Monday, December 06, 2004
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- Sun Creates New Open Source License
- New Open Source Group: Offers Insurance?
- What does "any third party" mean in the GPL
- GPL and Compilations
- New Version of GPL
- Import Issues
- More Microsoft and Patents
- Microsoft's IP Indemnity
- Microsoft Broadens IP Indemnity
- Microsoft Claims to Open Protocols?
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6 Comments:
What keeps the open source users from pirating and licensing the code as their own?
Iceman, interesting philosophical question. Fundamentally, either (1) a person does or doesn't do something voluntarily or (2) he or she is forced to do or not do something.
(1) In this context, either out of a sense of obligation, worry about being sued, worry about losing a suit, a sense of pride, or other reason, he or she might not pirate or relicense the software.
(2) The other option is that an open source user who tries to use open source against the license for it gets sued by either the licensor or the copyright holder (depending on the license), loses the suit, and gets a court judgment that requires his or her compliance. The law frequently causes persons to chose option (1) without the necessity of a lawsuit.
From the article:
"with the product now available either under the GPL (GNU General Public License) via open-source or commercially as embeddable software."
That means:
- if you write GPL code, use the GPL version we provide
- if you don't write GPL code, shame, you have to purchase a license/non-gpl-version from us, because you can't use the GPL version embedded in proprietary code.
seems nothing new.
Is a dual licensing strategy consistent with either the open source movement or the free software movement?
Is it so hard to grok that the copyright holder can permit their material to be reproduced or used under different conditions.
Dual-licensing seems a great strategy to get some income from OSS or FS... but how does MySQL, for example, charge an end-user for using its database?
The GPL specifically allows all forms of usage - commercial or otherwise. What stops X company from using the DB under the GPL and not paying MySQL for the commercial license? They are not breaching the GPL by simple use. Maybe I'm not getting something.
In fact, reading the MySQL pages, it seems to me that they also have a very odd interpretation of "distribution" (as in Copyright law distribution) - something which would activate the GPL's copyleft clause: they seem to include internal corporate implementations as a distribution... Any thoughts?
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