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[FYI] Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/fla/
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Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)
Version 1.0
English: PDF(96k)
German: PDF(94k)
What is the FLA?
The Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) seeks to strengthen the legal
fundament of Free Software by allowing Free Software authors to make
the FSF Europe their fiduciary for all legal issues.
This is in principle very similar to what the FSF North America has
been doing with its Copyright Assignments (CAs) for the GNU Project
in order to secure the legal fundament on which our operating system
stands.
As some readers will know, the continental European "Droit d'Auteur"
(authorship right) tradition is in some parts significantly different
from the Anglo-American Copyright tradition.
Giving special attention to these differences, the Fiduciary Licence
Agreement offers a European approach to the same issues handled by
the Copyright Assignment mentioned above.
Effect
The effects of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement can be summarized as
follows:
Transferral of Copyright/Exclusive Exploitation rights to the FSF
Europe Re-Transferral of unlimited Usage/Single Exploitation rights
to the assigning party. Safety clause: Should the FSF Europe ever use
the transferred rights for proprietary software, the assignment
becomes void.
Authors
The Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) was written in cooperation
between RA Dr. Till Jaeger, Dr. Axel Metzger, Carsten Schulz (ifross)
and Georg Greve (FSF Europe) in consultation with others who take
interest in the legal security of Free Software. At some time
involved in the process were Prof. Eben Moglen, RA Thorsten Feldmann,
LL.M., Werner Koch, Alessandro Rubini, Reinhard Müller and others.
Usage
The Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) is Copyright 2002, 2003 Free
Software Foundation Europe. Similar to the GNU General Public License
(GPL), everyone is given permission to copy and distribute it, but
changing it is not allowed.
If you wish to make the FSF Europe your fiduciary by filling out the
assignment, please send information about the project to
fla@fsfeurope.org.
For the legal security of Free Software, we hope to be able to
provide this service to as many projects as possible, but our
resources are limited by the support we receive in terms of volunteer
contribution and donations, so this will need to be decided upon a
case to case basis.
If you are another Free Software organization that wishes to adopt
the Fiduciary Licence Agreement to increase the legal standing of
your own projects, please also write to fla@fsfeurope.org.
Generally we will be glad to allow such uses, but we would like to
know what you plan and also to ask you to include a notice referring
to the source of the document.
Feedback
General feedback, comments and also questions about the Fiduciary
Licence Agreement (FLA) can be sent to fla@fsfeurope.org.
Background
With growing popularity, Free Software also faces more and more legal
issues. Unlike proprietary projects, which tend to be owned by a
single company and thrown away after a few years, Free Software often
has many authors and is used for many years, some of the Free
Software programs in wide use are 10-20 years old or even older than
that.
Making sure these programs will be legally safe to use and defendable
even after their authors are possibly nowhere to be found or have
even left planet earth is one of the issues the Free Software
community is facing.
Recently, we have also seen an increase in cases where authors of
Free Software were attacked solely on legal grounds to get him or her
to change the name of a software package or to stop distributing it
entirely. We as a community must find ways to defend our active
contributors against this.
Another issue is that more and more companies are running Free
Software projects and ask developers to give up their rights so these
companies can sell proprietary versions of that piece of Free
Software.
As management, company policy and markets are often subject to
drastic and rapid change, no company could ever guarantee to stick to
a certain policy for 20 years or more. Additionally, no company is
entirely safe from bankruptcy or buy-outs by other companies.
Also for this reason companies often don't trust each other to "do
the right thing" for a long time into the future.
The Fiduciary Licence Agreement will help with all these issue by
allowing the FSF Europe
to relicence software under a new Free Software licence, should it
become necessary because of technical or legal changes. to defend
software against abuse, even in court, should that become necessary.
to protect Free Software authors by accepting to take over their risk
of being attacked on legal grounds. to provide a stabilizing and
equalizing factor in commercial or mixed commercial/volunteer Free
Software development.
Especially the fourth issue is becoming increasingly important with
publicly funded software in Europe.
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