On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 08:35:43AM -0400, Olin Lathrop wrote:
> Byron Jeff wrote:
> > It's the none at all that's the real problem. Without a license, no
> > one has any right to do anything with the source for your software.
> 
> Are you really sure?
>  I am not a lawyer, but if there are no restrictions
> listed then it seems to me there are no restrictions.  

IANAL for sure, but yes. If there is no license granted then one is held to
copyright law. And that gives the copyright holder exclusive rights to
copy.

> Many things on the
> internet have no explicit copyright and are routinely copied.  I don't
> remember anyone claiming that something without a explicit copyright was
> illegally copied.

It was illegally copied. It's just that with no one to enforce the
copyright violation, nothing gets done.

> 
> In fact I remember a case around 1984 when I was at Raster Technologies.  We
> made display controllers.  At the time these were 20K$ rack mounted boxes
> that recieved commands over RS-232 or DR-11W and produced RGB video.  We had
> a quick reference card that briefly listed all the commands.  A competitor,
> Vermont Microsystems Inc, made a stripped down display controller and
> decided to use our command set to claim "Raster compatible".  They even
> produced a quick reference card that was clearly a copy of our card.  Then
> someone looked at our card carefully and realized we had forgotten to put a
> copyright notice on it anywhere.  VMI hadn't broken any laws.  All
> subsequent cards we produced had a copyright notice on them though.

Copyright is granted as soon as it is expressed, copyright notice or not.
The problem is proving when the expression occurs. That's really what
copyright notices are about.

> > The only point is that because your license above specifically limits
> > redistribution both in number of copies and the devices the code can
> > be
> > used on, that it isn't open source by any common definition that the
> > open source community in general uses.
> 
> Apparently there is wide variation on what people consider "open source".

There really isn't. Generally open source arguments surround whether or not
users that are downstream from developers have the right to gain access to
open source work.

> Perhaps FSF is trying to push it in a restrictive (and self-serving)
> direction, but that doesn't make it so.

This isn't the FSF. The general tenants of what constitutes open source
comes from OSI, which often is in opposition to the FSF and the GPL.

>  These are two ordinary english words they don't get to redefine.
>  To me, "open" means it is for all to see,
> as in "open book".  If they want a label that means you can not only see the
> code but can also do what you want with it (except for their own favorite
> set of restrictions, of course) then they need to create a trademark or
> something.  Note that they tried and failed to trademark "open source", so
> apparently the government agrees they don't get to define what that means.

I wasn't dealing with the service mark, which I stated failed. The
trademark that OSI has is "OSI Certified".

I knew that walking in here and saying that your license wasn't open source
was going to somehow intimate that the license is not good or not fair. I'm
not saying that. It's yours. It's good. It's fair. It makes sense.

But when you have a term that has been used in a specific way in a large
community for over 10 years, and you attempt to redefine it, you're going
to run into problems not because what your are redefining is not good in
some way, but simply because of inertia, everyone has a specific perception
of what it means.

It's the same kind of issue that occurs in the US when soccer fans talk
about "football". To Americans the term "football" has a very specific
meaning that runs counter to everyone else in the world. It's not an
indictment of either sport, just that after all this time, in the American
context, the word has a specific meaning.

This page describes the history of the coinage of the term "Open Source"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_terms_for_free_software

Any to close up shop on this one: your software license limits commercial
use, and limits use on non EmbedInc products. So there are issues with
points 1, 8 , and 10 of the OSI definition. Each are major points on what's
considered Open Source software.

But to quite Jerry Seinfeld: "There's nothing wrong with that!"

BAJ
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