Hi Bernhard
On 9/16/25 13:01, Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
"The Agency for Education must have full rights of use and unlimited
access to the complete source code, including documentation and
dependencies, for the purposes of operation, maintenance, and further
development.
the question is: What does "full rights of use" mean?
With German Author's rights, it would also mean the exclusive right to license
the software. If this is similiar, the agency can use this right to license
the work as Free Software, but they do not have to.
But all exclusive (copyrights) would need to be transfered to the principal,
which could also chose to licence them proprietary.
A company cannot bid with a piece of Free Software where they keep the
exclusive rights.
So unless "full rights of use" mean something else, this is not a requirement
to procure Free Software, I thinkg.
"Full rights of use" means full rights to continue working with the
software, as they say "for the purposes of operation, maintenance, and
further development".
I don't see a way to parse that requirement as demanding exclusive
intellectual property of the software. Full *non*-exclusive right to use
and work with the software would also comfortably meet their
requirement. Also note their addition "and dependencies" - they could
hardly expect to have exclusive rights over the dependencies. But they
do want "full rights of use and unlimited access to the complete source
code".
The Greenlandic government has been experimenting with some variations
of this, and they also have some software that's not free software, but
that they own outright. And my own company has supplied a large-ish
number of systems which are all free software (under MPL 2.0, for the
most part). We're thinking of placing a bid on that tender and find the
requirement I quoted very suitable for us, since our habit of making
everything free software meets the requirement "out of the box".
--
Carsten Agger -ag...@fsfe.org
https://fsfe.org ---https://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/
FSFE Denmark Coordinator, General Assembly & European Team Member
Free Software, Free Society!
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