[License-discuss] Pars pro toto: a fundamental(?) lack in (MIT licensed) (jquery) java-script packages?

[Reincke, Karsten]

Many thanks for your comments. We discussed your proposals during the last weeks very thoroughly, even it seems to be only a 'small' issue:

We totally agree with John Sullivan: the main purpose of distributing the license text itself (as it is required by nearly all open source licenses) is not to use the software compliantly, but to let the user know that he has some rights and certain freedoms. Nevertheless, we have to take the licenses seriously: If the licenses require that "permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software" (MIT) and if that can't be implemented because of technical reasons (loss of performance), there is a gap.

To solve this gap in the spirit of the open source idea, we are modifying our sites by following the proposal of the FSF: our sites (eg. OSLiC [http://dtag-dbu.github.io/oslic/], OSCAd [http://dtag-dbu.github.io/oscad/], or DTAG github user [http://dtag-dbu.github.io/]) shall offer a specific page listing all FLOSS components used by the sites. And the footer of each page of the site shall link the phrase "FLOSS components" to that page. And we try to communicate this solution into our complete company.

Please feel free to add further comments and proposals if you see a better way to fulfill our obligations.

Best regards Karsten Reincke

---
Deutsche Telekom AG / Products & Innovation
Karsten Reincke, PMP®, Senior Expert Open Source Review Board - T&P/A&S/TM
[display complete signatur: http://opensource.telekom.net/kreincke/kr-dtag-sign-de.txt ]

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: John Sullivan [mailto:johns at fsf.org] 
Gesendet: Freitag, 3. Januar 2014 00:24
An: Reincke, Karsten
Cc: license-discuss at opensource.org
Betreff: Re: [License-discuss] Pars pro toto: a fundamental(?) lack in (MIT licensed) (jquery) java-script packages?

"Reincke, Karsten" <k.reincke at telekom.de> writes:

> Therefore, we want to ask: 
>
> Are we right? Do we really have to add the MIT license to an MIT 
> licensed package which does not contain this license? Or is there any 
> way to distribute the library to our 3rd. parties in exact that form 
> we received from jquery?
>

We have a couple of ways of conveying license info for JavaScript that we hope people will adopt -- they are both machine and human readable -- at <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html>. The method described at <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/javascript-labels.html> is probably most suitable for cases like jquery.

License notices are important for the people receiving the software -- so that users who get the software know they have certain freedoms. It may help to think about it in these terms as well as just satisfying copyright holder requirements/expectations.

-john

--
John Sullivan | Executive Director, Free Software Foundation GPG Key: 61A0963B | http://status.fsf.org/johns | http://fsf.org/blogs/RSS

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