Customer Reviews

Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law

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If you're looking to get an in-depth understanding of open source licensing and all the issues surrounding it, you should read Open Source Licensing by Lawrence Rosen (Prentice Hall).

Chapter list: Freedom and Open Source; Intellectual Property; Distribution of Software; Taxonomy of Licenses; Academic Licenses; Reciprocity and the GPL; The Mozilla Public License (MPL); The Common Public License (CPL); The OSL and the AFL; Choosing an Open Source License; Shared Source, Eventual Source, and Other Licensing Models; Open Source Litigation; Open Standards; The Open Source Paradigm; Appendices; Index

On the positive side, this book will teach you more about licensing than you thought existed. This book deals with all the legal issues that either have arisen or could become a problem as open source continues to make inroads against commercial software. The analysis is detailed as only a lawyer can do it. Another positive aspect of the book is that the author covers how different open source licenses mesh with each other. You may be forced into choosing a certain type of license if you've incorporated software that already uses a license that you're expected to apply to your software. All good stuff.

On the negative side, I don't think the book delivers on its promise to present "a plain-English guide to open source law for developers, managers, users, and lawyers". I see this as a book by a lawyer for lawyers needing to understand software licensing and how open source licensing fits into that. Companies that are building a business model around open source will need this material, but the typical developer and nearly all users will be bored to death as individual words are pulled out and dissected as for potential legal interpretations that could be applied.

I'm inclined to rank this a little higher than I'd like just because there's not a lot of material about this subject, and the author *does* cover it in great detail. But if you think you're going to get an easy-to-digest explanation of open source licensing, you will probably be disappointed.

At the core of the open source movement are licensing issues. These are still relatively new and potentially confusing to many. Here, Rosen offers a major clarification of the key ideas. He discusses the basic motivation underpinning the most common licenses, like GPL, CPL, OSL and MPL. These are compared with each other and with what might be considered the closest previous type of license - that used in academia. While the final choice is yours, he gives you a solid basis for determining that choice.

For many readers, there will be an interesting analysis of the SCO versus Open Source fracas. In essence, he suggests that after all the dust has settled, it will break no new ground in contract law. Nor will it stymie or halt the open source movement. A relief to many, if his assessment proves true.

When I recieved this book I was excited, finally I could read a book which would help my brain really understand all the licenses! I sat down to read it, and was impressed with how the author took the popular licenses and broke them down into more easily understandable. I mean, they *are* fairly straight forward, but the author gets into what they actually mean in legal terms, and that's interesting.

Unfortunately it turns out that reading about specifics of Open Source law is not terribly interesting to me (I guess I'll never be a lawer) After the few introduction chapters I had to stop reading straight through it and skip around and skim the parts that interested me.

In my case this is not such a good book for snuggling up with in front of the fire (some computer books are), but it is a fabulous reference book, written for us mere mortals.

The Open Source/Free Software movement can be very confusing because it is a mixture of ideology, politics and business. To choose the proper license for your purposes you first have to understand the purpose of the various licenses. Some, specially GNU/GPL, are mostly political and ideological in nature in that they try to create a 'right to software.' Others are designed to further either academic or business interests through free software.

Except for Chapter 10, I found the book to be eminently readable. Unfortunately, Chapter 10: Choosing an Open Source License, which can be considered the core of the book, turned my brain to mush and was no help at all choosing a license. The author states:

"If you expect a checklist method to select a license, don't bother reading this chapter; it cannot be so easy."

While from an attorney's point of view this might be correct, from a developer's point of view you don't really have an alternative to creating your own checklist to pick a license. An attorney will give you the attorney's standard solution: "consult your attorney." When you do, your attorney will not pick a license for you, he'll rehash everything in the book and you still have the burden to pick a license. So why not nip in the bud this Catch-22 situation?

My own checklist, created mostly from what I learned from this book, is as follows:

1.- Ideological intent? What is your prime intent, to make a political statement or is it something else like promoting academe or running a business?

2.- Reciprocal licensing? What is more beneficial for your project, reciprocal licensing which limits contributor's choices or non-reciprocal which allows alternative licensing modes for derivative works?

3.- Can you afford an attorney? If not, pick a license template used by a very popular and successful open source project that meets your first two requirements.

Remember that you can always relicense and if your initial choice is not perfect, it can be perfected in time provided you don't chain yourself to some irreversible license.

I purchased this book 18 months ago, along with two other references. Since that time, I have learned that when I have a question, this is the book to turn to first. In fact, I haven't read the others since first buying them.

This week we had a request to license some code under the CPL. Not only does this book cover that license, but it has a chapter interpreting each of the clever sections, and its repercussions.

As both a licensee and licensor, I have yet to come across an issue which this book did not address. It is the single volume you need.

I have studied and compared Open Source licenses for a number of years. I came to the conclusion that the licenses created by Mr. Rosen were the best and I adopted one of them for my own Open Source projects. I have also read his book on the subject and I have concluded that it is also the best in its field. I recommend his book as a must-read for licensors of Open Source content.

I have to admit it, there are few topics less interesting to me than open source licensing. But somehow Lawrence has turned this dry subject into something palatable for me. He runs through all of the general topics for each license (e.g. intellectual property, distribution, etc.) and then works through the commonly used licenses. It also gives a chapter on how to choose a license, which is much appreciated.

I can't say that this is a casual fun read to take on a vacation with you. But if you are choosing a license and you have no idea what you are doing, then this will be an informative read that will help you make that decision.

Open source software is growing explosively around the world. The SourceForge web site now lists 87,006 projects being done by 912,545 people. That's almost a million people writing code, probably more than all of the programmers employed by Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc. etc.

The code being produced is distributed free of charge. Free of Charge, but not without restrictions. This book, written by the general counsel of the Open Source Initiative is intended to explain the various licenses that are in common use in the Open Source Community. It is written in English, not lawyer-speak, and intended for developers, managers, users and of course lawyers. If this is what you need to know, you'll not find a better source.