Legal soundness comes to open source distribution

David Johnson david at usermode.org
Wed Aug 14 17:49:15 UTC 2002


On Wednesday 14 August 2002 07:20 am, Russell Nelson wrote:

> I like David's, because it's such a shot across the bows.
> Unfortunately, his suggestion says nothing about modification
> restrictions, such as the GPL's, or BitKeeper's.

That is because I wanted to limit the clause to what the user can do in the 
absence of a license. We already know that they need a license of some form 
before they can modify the software, but they shouldn't need one to use the 
software. In addition, modification is sufficiently addressed elsewhere in 
the OSD.

p.s. I also wanted to ensure the right of first sale, right of criticism, and 
all that, but an enumeration of all the rights a user should possess would be 
extremely lengthy.

-- 
David Johnson
___________________
http://www.usermode.org
pgp public key on website
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3



More information about the License-discuss mailing list