Differences between version 13 and predecessor to the previous major change of SoftwareLicensing.
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| Newer page: | version 13 | Last edited on Thursday, July 7, 2005 1:23:25 pm | by zcat(1) | Revert |
| Older page: | version 11 | Last edited on Wednesday, July 6, 2005 9:32:59 am | by DanielLawson | Revert |
@@ -40,9 +40,36 @@
''Purchasing a 'copy' of Windows isn't really like either of these. You pay a one off cost for the life of the product, so it's not like rentals because you don't keep paying every term. It is closer to a rental however, in that you don't have the right to do absolutely whatever you want with the item, because the actual owner of the item has decided that you can't do this. ''
''To go back to your analogy, leasing a car would be closer to the current situation for windows. You pay a certain amount to lease the car for a period of time, at the end of which you upgrade to a newer car, and pay a new lease sum. This seems almost exactly like what happens with most commercial software. You don't own it, so you can't have it modified - without the owners permission anyway. You can't onsell it - because you don't own it. You have conditions on what you can do with the car, such as the number of passengers and the speeds your allowed to drive it at, and the leasing firm handles maintenance - and the right to install alarms, gps tracking devices and remote engine disablers. It's __their__ car, after all''
-''As far as licences go, the GPL is actually exactly the same in this respect. It has restrictions on what you can and can't do with the software, and if you truly owned the software outright you wouldn't have those restrictions. If you owned it, you could mix it with your commercial code, or modify it and keep the changes to yourself. But you can't. The fact that the GPL offers you the freedom to knock down walls and renovate your house, to keep using that analogy, just means it's a more liberal form of licence. It's considered by some to be less liberal than the BSD licence, which incidentally still doesn't grant ownership to the end user. If you ever truly owned software, you could do anything at all that you wanted with it, including changing the license conditions. ''
+''As far as licences go, the GPL is actually exactly the same in this respect. It has restrictions on what you can and can't do with the software, and if you truly owned the software outright you wouldn't have those restrictions.''
+
+Quoting the GPL preamble and paragraph 5;
+
+"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not
+covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of
+running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program
+is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the
+Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
+Whether that is true depends on what the Program does."
+
+"5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not
+signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or
+distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are
+prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by
+modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the
+Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and
+all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying
+the Program or works based on it."
+
+'' So once again; I own the car/house/book/software outright and I can do whatever like with that property (temporarily ignoring restrictions imposed by zoning laws or the LTSA, which is once again more related to my use of property I do NOT own such as public roads). Only when I make a copy of the car/house/book/software (any copy, verbatim, partial, extended, or otherwise modified but still containing any significant part of the copyrighted design) do I need the permission of the architect/designer/author/programmer. ''
+
+I think perhaps we should bring this up on Groklaw and see what some real lawyers think? -- zcat(1)
+
+
+''
If you owned it, you could mix it with your commercial code, or modify it and keep the changes to yourself. But you can't. The fact that the GPL offers you the freedom to knock down walls and renovate your house, to keep using that analogy, just means it's a more liberal form of licence. It's considered by some to be less liberal than the BSD licence, which incidentally still doesn't grant ownership to the end user. If you ever truly owned software, you could do anything at all that you wanted with it, including changing the license conditions. ''
+
+Check the GPL again; I can mix it with commercial code (assuming only that the licence for the commercial code lets me do this) or modify it and keep the changes to myself. It's only when I start distributing that mixed code to other people that the GPL restricts what I can do. -- zcat(1)
''So the upshot of this is - if you want total and absolute freedom over your software, write it yourself. Or purchase it totally. But don't expect to buy the source code for an office suite for under a million dollars. And no, downloading the source code to abiword and gnumeric or OOo doesn't count. You still don't *own* the software. The fact is, basically all the software you 'own', you actually don't. You have permission to use, either by virtue of paying a fee to some nasty world-dominating megalithic corporation, or even to some other form of proprietary software selling company, if they exist; or by using OSS software. This is your choice.
