0x5C: Basic FLOSS Concepts: Licensing 101

Bradley and Karen give a basic introduction of copyright licensing of Open Source and Free Software. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:35) Bradley mentioned the phrase “fixed in a tangible medium” which appears in the USA copyright law. (03:10) Bradley mentioned the Sherman Antitrust act. (04:05) Bradley mentioned the card game Pit (04:15) Bradley jokingly quoted Mit Romney's famous gaffe, “Corporations are people, my friend.” (04:44) Bradley read Title 17, the USA Copyright act many times. (06:50) Bradley mentioned the court case, UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. v. Berkeley Software Design, Inc., which resulted in releasing the parts of BSD that could be Free Software. (12:27) Bradley mentioned the FSF's Free Software Definition (13:11) Bradley mentioned OSI's Open Source Definition (13:16) Apparently, the problem of categorization is called Categorization in Philosophy. (14:30) The issue of Open Source not being trademarked is discussed in this essay by Richard Stallman. (15:44) The basic categorizations of types of FLOSS licenses are copyleft and non-copyleft. Karen suggests reading GPLv2 and GPLv3. (39:31) Bradley made a crude drawing of the spectrum of licenses. (40:20) Bradley mentioned the The Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement (55:40) Send feedback and comments on the cast to <[email protected]>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).