Open Source Business Found Parasitic, and the ADCL

[maa at liacc.up.pt]

> > 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?

Because the license forbids.

> 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.

I'm sorry, I have trouble understanding these examples from the world of non-
intellectual artifacts.

> 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.

Again I'm at a loss. Hmmm... I think it's a problem of language, or level. I'm 
interested in the general principles. At the general level I think there is no 
difference between licensor and retailer. I want to get back to the basics and 
understand how to conciliate the good things of open source (review and more) 
with the good thing of IP (royalties). The legal details will follow, I want 
them out of the way now. At the general level I'd say we have
  - authors (writers and reviewers)
  - artifacts (program, document, music, etc.)
  - commercial users
The aim is simply making the commercial users pay the authors, keepinf the 
source open. I call this selling the software, and at this general level I 
also equate selling software with selling a license to use it.

> > 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).

I'll check.

> > > 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.

Before you said OS licenses don't forbid selling the software...

> > 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.

Sorry, I don't understand this language.

> But there are companies that sell only
> free software, ranging from the FSF to CheapBytes, and they have no
> problem.

Again, it must be a language problem. Above you said royalties are forbidden. 
Again, at a general level, it's the same thing. If I sell an artifact and pay 
the authors backoffice I'm doing the *economy* of royalties.

> > 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".

I know these models. They are in [Hecker 2000]. I don't see a continuum. The 
gaps are stronger than the continuances. Direct sale (general) is impossible.

> > 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.

Ok. Now if I only knew what those acronyms mean...

--MAA

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