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

[Karl Fogel]

Robin Winning <robin.winning at cyaninc.com> writes:
>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?

It's technically valid, in that the FSF (as a non-profit corporation)
can hold copyrightable assets under any licenses it wants.

But it's likely usually a mistake, in the sense that the FSF probably
has no idea these works are being "donated" to it under these non-GPL
licenses, and because there is usually no need to make the FSF the
copyright holder -- except in certain cases where the FSF is actually
involved in the development or maintenance of the software, in which
case they would have discussed this with the programmer and, in most
cases, the FSF would have insisted on one of the GPL family of licenses
(though there are some exceptions to that).

I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.  There are plenty of
people who can give you real legal advice if you need; we may be able to
help you find those people.

>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.

Nice researching (re ncurses)!

>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. 

It's not contradictory, but it's probably often a mistake by a
programmer who thinks that putting a license's terms on some software
implies that the software's copyright must now be held by whatever
entity wrote that license -- which, of course, is not the case and not
the norm.

-Karl