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License Kit

A kit of materials for advising hackathon teams of license options available to them.

People have limited time at a hackathon so we want material that is quick to deliver and easy to understand

Things like:

  • pamphlets
  • quick pitches
  • links to resources
  • Infographic

0) What is copyright?

Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution. This is usually only for a limited time. By default, in most western countries, copyright is assigned automatically to the author of any work.

1) What is a licence?

A software licence is a set of legal terms used by copyright holders of a piece of software to grant rights to users to read and use the piece of software. This can be used to grant or deny specific rights upon the user of a piece of software.

Copyright law grants the creator of a pice of software exclusive rights for the use and distribuition of the software. Software licences use Copyright law to grant rights to other individuals for the purpose of reading, compiling and running the software. Copyright stipulates merely the owner of a work, while its licence is the terms under which the user of the work can use it.

3) Why do we need a licence for copyrighted works?

Unlicenced works are by default all rights reserved to the copyright holder. Therefore, if you are the author of a piece of software and wish to grant users the right to copy, run, modify or redistribute your software, you need to license your work since by default these rights are not allowed.

4) What are the common licences we can use?

GPL family (2/3/A/L) MIT or other permissive licences Artwork and documentation (CC family)

5) What is the difference between a proprietary software work and a free software work and why do we care?

Free software gives any user of the work four essential freedoms (0, 1, 2 and 3)

Without these freedoms, the user cannot control the software, thus the developer controls the users. Any software failing to provide one or more of the above freedoms to users is considered proprietary software, because it has been demonstrated that in every case there are ways for the developer to mistreat the user.

6) Pros/cons of different licenses

GPL3

  • Focus on protecting users' rights
  • Ensures rights cannot be removed
  • LGPL:
    • Allows binary linking with proprietary works without requiring the release of source code of the proprietary work.
    • Allows the work to be reused with some licenses that would prohibit combination with GPL. It still preserves users freedoms, but only within the LGPLd component and not the whole work
  • AGPL:
    • Considers accessing your work through a network to be redistribution, thus:
    • Requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code, preventing modified versions of your code being developed and run in secret behind a network

MIT

  • Has very limited restrictions on the software with the exception of copyright and attribution
  • Allows users of the work to remove freedoms on future copies of the work by including the work in a proprietary work.

CC

  • The creative commons licenses are commonly used for artwork used in open source software.
  • They grant users the right to use, modify and build on the artwork.
  • There are several variants that allow the creator to restrict particular rights such as modification, attribuition and commercial use

7) Compatibility

The licenses we've discussed today are all considered GPL compatible meaning that they can be combined and packaged into a single work so long as that work is GPL licensed