Constitutional affairs legal affairs

Workshop: Legal aspects of free and open source software 
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Freedom #3 to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can 
give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source 
code is a precondition for this.
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Free software is, therefore, a characteristic attached to software distribution by means of a 
license. It is, in essence, a legal phenomenon. The word "free" does not relate at all to the 
price of software, but to the rights conveyed by the license. 
This study makes a comparative analysis of the main features of the different licenses and 
aims at providing the general reader with sufficient knowledge to have a workable 
understanding of the really complex world of Free (open source) Software licensing. It does 
so from a European perspective, although the same concepts and rules can largely apply 
world-wide. 
It shows how, from a legal perspective, Free Software revolves around licenses, mainly 
operating in the copyrighted world. It puts Free Software under a light that differs from 
commonly widespread views, which see it as an oddity from a legal perspective. Instead, 
Free Software is shown to be – historically – an exception to an exception, the first 
exception being the proprietary software and the initial normality being Free Software. 
Certainly, proprietary software has "environmental" advantages – from a legal standpoint – 
because all the legislation on the legal protection of software revolves around the concept 
of “all rights restricted”, so that to sell one copy of proprietary software one does not even 
need a legal instrument, whereas to the correct working of Free Software licensing is not 
only  needed,  but  usually  must  also  be  very  complex,  detailed  and  sometimes  very  strict. 
Free Software lives in a “hostile” legal environment, but has proven to be quite resilient, 
also legally so, as Chapter 3 shows. 
If Chapter 1 provides a historical description of why in mid-'80s the Free Software concept 
had to be re-engineered after the rise and domination of proprietary software, Chapter 2 
provides the main building blocks of a legal theory of the three main genres of Free 
Software, which bring along very different legal consequences: copyleft, weak copyleft, non 
copyleft.  Copyleft is a totally new concept that uses copyright in a very creative way: 
instead of using the restrictions provided by the said legal regime to obtain monetary 
compensations in exchange for trading the corresponding permissions, copyleft uses such 
restrictions to make sure that the rights granted are not taken back by the recipients; in 
other words, what is Free remains Free. Depending on the latitude of the copyleft 
conditions, or better, on its scope, very different obligations and conditions are attached to 
software distribution, and therefore resilience to proprietarization varies greatly.  
The  European Union Public License (EUPL) is also discussed in this framework. The 
discussion is particularly fit in this chapter because of the particular nature of the EUPL, 
which is metamorphic, in a way, given its compatibility clause that implements a concept 
commonly referred to as “legal interoperability” - upon which the author remains very 
sceptical.  
Chapter 3 discusses how Free Software is a multi-dimensional space where one dimension 
is independent from all others. The discussion starts from a common mistake, that Free 
Software is a development model where the developers work independently and 
unorganized, perhaps from their garage, whereas this is just one possible occurrence of the 
many different possible conceptual models that can be useful to describe a particular 
example of Free Software development. In the same conceptual model (which considers 
the degree of sparseness, the control and governance, and the professionality of 
development) there are examples covering the whole spectrum, from hobbyists to large 
enterprises, from sparse development to very concentrated, or one-entity, development, 
and from very loosely coordinated projects to tightly managed ones. Other conceptual 
models take into consideration different characteristics, such as whether the software is 
backed by business entities or communities of individual developers, or again whether the 
software is distributed only as Free Software or there is some proprietary licensing 
                                                 
39 From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html 

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Policy Department C: Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs 
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accompanying it (e.g. in the form of dual licensing or “open core”). All of these conceptual 
models can be used to form the axes of the multi-dimensional space mentioned above. 
To this effect, the Chapter also includes a discussion of dual licensing, where pure Free 
Software distribution lives together with proprietary exploitation of the same code – and 
consolidated one-entity ownership. Another business model that is discussed is “open   
core”, which combines Free and proprietary Software, but in a totally different setting and 
without consolidation of copyright title. Another independent axis is considered, linked to 
another commonly misunderstood concept: that Free Software is all about community. 
Communities are an important part of the Free Software world, but reality is far more 
complex. 
As mentioned, Chapter 4 answers the question whether – and why – Free Software 
licensing is valid and enforceable, and also includes a more in-depth analysis of the liability 
regime that comes together with software distribution. Because of the particular conditions 
under which Free Software is distributed, the liability regime is very likely to be opposite to 
that applicable to proprietary software.  
Chapter 5 discusses how copyright is not the only legal area that is relevant to Free 
Software. Software is in a peculiar position since it has many different protections and 
interactions. The most relevant point in this discussion is the stark contradiction between 
Free Software (and software in general) and patents, and how Free Software reacts 
against patents. The Chapter also includes a short mention of a particular kind of 
standards, namely patent-ridden standards, which are at odds with Free Software, 
including some commonly referred to as “open standards” which are not open. 
Finally, Free Software is a way of distributing software. But the most outspoken buzzword 
nowadays is “Cloud”, and cloud is a form of non distribution of software. But cloud services 
as we know them would be virtually impossible, quite ironically, without Free Software. A 
short discussion of how this is relevant and what Free Software has conceived to face the 
hurdles will also be included. 
 
1.
 
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
 
Free Software, or “open source software”,
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 dates back to the early days of computer 
science, although only relatively recently it has become a subject of public discussion as 
such. 
At the beginning of the computer industry, there was no point in defining “Free Software” 
at all, because software was not a separate subject from the hardware where it ran. Much 
of the programming was specifically written for the few computers that existed.
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 The main 
sectors where software was made were essentially three: military, university, hardware 
manufacturing. 
Military did not distribute software at all. Software distribution occurred only in the 
hardware manufacturing industry, but only in the form of installed software as an accessory 
of the “real” computer, and in university. 
1.1 
The Academic licenses were the first form of Free Software 
The first forms of Free Software can be found precisely in university. Academic software 
was originally distributed under (implied or express) conditions that allowed redistribution 
and modification. The most important of these conditions was to provide an attribution of 
                                                 
40 “Free Software” and “open source software” are two wordings that move from different premises, but for all 
practical purposes they can be considered synonyms and they are to be read in this work as strict synonyms. 
Please note that Free Software, as well as the term “Free” as in “Free speech” are written capitalized  in this paper 
as a defined term, so that possible confusions with the homonym “free” which means “at no cost, gratis” are 
avoided. 
41 For the quite famous quote of the IBM chairman "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers", 
although there is no direct evidence that it was ever uttered, see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquote
  

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