6  Licenses

6.1 Readings prior to class

A chapter from a book, and four blog style articles. The book chapter should take between 1-2 hours to read, the blogs should take about another 20-40 minutes.

1. Chapter “Writing Copyright Licenses” of Kelty, C. M. (2008). Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham: Duke University Press Books. https://twobits.net/pub/Kelty-TwoBits.pdf#page=195
   A medium length chapter describing how open source licenses came to be. Should take between 1 and 2 hours to read.

2. The Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/osd
   
   Quick list of elements to be found in open source licenses

3. FSF Settles Suit Against Cisco. https://www.fsf.org/news/2009-05-cisco-settlement.html

   A summary of the Free Software Foundation enforcing the GPL license

4. Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing. (2021, January 19). Elastic Blog. https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS
   
   A summary of a recent trend in open source breaks with the “no field of use” restrictions, trying to sustain an open source business model funded by cloud service delivery.

5. Carlos Munoz Ferrandis. (2022, August 31). OpenRAIL: Towards open and responsible AI licensing frameworks. Hugging Face Blog. https://huggingface.co/blog/open_rail
   
   Machine learning leaders, huggingface (yes, that’s their real company name), explaining why sharing trained AI/neutral network models/weights is both similar to sharing code and different, proposing a new license focused on ethical reuse of shared trained models.

6.2 Lecture notes

6.2.1 Copyright

• Source code is writing, just like a book or a poem.

• Edits are modifications, improvements create derived works, distribution makes copies

• Writing is copyrighted.

  • Owner has the right to decide who can copy or modify

• Violations of a license triggered by distribution

  • giving to others, esp. selling

• Penalty for violation are:

  • Court order to stop distributing
  • Economic damages

6.2.2 Revocation, time-limitation, and exclusivity

• The text of specific copyright licenses can specify time-limits (after which they expire or change)

• Owner can release same work under many different licenses at once (as long as they are compatible).

  • Called dual-licensing

• Owner can re-license their own derivative works (but the license on the original is unchanged by that)

6.2.3 Open Source Definition

The Open Source Initiative holds a trade mark so they can determine which licenses can be called open source. They have established the “Open Source Definition” with 10 elements (slightly abridged below):

** Introduction **

Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:

1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software … The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

2. Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form … Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

3. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

4. Integrity of The Author’s Source Code

The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of “patch files” with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

7. Distribution of License

The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program’s being part of a particular software distribution…

9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software

The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.

10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral

No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

6.2.4 Copyleft

• Some licenses add an additional restriction; They are called copyleft licenses (a play on the word copyright).

• Item number 3, Derived Works, says:

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

Copyleft licenses alter this by changing “must allow” to “if distributed, must require”

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and if distributed must require them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

• Copyleft means derived works, that are distributed, cannot be licensed under a different license but must be licensed under the same license. See detailed discussion at copyleft.org

• This is informally referred to as viral: derived works are “infected” and must all be copyleft.

• This only applies if the changes are distributed. Usually this means distributed beyond the individual or company that owns the copyright. This means that companies can alter copyleft software, as long as they don’t let that code outside their own organization.

6.2.5 Recent controversies discussion

6.2.5.1 Cloud software

The original open source licenses were written before cloud, and the idea of Software As A Service (SAAS). Why does cloud and SAAS change a key circumstance?

1. Cloud delivery of software
   

   Why was the Affero GPL created?

2. Amazon Web Services and open source.
   

   Elastic Search has created their own license. What does it do differently? Is it an open source license? Would OSI consider it to be an open source license?

6.2.5.2 Artificial Intellegence software

Neural Networks express much of their logic not in code, but in the weights of a trained neutral network.

• Why does this change impact open source?
• Can trained neutral networks be modified or improved? What would be needed?
• What does the OpenRAILs license try to do? See Hugging Face reading above (Section 6.1).
• Would OSI judge that license to be “open source”? Which provisions, if any, might it violate?

6.2.5.3 Recent license violation articles.

https://undeleted.ronsor.com/voice.ai-gpl-violations-with-a-side-of-drm/

Discussed on Hacker News here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34681636

Not just violating GPL, but likely other licenses too (not including license in distributed non-copyleft open source).

Lots of these out there, found this as searching:

https://hackaday.com/2022/07/15/watch-out-for-lasercutter-manufacturers-violating-gpl/

Including stories about startups whose cash out was sunk by OSS license violations:

https://abovethelaw.com/2022/01/how-to-ensure-open-source-risks-wont-scuttle-your-deal/

Point is not to scare people from using open source, but to understand the very real meaning of the licenses. The more sophisticated understanding of open source you are gaining from this course will be an advantage in the job market.