[License-discuss] Copyright Free Software Foundation, but license not GPL

[Robin Winning]

Hi All,
I am a contracts manager at software company, and in addition to doing contracts, I now find myself reviewing the licenses associated with the open source packages my company has acquired. I have become quite familiar with the GPL/LGPL/AGPL suite of licenses, as well as the other, permissive licenses: MIT, BSD, etc. Here's my question: quite frequently, the programmer makes the Free Software Foundation the copyright holder, but then attaches a license that is not in the GPL family. Is that a valid combination?

In the case of "ncurses," I was able to research and determine that when they assigned their copyright to the Free Software Foundation, the FSF gave ncurses a special carve-out allowing them to use a permissive license. However, all the rest of the open source packages I have come across that assert "Copyright Free Software Foundation" but are accompanied by non-GPL licenses do not seem to have that sort of special arrangement.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it seems contradictory to me, and I don't know how to characterize the license in terms of permissive or restrictive. 

Thank you,
Robin






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