Constitutional affairs legal affairs

Workshop: Legal aspects of free and open source software 
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and uses a trademark to identify its software products, under more or less strict trademark 
policy, sometimes not even expressly fleshed out. Since the same Free Software product is 
very likely taken and modified, even substantially, by third parties, this can lead to 
confusion and can even have consequences on the validity of the registered trademark. 
For this reason, some entities have implemented very strict policies. For instance, the 
Mozilla Foundation requires that the name “Firefox” can be kept to identify only those 
versions  of  the  software  that  have  been  compiled and packeted by it, regardless of who 
distributes them. Therefore, if someone takes the source code of Firefox and recompiles it, 
even without modifying the source code, they cannot call the resulting product “Firefox”, 
but they must use a different name. In fact, since the Debian Linux distribution repackages 
it as a part of its quality assurance process, the version distributed with  Debian  is  called 
“Iceweasel”.  
Another notable example is Red Hat. Red Hat manages one of the most widely adopted 
Linux distributions. Because of its stability and quality, it is a certified target distribution for 
enterprise-level software applications. Since it is entirely Free Software, there are perfectly 
legitimate “clone” distributions, distributions that use the same codebase as Red Hat with 
small additions and changes (CentOS and Oracle's Unbreakable Linux are the most famous 
examples) so that they are almost entirely compatible with Red Hat and can easily become 
certified, in case. Contrary, or in addition, to the use case of Firefox, where restrictions on 
the use of the trademark are mainly due to quality assurance and control over the 
trademark, Red Hat uses the trademark as a business tool for selling services, which can 
only be used by those who deploy the Red Hat distribution. 
Tight control of trademark is not incompatible with Free Software, rather the opposite. 
Since trademark law has “fair use” concepts, use of the originator's trademark is generally 
permitted to indicate provenance of the code, if other requirements of fair use of trademark 
are complied with. This includes the permission to reference the trademarked software to 
indicate that the other software is a derivative of it, a reimplementation, a drop-in 
replacement, a compatible alternative,  etc.  As  we  have  seen with a notable example, 
trademark is one way to monetize software development and quality assurance in a 100% 
Free Software distribution model. 
5.3 Database 
rights 
Database rights are sui generis rights (rights of their own kind) granted to a collector of a 
set of data when relevant investment has been put into creating the database. They do not 
relate to the copyright of the content of the database, or to the peculiar way the database 
is construed. Finally, they do not relate to the database software that can host a database, 
which is a software application like all others. 
There is no particular interaction between database rights and software. It might happen 
that a software distribution contains databases, but it is very hard to find relevant cases in 
the licensing of Free Software, especially if the database – even if it is required – can be 
replaced with an empty or meaningless one (so called “dummy” database). An example can 
be content management software which comes with a database of configurations. In this 
case it is not a database as such, but just a set of configurations that have no meaningful 
purpose outside the application itself. In any event, as mentioned earlier, since this is an 
integrated part of the application, the database rights can safely be considered under the 
same license as the whole application, unless specific provisions in the licensing language 
carve the database out of the license grant. 
 
6.
 
THE CLOUD 
For the purposes of this discussion, “Cloud” refers mainly to Software as a Service (SaaS), 
which is the farthest end of the different kinds of cloud computing. SaaS subverts the 
traditional way of distributing software. Leaving aside the technical implications, for the 
sake of this discussion SaaS delivers the same useful effects of software not by distributing 
code – be it in object, source code or other forms – but by providing remote access to 

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Policy Department C: Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs 
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interfaces and services of software executed on servers that are run by third parties, or 
service providers. 
If the relationship between a software maker and a software user is a license (express or 
implied) under copyright, the relationship between the software service provider and the 
user is a service contract and the performance of this contract is measured in service levels 
and availability. There is no exchange of code and there is no direct relationship, or rights, 
of the end user on the code. There are also no statutory protections granted by software 
legislation (such as the right to make backup copies or to study how the software works or 
to decompile it), to date.  
Free software is widely used to power many cloud services,
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 yet customers of these 
services cannot benefit from the Freedom that they would benefit from if they used 
software directly. They certainly have no rights to demand to receive the source code, 
which is the foundation of most of the Freedoms of Free Software, because SaaS is not a 
distribution of software, while copyleft is triggered by distributing modified copies of the 
software. 
6.1 
A different license, The Affero GPL, or the AGPL 
To close the gap, which at the time was referred to as “the ASP loophole” (“the Cloud” was 
not yet a buzzword), Bradley Kuhn, a developer and Free Software activist, devised an 
addition to the GPL, that was christened “Affero clause”, in cooperation with at-the-time 
counsel to FSF Eben Moglen.
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In the Affero clause, the copyleft effect is not triggered by distribution, but relies on the 
right to control modifications. Therefore, anytime software is modified, even if the code is 
not distributed, but it is consumed through a network interface, there must be a convenient 
facility where the corresponding source code is included. 
The Affero GPL, initially being just an “unauthorized” variant of the GPL v2, is now an 
officially recognized license of the Free Software Foundation and goes under the name of 
GNU  AGPL  v.3.  AGPL  v.3  is  made  compatible with the GPL v.3 through an express 
compatibility clause. 
 
 
 
                                                 
76  Google is a notable example: for references see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform
. But Twitter, 
Amazon, Facebook, Rackspace etcetera all are based on FOSS technologies, which in several cases they make and 
distribute as Free Software. 
77  References available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License 

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