Money makes the world go round...
Oct. 29th, 2003 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI cannot believe this crap!
Look, if I write software, it's mine. It's my property. Do you know what the legal definition of "proprietary" means? It means, simply, owned by someone.
If I license the software to you, I still own it. It has my copyright on it. It's mine, I've just given you certain legal rights with respect to using it. One of those rights may be the right to redistribute the software; another right may be to examine the source code; another right may be to modify the source code; and finally, one right may be to redistribute the software with those modifications.
I may attach certain legal responsibilities to those rights, such as the right to attribution, or the maintenence of clear demarcations of responsibility between my original code and your changes.
SCO wants to argue that if I don't charge money, if I don't keep my property "secret," I have no right to make such agreements with others. Since I've not kept my intellectual property secret, I have no right to it as "property." I'm not being "proprietarian" in the sense SCO wishes to redefine this very common legal term.
The GPL is a contract; it's clear contract law. SCO wants to take away the hard work I've done and make it "fair game," to destroy my copyrights and void my contracts.
I'm so fucking furious right now I'm nearly seeing red.
Look, if I write software, it's mine. It's my property. Do you know what the legal definition of "proprietary" means? It means, simply, owned by someone.
If I license the software to you, I still own it. It has my copyright on it. It's mine, I've just given you certain legal rights with respect to using it. One of those rights may be the right to redistribute the software; another right may be to examine the source code; another right may be to modify the source code; and finally, one right may be to redistribute the software with those modifications.
I may attach certain legal responsibilities to those rights, such as the right to attribution, or the maintenence of clear demarcations of responsibility between my original code and your changes.
SCO wants to argue that if I don't charge money, if I don't keep my property "secret," I have no right to make such agreements with others. Since I've not kept my intellectual property secret, I have no right to it as "property." I'm not being "proprietarian" in the sense SCO wishes to redefine this very common legal term.
The GPL is a contract; it's clear contract law. SCO wants to take away the hard work I've done and make it "fair game," to destroy my copyrights and void my contracts.
I'm so fucking furious right now I'm nearly seeing red.
The GPL is not a contract.
Date: 2003-10-30 02:30 am (UTC)There is no quid pro quo, there is no mutual consideration, there are no signatures. It is not an agreement between parties.
No one would ever try to enforce the GPL based on contract law.
The EULAs that many proprietary software companies want users to agree to as a condition of use are closer to contracts. And they have been litigated, with mixed success, under contract law. There have even been attempts to make the "click through" in so-called click through as legally binding as a signature.
Re: The GPL is not a contract.
Date: 2003-10-30 02:31 am (UTC)