[ILUG] [UKUUG] BCS OS Licence - London 24/07/07

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

Brian Foster <blf at utvinternet.ie> writes:
>  2.  http://ossg.bcs.org/oldarchives/licensing/msg00022.html
> 
>    “Things seem to be moving towards regional licences.

We're seeing new regional licences now because governments are getting into
free software and many governments have laws which require them to use
licences that are written in at least one of their official languages.

A solution is to a write licence which governments can publish software
under, but to add GPL relicensing clauses to these licences - so the
software is under a native-language licence when the govt. distributes it,
and it can be distributed under the GPL and combined with other GPL'd
projects the moment it's out in the wild.

This is the case in France with the CeCILL licence (section 5.3.4).
http://www.cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL_V2-fr.html

The EUPL is similar.  Their motivation was me-tooism, but the solution was
the same (article 5 "Compatibility clause", and Appendix 2).
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=27470

I haven't checked the Brazillian case.  I know there's a problem in Brazil
with a guy writing clearly non-free licences and calling them "a Brazillian
version of the GNU GPL" (and the govt. using them), so the Brazillian case
might be atypical.

So their data is correct, but they've drawn a wrong conclusion because
they've missed a common factor.  The press releases for these regional
licences are usually quite misleading since they go overboard in trying to
justify themselves, so it's an easy mistake to make.


-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3
http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \  GPLv3 and other work supported by
http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \   Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org