AFERO GPL Panel discussion - FOSDEM 04

2013-02-16 20:41
The panel started with a bit of history of the AGPL: Born in the age of growing ASP (application service provider) businesses AGPL tried to fix the hosting loop whole in GPL in the early 2000s. More than ten years later it turns out the license hasn't quite caught traction: On the one hand the license does have a few wording issues. In addition it is still rather young and used by few so there is less trust compared to GPL or ASL to last when put on trial. However there's another reason for low adoption:

Those that are being targeted with the license – people developing web services – tend to prefer permissive licenses over copyleft ones (see Django, Rails for example). People are still in the postion of trying to gain strong positions when opening up their infrastructure. As a result there is a general preference for permissive licenses. Also there are many more people working on open source not as their hobby project but as their general day job. As a result the number of people backing projects that are infrastructure only, company driven and trying to establish de-facto standards through the availability of free software is growing.

Depressing for the founders of AGPL are businesses using the AGPL to try and trick corporations into using their software as open source and later go after them with additional clauses in their terms and conditions to enforce subscription based services.

Mozilla legal issues - FOSDEM 03

2013-02-15 22:39
In the next talk Gervase Markham talked about his experience working for Mozilla on legal and license questions. First the speaker summarized what kind of requests he gets most:

  • There are lots of technical support requests.
  • Next on the top list is the question for whether or not shipping Mozilla with a set of modifications is ok.
  • Next is an internal question, namely: Can I use this code?
  • Related to that is the “We have a release in two weeks, can we ship with this code?”
  • Another task is finding code that was used but is not ok.
  • Yet another one is getting code licensed or re-licensed.
  • Maintaining the about:license page is another task.
  • Dealing with ECCV/CCATS requests is another issue that comes up often.


However there are also bigger tasks: There was the goal of tri-licensing Mozilla. The only issue was the fact that they had accumulated enough individually copyrighted contributions to make that that task really tricky. In the end they wrote a tool to pull out all contributor names, send them mails asking for permission to tri-license. After little over three years they had responses from all but 30 contributors. As a result the “find this hacker” campaign was launched on /. and other news sites. In the end most could be found.

As another step towards easier licensing the MPL 2 replacing 1.1 was introduced – it fixes GPL/ASL license incompatibilities, notification and distribution requirements, the difference for initial developers and the use of conditional/Jacobson language.

There are still a few issues with source files lacking license headers (general advise that never has been tested in court is the concept of license bleeding: If there are files with and without license headers in one folder, most likely those w/o have the same license as those with. “aehem” ;)

There are lots of questions on license interpretation. This includes questions from people wanting to use Mozilla licensed software that wasn't even developed within the Mozilla foundation. Also there are lots of people who do not understand the concept of “free does not mean non-commercial use only”.

Sometimes there a license archeology task where people ask “hey, is that old code yours and is it under the Mozilla license?”

Another interesting case was a big, completely unknown blue company asking whether the hunspell module, having changed licenses so often (from BSD forked to GPL, changed to LGPL, to CC-Attr, to the tri license of Mozilla, including changed GPL stuff with the author's permission) really can be distributed by Mozilla under the MPL. After lots of digging through commit logs and change logs they could indeed verify that the code is completely clean.

Then there was the case of Firefox OS which was a fast development effort, involving copying lots of stuff from all over the internet just to get things running. A custom license scanner written to verify all bits and pieces was finally implemented and used to give clearance on release. It found dozens of distinct versions of the Mozilla and BSD licenses (mainly due to the fact that people are invited to add their own name to it when releaseing code). As a result there now is a discussion on OSI to discourage that behaviour to keep the number of individual license files to ship with the software down to a minimal number.

The speaker's general recommendation on releasing small software projects under a non-copyleft license was to use the CC-0 license, for larger stuff his recommendation was to go for the ASL due to its patent grant clauses. Even at Mozilla quite a few projects have switched over to Apache.
There also were a few license puzzlers:

  • OpenJDK asked for permission to use their root-store certificates. Unfortunately at the time of receiving them they had not been given any sort of contract under which they may use them. *ahem*
  • The case with search engine icons … really isn't … so much different.


There also tend to be some questions on the Firefox/Mozilla trademarks ranging from

  • “can I use your logo for purpose such'n'such”?
  • ”Do you have 'best viewed in...' button”? - Nope, as we generally appreciate developers writing web sites that comply with web standards instead of optimizing for one single browser only.
  • They did run into the subscription on download scam trap and could stop those sites due to trademark infringement.
  • Most of this falls under fair use – especially cases like Pearson asking for permission (with a two-page mail + pdf letter) to link to the mozilla web site...


In general when people ask for permission if they do not need to ask: Tell them so but give them permission anyway. This is in order to avoid an “always-ask-for-permission” culture, and really to keep the number of requests down to those that are really necessary. One thing that does need prior permission though is shipping Firefox with a bunch of plugins pre-installed as a complete package.

On Patents – Mozilla does not really have any and spends time (e.g. on OPUS) avoiding them. On a related note there sometimes even are IPO requests.

Trademarks and OSS - FOSDEM 02

2013-02-14 20:38
So the first talk I went to ended up being in the legal dev room on trademarks in open source projects. The speaker had a background mainly in US American trademark law and quite some background when it comes to open source licenses.

To start Pamela first showed a graphic detailing the various types of trademarks: In the pool of generic names there is a large group of trademarks that are in use but not registered. The amount of registered trademarks actually is rather small. The main goal of trademarks is to avoid confusing costumers. This is best seen when thinking about scammers trying to trick users into downloading users pre-build and packaged software from third party servers demanding a credit card number that is later charged based on a subscription service the user signed by clicking away the fine print on the download page. Canonical example seems to be e.g. the Firefox/Mozilla project that was effected by this kind of scam. But also other end-user software (think Libre/Open Office, Gimp) could well be targets. This kind of deceiving web pages usually can be taken down way faster with a cease and desist letter due to trademark infringement rather than due to the fraud they do.

So when selecting trademarks – what should a project look out for? One is the name should not be too generic as that would lead to a name that is not enforceable. It should not be too theme-y as the names that are themed usually are already taken. The time to research should be contrasted with the pain it will cost to rename the project in case of any difficulties.

There are few actual court decisions that relate to trademarks and OSS: In Germany it was decided that forking the ENIGMA project and putting it on set-op boxes but keeping the name was ok for as long as the core function would be kept and third party plugins would still work.

In the US there was a decision that keeping the name of re-furbished SparkPlugs is ok for as long as it is clearly marked what to expect when buying them (in this case re-furbished instead of newly made).

Another thing to keep in mind are trademarks are naked trademarks – those that were not enforced and have become too ubiquitous. In the US that would be the naked license trademarks, in Greece the recycling mark “Der Grüne Punkt” has become too ubiquitous to be treated as a trademark any more.

Trademark law already fails in multinational corporation setups with world wide subsidies. It gets even worse with world wide distributed open source projects. The question of who owns the mark, who is allowed to enforce it, who exercises control gets worse the more development is distributed. When new people take over trademarks there should be some clear paper transferral document to avoid confusion.

Trademarks only deal with avoiding usage confusion: Using the mark when talking about it is completely fine. Phrases like “I'm $mark compatible”, “I'm running on top of $mark” care completely ok. However make sure to use as little as possible – there is no right to also just use the logos, icons or design forms of the project you are talking about – unless you are talking about said logo of course.

So to conclude: respect referential use, you can't exercise full control but should avoid exercising too little control.

There is a missing consistent understanding of and behaviour towards trademarks in the open source community. Now is the time to shape the law according to what open source developers think they need.