All rights reserved [LWN.net]

All rights reserved

Posted Jan 18, 2013 13:02 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: All rights reserved by mjw
Parent article: A discordant symphony

And others have commented that the current situation is so murky that it is really hard to see who has rights to hack on and redistribute which files.

That is a pity. I think (IANALly) that the files have clearly been donated by IBM under the ASL, and that the contents of individual headers is not relevant since there is an overarching permission.

A real world analogy: imagine that I sign a contract to sell you a pile of my books, but then you refuse to take them because some books have "property of man_ls" written in the first page, until I erase that line from all of them. Hey, the books are now legally yours; feel free to modify them as you see fit.

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Posted Jan 18, 2013 14:52 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

Nice analogy! One thing that has to be considered is that statements of ownership are easily disregarded if everyone involved knows about agreements to the contrary, but the real problem is where people who are not aware of (or party to) such agreements see such statements and are then thrown into confusion about the real status of the work in question.

It would be a bit like someone pulling a book of the shelf in the aforementioned purchaser's house, having been told by the purchaser to "take any of my books if you like them", and then reading the "property of man_ls" statement. One would be obliged to check once again with the purchaser or potential owner to make sure that the book is not one that has been borrowed and then mixed up with the rest of the purchaser's collection.

Such manual checking that everything is still legal or acceptable is precisely the kind of thing that conflicts with Free Software licences because one of the aims of such licences is to eliminate such bureaucratic obstacles, especially when they can be misused to effectively limit distribution even if grand promises of generosity have been made.

Posted Jan 18, 2013 14:55 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Your comment is completely on target. Just wanted to say.