[License-discuss] Red Hat compilation copyright & RHEL contract

[Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz]

This is indeed depending on the case: people (developers) always declare (often after the work has been done, and not before as it should be) that they "used" products X,Y, Z. But what do they mean by "use"? Aggregating? Linking? Copying only some APIs or data formats in order to ensure that software is interoperable? Or really merging their code with the existing one? Depending on the case, solution will differ, but the need for simplifying (or just making legally possible) distribution is there. Cases are indeed multiple, and these developers want to license under FOSS conditions (not proprietary). Incompatibilities between copyleft FOSS licences (including between GPLv2 only and GPLv3 only) produce a lot of FUD in such cases...

Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz

On 11 sept. 2013, at 16:00, "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn at ebb.org> wrote:

> Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz wrote at 04:31 (EDT):
>> Frequent cases are submitted when developers (in particular European
>> administrations and Member states) have build applications from
>> multiple components, plus adding their own code, and want to use a
>> single license for distributing the whole compilation.
> 
> While the description you give there is a bit too vague to analyze
> against the USA copyright statue (i.e., the example lacks any real world
> facts), I'd suspect that the default case of that situation, at least in
> the USA, is the creation of a new single work that derives from those
> components, plus their own code.
> 
> The compilation copyright situation, at least in the USA, comes up more
> with putting a bunch of unrelated works on the same medium, like a CD
> ISO image.  Making a single work of software that includes many
> components is very different from mere compilation.
> -- 
>   -- bkuhn
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