Don Grodecki wrote:
I am having arguments with my colleagues regarding some of the terms used with respect to FOSS. Can anyone help me to understand what some of these terms really mean?A couple of things I know:
Open
Open Source Software
Software in the Public Domain
Software licensed to the Public Domain
Ownership
Copyright
License for Use
License for Derivation
License for Re-Distribution
- copyright alone on software or other constantly changing materials is probably worthless, since all it does is identify the original author with the original work, and it relies on rights in law to protect the author - it's not much use if the version of something everyone is using now is an unrecognisable 100 modifications later than the original. This is true for software documents as well, which tend to change all the time. Do a google on "software copyright" to get some interesting reading.
- so that's why we need explicit licenses-to-use for both documents and software. See e.g. W3C IP pages for examples. These licenses govern the rules for various kinds of use, usually including the last 3 items on your list
- licenses on source materials (documents and software source) are for protection of the developers/developer community using the materials, against losing rights to use and modify the materials
- trademarks and service-marks on the other hand protect users of built software (generally) - if it has some mark on it like "OMG PIDS 1.0-compliant", then they should be able to trust it (depending on what the OMG's trade & service mark statements say - you can read them in the specifications). Generally, a trade- or service-mark can't be used a) without permission of the owner, and b) without the developer having shown that the built software complies with some published conformance criteria - could be a set of test cases for example. This kind of protection ensures that some company cannot build a bug-ridden non-compliant PIDS server, and claim that it is compliant to PIDS 1.0 or whatever.
In summary, the protections as I see them for developers that use source materials to build things - under a public "name" (e.g. "mozilla") - that they then sell or give away, are 1. licenses and 2. trademarks/service-marks. You might add control of their own namespace like mozilla.org as a third (this also gives ownership of the inverted namespace used for software libraries e.g. org.mozilla.xxxx.yyy.zzzz).
hope this helps,
- thomas beale (not a lawyer, and not ever thinking of becoming one)
