Licensing AGAIN [was: Sharing FontLab Plugin]

[Richard Gaskin]

Rick Harrison wrote:

 > If student A wants to assign or sell student B all copyright rights
 > for his work for let’s say $1.00 (which is consideration in the legal
 > sense of then word.) then student B legally owns all copyright rights
 > to that work.  It is treated as though it was a work for hire even
 > though only $1.00 changed hands.

Transfer of copyright may not require a financial transaction.  Many 
open source projects use Contributor License Agreements to allow 
contributions while maintaining a single copyright holder:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement>

The CLA for the LiveCode project is linked to from this "Contribute to 
LiveCode" page:
<https://livecode.com/resources/contribute-to-livecode/# Contributors 
Agreement>


 > Student B, who owns an Indy License, may then publish the work as
 > if he had written the entire code, because he legally owns the whole
 > work.
 > Any revenue then obtained all accrues to student B.
 >
 > If the LiveCode Indy license does not allow this - at least for the
 > U.S.A. then there is a problem with the LiveCode license.

I'm not a lawyer, but the restrictions on building for others seem 
geared to prevent build farms, where any number of people may attempt 
use the Community Edition to build a work and then one Indy licensee 
makes all their standalones for them for proprietary distribution - see 
section 3, "No Competition", here:
<https://livecode.com/eula/>

In my layman's reading this seems a reasonable restriction to prevent a 
single licensee from undermining the development of the platform by 
churning out proprietary works for people who have no proprietary license.

As with the questions about the GPL, if the current wording of either 
license later proves unenforceable that will be a very brief moment, 
since as Mark Waddingham noted during the last tediously lengthy 
discussion on licensing a few months ago:

     I can say for certain that if that does happen then we will
     immediately change the license of the community version of
     LiveCode to that new iteration. As the computer world evolves
     so fast, it really doesn't matter what source code is out
     there in the wild under the current version as that source
     will become obsolete in a relatively short space of time.
<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2016-March/224277.html>


It may be possible to use loopholes in the current licenses against the 
intentions of the company, but personally I can't see spending my own 
time pursuing that.  I understand how expensive it is to produce a tool 
like this for so many platforms, and even though I can use the Community 
Edition for two of my biggest projects right now I'm still prepaid on my 
Indy license many years in advance because I would like the platform to 
continue providing the unique value it delivers for my business and 
those of my clients.

For myself (I do not offer legal advice for others), I especially 
appreciated this simple clarify from Mark's post linked to above:

    The fact of the matter is that it comes down to one of the following:

      1) If you are happy to buy into the ideal of the GPL and abide
         by its terms then use the community edition.

      2) If not, buy a commercial edition.

I tend to follow that with all of my projects, whether LiveCode or 
Drupal or Wordpress or any others who hold a similar view of the GPL. 
After all, for most of LC's life there was no GPL option at all, so it's 
easy enough to ignore it whenever I prefer a project not to be bound to 
the GPL's terms and just keep using the proprietary edition as I've been 
doing for so many years.

The company's intentions seem reasonable to me, and both LiveCode Ltd. 
and the previous owner of the engine, MetaCard Corp., have been reliable 
business partners for nearly two decades.  In my own office I see no 
value in disrupting that, and much value in supporting it.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com