Open Source Business Found Parasitic, and the ADCL

[John Cowan]

maa at liacc.up.pt scripsit:

> I don't understand the difference between discrimination by license and 
> discrimination by retailer. If the retailer (vendor?, licensor?) is selling 
> under the license surely they cannot discriminate!

Why not?  If you go to a store, and they do not like your face, or your
credit rating, they can refuse to deal with you.  (They can't, in the
United States, systematically refuse to deal with people who belong to the
"wrong" race or gender or whatever, but that is a separate issue.)  After
all, you can always go to another retailer, since with OSS anyone can be
a retailer.

You cannot, however, go to another licensor, because the licensor has a legal
monopoly enforced by the copyright laws.  So the OSD forbids the licensor to
discriminate in a variety of ways.

> Spreading = tainting = infecting. I've seen these terms used to describe 
> licenses that force the resulting work to be under the same license. GPL does 
> this with clauses 1b and the 2nd paragraph of clause 1c.

Ah.  Open-source licenses are typically less restrictive than the GPL, though;
I know of none that are more restrictive (except that the Artistic License
sometimes and the QPL always require you to distribute patches rather than
derivative works).

> > Yes.  The FSF (back to them again) insist that any contributor assign the
> > copyright of the contribution back to them, not because they have any
> > intention of dual-licensing, but because it allows them to be the sole
> > copyright author for purposes of copyright-infringement lawsuits.
> 
> And for royalty purposes?

No, the FSF neither pays nor collects royalties.  Indeed, per-copy
royalties are explicitly forbidden by Section 1 of the OSD.

> So there are "good reasons" to close as well as to open! This seems to suggest 
> it's a symbiosis, not a parasitism. But still closed software could strive 
> without the open, and the opposite is not true...

As far as selling software constitutes collecting (liquidated) monopoly rent
for the software, then yes.  But there are companies that sell only
free software, ranging from the FSF to CheapBytes, and they have no problem.

> So many factors, and so few models (open, closed).

It's a continuum.  Read the whole paper: it proposes a number of models
such as "sell the present, free the past".

> Ok. These are legal details. I'm interested in the gist (clase 1.1.) It's a 
> good thing it passed undiscussed?

If you don't care about enforceability, then yes.  IANAL, TINLA.

> (I'm replying to the individual address and cc-ing to the list as this was how 
> I got the message. But shouldn't we just write to the list?)

My email software makes that difficult.

-- 
A rabbi whose congregation doesn't want         John Cowan
to drive him out of town isn't a rabbi,         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
and a rabbi who lets them do it                 jcowan at reutershealth.com
isn't a man.    --Jewish saying                 http://www.reutershealth.com
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