Licenses
Distribution under a GPL licence
GPL will be the recommended licence within the Morfeo Community. This licence is by far the most commonly used in the open source software world, has been put to the test at courts in some jurisdictions, has been the subject of numerous studies, and has been carefully designed to prevent any of its conditions being breached in successive redistributions (of the program or derived work).
This point is especially important as it will force any agent that wants to redistribute the program or derived work to respect the GPL provisions, thereby leaving the door open for a business model based on the sale of traditional licences to agents who want to redistribute the program but not comply with the above conditions. For example, this will be the case of manufacturers of equipment with inbuilt software that want to sell their equipment on the domestic market, but do not want to deliver the source code of their program version to third parties (dual licensing, see below). The software will be able to be licensed under a GPL provided it complies with any of the following conditions:
- The licensing agent is the owner of the intellectual property of the whole product.
- The licensing agent is the owner of the intellectual property of part of the product, and the other part is already licensed under a GPL (or compatible licence) by its owner.
- If part of the software is licensed by a third party under any traditional licence, or the open source code is not GPL compatible, it will not be able to be licensed under a GPL.
There are some cases in which the consequences of distributing a component under a GPL have to be analysed very carefully. The best known and most common case is the use of GPL components linked with code distributed under non-GPL compatible licences. Generally, the distribution of a fully linked program that includes a GPL module could be considered as work derived from this (and perhaps other modules too).
But if this is the case, the whole program should, subject to GPL terms, be redistributed under a GPL or a GPL-compatible licence. However, this will be impossible if any of the other modules is distributed under a licence enforcing non-GPL compatible conditions (e.g. a traditional licence). If you want to permit such scenarios or offer dual licensing, the best thing would be to consider licensing the module under other licences (see next section).
Distribution of open source code under other licences
As mentioned above, it may be a good idea in some cases to use open source licences other than GPL. These will generally be exceptional cases that will need to be carefully evaluated. Two examples are discussed below.
- In some cases, you may want to distribute a software module that you would like to be used as widely as possible (e.g. to help to establish a standard). MIT- or BSD-type licences (permissive licences) are likely to be the best option in these cases, as they will allow the module or derived work to be used by programs that are distributed under any licence type, including traditional licences. In some cases, as explained above, the GPL licence prevents a module from being used in combination with others that have GPL-incompatible licences. The LGPL can be a good option in these cases. It has the same features as GPL, except for its application when code is linked (or generally used in combination) with other code.
- If the software provides services in a distributed system (e.g. web services), an important point for consideration is the provision of services as a form of redistribution. This prevents a third party from making improvements to a Morfeo community component unless it redistributes the source code. There are special-purpose licences for these cases, like Affero or what is expected to be GPL version 3.0 (still unpublished).
The legal risks of using a fairly widespread or well scrutinized licence like LGPL, or a BSD- or MIT-type licence, will not necessarily be any greater, although the pros and cons of using such a licence instead of GPL, which, as mentioned, is generally recommended, should to be carefully weighed up. Note that the above three licences are GPL compatible.
Distribution under dual licensing
What really happens in this case is that you are distributing different versions of a piece of software under several licences (this software can be functionally and structurally identical, the only difference being the licence). Typically, one is an open source licence and the others are traditional licences.
The Morfeo community will make use of this option when we want to give a client the chance to work on a component without having to comply with GPL requirements (which, as already mentioned, will be the licence under which software is generally distributed).
In these cases, the software’s owner will publish one version of the component under a GPL licence, as it would in any other case. But it will advertise the possibility of licensing the product under other licences subject to a financial agreement. This form of licensing can often lead to a business model, where the income flow comes precisely from clients that want to use the software, which they have got to know about thanks to the popularity of the GPL version, but do not want to (or cannot) comply with its conditions.
Note that this type of distribution under several licences is only possible if the licenser is the owner of the whole product to be freed, or if the licences of the modules that the licenser does not own make provision for this. For example, if third-party components are distributed under a minimalist licence like BSD or MIT, distribution under dual licensing will be possible.
