thoughts on Fluid licensing and GPL

[Peter Wilkins]

Hi Shelia:
On the outside chance you are unaware of the Sakai Licensing Working  
Group, I recommend this link:

http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/LIC/Home

The 3rd Party Licenses section is a great resource.

I have had a couple of conversations with Chris Coppola, and he has  
been very helpful in providing some orientation to the confounding  
world of open source licensing.

Regards,
Peter

Peter Wilkins
Technical Project Manager
DUE -  Office of Educational Innovation and Technology
N42-040n

pwilkins at mit.edu


On Jul 9, 2007, at 10:34 AM, Sheila Crossey wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I've been pondering the issue of how to license Fluid code so that  
> it can legally interoperate with software licensed under the GPL -  
> in particular, Moodle or ATutor.
>
> According to the GNU website, GPL'd code can be "combined" only  
> with code licensed under a GPL-compatible licence. The website  
> classifies various licences, but does not list the ECL 1.0 which is  
> the current Fluid licence. ECL 1.0 is probably compatible with the  
> GPL, but we're planning to move Fluid to ECL 2.0 to stay in synch  
> with Sakai. The problem is that ECL 2.0 is almost identical to the  
> Apache 2.0 licence which is classified as incompatible with the  
> GPL. So this means that Fluid code licensed under ECL 2.0 could not  
> be "combined" with GPL'd code. The definition of "combined" is not  
> entirely clear, and it's possible that Fluid could be seen to be  
> arm's-length enough to be considered as not combined with Moodle or  
> ATutor, but making this argument is dangerously hair-splitting.
>
> One way to solve the problem is to license Fluid simultaneously  
> under two licences: ECL 2.0 plus a licence compatible with GPL.  
> This second licence could be the GPL itself, or a GPL-compatible  
> non-copyleft licence such as the MIT licence. The problem with  
> cross-licensing is that if a third party picks up the code under  
> one licence, modifies it, and releases it under that single  
> licence, then there is a danger of forking especially if the  
> modifications are licensed under GPL meaning we couldn't merge them  
> into our ECL 2.0 licensed version. In light of this forking  
> problem, I think our best option is to cross-license Fluid under  
> ECL 2.0 and a non-copyleft licence such as MIT or BSD as this  
> should enable us to merge third party modifications back into the  
> mainstream. This is not bullet-proof since the third-party could  
> still choose to license their modifications (which they own) under  
> GPL, but they would be less likely to do this if they're modifying  
> non-GPL code.
>
> Does anybody have a headache yet?
>
> As always, I must make the disclaimer that I am not a lawyer and I  
> don't have a perfect understanding of all of this, so please feel  
> free to poke holes in my reasoning.
>
> Sheila
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Sheila Crossey
>
> Senior Project Coordinator
> Adaptive Technology Resource Centre
> Faculty of Information Studies
> University of Toronto
>
> voice: (416) 946-7820
> fax:    (416) 971-2896
> email: sheila.crossey at utoronto.ca
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