Timeline for Licensing of content created by licensed code
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 5, 2015 at 16:18 | comment | added | Jörg W Mittag | @Lohoris: the only formal and precise definition I am aware of is the Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition, which is based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which are in turn a pragmatic and more precise interpretation of the FSF's Free Software Definition. (The DFSG were created to limit endless discussions about what is and isn't Free Software on the Debian mailinglists.) The OSD has non-discrimination clauses in Articles 5 (people and groups) and 6 (fields of use). | |
| Apr 5, 2015 at 16:13 | comment | added | o0'. | @JörgWMittag it would not be "free software", maybe, but the definition of "open source" is not so widely accepted… | |
| Apr 5, 2015 at 12:24 | comment | added | rwong | As a reminder, "non-commercial use" is itself quite a fuzzy concept. It certainly goes beyond what people thought of as "revenue generating". In other words, there might be non-revenue-generating use that would still run afoul of the "non-commercial-use" clause. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is personal opinion.) | |
| Apr 5, 2015 at 12:22 | comment | added | rwong | @jwenting: To answer your question shortly, those restrictions (of which "non-commercial use license" is a typical type) would not be called a GPL license, but would be called by some other names. Note that a work can be dual-licensed, in which case a commercial use that involves redistribution will have to choose to either redistribute the source code per GPL, or to instead comply with that alternative license. | |
| Apr 5, 2015 at 12:16 | comment | added | Jörg W Mittag | "This is generally true of most open source licenses, however, I suppose it might not be the case for every single one." – Such field of use restrictions are expressly forbidden by both the FSD and the OSD. A license which contains such a restriction would, by definition, not be an open source license. | |
| Apr 5, 2015 at 12:14 | comment | added | Jörg W Mittag | This is pretty common, actually. It is a form of price discrimination and sometimes quality control. Microsoft generally forbids releasing software created using pre-release versions of MS products, for example. They also often forbid creating commercial products with their free offerings, e.g. for students. IntelliJ offers special licenses for IDEA, which can only be used to create open source software. For free/open software, however, this simply cannot exist, because both the Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition forbid such field of use restrictions. | |
| Apr 5, 2015 at 11:06 | comment | added | phyrfox | I have an example of a licensing agreement that included such a limitation, actually. The Visual Studio Express IDEs, available for free from Microsoft, were for personal use only. You were not allowed to redistribute any application compiled by those IDEs. You had to purchase an actual copy of Visual Studio in order to sell/distribute the apps created by it. The latest incarnations of Visual Studio do not have this requirement anymore (that I could find), but that EULA was probably around for a decade or more. | |
| Apr 5, 2015 at 10:29 | comment | added | Brandin | If such a license DID exist, wouldn't this be equivalent to putting an end user license on a tool like a saw and saying "all your woodworks are belong to us". IANAL as well but this sounds pretty ridiculous. BTW I produce plenty of content in proprietary products like MS Word, Visual Studio et al, and pretty sure none of that that I produce "belongs" to MS. | |
| Apr 5, 2015 at 5:25 | comment | added | user53141 | Yeah, that's why I added the caveat about weird licenses. The most common licenses out there don't do that. | |
| Apr 5, 2015 at 4:45 | comment | added | jwenting | I've seen libraries and tools that in their licenses/TOS included restrictions on the licensing/rights of the created data/content. Don't ask me the legality of such things, but some programmers do try. | |
| Apr 5, 2015 at 4:30 | vote | accept | Cyrus Roshan | ||
| Apr 5, 2015 at 3:46 | history | answered | user53141 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |