Plan 9 license

[Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M.]

Many of you may find this interesting, if you have not read it already.

Open Source Initiative President Eric Raymond publicly responded to
DVD-CCA's erroneous statements made against the open source community in
its recent California legal filings:


The DVDCCA states in its brief at
<http://cryptome.org/dvd-v-521-opq.htm>:

"Defendant Pavlovich is a leader in the so-called "open source"
movement,
which is dedicated to the proposition that material, copyrighted or not,
should be made available over the Internet for free."

This claim is both incorrect and defamatory.  The Open Source
Initiative, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that is the custodian of
of the Open Source Definition and widely recognized in the open source
community for its educational and advocacy work on behalf of the
that community, takes the strongest possible exception to it.

We in the open source movement respect copyright; in fact, we use
copyright law to underpin the licenses that define the social contract
of our community.  The basis of Matthew Pavlovich's work, and of our
community's opposition to the DVDCCA lawsuit, lies in that social
contract; a belief, founded in both engineering pragmatics and ethical
conviction, in the *voluntary* sharing of program source code and the
*voluntary* renunciation of secrecy.

The core principles of open source are transparency, responsibility,
and autonomy.  As open source developers, we expose our source code to
constant scrutiny by expert peers.  We stand behind our work with
frequent releases and continuing inputs of service and intelligence.
And we support the rights of developers and artists to make their own
choices about the design and disposition of their creative work.

The results of this policy of openness can be seen in the enormous
public benefit that has come through the open-source movement's works:
the World Wide Web, the core software of the Internet itself, and
the Linux operating system.

While we advocate the full disclosure of code, and we support Matthew
Pavlovich's right to reverse-engineer proprietary technology in order
to permit Linux users to play DVDs that they legally own on machines
they legally own, we oppose piracy and reject as a prejudicial
falsehood the DVDCCA's attempts to tie the open source community to
copyright violation."

Issued by and for the Board of Directors of OSI
by Eric S. Raymond, President
28 August 2000


Rod Dixon
Visiting Assistant Professor of Law
Rutgers University Law School - Camden
www.cyberspaces.org
rod at cyberspaces.org


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Sloan [mailto:cds at ghs.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2000 7:29 PM
> To: david at usermode.org; Martin Konold; rms at gnu.org
> Cc: weigel at pitt.edu; license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: Re: Plan 9 license
> 
> 
> On Sun, Aug 27, 2000 at 11:45:02AM -0700, David Johnson wrote:
> [...]
> > First, there is no requirement to give changes back to the orginal
> > authors. If I modify gcc, for example, and give a copy to my friend, I
> > am not required to submit my modifications to anyone else. Second,
> > despite any legal shieldings a corporation may have, they still cannot
> > change the software's license. It doesn't matter if the corporation
> > tells me as an employee not to redistribute their modifications, since
> > it is not their copyright to change. As long as I personally possess a
> > copy, I can redistribute it. 
> 
> Is this really true?
> 
> My understanding was that a legal entity can make private
> modifications to GPL software and is allowed to keep those
> modifications private, but if they choose to distribute the modified
> version, they are required to distribute the source to the
> modifications under the GPL.
> 
> So, since a corporation is allowed to make private changes, I don't
> see why they could not instruct their employees to keep those changes
> private to the company.
> 
> Have I misunderstood something here?
> 
> 	Chris
> 
> -- 
> Chris Sloan
> cds at ghs.com
> Systems Software Engineer
> Green Hills Software
> 
>