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**Nadia Eghbal:** Niche topic, I'm sure. |
**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, it was the kind of topic where there are maybe a few thousand people who really wanna read a book about it, but they REALLY want the book... \[laughter\] So I think the book was very successful given the audience, but it's never gonna be broadly successful. |
Then I decided, "Okay, now I'm gonna publish on my own because that means I can update whenever I like", not that I have been as diligent about that as I would have liked to be... So I just basically rewrote the book from scratch, because it had been 7-8 years by then; it was really time to do a total refresh of it. So... |
One of the things I did on the book which was a lot of fun is there's a fairly detailed technology tutorial in it, because a lot of lawyers who are trying to grasp open source issues struggle with some of the technology concepts, and in open source licensing some of those actually matter. In lots of IP licensing it doe... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome! |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That sounds great! We're gonna take a short break, and when we come back we're gonna get into what developers need to know about licenses, versus what they probably think that they know. We'll be back in a minute. |
**Break:** \[22:56\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back. Alright... Heather, one of my favorite jokes that I heard recently was "I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on Reddit." \[laughter\] Developers are somewhat notorious for playing lawyer. What are some of the biggest misconceptions out there that developers have, and what are the importan... |
**Heather Meeker:** First I'll say that there are a lot of developers who are extremely sophisticated about open source licensing, and then there are a lot of them who basically have no concept about it at all. The problem is distinguishing between the two. If you're a person in business and you're not an engineer, the... |
The ones who don't know that much about it, the things they get wrong are -- I think the classic misconception is that it's okay to dynamically link to GPL code. This is a meme that has been traveling around for at least 20 years and it's basically wrong. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** What does that mean? |
**Heather Meeker:** If you'll forgive a small foray into the technology, when you build a program it's not just one big, amorphous blob, at least not usually. You build it in pieces and you kind of stitch it together. That process, at least in a language like C or C++. It's called linking - you take all the little blob... |
The static way is where you tell the program that's building your program, "Just put it all together and smash it into one binary." That's static linking. Once it's put together it doesn't change, in the sense that all the blobs are sticking together in exactly the same way, and that fact doesn't change. |
Dynamic linking is something a little more sophisticated where one of your blobs, say, might do something that you don't wanna be doing all the time, like printing a file. So you tell the builder that is building your program, "Build the program, but leave the printer blob on the side. When you need it, go get it, and ... |
To make a long story short, GPL is for whole programs, and if you put the program together as one big blob or a bunch of blobs, it doesn't really matter from the point of view of GPL compliance, whereas a license like LGPL allows you to use a dynamically-linked library and bifurcate the licensing. \[27:58\] A proprieta... |
So that's the difference... It's a difference about how you engineer the build of the program, and LGPL in particular is directed towards libraries that are primarily used as dynamically-linked libraries. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And also in a lot of modern dynamic languages, everything is dynamically linked; nothing is statically linked. |
**Heather Meeker:** That's a really good point. The LGPL and the GPL - the way they're written and the compliance rules that people talk about are really focused on a language like C, that has this notion of static and dynamic linking and building. The higher-level scripting languages... There's almost not a concept li... |
If you're a businessperson or a lawyer and you talk to an engineer and you say "You can dynamically link this library" and you get a blank look, the most common reason for that is that the person you're talking to is developing in a language that doesn't really have that kind of concept. That may very well be so. A pro... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** What are some things that you think some developers are quite sophisticated about legal issues? What do you think are some things they get right, or that they know a lot about? |
**Heather Meeker:** Engineers who have been around open source for a while, particularly ones doing Linux kernel development often have a very sophisticated and nuanced sense about GPL compliance in the Linux kernel space. That, I think, is where most people find the most challenge in figuring out what GPL means. Again... |
The engineers who are working on that will have a very good sense about what GPL means in the context of kernel development and what you can or cannot do. Their knowledge is particularly useful when you get into these very detailed questions like "What if you have multiple processors? What if you have a small embedded ... |
\[32:09\] When you get down to these very detailed questions, it's ultimately kind of the engineers who know the answers and not the lawyers. Many of the engineers who have been around a while know the compliance rules best, better than the lawyers do, because what they are telling you is what community practice is. An... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So for developers that are not working on kernel-level work, and who aren't working with the GPL - let's say your average developer today who just wants to write something and put it up on GitHub and then slap an MIT license on it... How do you think that developers' self-education is changing, going ... |
**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, so the conventional wisdom is that the new kids on the block don't care about licensing issues at all... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And is that okay? |
**Heather Meeker:** That's perfectly okay. I mean, as long as they're not treading on other people's rights, they can decide to share their code with anybody and let anybody do anything they want with it; that's their prerogative as a copyright owner. |
I would say a few things to developers who are thinking about this stuff. First, you have to have some license, because the default with no license is no rights. I actually spend a moderate amount of time in my practice contacting developers on GitHub or elsewhere and saying, "Could you please apply a license to this c... |
I would really summarize it as "Any license is better than no license." If you really don't care, don't burden the world with any licensing requirements at all. I guess one final thing I would say is that you can always move from a more copyleft license to a less copyleft license. If you decide to release code and you ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[36:05\] I'm a little bit curious - mostly for my own personal reasons - what is involved in migrating from one license to another? I know that you're involved in the Mozilla public license version two, and that was a very large effort to migrate to. I think that there's this conception that if lice... |
**Heather Meeker:** Well, there are two things going on at work there. One is the versioning of a particular license. Many of the copyleft licenses have this mechanism in them that, say, if you take the code under this license as it exists today, and the license steward (the person that wrote the license) issues anothe... |
For instance, when we were working on Mozilla, anybody who had code under 1.1, which was the most common version at that time, could then automatically use it under 2 once it was issued, assuming the code was issued under that default structure, which is this version or any later version. So in a way, you don't have to... |
For instance with the kernel, there are literally thousands of contributors, and the license basically can't be changed because you would have to go to every contributor and get their authority to change it. One thing that people do in order to avoid that problem is use something called the contribution agreement, whic... |
That means that if I'm running a project, you as a contributor just grant me the right to do whatever I want with the code, and then I decide the outbound license. Then, all I have to do is stick a new license notice on the code, and going forward everybody can use the code under the new license, but importantly, it do... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[39:40\] I think we need to walk it back just a little bit, because a lot of times when I talk to newer developers they think that in open source a license essentially means that they're no longer the owner, or that the author is no longer the owner, and they're essentially just putting it out in th... |
**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, exactly. As to the question of ownership, one of the core principles of intellectual property is that intellectual property rights are the ability to exclude others from doing things. So if you are a copyright owner, you have the right to prevent other people from doing certain things with you... |
If you release code under something like BSD, which is a broad, permissive license with really only one condition, which is the license notice, you don't have much of that exclusionary right left, but you still have some left. It is not getting rid of ownership at all, it's just that you've granted a license to the wor... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I've seen some of that tension, I think, culturally at least, where more and more companies are relying on open source software, and there's this sort of expectation that like "It's your code, you fix it", and sometimes the project owner is like "Well, it's not my code, it's everyone's code. Use it at... |
**Heather Meeker:** Well, really my main reaction to that is a company that's building a product - it's fine to use open source stuff, but it's not a licensing decision to figure out whether that code's gonna be maintained or not, \[laughter\] and the open source author has no obligation to do that at all. Just because... |
Don't get me wrong, the most commonly used open source code out there is great. A lot of it has got great maintenance, very robust and secure, but the fact that something's open source doesn't mean it has a community; it just means it could have a community, and when people are making engineering decisions about using ... |
\[43:57\] We've had some issues in the past, because there have been security problems with some open source software, which is really down to the fact that a whole bunch of people were using this software without contributing back any resources to maintain it. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right... Which is their right. That's one of the rights in there. But I think there is a bit of a misconception - copyleft people and permissive license people both really care about community, and you need to care about if there is a sustainable community there when you use the software; it's just t... |
**Heather Meeker:** Yeah, fair enough. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a good point to break at. When we come back, we'll talk about the role of companies and commercial applications in open source. |
**Break:** \[44:54\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And we're back! One of the things we talk about on this show - well, kind of the main theme - is open source and sustainability, and in the topic of sustainability there have been all these sorts of experiments around trying to make the production of open source sustainable through licenses, and tryin... |
I know, Heather, you helped draft the Fair Source License. Recently, the founder of MySQL just came out with the Business Source License, which they're using for MariaDB. There are also all these dual-license models; some of these go between open source and closed source, and have touched off a lot of debates... What d... |
**Heather Meeker:** Well, I'd say that something is open source or it's not open source. For instance, fair source is not open source, and nobody would have claimed that it was. The hybrid model - maybe you call it source available, although that's a pretty awkward term. Fundamentally, what makes something proprietary ... |
\[48:00\] Maybe this is obvious, but people who manage software in organizations spend an extraordinary amount of time managing license restrictions. You can go to entire conferences on how to figure out whether you've exceeded your thousand-user limit and so forth, and there's also technology to monitor it and all thi... |
Now, if you're an author and you wanna release your code, you can choose open source or you can choose something else. If you choose something else, it's pretty much designer; you get to pick whatever you want. Example - fair source; pick a set of terms that you think are fair, and that will make sure that people can u... |
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