discuss: OCLC Office of Research Open Source License

[Terrall,Tom]

Thanks for your comments, Forrest!

My first thoughts were the that the open in open source required that any
modifications should be done in source code (high-level languages) so that
all users would have access to the change. Indeed the license in Section 3.C
requires that if you distribute non-source code the source code should be
available on demand.  One of our java programmers informs me that java
bytecode is highly modifiable by using a java decompiler to regenerate the
source code. So looks like we need to clarify things in this area. 

We are also looking at "Combined work" and "Aggregate work" distinction.

Tom
-----Original Message-----
From: Forrest J. Cavalier III [mailto:mibsoft at mibsoftware.com]
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2002 12:30 PM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Cc: mibsoft at mibsoftware.com
Subject: Re: discuss: OCLC Office of Research Open Source License


This is how combined work is defined...

> A "Combined Work" results from combining and integrating all or
> parts of the Program with other code. A Combined Work may be
> thought of as having multiple parents or being result of multiple
> lines of code development.
> 

Is this definition precise enough to exclude agregate works?

As written, it seems that Agregate works are a subset of Combined
works.  This indicates to me that Section D restrictions, because
they would apply to CD complilations for example, are not OSD compliant.

------------

As another note, I personally do not consider "object code" 
non-modifiable.  In fact, back in the day when assemblers were slow,
simple flaws in code could be "hand-patched" by replacing the
defective code with a jump instruction out to unused memory, and
hand-assembling the code to perform the correct operation and jump
back.

This hand-patching would save about 25 minutes of time for each bug, with
the added BIG advantage that the 180 page assembler output would
remain usable (because subroutine addresses would remain the same.)

--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3