License Compatibility for Collective Works

I finally explain Open Source Principle # 5, which states that " licensees are free to combine open source and other software."

The word combine in this present context means to "bring together or to join." This is a common activity in the software world. We do that when we load a variety of software onto our hard disk, perhaps from different vendors , to perform useful tasks . For example, business owners often combine an accounting package to collect and store financial data with a tax package that is used at year-end to calculate the government's due based upon those financial data. Office productivity suites may include separate programs for word processing, spreadsheets, and electronic mail. These software packages may actually communicate with each other so that data need be entered only once.

Distributors of open source software often aggregate separately developed contributions onto their distribution disks as a convenience for their customers. These contributions may have been designed originally by their authors to interact with other programs in the aggregation, and the original authors or downstream aggregators may even have tested them for compatibility. Or they may be compatible simply because the contributions were designed to meet industry standards.

Computer hardware and software vendors often build turnkey systems, combining operating systems, drivers, data bases, server software, utilities, applications, and other "glue" to create comprehensive customer solutions. Such combinations, under copyright law, are collective works .

It matters not whether some of the contributions to collective works are open source and some are proprietary. No open source license can prohibit a licensee from using an open source accounting package in a collective work with a proprietary tax package, or a GPL-licensed operating system with an Apache-licensed server and an MPL-licensed browser. Users are free to select open source software based upon technical criteria without restrictions as to the uses ”or combinations of uses ”to which that software can be put.

The contributions to a collective work always retain their original copyrights and licenses. (17 U.S.C. § 103[b].) If they are open source, contributions to a collective work can be removed and reused in other collective works, subject to the terms and conditions of their original open source licenses, even without the permission of the author of the first collective work.

On the other hand, a collective work as a whole is also an original work, subject to its own copyrights and its own license. Here's a simple example outside the software field: You may copy each of the public domain poems in an anthology of Chinese poetry, but you may not copy the anthology itself without permission of its author.

So it is with software. While you may remove and reuse the original open source contributions in a collective work, you may not copy or modify the collective work itself without the permission of its owner. For example, you may remove and redistribute Linux from the Red Hat or SuSE distribution disk, but you may not simply copy and distribute those companies' entire distribution disks ”unless, as is usually the case for these open source distributors, the licenses for the distribution disks permit you to do so.

There is nothing in any open source license that would prevent someone from creating a non “open source collective work of open source software, trying thereby to collect royalties for copies of the collective work or to prevent people from making copies of the collective work as a whole. Of course, that can't affect the open source character of the individual contributions themselves ; the collective work, however ”reflecting the creative aspects of the aggregation process ”may be copyrightable and restricted.

The aggregator remains responsible for honoring the terms and conditions of the licenses to the individual contributions he or she has collected together including, if necessary, publishing the source code of those contributions and making available copies of the relevant licenses.