Calling all open source developers

[David Bovill]

2009/10/21 François Chaplais <francois.chaplais at mines-paristech.fr>

> just a remark about all the legal stuff in this thread:
>
> assume you have a non totally permissive license on your code, and that
> somebody breaks the license, by, let us say, making a copy  of the code and
> commercially distributing it
>
> Now who will flex the muscle to prevent this? Who will pay the lawyer(s)?
>
> If there is nothing prepared at this stage, you may as well drop all of
> this legal stuff...


Quick answer to that:

   1. There are a number of organisations like the Free Software Foundation,
   that have and will continue to take on legal case which they fund, often
   with high profile pro-bono lawyers to defend such violations. This has been
   done before and they will continue to do so in order to help set legal
   precedents.
   2. Some of the brightest lawyers in countries all around the world are
   part of the open source and Creative Commons networks. I've sat on the
   steering committee here in the UK for Creative Commons, and can vouch for
   how bright and surprisingly generous these people can be. Someone who rips
   one of these licenses off makes a LOT of people very angry, it is a foolish
   company or individual that messes with this network. Much easier to pick on
   someone else.
   3. Being explicit about your licenses costs you nothing, help everyone be
   clear about what they can and cannot do, and in a direct answer to the
   skeptisism you rightly raise, makes a companies lawyer think twice, about
   breaking the terms laid out in the license.
   4. You don't need to be convinced of any of the above. None of the
   philosophy, banter and arguments littered around the internet. You can
   simply learn from the practices of successful communities. There are plenty
   of examples of robust scaleable long lasting software communities that have
   adopted clear open source licenses. Looking around and trying to find
   successful code sharing communities without any licensing - and you'll come
   up short. Why? I think it is reasonable to conclude that being clear about
   your licensing helps.