Re: ATLAS license discussion, please

You might look at the C++ Boost licence, this is specifically designed to allow
both free use of the Boost library, Standardisation of the intellectual content,
and commercialisation.

My thoughts in general are:

You must decide what you as the author you desire. If you want to support
the notion that your software is *freely* available you need an open
licence.

If you want to *enforce* open-ness at the expense of freedom, GNU is the
traditional supplier of licences. If you take the GNU path you're
*endorsing* the kind of legal system that also supports software
patents and authoritarianism. GNU chose to leverage the legal system
to satisfy its primary goal: open-ness. GNU licences are not, by
any stretch of the imagination, supporting "free" software as in
"freedom of use for any purpose".

You must think: do you approve, for example, Apple taking BSD Unix
and making a proprietary product with it? Do you approve Apple
being "forced" to throw out GNU Gcc support in favour of LLVM just
because of GNU's licence policy?

Now, the other thing to think about is: what possible litigation could arise?
ANY litigation is a major negative. You neither want to sue someone nor
be sued.

It is not so easy, despite what some courts think. In Australia in some
states if you leave your keys in your parked car it is a criminal offense! you are
considered to be "inciting theft".

By analogy, if you put software in which you claim intellectual property rights
on the Internet and do not provide a reasonable way of enforcing your
rights, it may at least be that you have violated your own ability to claim
any rights at all. After all, if I can simply download your software, without
signing a paper saying I read and accept the licence terms,
who is to say I have broken any laws? What if the download is done
by a robot? What if that robot is a system backup?

My point really is: what's the point of trying to enforce a copyright with
possible exemptions which in fact you not only cannot enforce due to
lack of funds .. but probably don't even want to enforce?

It is generally considered that in the woeful US and European legal
systems you actually need a licence to prevent someone taking
your work, copyrighting it or patenting something YOU invented,
and then suing YOU for breaching their rights.

Luckily, the primary motivation in such cases is commerical gain: if you're
not making a commercial gain or interfering with someone else making
one there are no grounds for a suit.

Ed Borasky wrote:

"My recommendation is
to consult an attorney. He / she may advise creating an "entity" to
house the intellectual property before devising a license."

and there is much sense in that: a separate entity holding the
property my provide your private assets some protection.

If Google stole my software and commercialised it I'd be ecstatic!

IMHO the major concern is not people doing math with your software,
but people releasing a product (such as a programming language)
which has the kind of licence THEY want. If you want such people to
use your software you MUST provide the most liberal licence possible.

For example if my programming language Felix were to incorporate
Atlas as a "standard" component, your licence would have to be
compatible with mine (BSD camp: my actual licence is FFAU:
free for any use). Any GPL licence would conflict with that and exclude
such use, at best I would be forced to distribute and build your product
in a special way to ensure your software was kept "at arms length"
from mine so your licence didn't pollute mine .. or simply not use
your software.

I have in fact spent considerable effort ensuring I did NOT incorporate
any software polluted with Gnu licences. Unfortunate since some
of it is very good. For example to utilise Gnu's Multiple precision
arithmetic package I was forced to write the interface (header
file equivalent) by hand, since generating one automatically
from the C header would render the product "a derived work".
A hand written interface supporting the required protocol is
not a derived work because it is derived from the intellectual property
but not the embodiment of it.


The point here is to strongly consider indirect use of your product:
it is OTHER people's licensing desires you need to think about when
constructing your own, if you want your product to be widely used.




--
john skaller
skaller@...





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