[xsd-users] License and Portability

Boris Kolpackov boris at codesynthesis.com
Wed Jul 6 07:30:15 EDT 2011


Hi Peter,

Peter Backes <rtc at cdl.uni-saarland.de> writes:

> Sure, these things may be gray areas.  I think it is not a good thing, 
> from a philosophical point of view, to try to claim copyright on such 
> generated code, even if, in the end, such a claim could be upheld.  It 
> is much better to disclaim copyright for generated code of any 
> compiler-like program.

I think we will just have to agree that we disagree ;-). IMO, the
major flaw in your reasoning comes from the fact that any however
complex program can be viewed as just a collection of trivial and
unoriginal idioms and code snippets. Following your logic we can
then conclude that such a program (or poem, or book, etc) is not 
copyrightable. I think what plays an important role is the way
these fragments are arranged and are interacting to perform
something useful. In case of the XSD-generated code the "trivial"
pieces of code are arranged and interact in such a way that they
will parse an XML and present you with its object model (note
that the schema does not provide a recipe that states how this
code should be arranged or interact to achieve this; it merely
describes the kind of XML documents that we must be able to 
handle). The same holds true for bison/lex; you merely state
what kind of language you want to parse/lex, not how to achieve
this. This is in contrast to, say, a C++ program being translated
to assembly, where the arrangements and interactions are specified
in C++ and assembly is merely a different representation of these
rules.


> I also read the FLOSSE and I have some reservations against it.  Some 
> of it seems redundant (why give permission to license your program 
> under a GPL-compatible free software license if the GPL already gives 
> you this permission), and most of it seems to try to be too clever... 
> It would be better to have some easy to understand, clear and standard 
> permission.

FLOSSE gives you permission to license your program under various
open-source licenses, many of which are GPLv2-incompatible.


> I would like to publish some academic tool under the GPLv3 that makes 
> use of XSD generated code. Given the fact that XSD has the non-standard 
> GPLv2-only license (something else that IMO tries to be too clever), I 
> need to rely on this FLOSSE exception. But it is hard for me to find 
> out what it really means.

We put the Rationale section before the legal terms especially to
clarify this. It provides concrete examples that show the situations
where FLOSSE can and cannot be used. Not sure what else we can do to
help with this.


> Why not simply license the program GPLv2 or any later version and 
> thus make it easy and clear for people who want to publish something
> under GPL-compatible licenses?

To issues:

1. We may not necessarily agree with the ideas behind GPLvX. Giving
   a third-party a perpetual right to dictate the license under which
   our software is distributed is something that we are not comfortable
   with.

2. GPLv3 is still incompatible with some open-source licenses. We
   use FLOSSE to give you the right to release your code under these
   licenses (including GPLv3) provided certain conditions are met
   (i.e., you are not simply relicensing the generated code to use
   it a proprietary application).

Boris



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