Real-World Copyright Assignment

[Dave J Woolley]

> From:	Greg Herlein [SMTP:gherlein at herlein.com]
> 
> I'm also interested in what constitutes "distribution" - if someone
> takes GPL code and embeds it into a network appliance and sells that
> product as a black box and the user never even knows what happens
	under the hood, is that considered "distribution?"  How can a
	[DJW:]  
	IANAL, but, in my view, this is distribution and, if
	the licence were the GPL, would have to provide a copy of
	it in the users' documentation, and some indication of 
	what it covered in the product, and would have to provide 
	the required access to the source code parts derived from
	GPLed material.  It would be interesting to know how TiVo
	handles this.

> develper enforce it if they want to license the code so that "if
> you are free, my code is free; if you are commercial, my code is
> commercial?"
	[DJW:]  I believe that this would violate the definition
	of "open source" used on this mailing list, but the Kermit
	licence might be an example of such a (non-open source)
	licence.

	Dual licensing might allow you to forbid payment for redistribution
	rights without payment to you, but I think that the common 
	open source licenses would allow the option of paying you for 
	such rights to be dropped. 
[DJW:]  

-- 
--------------------------- DISCLAIMER ---------------------------------
Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender,
except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of BTS.

>