Bazaar Licenses

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

John Arbash Meinel writes:

 > Usher, Sean (Sean) wrote:
 > > John,
 > > 
 > > I blieve the worry is that we may need to make changes and
 > > possibly add proprietary source code,

Do you want to make Bazaar part of a product you sell or bundle with
products you sell?  If not, just publish your improvements and save a
bundle on legal worries and fees.  Even if it *is* part of your
product, you should probably publish your improvements anyway, unless
they involve incorporating something as big as the RSA patent.

If you have any pull with management, tell them the lawyers are
getting out of control here.  This should be management's strategic
decision; it is normally not that big a risk that you should delegate
the decision to the lawyers.  (And if it is, management will be able
to see that immediately.)

 > > and under GPL, we may be force to release that code to the
 > > public.

The GPL *never* requires a direct release *to the public* or to any
third party (eg, the owner of the copyright).  It *may* require
licensing under the GPL to people (customers but not employees, maybe
contractors) you give copies of your the code (see Russel Winder's
post for some of the caveats involved).  Whether that itself is a
worry, or involves worries about an indirect release "to the public"
is something you and your lawyers need to decide.  Some customers are
quite trustworthy (because distributing your code would involve a
strategic threat to themselves).

 > I'll note that Bazaar has a pretty good plugin system, which allows a
 > lot of customization without actually modifying the core of bzr.

Please be careful.  Richard Stallman has a pretty good lawyer, and
that lawyer says plugins that call code used under GPL must themselves
be distributed under GPL (of course, assuming that they are
distributed at all).  Ie, you can infringe the GPL by distributing a
plugin even though you do not distribute the GPL'ed main program the
plugin plugs in to.  Note that although some good lawyers do disagree,
this is the important difference between the GPL and the LGPL, so a
huge amount of FSF policy is staked on this claim.