Don't Screw Up Your Licensing
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The document discusses how to properly license open source software to avoid legal issues. It recommends: 1) picking the right license for your project; 2) including attribution, license notices, and the full text of the license in your source code; and 3) using a contributor license agreement to assign copyrights of contributions to the project owner. Failure to follow proper licensing can result in losing control of your code, patents, trade secrets or even your company to legal issues. The presentation provides tips and examples of how to properly implement licensing.
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Don't Screw Up Your Licensing
- 1. Silicon Valley Code Camp October 12, 2014 Don’t Screw Up Your Licensing Ansel Halliburton" ansel@halliburtonlegal.com @anseljh https://halliburtonlegal.com/
- 2. Who am I? 2 Lawyer" • Starting startups • Keeping startups out of hot water • Defending patent troll cases • Suing bad guys ! Hacker" • Since age 10 • Lex Machina • Mechanical Turk module for Boto (AWS for Python) • Raspberry Pi & Arduino robot Writer" • TechCrunch contributor • legal tech • startup law • smartphone patent wars • computer crime • Paper on Somali maritime piracy Daddy" ! ! ! ! ! !
- 3. Disclaimers! 1 2 IANAL IAAL but IANYL 3 This is general information for educational purposes. It might not be right for you! Talk to a lawyer for advice about your own specific situation.
- 4. What is open source? • The Open Source Definition by the Open Source Initiative: 10 paragraphs • The Free Software Definition by the Free Software Foundation: 4 pages 4
- 5. What is open source? 5 Open source Public domain Free software FOSS FLOSS GPL BSD ???
- 6. What is open source? “Open source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone.” • Free of charge • Published source code • Varying restrictions on commercial use 6
- 7. Intellectual Property Kind Protects Laws 7 Patent Technological inventions Federal Copyright Expression Federal Trademark Signals of source Federal and State Trade Secrets Information that is valuable because it is secret State Open Source Proprietary
- 8. What is a license? 1. Contract 2. Allows use of IP (copyrighted source code) 3. Imposes conditions 8
- 9. License dimensions Notice Must include notice and a copy of the license with code Source code disclosure Must include a copy of your source code Sublicensing Can you grant downstream licenses? Copyleft You code must be under the same license Patent license Some give express patent license (GPLv2 is silent!) 9
- 10. Major open source licenses Notice Source Code Sublicense GPL Y Y N BSD Y N Y MIT Y N Y Apache Y N Y ChooseALicense.com by GitHub
- 11. MIT License 11
- 12. GPLv3 12 pages long! 12
- 13. GPLv3 § 5 13
- 14. GPLv3 § 8 14
- 15. Consequences of screwing up licensing • Lose control of your… • code • patents • trade secrets • company 15
- 16. How to screw up • Pick a bad license ( ) • Pick the wrong license for your project • Fail to attribute • Fail to give source code • Forget to get contributor assignments 16
- 17. Notable screw ups • BusyBox cases (GPL violations by embedded developers) • Linksys (GPL violation in routers) Free Software Foundation, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc. • Settlement: $ donations to FSF + open source compliance director • Versata (GPL violation in enterprise software) XimpleWare Corp. v. Versata Software, Inc. 17
- 18. How not to screw up 1. Pick the right license" 2. Give attribution 3. Give notice in source code 4. Include license 5. Contributor license agreement 18
- 20. How not to screw up 1. Pick the right license 2. Give attribution" 3. Give notice in source code 4. Include license 5. Contributor license agreement 20
- 21. How NOT to screw up: attribution 21
- 22. How not to screw up 1. Pick the right license 2. Give attribution 3. Give notice in source code" 4. Include license 5. Contributor license agreement 22
- 23. License header (GPLv2) one line to give the program's name and an idea of what it does. Copyright (C) yyyy name of author ! This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. ! This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. ! You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. 23
- 24. License header (GPLv2) #!/usr/bin/env python ! # dont_screw_up.py - Demo program for Don't Screw Up Your License talk # Copyright (C) 2014 Ansel Halliburton # # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or # modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License # as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 # of the License, or (at your option) any later version. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software # Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. ! LICENSE_INTERACTIVE = """dont_screw_up.py, Copyright (C) 2014 Ansel Halliburton dont_screw_up.py comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.""" ! if __name__ == '__main__': 24 print(LICENSE_INTERACTIVE) print("Now we'll do something useful.") print("Just kidding!")
- 25. How not to screw up 1. Pick the right license 2. Give attribution 3. Give notice in source code 4. Include license" 5. Contributor license agreement 25
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- 27. 27
- 28. How not to screw up 1. Pick the right license 2. Give attribution 3. Give notice in source code 4. Include license 5. Contributor license agreement 28
- 29. Contributor License Agreements (CLA) • Default copyright rule: every author owns his own contributions • 100 contributors —> 100 separate copyrights • CLA assigns contributors’ copyrights to the project (or project leader) 29
- 30. How to do CLAs • Make sure all committers sign a CLA! • The easy way: • get a CLA from Project Harmony. http://www.harmonyagreements.org • use CLAHub to integrate your CLA with a GitHub repo https://www.clahub.com/ 30
- 31. Get a CLA 31
- 32. Get a CLA … 32
- 33. Using CLAHub 33
- 35. Paste & markup CLA with Markdown 35
- 36. What contributors see 36
- 38. Owner gets a nice CSV report 38
- 39. Add it to your repository 39
- 40. Bigtime compliance https://www.blackducksoftware.com/audits/open-source-audits https://www.blackducksoftware.com/products/black-duck-suite/protex/black-duck-code-label 40
- 41. Miscellaneous • Copyright exists by default • Copyright registration grants more remedies • Copyright lasts as long as Mickey Mouse needs it • Fair use is probably not what you think it is (and doesn’t exist outside the US) 41
- 42. How not to screw up 1. Pick the right license 2. Give attribution 3. Give notice in source code 4. Include license 5. Contributor license agreement 42
- 43. Q & A 43
- 44. Thanks! Ansel Halliburton" ansel@halliburtonlegal.com @anseljh https://halliburtonlegal.com 44