JISC legal demostrates how far we have to go

A recent publication from JISC Legal entitled Copyright Licensing for e-Learning Authors shows just how far we have to go in terms of educating our peers about Open Source and open source licensing. To quote from the document:

Open source software ('OSS') is software where the human-readable source code is made openly available for copying. While OSS is often described as 'free' this does not necessarily mean that it will be without a licence fee. OSS is normally licensed under a General Public Licence, and it is vital to understand the terms of this. While OSS can be used and developed freely it will always be subject to the constraints of the original licence, and may present a range of other copyright risks.

This completely misses the point.

Firstly I've never heard of anyone legally charging a licence fee for open source software. I've heard of people charging for the media, for support, for documentation, for hosting, for bandwidth and even for writing the stuff in the first place, but never for a licence (which isn't to say it can't be done, just that it's very uncommon).

Secondly the phrase "[...] it will always be subject to the constraints of the original licence [...]" would appear in direct conflict with the clause from the GPL that reads "[...] you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation." I'm not a lawyer, but it seems entirely possible to me that a later licence version could specifically remove constraints of the original licence.

tags:osswatch opensource uk jisc law