Open source, closed source, and the value of code

Matt Maier blueback09 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 1 18:26:36 EST 2016


On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 2:47 PM, Robert Mann <rman at free.fr> wrote:

> indeed.. I do have an android phone!!
>
> And I read the GNU license for good,
> and the FAQ's for good,
> and some discussions
>
> 1) my personal conclusion reading these is that the assumption you make
> about stack files falling under GPL is.. questionable, but.. arguable,
> particularly if there are elements of interfaces buttons so on that would
> link to the engine. And the more intricated these become e.g. with widgets,
> the more linked this will be.
>
> But, if the stack file contains only code, I doubt that can fall onto GPL.
> The language itself is not copyrightable so a piece of code really is an
> "output" of an editor program and as such is not covered by GPL so long I
> can read!
>

If you sit down at a text editor and write a string of characters that the
Livecode engine happens to understand then you can put whatever copyright
license terms you want on it. So, I supposed in theory (disclaimer: IANAL)
if you wrote absolutely everything in plain script, and never included the
engine, you would still be able to apply your own license terms. But that
script can't be interpreted by anything other than the Livecode engine, so
you wouldn't be able to use it for anything. The value is in the engine,
which someone else wrote and allowed you to use as long as you follow their
rules. Since the rules they chose are the GPL, it's safe to assume there
isn't a legally sound way around it. The best you could hope for is a murky
grey area.


>
> Arguably, code dispersed in interface objects "sections" can also be
> regarded as a kind of organization of code and thus treated as output of
> the
> editor's program and thus not covered by the GPL.
>
> 2) are you saying do I rightly understand? that in order to be published by
> apple a program has to be written FROM scratch up in a commercial
> version???
> So that one cannot start up to write code in OS version and later switch to
> commercial????  Are there any.. markers in the code?
>
>
The number of question marks indicates that you're working your way through
the mourning process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model#Stages
There are whole cadres of lawyers who live in fear of the day they walk
into work and their boss calls them into a meeting because a random coder
accidentally included a piece of GPL software somewhere in the company's
proprietary product. GPL is not practical, it is idealistic. The authors
consider it a social movement. So it's not so much Apple's policy, it's
that the GPL is incompatible with anything vaguely proprietary, and of
course Apple is crazy proprietary.


> In practice I really wonder if Apple would trace back the origin of the
> origin of a code and make sure it was not "written" with GPL covered
> program. if it did, I wonder what they say about all those lines written in
> EMACS.
>
> To me that argument is kind of "tiré par le cheveux" as we say in french.
> (something like.. stretched out?).
>
> I love my android phone...
>
>
>
>
> --
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> Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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