Quick FOSS legal literacy quiz
Imagine the following situation: someone takes your whole project and white-labels it (changes the name), then sells it commercially without providing the source code or sharing any of the sales revenue with you.
Your project uses the MIT license. Is this allowed?
Follow-up question.
You wrote a library in Rust and uploaded it to Cargo using the GPL license. Someone grabs it via cargo and uses it in their own project, which uses the MIT license.
Is this allowed?
A proprietary, commercial video editor includes a modified version of libav in their software. Upon request, they provide a copy of their modified version of libav and instructions on modifying their software to use a customized version of libav.
libav uses the LGPL license. Is this allowed?
Your project uses the MIT license. Someone who is upset at the way the project is being run starts a fork. They use the same name as your original project and claim to be the authoritative source for thew software. They change the license to GPL so that you "can't steal their code", but leave a copy of the MIT license in the repository with your copyright notice intact.
You do not have a trademark on the project name.
Is this allowed?
You're a web developer. You use "npm install" to install 500 or so dependencies from npm, then use webpack to combine all of the modules into one minified javascript bundle.
Are you compliant with the software licenses of your dependencies in any way whatsoever?
Bonus round:
You're a cloud services provider and you make a commercial cloud offering based on MongoDB. You release the source code for your cloud dashboard and any modifications to MongoDB, also using the SSPL.
Are you in compliance with the SSPL?
Answer
No; it is virtually impossible to comply with the SSPL by design.
Answer
@drewdevault I don’t disagree that is arguable semantically, but do you personally believe it would hold up legally?
@glacials @drewdevault Yeah, I suspect that *in practice*, if a company released:
1. The modified work,
2. Source and config for all custom supporting infrastructure, under the SSPL, and
3. A _listing_ of all of the relevant surrounding infrastructure, all of which is also open source and freely available,
...then the licensor would have a very hard time convincing a court that a violation had taken place.
I personally wouldn't take that chance, but I personally am also not a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Indeed the SSPL say explicitly "all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available"
You wouldn't need to release unmodified GPL code under SSPL just because you use it to provide a SSPL software as a service as long you release under such license all the code you write.
A license cannot request you to violate the copyright of third parties, so such interpretation would be bongus in court.
To be honest, I can't see any compliance issue.
You can use #MongoDB under the #SSPL, but in practice you cannot have an edge over your competitors by doing so, as they will benefit of any innovation you create to make the service more useful, easy to manage or integrate and so on.
Probably this means that you cannot drive profit from such a business, but it's not technically impossible to use it this way, just anti-economic for a cloud company.
But "anti-economic for a cloud company" is quite different from "impossible".
