Difference between revisions of "Licensing"

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(Moving this to a separate page, minor update)
 
(was already working on a licensing page. I'll just dump what I had.)
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[[Source code]] is copyrightable, which means a programmer owns the code they write. How they aim to publish it is up to them, and many licenses assist in this process.<!--
  
Software is copyrightable, but the source code can be made available to users however the author chooses. A copyright license is a legal document that tells people how the software can be used and what limitations come with using it.
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A copyright license is a legal document that tells people how the software can be used and what limitations come with using it.-->
  
The more successful emulation projects are often open source (though you definitely will find exceptions).
+
==Intellectual property law==
 +
Explaining all of this requires an understanding of the fundamentals. Intellectual property is a mouthful, but it refers to the ownership of things by nature of originality. There are three big fields of intellectual property law; copyright, patents, and trademarks, and are all used for different things.
  
==Public domain==
+
;Patents:System design and inventions. An author designs a system (an invention), and then describes it in detail for others to implement. This is usually something you register at an agency (such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office if you live in the United States).
There is no copyright (i.e. No Rights Reserved). Works enter the public domain when they:
+
;Trademarks:Names and brands. An author comes up with a name that identifies their products, and ensures that nobody else in the same industry can use it. This is usually something you register at an agency (such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office if you live in the United States).
:# were released before the current copyright expiry date. This is why old paintings, plays, and books are so commonly quoted and used in modern works, because they'd have to negotiate the rights with the author otherwise. Most software is not released this way because it is still covered by the current American copyright term.
+
;Copyright:Creative works. An author creates a work (sometimes called a work of art but that's misleading because it assumes everything that can be copyrighted is art), and then licenses this work to others for reproduction. Is designed to be granted as soon as the work is created, unlike the other two.
:# are dedicated through a license like Creative Commons Zero or the Unlicense. This is the only option for modern works to be released into the public domain because, per the Berne Convention, copyright is seen as opt-out, not opt-in. If a public domain dedication can't be made (probably because the jurisdiction doesn't recognize the public domain), then the license grants users the equivalent freedoms.
 
  
==Open-source==
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===Legal entities===
The program is released under a copyright license that permits four freedoms: that it can be run at any time, studied and modified for the user's own purposes, distributed to anyone, and improved for everyone else. This bypasses most of the issues encountered with public domain works. For anything else copyrightable, the term "open content" often applies.
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The owner of intellectual property doesn't have to be a person; if an employee does any kind of IP-related work for a company, then the company may retain control of it depending on the terms they've set up with said employee through contracts. That contract may also contain clauses preventing the employee from speaking publicly about the work that goes on inside, since trade secrets are considered valuable. This is often called a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
  
Common open-source licenses:
+
===Public domain===
*'''GNU GPL''' - This is a copyleft license, everybody has the freedom to do whatever they like with the software (even selling it), the only caveat is: if you make changes, you have to publish the modified source code upon request.
+
Based on the original design of copyright, we know that the time that a work stays protected is supposed to be finite; that is, it should expire. This is because the protection originally lasted fourteen years from the date of a work's creation when it was originally conceived in the commonwealth, as a way to incentivize further creation of works. But because long-running companies want to continue profiting off of old work, they set precedents in modern law that extend this time to as long as '''one hundred years'''. In many western countries, companies have a love-hate relationship with the public domain, wilfully using works that are in it while preventing their transformations from being misused.
*'''MIT/BSD/Apache 2.0''' - These three are basically the same and similar to ''Public Domain'', you have complete freedom and can do whatever you like with the software. The difference between this and ''GPL'' is that these are not copyleft: you can fork a project and turn it closed-source, you don't have to publish the source code changes.
 
  
It's worth noting that open-source does not replace copyright. And likewise, the license cannot be removed after the work has been released under it. To see the various open-source licenses available, see [https://choosealicense.com/ choosealicense.com]. Also see [https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ the appendix] at the same website.
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==Legality of emulation==
 +
As a result of two landmark cases in the United States in the early 2000s, it is considered legal to emulate any system. More specifically, the ruling was meant to allow commercial emulators to profit, something Sony didn't like the sound of; it's possible that if Bleem and Connectix hadn't developed commercial emulators, they wouldn't have been sued.
  
==Source-available==
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==Free and open-source software==
The program is released under a copyright license more restrictive than an open-source license, but the source code is still publically available. The biggest example is [[Snes9x]], which is released under a non-commercial license. This license makes it not open-source, as it restricts the users' commercial use.
+
The fundamental concept of free and open source software is an inversion of the regular practice of software developers selling binary code to consumers and businesses. The [[source code]] that goes into developing commercial software isn't open to the public because releasing it would give others a competitive advantage and allow unauthorized ports. This is what is known as proprietary software, named such because it often has a proprietor (i.e. an owner). With free and open source software however, the source is open (hence the term open source) and available to others to use, study, modify, and share, to ensure that a user always has access to these tools. The Linux kernel is at the forefront of the movement, as it is the most active open-source project. (It's not the most widely-recognized, however; that would be Android and VLC Media Player.)
  
==Closed-source / Proprietary==
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The benefit of software being open is that they're easier to port to other platforms by virtue of being open (though that says nothing about the effort required to get it working without bugs). Many of the [[Recommended Emulators|best emulators]] use an open source license, though not all of them do.
The program's source code isn't available. Often because the ecosystem behind the platform is closed, sometimes by nature (like Windows and Android), or sometimes by force (like every modern console).
 
  
===Freeware===
+
===Definition===
The source code isn't available but the program is still free.
+
The meaning of open-source is usually lost on those who aren't familiar with it, but institutes and organizations have defined what it means for clarity's sake. Essentially, a program is considered open-source (or if you're a GNU advocate, free software) when it grants the four freedoms, that it can be:
  
===Shareware / Trialware===
+
# run at any time.
A limited demo version of the program is free. This was common for [[Intel CPUs|DOS]] games.
+
# studied and modified for any purpose.
 +
# distributed to anyone, and
 +
# improved by anyone.
 +
 
 +
There's also copyleft, which is a play on copyright that inverts its goal of consolidating ownership to one entity and preventing others from having it, by ensuring that the ownership is largely in the public and no one can't have it. The copyleft strength of a license depends on how strict it is about keeping things open; weaker copyleft licenses require attribution but not much else, while stronger ones require the source to be available by any means necessary. The GPL is an example of a strong copyleft license; the BSD and MIT licenses are examples of a weak one, which makes it a frequent point of contention in the community which is better. Essentially, it's the difference between Creative Commons' Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike license. One is the all familiar royalty-free license used by renowned composer Kevin MacLeod, the other is one of two licenses used by Wikipedia (they dual-license it under the <abbr title="GNU Free Documentation License">GFDL</abbr> too).
 +
 
 +
===GPL===
 +
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or just GPL) is one of the most popular open-source licenses in the free software community, and for good reason; it's remained one of the strongest copyleft licenses, requiring users to share their contributions (some might say to an insane degree).
 +
 
 +
The GPL has two widespread versions; version 2, written in 1991, and version 3, written in 2007. No one talks about version 1 (1989). The GPL3 was meant to reconcile license compatibility, address software patents, license violations, nullifying DRM by calling it an ineffective technological measure, and the big one; [[wikipedia:Tivoization|Tivoization]], which was a severe flaw they completely missed when drafting the first two versions that allowed Tivo to make use of GPL2 software by sharing its code while preventing unsigned firmware from being loaded on the hardware. The GPL3 prohibits this, which proved to have major problems when Hyperkin tried to incorporate the GPL3-licensed [[RetroArch]] in the [[Retron5]] (among other violations).
 +
 
 +
====LGPL and AGPL====
 +
The GPL is not the only license that the Free Software Foundation created; because the GPL2 ended up being overly restrictive in how software could work with it, many open-source libraries needed a less strict license to allow interoperability with commercial software.
 +
 
 +
This ended up being solved in two ways; the linking exception found in GNU Classpath's GPL2 license allowed it to not affect the software it would be bundled in, and the Lesser GPL, which is an entire license that was made to make this aspect clearer rather than be an exception.
 +
 
 +
The GPL also doesn't account for software used exclusively for consumer-facing servers, so the Affero GPL was made to require web app developers to share the source code of their app to users over the network.
 +
 
 +
===BSD===
 +
The history of Unix is comprehensive but, to make a long story short, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) was basically one of the many flavors of Unix that was very simple and permissive in how it was licensed. Ever since then, descendants like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD have been licensed under a variation of it. The ISC and MIT licenses are based on its philosophy which makes them very compatible.
 +
 
 +
The original license had four conditions:
 +
 
 +
# Redistributions of the source code must retain the copyright notice.
 +
# Redistributions of the binary code must be able to show the copyright notice.
 +
# Advertisements surrounding the use of the code must have this line: "This product includes software developed by (organization)."
 +
# Do not claim the original developers endorse the use of the software without permission.
 +
 
 +
The third clause (about advertising) ended up being controversial and was left out of newer licenses, resulting in the familiar three-clause BSD license. FreeBSD and NetBSD removed the fourth clause as basically no one violated that clause, and OpenBSD used a version of the license that details the first two clauses in one paragraph instead of listing them in asterisked bullets. The fact that the licenses are so permissive allowed Sony and Nintendo to use FreeBSD in the PS3, the PS4, and the Switch without having to share the source code.
 +
 
 +
The conditions in the BSD license are easy to modify, which makes it an attractive target for those wanting to include the prohibition of commercial use. [https://github.com/mamedev/historic-mame/blob/master/docs/license.txt The old MAME license] (and by extension [https://github.com/barry65536/FBAlpha/blob/master/src/license.txt FinalBurn Alpha] and [https://github.com/finalburnneo/FBNeo/blob/master/src/license.txt FinalBurn Neo]) is based off of (or was heavily influenced by) this license, which ended up causing a ton of problems in recent times, notably when a libretro port of MAME tried to backport GPL code into old-licensed code, and when the Capcom Home Arcade [[Emulation Boxes|emulation box]] was said to use FinalBurn Alpha ahead of its release (despite its creators not getting permission from all of FBA's developers).
 +
 
 +
===Apache===
 +
The Apache 2.0 license differs from both the BSD and GPL licenses in that:
 +
 
 +
* It's not as permissive as the BSD because it still requires companies to state any changes they made.
 +
* It's not as strict as the GPL because it also prohibits trademark use.
 +
 
 +
==CLA (Contributor License Agreement)==
 +
Some projects use a Contributor License Agreement, which contributors have to sign before getting their work merged upstream. The sole intention of a CLA is to consolidate control of a project to one entity (which, as stated earlier, can be a person or a company). This can be useful if one wants to relicense the project retroactively when there are potential conflicts, but it's also a very easy way to prevent future versions of the code from being available (two projects in the Dreamcast scene encountered controversy with this approach).
 +
 
 +
===Dual licensing===
 +
CLAs allows emulators (and pretty much any work, even things that aren't [[source code]]) to be licensed under multiple licenses. Most often, the point of doing this is to allow a revenue stream that funds development of software and allows the primary developer to sell the software (or monetize it in some other way) without having to share the code (provided they pay a fee). At least, that's the most common use; one other is to allow the software developer to use the code in their own commercial projects. <!-- todo: gpl2+
 +
 
 +
==Problems==
 +
todo: explain problems with copyright, license problems, and law trolls illegally registering trademarks and tormenting related projects.
 +
 
 +
==FAQs==
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todo: answer questions like "can a license be revoked after it has been put in place?" and "is it possible to sell open-source software?"
 +
-->
 +
[[Category:FAQs]]

Revision as of 10:20, 9 July 2019

Source code is copyrightable, which means a programmer owns the code they write. How they aim to publish it is up to them, and many licenses assist in this process.

Intellectual property law

Explaining all of this requires an understanding of the fundamentals. Intellectual property is a mouthful, but it refers to the ownership of things by nature of originality. There are three big fields of intellectual property law; copyright, patents, and trademarks, and are all used for different things.

Patents
System design and inventions. An author designs a system (an invention), and then describes it in detail for others to implement. This is usually something you register at an agency (such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office if you live in the United States).
Trademarks
Names and brands. An author comes up with a name that identifies their products, and ensures that nobody else in the same industry can use it. This is usually something you register at an agency (such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office if you live in the United States).
Copyright
Creative works. An author creates a work (sometimes called a work of art but that's misleading because it assumes everything that can be copyrighted is art), and then licenses this work to others for reproduction. Is designed to be granted as soon as the work is created, unlike the other two.

Legal entities

The owner of intellectual property doesn't have to be a person; if an employee does any kind of IP-related work for a company, then the company may retain control of it depending on the terms they've set up with said employee through contracts. That contract may also contain clauses preventing the employee from speaking publicly about the work that goes on inside, since trade secrets are considered valuable. This is often called a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

Public domain

Based on the original design of copyright, we know that the time that a work stays protected is supposed to be finite; that is, it should expire. This is because the protection originally lasted fourteen years from the date of a work's creation when it was originally conceived in the commonwealth, as a way to incentivize further creation of works. But because long-running companies want to continue profiting off of old work, they set precedents in modern law that extend this time to as long as one hundred years. In many western countries, companies have a love-hate relationship with the public domain, wilfully using works that are in it while preventing their transformations from being misused.

Legality of emulation

As a result of two landmark cases in the United States in the early 2000s, it is considered legal to emulate any system. More specifically, the ruling was meant to allow commercial emulators to profit, something Sony didn't like the sound of; it's possible that if Bleem and Connectix hadn't developed commercial emulators, they wouldn't have been sued.

Free and open-source software

The fundamental concept of free and open source software is an inversion of the regular practice of software developers selling binary code to consumers and businesses. The source code that goes into developing commercial software isn't open to the public because releasing it would give others a competitive advantage and allow unauthorized ports. This is what is known as proprietary software, named such because it often has a proprietor (i.e. an owner). With free and open source software however, the source is open (hence the term open source) and available to others to use, study, modify, and share, to ensure that a user always has access to these tools. The Linux kernel is at the forefront of the movement, as it is the most active open-source project. (It's not the most widely-recognized, however; that would be Android and VLC Media Player.)

The benefit of software being open is that they're easier to port to other platforms by virtue of being open (though that says nothing about the effort required to get it working without bugs). Many of the best emulators use an open source license, though not all of them do.

Definition

The meaning of open-source is usually lost on those who aren't familiar with it, but institutes and organizations have defined what it means for clarity's sake. Essentially, a program is considered open-source (or if you're a GNU advocate, free software) when it grants the four freedoms, that it can be:

  1. run at any time.
  2. studied and modified for any purpose.
  3. distributed to anyone, and
  4. improved by anyone.

There's also copyleft, which is a play on copyright that inverts its goal of consolidating ownership to one entity and preventing others from having it, by ensuring that the ownership is largely in the public and no one can't have it. The copyleft strength of a license depends on how strict it is about keeping things open; weaker copyleft licenses require attribution but not much else, while stronger ones require the source to be available by any means necessary. The GPL is an example of a strong copyleft license; the BSD and MIT licenses are examples of a weak one, which makes it a frequent point of contention in the community which is better. Essentially, it's the difference between Creative Commons' Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike license. One is the all familiar royalty-free license used by renowned composer Kevin MacLeod, the other is one of two licenses used by Wikipedia (they dual-license it under the GFDL too).

GPL

The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or just GPL) is one of the most popular open-source licenses in the free software community, and for good reason; it's remained one of the strongest copyleft licenses, requiring users to share their contributions (some might say to an insane degree).

The GPL has two widespread versions; version 2, written in 1991, and version 3, written in 2007. No one talks about version 1 (1989). The GPL3 was meant to reconcile license compatibility, address software patents, license violations, nullifying DRM by calling it an ineffective technological measure, and the big one; Tivoization, which was a severe flaw they completely missed when drafting the first two versions that allowed Tivo to make use of GPL2 software by sharing its code while preventing unsigned firmware from being loaded on the hardware. The GPL3 prohibits this, which proved to have major problems when Hyperkin tried to incorporate the GPL3-licensed RetroArch in the Retron5 (among other violations).

LGPL and AGPL

The GPL is not the only license that the Free Software Foundation created; because the GPL2 ended up being overly restrictive in how software could work with it, many open-source libraries needed a less strict license to allow interoperability with commercial software.

This ended up being solved in two ways; the linking exception found in GNU Classpath's GPL2 license allowed it to not affect the software it would be bundled in, and the Lesser GPL, which is an entire license that was made to make this aspect clearer rather than be an exception.

The GPL also doesn't account for software used exclusively for consumer-facing servers, so the Affero GPL was made to require web app developers to share the source code of their app to users over the network.

BSD

The history of Unix is comprehensive but, to make a long story short, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) was basically one of the many flavors of Unix that was very simple and permissive in how it was licensed. Ever since then, descendants like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD have been licensed under a variation of it. The ISC and MIT licenses are based on its philosophy which makes them very compatible.

The original license had four conditions:

  1. Redistributions of the source code must retain the copyright notice.
  2. Redistributions of the binary code must be able to show the copyright notice.
  3. Advertisements surrounding the use of the code must have this line: "This product includes software developed by (organization)."
  4. Do not claim the original developers endorse the use of the software without permission.

The third clause (about advertising) ended up being controversial and was left out of newer licenses, resulting in the familiar three-clause BSD license. FreeBSD and NetBSD removed the fourth clause as basically no one violated that clause, and OpenBSD used a version of the license that details the first two clauses in one paragraph instead of listing them in asterisked bullets. The fact that the licenses are so permissive allowed Sony and Nintendo to use FreeBSD in the PS3, the PS4, and the Switch without having to share the source code.

The conditions in the BSD license are easy to modify, which makes it an attractive target for those wanting to include the prohibition of commercial use. The old MAME license (and by extension FinalBurn Alpha and FinalBurn Neo) is based off of (or was heavily influenced by) this license, which ended up causing a ton of problems in recent times, notably when a libretro port of MAME tried to backport GPL code into old-licensed code, and when the Capcom Home Arcade emulation box was said to use FinalBurn Alpha ahead of its release (despite its creators not getting permission from all of FBA's developers).

Apache

The Apache 2.0 license differs from both the BSD and GPL licenses in that:

  • It's not as permissive as the BSD because it still requires companies to state any changes they made.
  • It's not as strict as the GPL because it also prohibits trademark use.

CLA (Contributor License Agreement)

Some projects use a Contributor License Agreement, which contributors have to sign before getting their work merged upstream. The sole intention of a CLA is to consolidate control of a project to one entity (which, as stated earlier, can be a person or a company). This can be useful if one wants to relicense the project retroactively when there are potential conflicts, but it's also a very easy way to prevent future versions of the code from being available (two projects in the Dreamcast scene encountered controversy with this approach).

Dual licensing

CLAs allows emulators (and pretty much any work, even things that aren't source code) to be licensed under multiple licenses. Most often, the point of doing this is to allow a revenue stream that funds development of software and allows the primary developer to sell the software (or monetize it in some other way) without having to share the code (provided they pay a fee). At least, that's the most common use; one other is to allow the software developer to use the code in their own commercial projects.