License classification for fraunhofer-fdk-aac-codec

[LeChasseur]

The classification as "Copyleft Limited" for fraunhofer-fdk-aac-codec seems wrong for two reasons:

1. It is not an open source license since it explicitly excludes a patent license ("3. NO PATENT LICENSE", "Patent licenses for necessary patent claims for the FDK AAC Codec (including those of Fraunhofer)
   may be obtained through Via Licensing (www.vialicensing.com) or through the respective patent owners
   individually for the purpose of encoding or decoding bit streams in products that are compliant with
   the ISO/IEC MPEG audio standards."

2. There is no limitation for the requirement to provide the source code of modified versions, in particular the copyleft is not restricted to libraries ("You must make available free of charge copies of the complete source code of the FDK AAC Codec and your modifications thereto to recipients of copies in binary form." - "modification" could be interpreted as in GPL-3.0).

I suggest to classify the license as "Proprietary" (which seems to be called "commercial" - which is misleading since all FOSS can be commercially used)

[pombredanne]

@LeChasseur Hi! thank you++ for chiming in
A proprietary-related category most likely makes sense here alright. @DennisClark what's your take? @LeChasseur is quite the expert there. Also it would be worth reviewing existing categories so they are better documented IMHO.

Then I think that Commercial is for something that would require some signed contract and payment of sorts. But I am not entirely clear about the differences between a Free Restricted and a Proprietary Free categories.

Now here are all the categories we have today with some examples:

Free and open source licenses:

These are likely fairly clear:

• Copyleft such as gpl-2.0 or ``agpl-3.0`
• Copyleft Limited such as lgpl-2.1 or mpl-2.0
• Permissive such as bsd-new, mit, apache-2.0

Non open source licenses:

These categories are not super clear/well defined to me and may need some refinement?

• Commercial such as a commercial-only license https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/develop/src/licensedcode/data/licenses/sencha-commercial-3.9.LICENSE
• Free Restricted such as https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/develop/src/licensedcode/data/licenses/naughter.LICENSE
• Proprietary Free such as the old "Sun BCL(s)" https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/develop/src/licensedcode/data/licenses/sun-bcl-j2re-5.0.LICENSE

(The bare Proprietary Category is used only by two licenses and is a typo of mine.)

Miscellaneous:

• Public Domain such as a simple public-domain dedication
• Unstated License such as unknown, unknown-license-reference etc
• Patent License as for some rare patent-only licenses from Google or Facebook https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/develop/src/licensedcode/data/licenses/google-patent-license.LICENSE or https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/develop/src/licensedcode/data/licenses/ms-patent-promise.LICENSE

[LeChasseur]

I agree to the following categories:

1. Free and open source licenses:

   • Copyleft such as gpl-2.0 or ``agpl-3.0`
   • Copyleft Limited such as lgpl-2.1 or mpl-2.0
   • Permissive such as bsd-new, mit, apache-2.0

2. Proprietary licenses:

• Proprietary Free, i.e. no license fee is required but rights are restricted (or the Free Software Defintion and Open Source Definition isn't met for other reasons
• Proprietary fee-based, i.e. license fees are required

However "commercial" is not a criterion of differentiation since the term is unclear and FOSS can be sold too. I know that some companies offering software under a dual licensing model (i.e. proprietary and FOSS) are using the term to classify a proprietary license but this term misleading (one copies from the other).

3. Other/Miscellaneous

   • Public Domain such as a simple public-domain dedication makes sense to me. However, it would be helpful to distinguish cases in which the author has dedicated the work to the public domain and other cases in which a program is public domain because it is a govermental work . The reason is that govermental works might be copyright protected in other countries

   • Unstated License such as unknown, unknown-license-reference etc is ok

I think that the category Patent License is difficult and might be misleading. If there is no free copyright license the license is just proprietary. Marking that a license has explicit patent language would be helpful, though.

The classification by ifrOSS might be of interest:
https://github.com/LeChasseur/ifrOSS/blob/master/Lizenzcenter.md

[DennisClark]

I think it makes sense to merge the Free Restricted licenses into just plain Proprietary.

I think it is important to note that what is really meant by Commercial is Contractual (or Contract Required) meaning that the software requires a specific agreement between both parties. Perhaps that Category could be renamed to Contractual and I think it is a distinction worth retaining.

And I still like Proprietary Free (or Free Proprietary) as an indication that yes, you can use the software for free (at least initially, and under certain circumstances) even though one day you might need to get a commercial (contractual) license agreement to do what you really need to do with the software.

[pombredanne]

Actually let me reopen this... this seems this was auto closed. But we have not finished the discussion on categories

[pombredanne]

@LeChasseur @DennisClark are we done on the categories and are we good with the status quo? or not?