software patents and licenses

notes

  • West Virginia is state you can use PO box as registered agent (secretary of state)
  • Bank of North Dakota is federal bank (less debanking)
  • entirely too many hours wasted arguing about imaginary property
  • mostly moot as enforcement is sparse/scarce and trolling is high
  • US software patents are not really applicable to the eu (ex. france and x264)
  • arbitrary stifling as licenses/patents mean little to china/russia/iran/etc
  • DMCA/NTD
    • circumvention of arbitrary controls/locks on things you OWN is illegal and punishable by fines and incarceration
      • applied to cars, phones, video games, TVs, streaming services, etc
    • 'Fair Use' is willfully ignored
    • broken with false takedowns and no repercussions for violations of 'good faith belief' of infringement
    • trolled usenet postings mitigations
      • encrypted/scrambled/password protected files
      • remove 1 piece to make invalid but other providers remove different pieces to enable reconstruction
  • CLA signage usually gives away right to project
    • allows proprietary forks later that violate original license

GPL

LGPL

  • non viral when linking but must allow replacement

AGPL

  • viral to providing service over network socket

GPL

  • must provide source code, licenses, copyright notices etc
    • mark modified files with copyright and pointer to license
    • 'should' print license if interactive
  • internal use allowed w/o following license
  • copyleft viral
    • all linkage must be compatible license
  • GPLv2
    • can add exceptions such as classpath, gcc runtime, 'or later'
  • GPLv3
    • patent grant
    • anti tivoization
      • must allow replacement of software

Apachev2

  • grants patent
  • implied CLA (under same license) for project
  • must
    • reproduce license
    • mark files changed
    • include NOTICE files

MIT

  • must reproduce license and copyright notice

BSD

  • 0BSD
    • no restrictions
  • 1 clause
    • must reproduce license with if given source
  • 2 clause
    • must reproduce license if given binary or source
  • 3 clause
    • must reproduce license if given binary or source
    • no endorsements from copyright holders

misc

public domain

  • no restrictions
  • ex. sqlite

boost

  • close to public domain for countries w/o the legal concept

EPL

  • v1
    • not GPL compatible
    • ex. clojure
  • v2
    • incompatible with EPL v1
    • GPLv2 w/classpath exception for gpl compat
      • effectively makes combined works gplv2+classpath exception

MPL

  • mozilla license is file based and allows some mixing