1.) Licensing provides legal remedies though. When a license is
violated the offended party has the ability to pursue legal remedies
to the wrong. That is the whole reason for copyright in the first
place, to fence off certain rights for producers for a period of time
so that they can determine how they want to benefit from their work.
The MIT/BSD license provides very little legal recourse because they
essentially allow the user to do everything short of claim the work is
their own. The GPL provides for the punishment of those who do not
reciprocate on its terms, a violator of the GPL loses the rights to
use the code until they comply with the license and this provision can
be enforced by courts, which is has been.
2.) Licenses in the FOSS community exist to remove restrictions
automatically created by the laws pertaining to copyright. If all we
had was the copyright system then things would be a lot more
restrictive than with the various open source licenses that restore
freedom to users.
3.) To repeat point 2 a bit; unfortunately the real world requires
licensing schemes of some sort. Because copyright law automatically
prevents people other than the copyright holder from doing certain
things with a produced work the FOSS community has the necessity of
developing licensing mechanisms to restore freedom.
-James
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Petri Laihonen<pietu@weblizards.net> wrote:
> I don't understand much about any of the licensing stuff.... I think it is
> way too much of complex reading and hidden agendas obscured with tons of
> text.....
>
> There are few simple things I do understand though....
>
> 1) Licensing has absolutely no effect on peoples honesty nor lack thereof.
> (upbringing has the most effect on that)
> 2) Licenses are created for the limiting purposes only.
> 3) Why would freedom need a license?
>
> petri
>
___________________
Nolug mailing list
nolug@nolug.org
Received on 07/15/09
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : 08/06/09 EDT