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To answer the question in the title ("What is the legal definition of a company/organization?"), that depends on the laws in the concerned countries and may also depend on how the company is exactly structured.
I will assume that the part in country A and the part in country B are legally independent companies that are both subsidiaries of a larger ...
14
AGPL is an OSI approved license. An open source license cannot permit who can use it, as per section 5 of the open source definition:
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
I am not a lawyer, but the terms of the AGPL and the statement mentioned in the question that "The author [sic] has the permission to prohibit a ...
12
It seems to me there are two ways to interpret what you propose. Either
a) you make the software is available to all under AGPLv3, except John Smith, who may not take a copy under any terms, or
b) you make the software is available to all under AGPLv3, with the additional proviso that John Smith is never allowed to use it.
In the case of (a), anyone who isn'...
4
It's legal - assuming they're the sole rightsholder, they may make their code available on any terms they choose - but it's completely ineffective. You may elect to take it under GPLv3 (as it says "GPLv2 or later") then, under the provision of s7 that says
If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is ...
4
Is my interpretation correct and am I really not allowed to link any closed-source library which does not fulfill the system library exception to a GPL software, if I am conveying a GPL software of someone else, which I only modified? Is that true, even if the closed-source, non-system DLL is zero-cost and either freely downloadable by the user or already ...
4
Finding right license to support open source community only. GPLv3 too strict, LGPLv3 too permissive
There's two fundamentally different takes on open source licenses:
a) the permissive ones like MIT, Apache etc which - roughly speaking - don't care what happens to their sources as long as the credits are maintained and communicated.
b) And there's the more strictly open source licenses, the copy-left
licenses, which want to make sure that any derivative ...
4
The Eclipse Distribution License (EDL) is just an alternative name for the BSD 3-clause license, listed by the GNU project as the modified BSD license.
This is a highly permissive license that is widely compatible with other licenses, including the GPL and AGPL in all versions.
4
You should use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead.
It is essentially the GPL with the Classpath exception, but it requires that a user is able to run their own version of the LGPL library in place of the original.
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I agree with JNic above. I note your edit regarding the distribution of binaries linked to System Libraries, but I think you are misunderstanding this exception.
The FAQ entry you quote makes it clear that if a library is a System Library, then the mere choice to distribute a copy of said Library along with your work doesn't prevent you from availing ...
3
Just because a language and its toolchains are licensed under the GNU GPL does not mean that any software you create with it also needs to be GPL-licensed. The GPL FAQ reads:
Can I use GPL-covered editors such as GNU Emacs to develop nonfree programs? Can I use GPL-covered tools such as GCC to compile them?
Yes, because the copyright on the editors and ...
3
GCC has a special exception that doesn't force you to use GPL for programs compiled with GCC
Correct. Its output does not have to be under the GPL. Similarly:
an image created with Photoshop doesn't need to follow the license that Photoshop is distributed under, even if fancy filters are used
a picture taken and edited with an Apple iPhone isn't owned by ...
3
If I am the sole copyright holder, I can distribute under any license I wish. Now "AGPL with one exception" is not AGPL obviously. I don't know about AGPL, but the GPL license is protected by copyright, and comes with a license that allows you to copy it unchanged, but does NOT AT ALL allow you to make any changes. Assuming AGPL is the same, you ...
3
The Class path Exception (CPE) used by OpenJDK essentially states "As long as you use the classes covered by the CPE unmodified and only load them via the standard class-path mechanism, we don't care what license your code uses. It is all considered compatible."
As the class-path mechanism is the default for loading Java classes, as long as you don'...
3
Finding right license to support open source community only. GPLv3 too strict, LGPLv3 too permissive
Let's say that someone uses your project (licensed under your custom license) in an MIT licensed application. Since the MIT license explicitly allows the software to be distributed closed source, your custom license would be ineffective and would not make sense.
If you do not want your library to be used in proprietary software, then the best choice would be ...
2
No, that is not possible.
First, the header file and the corresponding implementation are closely related enough that if one is under the LGPL license, then the LGPL requires that the other is also under the LGPL license.
And putting the header file also under a proprietary license is not going to work either if the existing LGPL code needs to be modified to ...
answered Dec 30 '20 at 8:28
Bart van Ingen Schenau
17.8k1 gold badge27 silver badges50 bronze badges
2
(I am not a lawyer and therefore this is not "legal advice")
If you really received the program under the terms of the AGPL v3, then look at section 7, third-to-last paragraph:
All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part ...
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Is it GPL compliant to distribute any non-GPL, closed-source linked library, which falls under the system library exception, with GPL code?
A library distributed with the program does not fall under the system library exception.
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The key insight is probably that a company counts as a person, legally.
When you (personally) copy a GPL'd program from one of your own computers to another, you don't need to give yourself source. You're not distributing the program each time you run cp.
If you're running doing that copy as part of employment, you're doing it as part of the company. Legally,...
1
Yes you can license your library with any LGPL-compatible open-source license. See this explaination which states that
[...] applications that use the library don't have to be [distributed under LGPL]
The LGPL is very permissive from the perspective of an application developer. Anyway, you cannot sub-license the 3rd-party library (arduino). If you want to ...
1
The owner of the complete source code is not limited to the list of official versions of any license. It is possible to write the license in the way "All terms of the known GPL license apply for everyone except John Smith". Changes are not permitted in the licenses but should be possible to reference them in any context.
However such licenses are ...
1
This is not the case if you use PySide instead of PyQt. PySide uses LGPL so your Python code can be whatever license you want.
From PyQt5 vs PySide2: What's the difference between the two Python Qt libraries?:
The key difference in the two versions — in fact the entire reason
PySide2 exists — is licensing. PyQt5 is available under a GPL or
commercial ...
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