March 13th, 2009
Is the new open source Eurolicense eurotrash?
The Open Source initiative updated one of its licenses this month, the EU DataGrid Software License.
This turns out not to be eurotrash. Instead it’s an important example of negotiating credit in a multinational corporate environment.
The EU DataGrid is a distributed computing environment designed for use across the European Union. This means it must work in many languages, and any legal agreements must not only be available under all those languages, but applicable in all those countries’ law courts.
Given that the system is designed for use by corporations and government employees, this is even more imperative.
The license does this by requiring attribution, and by taking advantage of laziness.
If you publish enhancements or derivative works from the software without notifying receipients they need a separate license agreement, you have in effect given your rights in that software over to everyone who signed the original license.
This does not keep companies from making a commercial distribution from code created using the datagrid. It’s just a “no backsies” clause. If you’re going commercial with something you have an obligation to tell us.
As more corporations get involved in open source, and consider their obligations under open source licenses, I hope they will have their lawyers look at this license. Not to copy it. But in appreciation.
If corporations across Europe can settle agreements under an open source license approved by the OSI, maybe you can too.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 03/13/09
