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From: "John Colagioia" <JColagioia@csi.com>
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Subject: Re: IF library licence / game licence
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 17:01:30 -0400
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I don't want to be here.  Oh, well...

Stephen L Breslin <breslin@acsu.buffalo.edu> wrote:
>Licences can be designed to do many things. Most commonly
>(comercially) they protect the work from certain kinds of misuse, as
>in selling without permission, or in other contexts, distributing
>without permission, using without permission, using outside of a
>certain location, and so on.

Actually, that's an incorrect statement, which seems to
be perpetuated by groups like Microsoft.  Licenses do not
protect the user, and they cannot grant rights to the
creator--mostly because there *are* no additional rights
to grant the author.

In the absence of a license, the author (copyright holder,
if you want to be technical) is the sole point of contact
and final arbiter of what uses a particular work can be
put to (ignoring Fair Use, Right of First Sale, and a few
other muddying things that don't quite apply, here).

The advantage of a license is that people don't have to
ask the explicit permission of the copyright holder for
each use; the license serves as a blanket statement of
permission granted by the copyright holder to designated
recipients (typically "everybody," when discussing Free
Software, and "customers" in commercial software).

The supposed protection (see the foregoing about
corporate redefinition) stems from the fact that the
license can be explictly revoked.  For example, the GPL
loosely translates to, "you can read and modify this
[right granted], but if you try passing it off as your
own work [term of contract violation], I revoke that
right [what you refer to as protection, which really
just re-establishes the pre-licensed state]."

Though it's never phrased that way, the typical "assumes
no responsibility" clause similarly negates the license,
if the user tries to sue, rather than granting some
mystical protection from the law; if the license is
implicitly revoked, the user couldn't have been using
the software legally, which makes the lawsuit
groundless.  The legal industry puts a different spin on
it, but that's more or less the concept.

[...]
>A licence designed to protect libraries from misuse is
>perhaps a silly idea.

I suspect a license of, "This library may be used, adapted,
and modified in any way without charge, so long as the
originating author remains credited," is all most people
around here *really* want.  Maybe add a clause that the
licensee may not use the product for a commercial project,
for authors who care.

I've used a similar license, in the (non-IF) past, which
replaces the credit clause with feedback.  I don't care if
someone's making money on something I gave away for free;
I don't care if I get credit for it.  I am interested in
knowing what sorts of things people think they can use the
code for, however.

[...]

OK, I've now gone on far too long on a topic I find
uninteresting and in which have insufficient training...
