Business Success with Open Source

Derivatives

To some, a “derivative” is something you studied in calculus. To others, it’s a type of financial product. For people in FOSS, a derivative is a modification to an existing copyrighted work or a work that incorporates some or all of another copyrighted work. You’ve likely come to expect that nothing is simple where FOSS licensing is concerned, and derivatives are certainly no exception.

For starters, where do we draw the line between what’s a derivative and what’s not? In the simplest case, if you take FOSS project A and modify it to add, remove, or alter functionality, you now have a new piece of software A’ that is also obviously a derivative of the original A, as shown in the image that follows. This situation is fairly easy, ...