OpenE License

I.R.Maturana irm at myrealbox.com
Wed Feb 27 20:38:44 UTC 2002


Hello,
Perhaps i can give a point here.

> >  > (I dislike seeing copyrights on licenses anyway.  It implies that
> >  > someone modifying the license needs approval...which 
> means that OpenE
> >  > needs approval from Apache group....Did they get it?  Does OpenE
> >  > want to be bothered when someone wants to take the OpenE license
> >  > and modify it?)
> >
> > This is a sticky wicket which we have not found a good 
> answer to.  On
> > the one hand, licenses that name a copyright holder are not 
> reusable.
> > On the other hand, it seems hypocritical for an organization that
> > promotes software reuse to NOT promote license reuse.  And as you
> > point out, the license does not give any permissions to 
> create derived
> > works.
> >
> > The OSD is silent on this issue, so we have no grounds for 
> refusing to
> > approve a copyrighted license.
> >
> > We're having a board meeting today, and I'll bring this issue up.


There are few points which justify the copyright of the license itself:

1- The license itself has no authority without the copyrigth
  af the author. Copyright underline the author's moral right 
  (or the tutelage authority) on the license. 
  The only legal defender of a license is the first owner of the 
  rights granted.

2- There are no international laws, only treaties. 
   But there are individual *human rights* which are accepted by all
   countries which accept. One of these rigths are the author's right
   Therefore, the only way a license can have legal authority outside
   the author's country, is the copyrighting of the license itself

In fact, this is why you see that administratives institutions use 
copyright on their Web sites and for their documents. 
Inside the country, this copyright has no matter, but outside
their "country visibility", States acts like collective authors
and the Berne Treaties apply for all of them.

[I.R.Maturana -- Trad En>[ES<>FR] - http://www.in3activa.org]


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