Top 10 legal issues for free software of 2013

Last year, I provided a look at the top legal issues from the year before. Continuing with this tradition, here is my take on the top ten legal developments in FOSS during 2013.

Choose The Best Licence For Your Open Source Project

The licences page breaks down a number of popular options, including MIT, Apache and GPL. Each is explained in the form of Required / Permitted / Forbidden, so it’s clear what others can and can’t do with your work.

Science and Liberation: Science as Human Curiosity, as Authority and as Business

Creative Commons and the GPL are legal tools to facilitate sharing, and in their domains they are analogous to peer review and publication in scientific journals for scientists. However, like the conflict between free and proprietary software, there is a conflict between open access and proprietary access to scientific publications, a conflict Aaron Swartz became aware of as an activist.

Copyright statements proliferate inside open source code

Earlier today I was looking at a source file for the OpenStack Ceilometer docs and noticed that there's a copyright statement at the top. Now, in no way do I want to pick on Nicholas. There are hundreds of such copyright statements in the OpenStack docs and code, and this is just the example I happened to be looking at.

Open Compute pushes GPL-like license for 'open source hardware'

Should I use a permissive license? Copyleft? Or something in the middle?

The open source license you choose for your project, or for the projects you choose to contribute to, can have significant effects on how what you contribute is used. One question that has garnered quite a bit of interest recently is the fall in popularity of copyleft licenses in favor of permissive licenses. An article last year looked at the issue of large number of projects on GitHub that have no explicit license and posited the question about whether we live in a 'post open source software' world, where seemingly open source software has no license. After some time, GitHub agreed that licensing is important and worked to improve the situation with a license chooser.

Which License Should You Use for Your Software?

When I first started writing my little software programs, I borrowed some code from my chum Mike Field (a.k.a. The Mighty Hamster) who is based in New Zealand. At that time, I noticed that in the comments to his code, Mike had the line "// License: GPLv3" (this refers to the GNU General Public License).

Apple Veteran Named PayPal’s First Head of Open Source Software

Cooper has seen the benefits of open source collaboration first hand — and has learned the hard way what happens when developers don’t share code when they should. At Apple, she managed a team that developed a video chat program based on Apple’s QuickTime video format, and the code behind Quicktime wasn’t even shared with everyone inside the company. “There were some people in my group that helped write Quicktime, but because of an internal licensing struggle at the time, the QuickTime team shut them out of their own code tree,” she says. “It was really inefficient, and it really pissed me off.”