[License-discuss] OSL and GPLv3

Tue Jun 18 21:17:19 UTC 2019

Dear Antoine,
Providing a definitive legal answer (and certainty) in your specific case
is difficult.
At Joinup.eu we constantly promote interoperability and the respect of
primary licences.
Therefore, in our view, a global project may include components under
several licences and each component should keep its licence (by the way, we
spell it "licence" and not "license" as in US).
You wrote the you "use" libraries.
As I said, "using" a library according to its normal usage instruction
should never impact the licensing of a resulting work.
To take a very trivial example, If someone writes a novel and distributes
it electronically to third parties as a ."doc file",  this file (in MS
proprietary format) may contain some Microsoft proprietary code or data
formats, but this is the result of the normal use of MS/word and Microsoft
will not request any copyright on this novel.
In case of linking, the copy or reuse or decompilation of data formats/API
needed for implementing interoperability is considered as a copyright
exception by the European law and I am not aware of any case law
contradicting that point, even outside Europe. Does anyone knows?
So the real issue that you could meet is in case of real merging of
software codes from components covered by incompatible licences (in all
other cases each component could be licensed under its primary licence,
i.e. OSL or or LGPL or GPL). This is to avoid, generally speaking.
The French reference you mention is outdated regarding the EUPL-1.2 which
is now compatible with all the copyleft licences listed in this "Veni Vidi
Libri" table..
For this reason, the EUPL-1.2 was preferred in case of project integrating
multiple components, as it was reported by Dr Martin Serrano (Fiesta-IoT
project) in a recent Joinup published interview:
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/inline-files/SC50_D06.01.02_EUPL_Interview_summary_vFINAL.pdf

Of course, you will never obtain a 100% guarantee of legal security in all
possible cases and jurisdictions around the world, but the fact is that the
EUPL covered code is publicly available and reusable in other projects
covered by OSL, GPL-2.0, GPL-3.0, LGPL etc. So no one should have any real
interest in litigation.
Best,
Patrice

Le mar. 18 juin 2019 à 17:02, Antoine Thomas <antoine.thomas at prestashop.com>
a écrit :

> Patrice, thanks a lot for your answer.
>
> About your introduction question: the original code of PrestaShop project
> is currently in OSL, with some modules in AFL. We also rely on librairies
> in MIT and BSD, shipped with the installer (like the Symfony framework).
> But, we would like to use a few librairies in LGPL and GPLv3 to accelerate
> our developments and features. And we feel limited by the use of the OSL
> license: it is difficult to find information about compatibility and other
> feedback, as only a few projects are using it.
>
> So, if I understand well, changing the license of the project to EUPL-1.2
> could allow a project to include and ship both OSL (like our current code)
> and GPLv3 (some new libraries) code? Interesting. Would this be possible
> only in the European legal framework, or also outside Europe?
>
> I had a quick look at an other reference (in French, but easy to
> understand), a compatibility table between licenses:
>
> https://vvlibri.org/fr/guide-de-lauteur-libre-gerer-des-licences-differentes-compatibilites-de-licences/tableau-de
> Maybe this table needs to be updated about EUPL? What do you think? Do you
> have an equivalent on joinup.eu?
>
> Or maybe, if we follow this table, the best way is to change the license
> of the OSL code, and move it to GPLv3. That would be a huge IP work, to
> check with all authors of the project's code if they agree. But that would
> be an interesting investment in IP for our community of users and
> developers. And, also, in a time when many business backed open source
> project move to proprietary, this would be a strong message of PrestaShop's
> commitment to open source.
>
> Patrice, what do you think? is it possible to have your feedback on this
> questions and hypothesis? Maybe some other reader of this mailing list
> could have feedback to share?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Antoine
>
>
> [image: PrestaShop]
> <https://www.prestashop.com/?utm_source=signature&utm_medium=e-mail&utm_campaign=emails-signatures>
>
> Antoine Thomas aka ttoine
>
> Developer Advocate
>
> t: +33 (0)6 63 13 79 06
>
> antoine.thomas at prestashop.com
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 18 Jun 2019 at 13:53, Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz via License-discuss
> <license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:
>
>> Dear Antoine,
>> It seems related to the question: how far is your project (that would be
>> globally licensed under OSL) a derivative of the GPL-3.0 code, or not?
>> It is also related to your legal framework, in so far the various codes
>> are more or less closely linked.
>> The European legal framework considers that the normal and fair use of a
>> tool (like a library, according to its usage instructions, without
>> modifying the library source code) does not make resulting works
>> "derivatives" of the used tool.
>> In addition, it states (in my opinion) that linking different components,
>> for the sole and fair purpose of making these components interoperable, is
>> a copyright exception and cannot be restricted by the copyright owner. This
>> temperate a lot the theory of "strong copyleft" on this point. (Law lovers
>> will reed Recital 15 of *Directive 2009/24/EC
>> <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32009L0024&from=EN>*).
>>
>> An alternative solution is the use of the EUPL-1.2 that is expressly
>> covered by the European legal framework and is expressly compatible with
>> both the OSL and the GPL-3.0
>> More on joinup.eu and in particular the recent JLA (joinup licensing
>> assistant)
>> https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/joinup-licensing-assistant-jla
>>  .
>> Best regards,
>> Patrice
>>
>>
>> Le lun. 17 juin 2019 à 11:57, Antoine Thomas <
>> antoine.thomas at prestashop.com> a écrit :
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> With our IP team, we have a few questions about compatibility between
>>> OSLv3 and GPLv3. We consider as acknowledged that it's not possible to
>>> distribute GPLv2 code in an OSLv3 project. However, what about the more
>>> recent GPLv3, considered to be more open?
>>>
>>> Of course, it's about using librairies and other dependencies in an open
>>> source project, and then ship it.
>>>
>>> So, there are two questions:
>>>
>>> 1/ Is it possible to ship GPLv3 code within an OSLv3 project installer?
>>>
>>> 2/ Is it possible to ship OSLv3 code within a GPLv3 project installer?
>>>
>>> What do you think? what is your experience? Is there some examples?
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>> Antoine
>>>
>>> [image: PrestaShop]
>>> <https://www.prestashop.com/?utm_source=signature&utm_medium=e-mail&utm_campaign=emails-signatures>
>>>
>>> Antoine Thomas aka ttoine
>>>
>>> Developer Advocate
>>>
>>> t: +33 (0)6 63 13 79 06
>>>
>>> antoine.thomas at prestashop.com
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> License-discuss mailing list
>>> License-discuss at lists.opensource.org
>>>
>>> http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz
>> pe.schmitz at googlemail.com
>> tel. + 32 478 50 40 65
>> _______________________________________________
>> License-discuss mailing list
>> License-discuss at lists.opensource.org
>>
>> http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
>>
>

-- 
Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz
pe.schmitz at googlemail.com
tel. + 32 478 50 40 65
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