what programs you're using this in"). The copyright holder of all the GPLd files - me - made the special exception that this is to be considered okay, and the author of ftpparse knows that ftpcopy uses it.

• One cannot rewrite the whole software on earth (although i sometimes feel tempted to do this).
• Some packages with a different copyright are just perfectly OK. As long as the distribution of unmodified files and patches is allowed i just don't care in that case (the distribution of "patches" needs to be allowed in case a problem needing fixing arises).
• I sometimes release files under a different copyright if i see a good reason to do so. One such reason is that the file has not a high value and doesn't need a copyright protection.

Some people seem to think that such packages aren't open source because of this, but (i'm not a lawyer) i disagree.

Note: there is room for negotiations. It's unlikely that i'll change some complete package away from the GPL, but i did change the copyright of smaller entities (from single files to a set of library functions) when the need arose.

You seem to not care much about open source?

• Open Source hasn't brought me anything i didn't have before. Perl, AWK, Apache, GCC ... they all were available before that time. And none of them was going to die. Oh, this is true for qmail, linux, OpenBSD, too ...

  Often enough i hear "Open Source has brought us mozilla". Oh, thanks. Netscape released the sources of netscape communicator as open source. But that's not mozilla. The netscape sources were a pile of junk, if i've ever seen one. Mozilla has been a rewrite, for the most parts, at least.

• I've yet to see a major contribution to any of my projects. There have been some minor ones, and there may be a medium sized one coming soon, but that's it.
  I admit to be hard to work with. But hard is not impossible.
• There now is more "open" software available than a few years ago. Some people attribute this to the "open source" community, but i disagree: Show me a single piece of software that has been written just because of "open source". The sole reason for the increasing number of software packages is that it's now easier than before to publish something (not limited to software) _and_ time has passed.
• Would any contributor of a major open source product have contributed less if the open source hype wouldn't have happened? Why?
• Some companies, notably bigger ones, started to relase major packages as open source. I didn't look at all the sources, but what i've seen from them is just a insultingly bad code. "It's unmaintainable now, and the other company (from redmond?) is having more success, so let's release this and get some friendly press".
• The "open" thing ends where the nose of your linux distributor ends. Really. Believe me: i still wait for some linux distributor to inform me about a really stupid (non-critical) bug they found.
  This is perfectly ok marketing-wise - after all, they want to be better than other distributions. It's just not fair to me. And it's against that spirit of open source - if it exists, of course.
• The open source initiative has created even more license hassles. Some years ago there were less than a dozen software licenses in general use (as opposed to be used for one or two small projects), and most were compatible with each other. Today? The number has trippled (or so), and most of the new ones are incompatible.

  On 2002-09-28, the /usr/portage/licenses file of a fresh gentoo linux installation contained 142 files. 142. Indeed. Growth seems to be about 20 to 30 per year.

  That's _clearly_ a "success" of the open source hype.