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.
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-30 06:25 am (UTC)It's not going to make one bit of difference in the long run. They've tried invoicing people, and all they're getting if anything is a digitus impudicus from the FLOSS community.
It's not worth stressing over. They're being tag-teamed by a combo of SuSE, IBM, Red Hat, and the German government, and they're going to lose by sheer weight of bucks against them. Normally I would say this ain't right, but they blow whale chunks, so....