revOnline and Open Source

Mark Schonewille m.schonewille at economy-x-talk.com
Thu Aug 1 06:25:40 EDT 2013


Hi Robert,

I would think that it is clear to users that sharing code (rather than 
stacks) in the code section of RevOnline, implies that people can use it 
to learn from. Copying and using it would violate copyright, but 
studying the code and reverse-engineering it would be a form of "fair 
use" because one may reasonably presume that people are aware of the 
learning function of the code section.

Note that this explanation doesn't apply to stacks.

Copyright doesn't protect ideas. That's what patents are for.

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

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On 8/1/2013 11:52, Robert Mann wrote:
> So to sum it up :
>
> 1. Situation is a big mess :: all stacks published at revOnline are ab
> initio protected by copyright, which is in apparent conflict with the
> purpose of revOnline, which is to share code ideas and code.
> 2. Authors SHOULD specify the terms and license they agree upon
> 3. Clearly, taking a revOnline stack and distributing a commercial version
> without the original author consent would be illegal.
> 4. Open  Source Side effect : If authors do not do not care to specify an
> Open Source License, the stack cannot be simply modified and re-published
> with OS Livecode, as the second "user" will have no clean right to do so,
> except if he asks the original author for authorization or license to do so.
> That should be cleared a minimum at the revOnline publishing stage otherwise
> one could end up with a bunch of mixed spaghettis.
>
> 5. The protection of libraries remains to be clarified.
>
> -----------
> Question :: what if I open a revOline stack, find some handlers and
> mechanism I like to use elsewhere, just copy part of the script from the
> editor, modify a little to suit my precise needs and environment.
>
> Copyright applies to a complete work and does and should not protect
> "ideas". The purpose of revOnline is to promote the communication of "ideas"
> of implementations... so we are on a kind of frontier.
>
> So that practice of using revOnline as a source of inspiration should not
> break copyright rules???
>




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