Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] moving API from LGPL to GPL???

[Norbert Bollow]

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> > The api license was changed from GPL to LGPL - the legality 
> > of which has been questioned by some.

Christian Böttger <address@hidden> replied:

> Well ... anyone around who knows enough about copyright laws and
> L/GPL to give a definite answer? Otherwise wre just playing hide
> and seek in the fog on a moonless night...

The GNU project's copyright law experts are busy supporting IBM in
the fight against SCO, so I think that my answer will have to
suffice for now.   Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and nothing in
this email should be understood as legal advice.

Relicensing from GPL to LGPL generally requires getting the
consent of all copyright holders.  This consent needs to be
obtained before the change is made, therefore those who question
the legality of *how* that step was carried out back then
definitely have a point.  On the other hand, it can also be argued
that the license change may have been legally valid:  In the
relevant "case law" (i.e. previous decisions of courts of law that
need to be taken in consideration) there is the notion of copyright
being "unenforcable" in some kinds of situation, and I think it
could well be that when you contribute code to someone else's Free
Software project, without making any clear contractual agreement
that specifies whether the project leader may later change the
license or not, and without adding a copyright notice of your own,
then any objections that you may have against license changes that
are decided by the project leader may be "unenforcable" in this
legal sense.  In that case, the GPL -> LGPL license change would
have been legally valid.

My conclusion is that this is probably a grey area of copyright
law.

A good way to avoid the problematic aspects of this grey area
is to make a "copyright assignment" contract between each
contributor and the FSF, in which the FSF gets the right to
release the code under some conditions.  These conditions are
strong enough to ensure that even if some company might mount a
legal battle against the FSF, and sue the FSF into bankruptcy,
and thereby obtain its assets, that will not give that evil
company any rights to put GNU project code into programs which
they distribute without making source code available, or into
programs for which they require payments of royalties.  (For
this reason, there is no economic benefit to be achieved from
suing FSF into bankruptcy, and that gives me a lot of confidence
to predict that that will never happen.)

This copyright assignment process makes sure that if it is
really necessary for some reason, the licensing can be adapted
to a changing environment.  For example, in the (very unlikely)
case that SCO might succeed in convincing the courts of law that
there is some kind of flaw in the standard language which is
used to indicate that a program is GPL'd, FSF-copyrighted code
can easily be re-released with modified boilerplate comments
that fix the problem.  Doing the same in a project which does
not use copyright assignment, such as the linux project, would
make it subject to legal challenge of the grey area described
above.  (Note that if there is a problem with the GPL or LGPL
licenses themselves, that kind of problem can be fixed totally
independent of copyright assignment by the FSF releasing a new
version of the licenses.  That's what the "... or any later
version" language in the licensing boilerplate is good for.)

By assigning copyright to the FSF and not to the project leader
or to some corporate sponsor of a project you can be sure that
there will be no license changes for reasons like furthering
the business interests of some proprietary software company.

I should add however that the main reason for assigning copyright
to the FSF is not what I explained above, but rather that that
will make enforcing the terms of the LGPL / GPL much easier in
case of license infringement by someone who tries to make the
code non-free.

Greetings, Norbert.

- -- 
Founder & Steering Committee member of http://gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/
Free Software Business Strategy Guide   --->  http://FreeStrategy.info
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 1 972 20 59        Fax +41 1 972 20 69       http://norbert.ch
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