From: "Curt Sampson" <cjs@cynic.net>
> On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Jamie Hughes wrote:
>
> > By having made the product downloadable you may use this version as you
> > wish. I hope you find some good and interesting uses.
>
> Uh...I'd be careful with phrases like this. This could easily be
> interpreted as saying that you put the product in the public domain,
> meaning I can decompile it, sell it to other people, use it to
> compete directly with you, whatever I want. And once it's out like
> that, there's no putting it back. You can add prohibitions on newer
> versions, but not on this one.
Too bad they didn't have so much as ONE MINUTE to think about this
between the first announced release date (sometime in November)
and now, Stardate 01242002 by my calendar. Which almost entirely
cancels any cleverly-calculated effect of that November announcement if
the actual release date had been known in advance: i.e., chilling anyone
*else's* open-source ambitions for any similar package, for that amount
of time. (Microsoft applies this tactic brilliantly in the closed-source
world,
sometimes effectively killing competitors who are already out there. In
the open source universe, however, I think it's safe to say that "real soon
now" are the most ignored three words in the local galactic cluster. So
no harm done.)
> Also, though under the Berne convention, you have copyright on your
> work from the moment you create it, notices or not, not having
> copyright notices can weaken your copyright claim, should there be
> any sort of dispute over that at some point.
And by using such ill-defined terms as "open source" in the
November teaser, and "free" in the release announcement, and
by releasing some (but not all) source code at the same time,
IntaDev has basically already done a lot of that weakening,
I suspect.
Still, I say: be nice and pay the man.
> Not that I want to deter you from releasing free software, but
> unless you're like me and put most of your free work into the public
> domain, you should be fairly explicit from the start about what
> you will and won't allow people to do with it.
Oh, but .... that's a lot of boring legalistic work. They can
always hire a lawyer later on for any litigation that might come
up and-- ("WHAT!?!?! HE WANTS *HOW* MUCH
PER HOUR?!?!?")
But there is something legalistic that they can get done much
cheaper and more automatically, described below.
Larfed my head off -- and it's a real product, too!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/23732.html
(Scroll down to "NEW DISCLAIMER SOFTWARE IMPROVES
EFFECT OF DISCLAIMER NOTICE (their caps, btw)".)
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
Received on Thu Jan 24 10:22:54 2002