Quick FOSS legal literacy quizImagine the following situation: someone takes your whole project and white-labels it (changes the name), then sells it commercially without providing the source code or sharing any of the sales revenue with you.Your proje...
-
Quick FOSS legal literacy quiz
Imagine the following situation: someone takes your whole project and white-labels it (changes the name), then sells it commercially without providing the source code or sharing any of the sales revenue with you.
Your project uses the MIT license. Is this allowed?
-
Follow-up question.
You wrote a library in Rust and uploaded it to Cargo using the GPL license. Someone grabs it via cargo and uses it in their own project, which uses the MIT license.
Is this allowed?
-
A proprietary, commercial video editor includes a modified version of libav in their software. Upon request, they provide a copy of their modified version of libav and instructions on modifying their software to use a customized version of libav.
libav uses the LGPL license. Is this allowed?
-
Your project uses the MIT license. Someone who is upset at the way the project is being run starts a fork. They use the same name as your original project and claim to be the authoritative source for thew software. They change the license to GPL so that you "can't steal their code", but leave a copy of the MIT license in the repository with your copyright notice intact.
You do not have a trademark on the project name.
Is this allowed?
-
@drewdevault is the library dynamically linked/separate from the main executable? Yes. Or else no
-
@CodingThunder incorrect! The answer is yes regardless of the answer to your question.
-
@drewdevault @CodingThunder because they provide an object files to relink their program with their customized version of libav?
-
@a1ba @CodingThunder yep
-
You're a web developer. You use "npm install" to install 500 or so dependencies from npm, then use webpack to combine all of the modules into one minified javascript bundle.
Are you compliant with the software licenses of your dependencies in any way whatsoever?
-
1. Yes
2. No
3. Yes
4. Yes
5. lol no -
@drewdevault That's four answers to five questions, or I am missing something
-
How did everyone do on the quiz?
-
@drewdevault 100% but i’ve been asking these questions since the 90s
-
@drewdevault I didn't really know the answer to any of them for sure, therefore when I'm choosing something for my own projects I err on the side of the most permissive one [with attribution].
The energy invested in thinking about these things wouldn't be worth it for me.
-
@drewdevault I suspect the answer to 4 could be more complex because of the "use the same name as your original project and claim to be the authoritative source for the software" part of it, depending on jurisdiction. I guessed "no"
-
@drewdevault I had a little trouble interpreting this. I answered "wrongly" here because there is no clear indication of a combination redistribution. In this case, it's allowed if it's a source-only distribution and does not contain a copy of the GPL-d Rust library. It's even allowed at the compilation level, it just means that in practice the resulting binary is effectively GPL because the GPL terms are a superset of the MIT terms and both need to be respected.
-
Bonus round:
You're a cloud services provider and you make a commercial cloud offering based on MongoDB. You release the source code for your cloud dashboard and any modifications to MongoDB, also using the SSPL.
Are you in compliance with the SSPL?
-
No; it is virtually impossible to comply with the SSPL by design. You would also arguably need to release your text editor, web browser, the Linux kernel, etc, all under the SSPL, in order to comply.
-
@drewdevault 4/5. I thought that the fourth question answer might be dependent on the country laws.