Thanks for the feedback. I work in (applied) mathematics, and in this
fields patents are a no-no. You cannot patent a mathematical idea. The
best you can do is disseminate it and hope it will have a great number
of children (I will not digress on the muddy market of scientific
publishing).
For instance, JPEG is compression over a discrete cosine transform.
The DCT is not copyrighted, it is a mathematical transform. However,
it seems to me that incorporating into some code that runs on a
computer system may make it (the code) fit for some form of copyright;
moreover, if it is embedded into some hardware, the hardware may be
patended. Is this right?
Best regards,
François
Le 21 oct. 2009 à 21:00, David Bovill a écrit :
2009/10/21 François Chaplais <[email protected]>
just a remark about all the legal stuff in this thread:
assume you have a non totally permissive license on your code, and
that
somebody breaks the license, by, let us say, making a copy of the
code and
commercially distributing it
Now who will flex the muscle to prevent this? Who will pay the
lawyer(s)?
If there is nothing prepared at this stage, you may as well drop
all of
this legal stuff...
Quick answer to that:
1. There are a number of organisations like the Free Software
Foundation,
that have and will continue to take on legal case which they fund,
often
with high profile pro-bono lawyers to defend such violations. This
has been
done before and they will continue to do so in order to help set
legal
precedents.
2. Some of the brightest lawyers in countries all around the world
are
part of the open source and Creative Commons networks. I've sat on
the
steering committee here in the UK for Creative Commons, and can
vouch for
how bright and surprisingly generous these people can be. Someone
who rips
one of these licenses off makes a LOT of people very angry, it is
a foolish
company or individual that messes with this network. Much easier
to pick on
someone else.
3. Being explicit about your licenses costs you nothing, help
everyone be
clear about what they can and cannot do, and in a direct answer to
the
skeptisism you rightly raise, makes a companies lawyer think
twice, about
breaking the terms laid out in the license.
4. You don't need to be convinced of any of the above. None of the
philosophy, banter and arguments littered around the internet. You
can
simply learn from the practices of successful communities. There
are plenty
of examples of robust scaleable long lasting software communities
that have
adopted clear open source licenses. Looking around and trying to
find
successful code sharing communities without any licensing - and
you'll come
up short. Why? I think it is reasonable to conclude that being
clear about
your licensing helps.
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