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August 26, 2008

There's a new type of open source licensing right that is coming out, and it's called the FLA (Fiduciary Licence Agreement). It's an adjunct to any copyright license, designed to help ensure the long-term survivability of free software projects in the Linux and open source community.

With the announcement on Aug. 21 that KDE has adopted an FLA, this notion may take on a whole new significance.

Here's how an FLA works: as free software projects grow, the successful ones attract participation from many Linux developers and other contributors. By default, each individual contributor owns the copyright in their own code, but this could be a problem down the road if there are many contributors that have worked on hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

For example, what happens if project managers want to change their whole licensing rights, but one of the contributors can no longer be contacted?

They're stuck with either keeping the current license, or removing the contributor's work from the project, and that may or may not be such a good thing either.

Developed by the Free Software Foundation Europe, the FLA is a formal assignment of copyright from individual contributors to an organization, which can then act as the legal custodian of the code.

The FLA gives the assignee the right to relicense the software as necessary for the long-term legal maintainability and protection of the software.

Furthermore, the agreement also grants the author an unlimited amount of non-exclusive licences by FSFE, which allow using and distributing the program in other projects and under other licences. This by itself is new and worth noting since it can have some drastic meaning to the word open source or "free software".

By default, the FSFE is the recipient of the relicensing rights, but they have customizable versions of the FLA available for free software projects that have their own infrastructure in place to manage these rights.

Projects that want to concentrate on technical issues can apply to use the FSFE's Fiduciary Services to manage their legal side.

If you're an individual Linux or open source developer, you might want to consider FLA. But others would probably prefer to reject it, since it may not work for everyone. In the Linux community, individual needs can vary drastically.

However, once you start taking in contributions from others - especially if those others are located in more than one legal jurisdiction - it's definitely something that you should be looking into, to help guarantee the code's long-term survival as free software.

We will cover this topic in more detail in upcoming articles similar to this one.

Source: E-Business News.

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