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From: | Tim Tyler |
Subject: | Re: Open source licenses are /actually/ contracts?!? |
Date: | Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:11:39 GMT |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0a1 (Windows/20060724) |
Alexander Terekhov wrote:
Tim Tyler wrote:
Re: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/osfreesoft/book/ch06.pdf (Chapter 6: Legal Impacts of Open Source and Free Software Licensing)
``This issue has obvious application to the open source and free software licenses already discussed. Staying with the MIT License, say, for example, that an ordinary user comes across a piece of code that is subject to this license. The user takes the code and uses it on his personal computer. The user incorporates the code into a program that he is writing. The user distributes the program, either for profit or not. At no point has the user taken any affirmative, symbolic action that would indicate his consent to the terms of the license that is comparable to the act of signing a contract.''In the case of open source and free software licenses, the "user"
> manifests assent by simply taking action(s) reserved to copyright > owners. They most certainly do not! *If* the user agreed to a contract by simply copying, the world would be full of court cases where SlimeSoft had included in the small print of its license agreement: "And by the act of copying this software, you hereby agree to sell all your worldly goods and deposit the proceeds in swiss bank account #xxxxxxxx." Users do not agree to *anything* by the act of copying something. The worst that can happen is that they can subsequently be sued for copyright violation - since the user can simply claim that they never bothered to read the license. Since copyright violation is such a frequently-performed crime, the remedies are usually limited to something rather less than "all your worldly goods" - which is what might be on the table if they had /actually/ entered into a binding contract. -- __________ |im |yler http://timtyler.org/ tim@tt1lock.org Remove lock to reply.
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