[License-discuss] Is what's made with Open Source, Open Source?

[cowan at ccil.org]

Gareth Edwards scripsit:

> And this is where Rapid apps get tricky. The debate (I think) is can a
> Rapid app exist, like my essay, independently of the Rapid platform used
> to make it? (like FileZilla can exist outside of the mysys compiler) And
> the answer is, no it can't.

The critical question is whether these files are or can be distributed
to anybody, or whether they just live on the Rapid server and nowhere else.
If they are distributed separately, they are OSS or not depending on how
the author has licensed them.  If they have an OSS license, then people
can copy and modify and resubmit them, or run them modified or unmodified
on their own Rapid servers (since the server is GPL) or independently
developed Rapid-compatible servers.  If they do not have an OSS license,
then they remain proprietary to the author by default, except that Rapid
presumably won't host them unless the author licenses Rapid to copy them
at a bare minimum.

If they are not separately distributable, but are generated on the Rapid
server through UI actions only, then the license is pretty much moot
in practice, since after the author has built the app on a particular
server, there is nothing to copy or distribute.

> What users generate with Rapid are just
> definition files of properties and what Rapid controls (html snippets)
> are on pages and what Rapid actions (JavaScript and pre-compiled
> server-side code) get called when.  The app has to constantly refer
> back to the platform resources to generate the pages and execute the
> actions.

This is no different from a Python script that can't be executed without
a Python interpreter.  If all Python interpreters were proprietary, it
wouldn't mean that all Python scripts would be, since anyone could still
write their own Python interpreter.  (Omnimark is an example of a language
for which only a proprietary interpreter exists, but there do exist
FLOSS Omnimark programs.  They can be freely copied and distributed,
though only people who have licensed the interpreter can run them.)

Nor does it mean that because Python is FLOSS, all Python programs are --
far from it.  A script and its interpreter are distinct works.  Similarly,
copyrighting a dictionary doesn't mean you own all the words in the
language and all texts made from them, not even if you made up the
language yourself
(Klingon, for example).

IANAL, TINLA, but not TUPOL either.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
After fixing the Y2K bug in an application:
        WELCOME TO <censored>
        DATE: MONDAK, JANUARK 1, 1900