Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary [LWN.net]

Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

Posted Jan 28, 2021 0:08 UTC (Thu) by himi (subscriber, #340)
In reply to: Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary by pizza
Parent article: Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

I thought this was still an issue at least up to the DMCA and some way beyond it - I recall it being a significant matter for discussion during the various flame wars that happened when the idea of "open source" as a distinct concept was being developed, as well as later on during the discussions around tivoisation which happened after the DMCA came into effect. Do you know what the case law or legislation was that explicitly carved out that exception?

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Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

Posted Jan 28, 2021 1:53 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Do you know what the case law or legislation was that explicitly carved out that exception?

https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Computer_Software_Copyright_...

(I'm sure there's plenty of nuance involved in the case law that followed, and the DMCA's anti-cirvumvention stuff threw a big monkey wrench into everything, but the original intent does seem clear...)

Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

Posted Jan 28, 2021 23:27 UTC (Thu) by himi (subscriber, #340) [Link]

Okay, reading through other parts of this discussion I've realised what my niggling issue/misunderstanding is here: if the /use/ of the code doesn't provide an avenue for copyright law to bite, how does a person running a service using this SSPL licensed code, assuming they acquired it entirely legally (i.e. they received all the necessary source and so forth), become in any way bound by the terms of the license? They're providing a service, not distributing the code, so how can they end up bound by the terms of a copyright license?

Unless there's some other kind of contract involved, in which case how would that kind of contract obligation be created?

I'm sorry to be asking what are probably dumb questions here, but this really is something that's hard to understand just by trying to read up on it in your spare time . . .