Relax, Open-Source Lawyers Aren't About to Sue You
by Reuven Lerner - Aug. 06, 2008Comments (9)- Related Blog Posts
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In an article headlined "The Pitfalls of Open Source Litigation", published today at InternetNews.com, Richard Adhikari claims that "enterprises using open source are being sued for not complying with the multitude of licenses the software comes with," He suggests that businesses should think twice before using open-source software, lest they find themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit themselves. Fortunately for the open-source community, his claims don't hold much water.
The key to open-source software is the license under which each program is released. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has approved about two dozen different licenses that may officially carry the "open source" label. All of these licenses allow the end user to modify and redistribute the program's source code without restriction, for free or (if they want) for a price.
The trickiest open-source license for businesses to understand, the GNU Public License, or GPL, is also one of the most popular, and leads to the greatest confusion. (There are actually several versions of the GPL, but the similarities are more important than the differences.) The GPL guarantees that anyone who receives the program may modify its source code -- and that modified versions of a GPL'ed program fall under the GPL as well. If you don't distribute the software, or if it stays hidden behind a Web site, then you don't have to disclose the source code.
But if you write a program that uses GPL-licensed code, you must release the source code to your entire program. Several companies were sued in the last year for failing to provide the source code to their programs, which incorporated the BusyBox library.
But it is only one license (the GPL) that has this issue, and for which there is an active legal defense team. If BusyBox had been released under a BSD license, then there would have been no violation, and the lawyers would not have had a legitimate case.
Moreover, these violations never apply to the end users of open-source software. Rather, they apply only to those people who modified and then redistributed the open-source code. If you merely use a program distributed under the GPL, or if you redistribute it in unmodified form, then you are in no danger whatsoever.
While you might believe that open-source lawsuits are a common occurrence, Only a handful of cases have even been filed over the years. The Software Freedom Law Center prefers to work quietly and behind the scenes, in order to educate and help violating companies rather than flog them in public.
Adhikari argues that there is a very large number of open-source licenses, and that their terms can be "wild and wacky." As an example, he points to "Beerware," a license that states "users should buy the authors a beer or drink a beer in their honor if they meet." The problem with this example is that (a) Beerware is not an approved OSI license, and is in use on a very small number of programs, and (b) it only calls upon users to buy the author a beer if the user finds the software useful, and if he or she meets the author in person. This may be "wild and wacky," but it is not representative of normative open-source licenses. Nor is a lawsuit likely as a result of violating the Beerware license.
I'm not trying to say that businesses should ignore the licenses that come with open-source software. Especially in the open-source world, licenses are important; they guarantee that we will have the freedom to modify and redistribute the software at little or no cost. But the number of legal threats, let alone lawsuits, made against users of open-source software represents a dozen or so cases cases over the last decade -- which, when you consider that there are more than 130,000 projects on SourceForge, and that this is far from a comprehensive listing.
So, should you worry about being sued over open-source software violations? Yes, if you are modifying and redistributing GPL-derived software without providing users with the source code. In any other case, you can almost certainly worry about more pressing issues.
