The FOSSology Project – Open Source Software for Open Source License Compliance - Anupam Ghosh

The FOSSology Project – Open Source Software for Open Source License Compliance - Anupam Ghosh

In collaborative project development, it is important to get an insight of the open source software, to determine involved licensing and license obligations. FOSSology is a software project that is specialized in identifying license relevant statements. It can also scan source code for Copyright notices, Keywords and Export control relevant statements. FOSSology lets users generate compliance documentation according to the organization's needs, in a variety of data formats such as SPDX tag-value, RDF. FOSSology, is a Linux Foundation collaboration project, licensed under the GPL-2.0. Recently, new technology has been introduced for FOSSology, which is going towards more automation by providing a REST API for example. New scanning approaches have been developed which enables more automation at imprecise licensing. This presentation explains how users of FOSSology can use the new features.

[qrst]

Since when can you license a copyright which as part of its definition includes fair use (derivatives and transformations?) but then tell people they do not have a license to use a copyright if they do things with the copyright entitled under copyright law, specifically fair use?

That is not licensing a copyright, that is deceptive advertising? Copyright laws serve a dual purpose to prevent monopolies (encouraging transformation and other fair use exceptions) and protect authors.

There is no need for GNU and other licenses, existing copyright law works fine. Attempting to construct a viral license on a corrupt object will lead to corrupt results?

We have people afraid of using tools as they believe customer variables and business logic subroutines used with open source tools will violate privacy, and financial reporting regulations to name a few if viewed as 'derivatives or modifications' of the program when clearly they are not.

If you want to contribute free software for people to use, fine, just understand people can use your copyrighted work under fair use laws or sue you for fraudulent descriptions in the license, because you are not licensing a copyrighted work with certain restrictions?

This is important in the next few years as machines begin to create things, making available opportunities for programmers shrink, not expand?

Larry Wall created the Artistic License understanding the law better? He understood that entering variables and business logic subroutines for company payroll should not require we add a repository module for every use case, as the variables and subroutines depend on the program to organize private information not modify the program.

If you want to contribute a module that does payroll, fine, but every use case scenario to organize information should not obligate owners of that information to disclose business logic, sensitive customer info, etc, simply because the developers of a program wrote misleading documentation.

If I licensed a free writing pad that required use of a pen, writing a love letter to your wife does not modify the intended use of the pad. Another person can still use that pad and write a letter to Mom. Case closed. You are not entitled to read the letters. And the judge would ask me what have I been smoking because I gave away a free writing pad, not a license?