Documenting Your Open Source Code
Some forethought, a clear statement of intent and practice, and a modicum of documentation can make contributors and benefactors more comfortable with donating and using open source code.
Sunday, January 15th, 2006
As an attorney and non-hacker, I often marvel at the breadth and depth of code that is available as open source. I also marvel at the process that manages to pull all of that code together into coherent, efficient packages and software stacks. But as an attorney who deals in intellectual property issues, I am less enamored with the lack of standardization around documentation practices for copyright and licensing of such open source code.
Have you every looked at an open source software package and tried to determine with certainty who wrote it, who holds the copyright to it, whether they conveyed adequate rights in their code to the project to which it was contributed, and what license covers that code? (And here I am only talking about the code at the package level– code at the file level often lacks any reference at all to copyright or licensing.) Add to this the fact that a fair number of open source hackers are a prickly bunch insistent on inserting comments into the code that may or may not have any legal effect, and purely from an attorney’s rightfully prickly perspective, the whole thing gets quite puzzling.
Here are some examples of questionable copyrights and licenses. What would you do with the following?
*A comment in a COPYING file for code covered under the GNU General Public License that states, “May not be used for commercial purposes.”
