revOnline and Open Source

[Mark Wilcox]

This thread is too long and full of misunderstandings (even from the expert lawyer on the technical side) to reply to every post separately.  Here's my take (IANAL but I did work for a open source software foundation and write the licensing FAQs etc):

1) Anything published without an explicit copyright license (or public domain disclaimer) has an implied license for you to make use of it personally but not to redistribute it or derivatives.  GitHub very recently woke up to this issue and the huge amount of legally suspect sharing they were encouraging - they added a license picker to their repository creation process: https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing
As part of this they created the very helpful http://choosealicense.com/ which in turn includes http://choosealicense.com/no-license/ - for another carefully crafted take on what having no explicit license means.

2) If you choose to create and share an open source library under an open source license then you don't usually also need a contributors agreement.  Code contributed to a project with an explicit license falls under the terms of that license.  Contributors agreements are for the ultra-paranoid or for situations (like RunRev's) where you need extra rights from the contributors than those given by the license (e.g. RunRev also needs the right to distribute contributions in the commercial version as well as the GPLv3 community version).  If you want to have an open source library (usable with community edition) and accept external contributions but you also want to use it in commercial closed source apps then choose a permissive license (e.g. MIT).

3) Stackfiles are (almost certainly) not derivative works. The content of stacks is generated by LiveCode but they do not contain bits of the engine code.  You could think of this as similar to the paint package case - most image files will have a header and encode your pixel data in some special machine readable format - they don't put parts of the paint package code in the file.

4) Standalones include the engine code and most definitely are derivative works and thus subject to the GPL.

5) Regardless of licensing issues, you can do whatever you want with (non-password protected) stacks you find on revOnline or anywhere else with the community edition *for your own use* - its further distribution of what you do that is restricted by the GPL.  Indeed the GPL very carefully secures your right to do almost anything you like with LiveCode for your own personal consumption.  The concept of "fair use" also applies to things like learning and study, giving you freedom to do those whatever the original license on the stack - it does not usually apply to commercial use or redistribution, although if your use is sufficiently transformative (i.e. you make the code do something else) it may.  However, copyright law is frankly completely inappropriate for software, having evolved for books, newspapers, songs etc.  There is not a great deal of case law in this area to clear up the mess, I suspect because most software companies don't want to risk
 precedents being set and thus settle out of court.  What precedents there are tend to follow a general trend of "you can do whatever you like if you don't distribute it (e.g. hacking/reverse engineering etc) but if you're making money out of any reproduction or derivative work you'll have to pay the copyright holder".  As such, it's best to avoid any commercial use of material with unknown licensing.

6) You can't patent ideas - only inventions.  Patents for software are an even worse idea than copyright, unfortunately US lobbyists somehow managed to get that form of protection extended.  There's a stackexchange site specifically for patent examiners to crowdsource prior art for dodgy patent applications: http://patents.stackexchange.com/