Bazaar Licenses

[Russel Winder]

Sean,

On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 14:47 -0600, Usher, Sean (Sean) wrote:
> Thanks for your help guys.  I'll talk to legal with the info I have
> received and see if they will agree to let us use GPL.

First off, I am not a lawyer (IANAL), but in early 2000s (i.e. pre
GPLv3) I was involved in a lot of legal issues with lawyers over GPL,
LGPL, tools, products, C code, Java code, etc.  (Basically the company I
was CTO of was using a mix of GPL and proprietary tools to generate
proprietary product, and we had to be hugely careful.)

Big Note:  tools such as CVS, Subversion, Bazaar are in a completely
different category to compilers such as GCC and Javac.

It was clear to me that most contract lawyers do not understand the GPL
(it was not part of their education nor their ongoing professional
development), they have been force fed a substantial amount of FUD about
the GPL, and (most importantly) do not have the time to sort out the
issues for themselves.  Given the situation, they general take the
defensive measure of refusing to allow the use of GPL material across
the board.  OK, this is running away from the issues, but I understand
why, even though in most cases, they are not allowing a perfectly
reasonable scenario.

The situation is very complex and a short email, indeed a long email or
email thread, cannot give you the right answer or even do the answer
justice.

However . . . 

If you are using something as a tool internally to the organization,
then GPL/LGPL/RAND/proprietary is not an issue of use, it is just an
issue of amendability.  If you get (for free or buy) an open solution
you can amend it as you wish, if you get (for free or buy) a closed
solution you are at a dead end, and must rely on the features the
providers allows you to have.

GPL only becomes an issue if you distribute changes to GPL material
outside your organization.  (Note that there is a serious issue of legal
entity here, so groups of companies have to be very, very careful --
sharing material between two companies in the same group is almost
certainly distribution under the terms of the GPL.  But note IANAL.)

So GPL tools used internally really are not a problem -- assuming the
tools generate self-standing product that have no dependencies on the
GPL toolchain.  This is crucially important and the reason for all the
issues surrounding Cywin.

Feeding back changes to a GPL tool used purely internally is not a legal
issue, it is a moral/ethical one -- in almost all cases.  There are some
cases where releasing changes is effectively required.

Basically, I see no reason (but the devil is in the detail that has not
been aired), why an organization cannot use GPL toolchains internally,
even if they amend them.

Lots of companies are using CVS, Subversion, etc. to develop their
proprietary product, and that is fine.  Perforce and ClearCase are fine
but not as amendable, Git, Mercurial and Bazaar are in the same category
as CVS and Subversion, they are fine.  And they are extendable and
amendable -- though Bazaar is already so adaptive it can almost
certainly already do everything you need :-)

But I don't know your case in enough detail and IANAL :-)

Your lawyers are in charge here, but I think it would be good to open a
dialogue with them, so you can find out what their issues are (if any),
and to help them.
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      Partner
                                            xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
Concertant LLP        t: +44 20 7585 2200, +44 20 7193 9203
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London SW11 1EN, UK   m: +44 7770 465 077   skype: russel_winder
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