Re: Equalis Octave group

[Dave Barnes]

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 6:09 AM, Judd Storrs <address@hidden> wrote:
> The Equalis terms of service makes this pretty useless for us. In
> particular they reserve the right to erect paywalls around your
> contributions, hold you responsible for fraudlent use of your account
> and have terms that are incompatible with their supposed mission:
>
> "Not to modify, distribute, transmit, perform, broadcast, publish,
> license, reverse engineer, transfer or sell, or create derivative
> works from, any material, information, software, products or services
> obtained from the Site"
>
> and later:
>
> "You retain ownership of the copyright in your User Submissions.
> However, by submitting User Submissions to this Site, and unless we
> indicate otherwise, you grant Equalis and its affiliates a
> nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and fully
> sub-licensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish,
> translate, create derivative works from, distribute and display such
> User Submissions throughout the world in any media now known or
> hereafter invented."
>
> which seems incompatible with the restrictions that guarantee free
> software remains free (at least to me). In other words, Equalis is
> demanding the right to strip any license from contributed code.
>
>
> --judd
>

There is a statement earlier in the Terms:

"Occasionally, material within the Site which is designated © Equalis
LLC may also be designated as distributable under special license
terms (for example a General Public License (GPL) or CeCiLL license).
Such material is exempt from the general restrictions outlined above
and is instead subject to the specific terms of the referenced
license."

So, in short, if software is covered under another license that
license takes precedent.

The first quote you cite is in reference to material not covered under
an open source license, basically software Equalis wrote to create the
site. The statement above specifically carves out an exemption for
open source.

The second quote allows Equalis to use submissions freely, nothing
more. If that condition isn't stated the site does not have the right
to display user posts. Posts may also be reproduced on other sites
using RSS, and others use RSS on their own sites.

Hopefully that provides some clarification. Legally speaking, any user
contributions are safe from paywalls.

If "... Such material is exempt from the general restrictions outlined
above ..." doesn't seem sufficient the language can be modified to be
more clear.

On another note, my original question wasn't to determine how Equalis
could supplant the current system for code submissions/sharing, but
how could it augment the Octave presence.

dave