Question on OSD #5

[David Woolley]

Tzeng, Nigel H. wrote:
> 
> I am not certain your point here.  The objective is to share code as
> much as possible.  The definition of "possible" may differ among folks
> but the sharing of code should be a common enough goal.

The objective of permissive licences is to achieve that, and they 
achieve this by allowing derivative works to have non-open source 
licences.  You seem to be talking about the resulting non-open source 
licences.

Copyleft licences attempt aim to prevent the creatin of non-open source 
works from the licenced material.  They maximise the rights of 
downstream recipients, but possibly reduce the number of those recipients.

If businesses could avoid providing source and free licences to 
recipients of copyleft licences simply by saying that the charter of the 
business didn't allow them to give away source code, a lot of businesses 
would set up to exploit that loophole.

> Yes, but they may need to distribute a binary version only and limit
> access to source code because the end users have no "need to know".

That is definitely not open source.  I'm sure every supplier of 
proprietary, closed source, software would argue that their customers 
had no need to know (although my experience is that, in many cases, the 
source code is the only accurate documentation, and users have an 
unsatisfied need to know how the software really works.

With the GPL, users with no need to know need not be supplied with the 
source code and they won't ask for it.

> An example of this would be the use of a classified physics or behavior 
> models that descibes the performance of a system or tactic.  The system
> may use this internally as a intermediate step that is used to compute an
> outcome for a user.  The user should not have knowledege of how the
> answer was developed as would reveal information they have no need to
> know even though they have the clearance to use the product itself.

In that case you are not giving them open source code.  It might be 
derived from permissively licensed open source code, and you might be 
giving them the closed source binaries, or you might be providing it 
using an Application Service Provider, with no access to the code.  The 
latter is allowed by the GPL V2, but is resented by a lot of people on 
the copyleft side of open source, and there have been several licences 
proposed that require any ASP to allow download of its source code.  I 
haven't read the GPL V3 closely enough in this respect.

With the GPL, it is a specific aim that users should be able to discover 
how the software works.

>  
> If I make the business case that releasing IP with some potential value
> as open source rather than conventional licensing because it provides my
> insititution ROI in the form of mindshare and potential service/enhacement
> revenue then it would be helpful to show that hijacking the project is 
> somewhat
> less likely than with the case with a purely permissive license.

The open source community doesn't like a situation where the original 
licence holder can use contributions in proprietary works but third 
parties can't.  If contribution back is voluntary, not many people with 
volunteer under those circumstances, and if it is mandatory, the 
software is likely to rejected in favour of a more open alternative.

Generally, open source businesses are expected either to make their 
money from services or to sell non-open source versions that do not 
include contributions from the open source community.

>  
> However, for bug fixes and enhancements to the core code it would be 
> annoying
> to do so and the path of least resistance is to simply return the 
> changes upstream.
> Especially if there is legal incentive to do so.

As noted above, you will run into the problem that many in the open 
source community considers this to be free-loading and will resist 
feeding back detailed bug fixes if they think they will end up in 
non-open source software.


-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.