I am reposting this email sent by my son last year as it seems particularly
relavant to this discussion. Earlier this evening, he reread it with the
added year of law school under his belt and he believes what he said is
correct. I will send him Rick's email.
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Copyrights and OpenVista
Date: Tuesday 10 June 2003 05:14 pm
From: Raymond F. Anthracite
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I've heard that there is some confusion over the trademarks and
copyrights
involved with OpenVista. Hopefully this will help.
The trademark to OpenVista is something that I'm vaguely interested in,
but
since it only could restrict use of the title "OpenVista" and not any of the
software that it refers to, the important issue is the copyright.
The works of the US government are not protected by copyright. However,
with OpenVista, it seems that it is not so simple. Copyrights can be
transferred to the US government, and are still valid. The US government
seems to have contracted out some parts, so it is unclear to me whether
OpenVista is copyrighted or not. I could probably figure out which it is
with a lot more time invested, but it does not make any practical
difference. Modifications are covered under copyright whether or not the
government owns the copyright.
The VA licensed the software in a way that is very beneficial to both
public
and private actors. The two licenses offered by the VA offer a path for
businesses looking to build a closed source proprietary product, and a path
for others looking to build an open source, non proprietary project. Whether
or not the government has a copyright over OpenVista does not change the
copyright protections of additions made under the GPL at all, and it makes
only a couple trivial differences to the copyright protections on additions
made under the commercial license that Hui offers.
Hui released OpenVista under two licenses. One is the GNU GPL V2, and
the
second license is well suited for companies looking to develop a proprietary,
closed product with only a few protections for the US government. Among the
few restrictions of the second license is that you can't modify OpenVista and
then charge the government for OpenVista itself, but you can charge for the
modification. Most importantly, the second license allows third parties to
modify openvista and then sell it without releasing any source. This is a
good idea if you are a corporation looking to turn an extended vista into
proprietary software, and very bad if you are a volunteer trying to
contribute to a public project.
The GNU GPL V2 is well suited to the sort of public collaborative effort
here. It also allows commercial persons or organizations to charge for
consulting, configuration, and modification of OpenVista, while keeping the
software itself non-proprietary open source. The GPL also allows
proprietary, commercial programs to run either on top of or under OpenVista.
Further, it allows commercial and noncommercial users to donate code to
OpenVista without worrying that their efforts will be converted into closed,
proprietary code by competitors with the sort of embrace and extend attacks
recently used by Microsoft against Sun's Java.
-Ray Anthracite
-------------------------------------------------------
--
Nancy Anthracite
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