Re: comparison of public licenses?

On Fri, Jan 21, 2000, Karsten M. Self <kmself[_at_]ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2000, Nate Puri <natepuri[_at_]office.ompages.com> wrote:
> >
> > What is uncertain is the manners in which copyright will render one or
> > more provisions of the GPL type licenses moot.
>
> Could you expand on this?
>
>
> IANAL, this is not legal advice.

IANAL, but I am studying for the bar, and copyright is not on it so I won't get too deep into this.

Consider the street name of the GPL, 'copyleft.' That sums it up. It's an attempt to circumvent traditional copyright. Copyright is derived from Art. 1 of the Constitution and traditional common law. It is like a universal BSD license that allows you a monopoly on the subject matter of your authorship. This is a sin to Stallmanites, and they drafted the GPL to attempt to prevent this kind of personal power. It is unclear in a dispute between an author of a patch to source code and the author of the original source code what the courts would do with the patch and or the patched code. Is it derivative and hence a new work owned by the patch author or is it restricted by the GPL and remains some kind of quasi public domain / IP of original owner? I can't answer this, but my initial feeling is that the courts will not expand or change copyright for the GPL. The most courts would do is hold that it is a contract of which only certain provisions withstand the illegality defense to contract. Specific performance of all the provisions will not happen to the extent courts find any provisions in conflict with existing copyright law.

I think the idea of "open source" needs a lot of treatment by lawyers. There should be a subset of copyright law created. And the concepts should be fleshed out. It should not be a mere litany of licenses, but all the licenses should be evaluated for unique concepts relating to software so that lawyers can tailor licenses for the specific needs of the author. There is no 'one-size-fits-all' license. Developers may have thought that there was, but then all these license iterations started to emerge. Now there are two factions: 1) GPL devotees, 2) everyone else.

This is a messy new area, and there really should be a law review on the whole topic.

If someone cares to pay my bills for the next three months, I'll write it. ;).

-- 
Nate Puri ("natedawg")		http://www.ompages.com
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