[License-discuss] Reverse Engineering and Open Source Licenses

[Johnny A. Solbu]

On Tuesday 10. March 2015 17.55, cowan at ccil.org wrote:
> I think I've bought software exactly once, a boxed set of
> Red Hat Linux back in 1999.  All the rest has been licensed under
> either a proprietary or an open-source license.

Then you are mistaken. The copy was licenced, not sold. If you did buy it, then it would become your property, and no longer Redhat's property. You would own it and could deny Redhat their use of it. I.e. If i bougth your car, I could deny you your use of the car, but if I licenced it, it would still be your car, but I got usage rights to it.

The Redhat distribution you bought back in 1999 was a collection of Free and Open Source software that you got a license to use in any way you wanted. The difference between that and software from e.g. microsoft of Apple is that you also got a license to use the source code any way you wanted, as long as you followed the terms of the license.

-- 
Johnny A. Solbu
web site,   http://www.solbu.net
PGP key ID: 0xFA687324
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