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

[Bruce Perens]

Karl, Robin means that the work is dedicated to FSF and placed under a 
BSD or MIT license. These are compatible with the GPL and FSF is fine 
with it.

     Thanks

     Bruce

On 4/17/2013 10:04 AM, Karl Fogel wrote:
> 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
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