Recently the Free Software Foundation put forth a call for volunteers to help answer licensing questions about the GPL, LGPL, and Free Software licenses in general.
The Compliance Lab does do one job which is very public: we answer licensing questions from the free software community. When people want to learn how they can mix code under different terms, or what license would be best for their program, we try to help them so they can spend less time worrying about legal nitty-gritty and more time hacking. It’s not the most glamorous job, but it’s a unique way to help out.
If you are interested in volunteering, or even if you just want to see how well you understand the GPL, take the Free Software licensing quiz.
The questions can be tricky, especially if you are not at all familiar with the GPL or LGPL. Some things might surprise you. I answered four or five answers correctly, which shows that I have a few things to learn. Even if you don’t want to volunteer, the quiz is informative, so go ahead and see how well you do.
2 replies on “How Well Do You Know GNU?”
Hm, I got 5/9. I thought I’d have done better than that. 🙂
8/9 – I got question 8 wrong, although I was answering from memory, I’d assumed the reverse engineering would be allowed only for the purposes of interoperability and so answered NO to been for any purpose for their own use.
The only reason I did well on the quiz though is because I’ve faced most of those issues for projects I’ve done in the past and for many of them I’ve had to make use of the compliance lab to clarify issues (such as helping form a suitable exception for one recent project)
The Compliance lab have helped me out a number of times and I’m sure they’ve helped many more people, so anyone that has the time available and is thinking of Volunteering, I really hope you do. They deserve all the help they can get 🙂