APL license - What about the enforced logos?

David Woolley david at djwhome.demon.co.uk
Sun Nov 12 20:03:55 UTC 2006


> 
> Rick Moen scripsit:
> 
> > [...] the Asperger's poster children so famously prominent among us.
> 
> I think that's a little strong.  Law may be code, but coders do tend

I think it is also an ad hominem and an obscure one at that.

I suspect he's accusing me of reading the licence terms literally when
I'm actually talking about reading between the lines much more than 
he seems to be doing.

What I believe the intended purpose of this licence is would be something
like this.

  We are providing this software as a loss leader to promote our 
  commercial offerings (much as Lite versions of concealed source
  programs are distributed free of charge and with redistribution 
  allowed, and like Wordpad is a loss leader for Microsoft Office).

  As such, we intend that it be used in a way that it is always 
  recognizable as being a version of our software and makes it very
  easy for the user to go to our web site where we can try to sell them
  our commercial product and services.

On this interpretation, a text only version might not be considered
sufficiently recognizable as the product to effectively advertise it and
extracting code and using it in an application without a user interface
might be considered as providing no benefit at all to the licensor.

The drafting isn't tight enough to prevent the code being repurposed to
a large extent, but, in my view, when interpreting the licence in an
edge case, one needs to take into account whether the interpretation is
in line with their real intention in distributing the code, and I believe
that the above is close to what those intentions were.

I've coined the term "concealed source" to represent the normal binary
only, may not reverse engineer, case, and distinguish it from both 
"open source" and source provided but OSD non-compliant.



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