Licence which allows trivial conversion to undocumented.

[SamBC]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave J Woolley" <david.woolley at bts.co.uk>


> >
> [DJW:]  The part about documentation is that the licence
> is given to people who receive the software plus documentation.
> The anomaly is that anyone can recursively sub-license it
> without supplying documentation, so, for all practical
> purposes, it could simply say to anyone receiving the
> software, without the added qualification
> of also receiving the documentation.

I haven't read this, but if what you both say is correct, I guess the
mention of docs is to imply that the docs are covered by the copyright &
license, and thus protected/copylefted. They ought, therefore, not to say
"software and documentation" but to say "software and/or documentation"

>
> > "fictitious business name". I don't think there's a problem
> > here as the copyright would belong to the owners of the firm regardless
> > of their "alias".
> >
> [DJW:]  I'm pretty sure that there is no legally
> incorporated body here that could own the copyright.
> They are just an informal group of people that belong to
> a club (which might be legally incorporated, but wouldn't
> own the copyright).  This would be under German law, not
> US law.  I'm not sure of the position in UK law, let alone
> German,  but I suspect
> there would be a test of what could be "resonably" understood
> to the intentions if there were an obvious "legal person".

IANAL, but my understanding of UK law (I live here, so it ought to be
reasonable) is that, where there is no clear definition of who (or what
entity) a name represents, a person or entity can considered represented by
the 'alias' if the relevant audience agrees, or documentary evidence can be
produced that the name corresponds to the person/entity (accounts,
correspondence, etc).

>
> After writing this initially, I had the thought that there is
> really a need for an article on the OSI site, or a reference to
> one, which explains who can actually own a copyright and the
> advisability of creating a legal person, or creating a formal
> agreement to avoid future disputes.  A number of open source
> projects have got into difficulty when one of the joint
> copyright owners has decided to change the coyright basis of
> their contributions.  The Lynx project has been unable to include
> SSL because of the difficulty of renogiating the licence (until
> the RSA patent expired, there would have been a licensing conflict).

I agree, but it should have relevant disclaimers about jurisdicitons (as the
matter varies)

>
> You probably want a real lawyer to write this, although they will
> probably want to stress the problems, rather than the solutions.

Will Larry Rosen do it perhaps?

>
> IANAL

Me neither (as I said earlier)

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SamBC