On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Marius Amado Alves wrote: > Ian, you've been most helpful, and it's a pity you thing I'm trolling > now. My point was: provide, license, seem to equate in practice (in the > case of open source). You have not contested this. But it's ok. I'm not > trolling, but I'm not making a big issue of it either. Let it be.
He has contested it - they mean entirely different things. Let me illustrate. The author gives me a copy of the software. He has *provided* it - I may or may not have paid. At this point, I have a legally optained copy of the software, and may use it. Then I want to give someone else a copy. I have no legal right to do this, so I implicitly accept the offered terms of the GPL (for example) when I do so. The product is then licensed. The important part is that it is *licensed* (this point) at no cost. That is to say, it costs me no more to be able to distribute/modify/whatever than it does to just get it. And that when I do distribute/modify/whatever, I determine the cost to the person I give it to, and keep any money I receive. If I had to give a share of this money to an upstream licensor, this would actually be, effectively, a license fee - in order to be licensed to distribute my modified copy, I have to pay a per-copy fee. -- Sam Barnett-Cormack -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
