A short trip to the East Coast over the last few days provided an enforced opportunity (ten hours of flight time) to catch up on self-assigned reading. One area of interest, due to a current project, is the ins-and-outs of open source software licensing in the context of building a system that will be partially open and partially proprietary. There have been enough alarmist horror stories circulated by partisans on both sides (Viral! Unconstitutional! Free-riders! Corporate media stooges!) to have me believe this was a time to avoid the blogs and look for a text, Yup, a good ol' fashioned squashed tree book.
To that end, two tomes were amazon'ed and accompanied me on pilgrimage to the land of humidity:
Lawrence Rosen's Open Source Licensing : Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law
Rod Dixon's Open Source Software Law
Both authors are attorneys, and have had affiliations with OSI, so I had some confidence that I would get views that were both informed and fairly catholic approaches to the topic. (There are certainly other options out there. Some appear pitched more towards the would-be individual OSS developer, and some border on screeds. I'm filtering for the investor's and manager's point of view.)
Of the two, Rosen's work gets my strong vote as the better fit to purpose. He does a good job of level-setting legal concepts for those who are not attorneys. While I've soaked up much of the basis of intellectual property and some basics of contract through osmosis over the years, it was good to have the reminders in context. Some items such as bare license, warranty limitations and fine distinctions between derivative and collective works were more novel, and also clearly tied to the relevant points in OSS licensing. After four chapters of background, Rosen dissects many of the more common OSS licenses in a fair amount of detail, and follows up with useful comparisons of their implications and compatibility (or lack thereof). He ends with a quick overview of open standards issues, and a background on issues likely to arise in litigation around open source. (The latter necessarily speculative due to a lack of relevant case law.)
Rosen did the job for me, in both giving enough information for me to highlight the most critical issues in the project at hand, as well as providing a well-organized tour of the area. Given that he has an undoubted bias on the topics, this is also a very even-handed and dispassionate treatment of the various OSS schools, as well as some of the commercial variants and alternatives. For about $26 for 300 pages of chewy material, it's also a decent deal. 'The DaVinci Code' it's not, but if you've survived a Python manual or an investment analytics tome, you can do this.
Dixon covers much of the same ground, but seemingly for a different audience, and with less clear organization. I'm assuming the audience is practicing attorneys, since a number of concepts of contract and IP are invoked without introduction. For instance, recent legislation and regulation around electronic contracting is surveyed, while only alluding to the basic elements. If you already know the basics, this may be a useful gloss of the salient points of practice invoked by OSS, to be used as starting point for an update. As a practical outline for a decision maker, it falls short. At $96 for little over 100 pages of new material, it's also not a good deal unless you're on a client's research budget and think you may need to draft a new form of license. The better half of the book is minimally annotated existing licenses.
Dixon also dips further into partisanship. An eventual hegemony by OSS is taken for granted - triumphantly so - though this outcome is actually much in doubt, and seems from here likely to be highly domain-dependent. The preface in particular needlessly conflates controversial areas such as p2p content distribution, DRM, trusted computing bases and other issues for which 'open' is a salient keyword. These may be politically linked, but their disparate business, architectural and economic underpinnings deserve analysis, not casual rhetoric. I will, however, give Dixon this much: Where Rosen (for instance) handwaves portions of the LGPL as 'an impenetrable maze of technological babble', Dixon plunges headlong into the distinctions of dynamic and static linkage and the implications for issues of derivative vs. collective work. If you're interested in the complex dance of modern programming and distributed systems architecture, intellectual property law, and the organization of economic activity, this could be tasty stuff.
The author do have one thing in common, other than OSI affiliation: Though both inveigh against the needless multiplication of forms of OSS license, they then proceed to introduce their own drafts. Perhaps it's in the nature of the beast. Any economics grad student who's out there looking for a topic could do worse than attempt an analysis of the relative merits and market successes of the various license forms, as we're clearly in the 'Cambrian explosion' stage of their evolution.