| LiMo, License Compliance, and the GPL |
| Written by Andrew Savory, Open Source Manager, LiMo Foundation |
| Monday, 07 December 2009 23:38 |
|
A recent blog post by Peter Vescuso of Black Duck Software discussed the important issue of license compliance and what companies should do to achieve compliance. This resulted in some interesting comments and questions about LiMo Foundation's platform, which warrant a full post rather than brief comment responses. So, on to the questions: What will happen if some GPLv2 code finds its way to a much deeper part of the Windows kernel? Whilst we can't comment on Microsoft's business strategies, it's worth noting an increasingly responsive and community-focussed approach to open source from Microsoft in recent months and years. There are many smart people at Microsoft who understand open source licensing and their commitments, and who are actively reaching out to open source projects to work with them. We can only hope to see increased openness in the future. Is LiMo Foundation code Version 2 GPL and/or its derivatives GPL ?? I suspect it is... then where is the code ??? do you need to apply for 2K $ at least to get and develop code for the platform ??? is that compliant with GPL license ??? The LiMo platform includes code under a wide range of licenses, both proprietary and open source. As Lefty wrote, "The reference implementations in use by Foundation members contain upwards of 70% open source". The open source licenses are not just GPL - they include GPL, LGPL, MIT, BSD, X11 and many more. We take our responsibilities under all these licenses, including the GPL v2, very seriously. We've used Black Duck's Protex product to help us with that. We constantly look at precisely what code is used, where it is used and how it is used. The commenter asks "where is the code?" LiMo as an organisation does not ship devices, and it is the responsibility of our member companies that do ship devices to make open source code available to anyone that has the device. The list of open source components used in the recently shipped Vodafone 360 H1 by Samsung can be found here. In addition, the source code for the open source software used within the device can be found at opensource.samsungmobile.com. We want to go beyond this. LiMo is committed to working with open source projects. Our open source policy can be found on our own open source website, http://opensource.limofoundation.org/. We're intending to publish information listing the open source software components used in the LiMo Platform real soon - stay tuned for a separate blog post on that shortly! LiMo's products seem to be primarily based upon GPL, how does LiMo address the GPL's requirements to redistribute source code based upon GPL code? Hopefully the explanation above answers why the Foundation itself does not yet redistribute source code. It's important to understand the requirements of the GPL. A common misconception is that if you use the GPL, you must automatically release all your code, or even redistribute it. The FSF GPL FAQ answers this point succinctly: you only need to make source code available if you release it outside the organisation.
|
