This reflects not only our corporate traditions of developer empowerment, but also our view that engineers typically have the greatest competence to determine the appropriate license strategy for growing user and contributor communities around their projects."īoth historically and today, many Red Hat engineers choose GPLv2 or LGPLv2.1 for their projects. "License selection is a form of legal decision making, but for as long as I've been at Red Hat, engineers have been given significant discretion to choose licenses for the projects they maintain, within certain boundaries (for example, expectations to pick from a small set of widely-used, de facto standard licenses). Why is Red Hat bothering with this when it's already incorporated the cure commitment language with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)? Red Hat's senior commercial counsel, Richard Fontana, explained: Other Red Hat-based projects considering this license protection include Anaconda, Red Hat's operating system installation program Candlepin the Cockpit server manager and Koji, the RPM package builder. These provide core components of Red Hat's JBoss Middleware, Red Hat Gluster Storage, and Red Hat Satellite products.
Open source license manager software#
Within Red Hat's non-commercial software family, the WildFly, GlusterFS and Pulp projects have added the language. Indeed, some people believe a singly copyright violation could lead to a lawsuit even if the copyright holders haven't bothered to tell the alleged violators of what was going down before seeking legal recourse. In its new position statement, Red Hat explained that the GPLv2 and LGPL, as written, has led to the belief that automatic license termination and copyright infringement claims can result from a single act of inadvertent non-compliance. We view legal action as a last resort, to be initiated only when other community efforts have failed to resolve the problem." We want to work with users in an open and transparent way to eliminate any uncertainty about our expectations regarding compliance or enforcement that might limit adoption of our software.
We want companies and individuals to use, modify and distribute this software. The purpose? The top Linux developers explained, "Our intent in providing these assurances is to encourage more use of the software. Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.If you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.Something that fits into the development workflow will help flag any issues as soon as possible and, with GitHub being familiar to so many developers around the world, the chances of it being adopted should be quite high. Will it help?Ī tool like this certainly looks to be useful for organisations trying to get a handle on their Open Source usage and compliance. Licensed helps automate this process and can also be used to create a “Bill of Materials” that enables users to see all the Open Source components used within the application. Typically, the license terms of an Open Source dependency will require that a copy of the license is distributed with future applications that contain it. Whenever dependencies change, the license data must be updated which helps things remain compliant. Licensed will store the dependency data in a source control repository, which helps make checking this data part of the development workflow. X% similar to an existing license i.e.This will flag up if the license appears to be: Using a project called “Licensee”, it automates the reading of license files and attempts to determine the license type. It finds, caches and checks the license metadata of dependencies and works across multiple languages and package managers across multiple projects. This tool is aimed at helping developers work towards compliance with the license terms of Open Source dependencies (an external software package used in an application) within their programs. GitHub, the online home of over 20 million developers, have open-sourced “Licensed” – their own, internal tool for managing Open Source licenses.
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