New Open Source License: Single Supplier Open Source License

[David Schwartz]

> underway at comcast.net (Gary W. Swearingen) writes:

> > Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd at online.fr> writes:

> > > You don't require its permission for that.  If you legally have a copy
> > > of it, you can do what you like to it, just as if you legally
> > > purchased a book, you may scribble on its margins.

> > You are wrong.  If you legally have a copy of it, you can do what you
> > agreed to do with it, else you've violated your copyright license
> > agreement to copy, derive, and/or and publish.

> No.  The right to modify etc. that the law grants you cannot be
> repealed by the license; if the license says you can't modify or
> reverse-engineer the software (for your own use), the license is wrong
> and unenforceable.  Likewise if it says you can't publish reviews or
> benchmarks without the author's permission.

	Note that, at least in the United States, this is true only if the license
is truly a license and not actually a contract. Most EULAs, for example, are
really contracts not licenses. The GPL is in fact a license. So it can't
take away any right that you would otherwise have. Contracts can.

	It seems, however, that a contract can remove any rights that you might
have otherwise had. This assumes that you agreed to the contract as a
condition of lawfully receiving the work. Since this is not the case with
the GPL (and most other OS licenses), they aren't contracts. They are
licenses and all they can do is grant you rights as a 'gift' from the
copyright holder.

	To a lot of people, I think 'open source' just means that if you can get
the binary, you can get the source too and you can, if you wish, modify that
source code to do what you want it to do. This does provide the crux
benefits of open source -- transparency and flexibility.

	DS