license vs contract

license vs contract

Posted Nov 28, 2003 17:22 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Examining an attack on the GPL by dmantione
Parent article: Examining an attack on the GPL

In my own country, the Netherlands, the law doesn't speaks about licenses and contracts. Instead, it speaks about agreements between two parties and a license or contract is just a proof of an agreement, not the agreement itself.

Then you're just translating to English wrong. In English, "license" isn't a document or evidence of something -- it's a synonym for "permission." It is, by the way, very common to contract with someone to give you a license in exchange for something else (e.g. money).

It's hard for me to believe that Dutch copyright, patent, and other law doesn't have some word that means "license" in this way.

FYI, in American law, "contract" and "agreement" are synonyms and there is no good word for the proof of the contract. It's just called "documentation of the contract," or "evidence of the contract," or something like that.

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