Re: [EE]: opinion on Willem programmer?

Byron Jeff wrote:
> It's the none at all that's the real problem. Without a license, no
> one has any right to do anything with the source for your software.

Are you really sure?  I am not a lawyer, but if there are no restrictions
listed then it seems to me there are no restrictions.  Many things on the
internet have no explicit copyright and are routinely copied.  I don't
remember anyone claiming that something without a explicit copyright was
illegally copied.

In fact I remember a case around 1984 when I was at Raster Technologies.  We
made display controllers.  At the time these were 20K$ rack mounted boxes
that recieved commands over RS-232 or DR-11W and produced RGB video.  We had
a quick reference card that briefly listed all the commands.  A competitor,
Vermont Microsystems Inc, made a stripped down display controller and
decided to use our command set to claim "Raster compatible".  They even
produced a quick reference card that was clearly a copy of our card.  Then
someone looked at our card carefully and realized we had forgotten to put a
copyright notice on it anywhere.  VMI hadn't broken any laws.  All
subsequent cards we produced had a copyright notice on them though.

> The only point is that because your license above specifically limits
> redistribution both in number of copies and the devices the code can
> be
> used on, that it isn't open source by any common definition that the
> open source community in general uses.

Apparently there is wide variation on what people consider "open source".
Perhaps FSF is trying to push it in a restrictive (and self-serving)
direction, but that doesn't make it so.  These are two ordinary english
words they don't get to redefine.  To me, "open" means it is for all to see,
as in "open book".  If they want a label that means you can not only see the
code but can also do what you want with it (except for their own favorite
set of restrictions, of course) then they need to create a trademark or
something.  Note that they tried and failed to trademark "open source", so
apparently the government agrees they don't get to define what that means.

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