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

[Karl Fogel]

Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com> writes:
>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.

Er, yes.  (Was there something I said that contradicted that?)

-K

>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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