Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4. Can be distributed with or without modifications.
This basic definition of FLOSS is identical to the “Four Freedoms”, with
which the Free Software Foundation (FSF, USA, [23]) has defined “free soft-
ware” and is in line with the open source definition formulated by the Open
Source Initiative (OSI) [23].
3.1
Public License for an “European” Project
A potential candidate for a license agreement text could be the most widely
used General Public License (GPL) or occasionally called “GNU Public Li-
cense”, which has been published by the Free Software Foundation [23]. Be-
cause this license text (and several similar license texts as well) is based on
the Anglo-American legal system. In Europe applicability and enforceability
of certain provisions of the GPL are considered as critical by many legal ex-
perts. The European Union has recognized this problem some time ago and
has issued the “European Union Public License” text [25], which not only is
available in 22 ocial EU languages, but is adapted to the European legal
systems, so that it meets essential requirements for copyright and legal liabil-
ity issues. The EU Commission recommends and uses this particular License
for its own “European eGovernment Services” project (iDABC [26]).
A key feature of the aforementioned license types is the so-called strong
“Copy Left” [27]. The Copy-Left requires a user who modifies, extends or
improves the software and distributes it for commercial or non-profit pur-
poses, to make also the source code of the modified version available to the
community under the same or at least equivalent license conditions, which
has applied to the original software. That means everybody will get access
to all improvements and further developments of the software in the future.
The distribution in principle has to be done free of charge, however add-on
services for a fee are permissible. That means for embedded control systems,
that software-hardware integration work, vehicle integration, homologation
and authorization costs can be charged to the customer as well as service
level agreements for a fee are allowed within the EUPL.
By applying such license concept to the core functionality of the ETCS
vehicle function as defined and already published in UNISIG subset 026 of the
SRS v3.0.0 [1] all equipment manufacturers as well as end-users would be free
to use this ETCS software partly or as a whole in their own hardware products
or own vehicles. Due to the fact that a software package of substantial value
would be then available to all parties, there would be not much incentive any
more for newcomers to start their own ETCS software development project
from scratch, but would more likely participate in the OSS project and utilize
the effect of cost sharing. Also established manufacturers, who already may
have a product on their own, might consider sharing in for all further add-on
functions by trying to provide an interface to the OSS software modules with
their own existing software.