FSFE releases solution to increase legal strength of Free Software projects
FSFE releasing the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL) and the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-alike (CC by-sa) licence.
The Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) is a copyright assignment carefully crafted for the specific needs of Free Software projects to bundle their copyright in a single organisation or person. This will enable projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to relicense and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court.
The FLA is a truly international copyright assignment working in both copyright traditions that was written by Dr. Axel Metzger (ifrOSS) and Georg Greve (FSFE) in consultation with renowned international legal and technical experts. The latest revision was compiled by Georg Greve and FSFE's FTF coordinator Shane M Coughlan based on feedback provided by Dr. Lucie Guibault of the Institute for Information Law in the Netherlands.
"The FLA has been carefully formulated to meet the legal requirements of every country and it ensures that assignment or licence granted has the same scope irrespective of the country in which it is signed," says Dr. Lucie Guibault. "This marks a clear step forward in copyright assignment and offers real benefit to the Free Software community."
There are two ways the FLA would be used: A project can apply to be accepted into FSFE's Fiduciary Program, examples for this are Bacula.org and OpenSwarm. This has the advantage that the work of handling the legal issues and taking care of licence compliance will be done by FSFE's Freedom Task Force and its large team of technical and legal experts. This allows the project to focus on project management and technical work.
The other usage would be to use the FLA and adapt it to assign the rights to another organisation set up by the project team itself. This organisation would then have to take care of the paperwork and licence compliance work itself, but it would still benefit from the solidity of the FLA for the gathering of rights and FSFE's Freedom Task Force will be glad to provide insight and experience to such organisations.
"For us the most important issue is not whether projects assign their copyright to FSFE or any other organisation. We just want to do our part so projects do not neglect these issues," explains Georg Greve, president of the FSFE. "Legal maintainability is a key issue for Free Software adoption. We started the Freedom Task Force to help ensure legal maintainability in practice as well as spread knowledge about these issues. Our idea for a healthy Free Software eco-system is to have a healthy and heterogenous infrastructure of organisations that will cooperate with each other to support Free Software in this way."
Shane Coughan, coordinator of the Freedom Task Force adds: "Deciding which approach is best for a project depends on many different factors and always boils down to individual circumstances. Ideally, organisations handling these issues should be non-profit and have a clear primary focus on Free Software."
"When building such an organisation, it is also important that people pay attention to the possibility of having to withstand organisational attacks from the outside as well as legal battles in court. Not all Free Software projects will want to adopt such hardened structures, which might contradict their technical and project management principles and structures," Mr Coughlan continues. "In that case, the FLA allows FSFE to help safeguard the project in the legal sphere, while maintaining the project's absolute independence in management and project decisions."
Whichever way projects prefer, the Free Software Foundation Europe and its Freedom Task Force will be happy to help projects adopt the Fiduciary Licence Agreement.
About the Free Software Foundation Europe:
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is a non-profit non-governmental organisation active in many European countries and involved in many global activities. Access to software determines participation in a digital society. To secure equal participation in the information age, as well as freedom of competition, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) pursues and is dedicated to the furthering of Free Software, defined by the freedoms to use, study, modify and copy. Founded in 2001, creating awareness for these issues, securing Free Software politically and legally, and giving people Freedom by supporting development of Free Software are central issues of the FSFE.