Question regarding GPL and membership requirements for a standards body

[Hardy, Allan]

I agree, requirements for the membership, restrictions on type of use,
those are all imho violations of the spirit and letter of the GPL.

"Though shall not wrap other restrictions around this license"  - ok its
not in the terms exactly like that.

 

For even more folks opinions, try the debian-legal discussion, they deal
with this stuff all the time.  Ask them if they would consider the
Alliances terms to fit the open source definition/if they would include
this in a debian free category.

 

Allan

 

From: legal-bounces at lists.gpl-violations.org
[mailto:legal-bounces at lists.gpl-violations.org] On Behalf Of Akiba
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 10:46 PM
To: legal at lists.gpl-violations.org
Subject: Question regarding GPL and membership requirements for a
standards body

 

Hi. 

I'm running an open source project to implement the Zigbee Protocol
stack. The code is currently protected by the GPL, however there's been
a challenge to the validity of the license. The problem comes from the
fact that the Zigbee Alliance requires membership in order to use its
spec for commercial projects. Although my code is license free, it's
claimed that the membership requirement is a licensing fee. If it turns
out that the code is incompatible with the GPL, I will need to go
mod-BSD. However I'd like to get a professional opinion on the validity
of the claim first. Can someone offer some advice?

 

More details can be found on this blog post:

http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Zigbee/Zigbee-Linux-and-the-GPL.html

 

Akiba

FreakLabs Open Source Zigbee Project

http://www.freaklabs.org

 

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