[License-discuss] Reverse Engineering and Open Source Licenses

[Reincke, Karsten]

Dear Colleagues;

In the past I was involved in some full discussions concerning the issue 'reverse engineering and open source licenses'. Although personally esteeming and inspiring, such discussions sometimes became a bit explosive: If - at least - the LGPL-v2 indeed requires to allow the reverse engineering of those programs which use LGPL-v2 licensed components, then companies are not able to protect these 'private' programs against revealing the embedded business relevant secrets, even if they do not distribute the corresponding source code. And - as far as I know - at least some companies have therefore forbidden to link essential programs against the LGPL-v2.

I have taken the view that this 'rule of reverse engineering' cannot be applied  in case of distributing dynamically linkable programs. By arguing that way,  I caused astonishment and dissents. But often, I was also asked to note down my argumentation, because some of my partners wanted to review it in detail.  They had the hope to get a solution for conflict of using open source software compliantly and protecting their business relevant software.

During the last two month, I had the pleasure to fulfill this request by writing the corresponding article. Now, I am indeed sure that all important open source licenses including the LGPL-v2 allow reverse engineering only in case of distributing statically linked programs. Moreover: I am definitely sure, that none of these open source licenses requires to allow reverse engineering in case of distributing dynamically linkable programs and that particularly even the LGPL-v2 does not require reverse engineering in case of distributing dynamically linkable programs.

Unfortunately, the deduction of this position had to become more complex than initially thought. But fortunately, it could preserve a straight-forward argumentation: After having started with a linguistic disambiguation and transposing the license statements into a logical formula, it derives the results by using logic ways of inferring a conclusion. And this method is applied for the LGPL-v2, for the LGPL-v3, and for the other most important open source licenses. Hence, for now, I - for myself - am indeed sure, that my argumentation is valid and mandatory.

But subjective certainty is not enough. As long as we do not have a legal decision, the best way to become sure is to invoke a discussion (and a consensus) by publishing the results. For that purpose, we decided, not only to insert the analysis into the OSLiC, but to distribute that chapter also as an autonomous article (http://opensource.telekom.net/oslic/en/planning/results.html ). Thus, it is also licensed under the der CC-BY-SA-3.0. So, feel free to use it, to modify it, and/or to share it. The sources of the pdf are part of the OSLiC repository (https://github.com/dtag-dbu/oslic/ ).

We, Deutsche Telekom AG and I, Karsten Reincke, are indeed hoping to having contributed something which simplifies the compliant use of open source software.

With best regards any many thanks for all the encouraging discussions - especially to Mrs. Karen Copenhaven, Mr. Armin Taldur, and Mr. Claus Peter Wiedemann Sincerely Your Karsten Reincke

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Deutsche Telekom Technik GmbH  / Cloud Infrastructure
Karsten Reincke, PMP(r), Senior Expert Key Projects - Open Stack Complexity- and Compliancemanagement
[display complete signatur: http://opensource.telekom.net/kreincke/kr-dtag-sign-en.txt<http://opensource.telekom.net/kreincke/kr-dtag-sign-de.txt> ]

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