Project Browser vs App Browser (was "script scope variables inexplicably becoming unset")

[Mark Wieder]

Richard-

Sunday, January 4, 2015, 5:21:36 PM, you wrote:

> Once you've sold it, any open source license lets that person redistribute
> freely.

While I should know better than to argue legal matters with a lawyer...
You're wrong about that.

The situation you're describing here and in your paper (I *did* skim
it... note that it's a dozen years old now and things haven't kept
still) is more akin to a viral license, and is the main objection
raised to using something like one of the GPL variants.

What I do for open-source licensing for PowerDebug and PowerTools is
distribute an unlocked stack. People still have to purchase the stack
from my website and download it from there using their registration
code, but they are free to examine the code, modify it, learn from it
(ha!), amuse themselves, without restriction. They also don't get
updates without downloading them from the website, again using their
registration code. The right to distribute it themselves in any form,
modified or no, is explicitly denied by the license.

This is open source software but not free software (in either sense of
the term).

It's similar in one sense to music or video distribution - when you
buy media it's not locked up so that you can't get to it... you get
the right to listen or view yourself, but you don't get the right to
distribute it to others, in spite of the fact that it's technically
possible to do so.

Creative Commons offers something similar in various forms of their
licensing agreements. You can choose what restrictions, if any, you
want to place on the documents you distribute.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 ahsoftware at gmail.com

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