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LICENSE
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LICENSE
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
---
I enourage you to read this essay by Martin Sustrik, one of the authors of
ZeroMQ, and a far more intelligent man than I. Portions of his essay are
excerpted below.
http://250bpm.com/blog:82
> The projects without license can in theory be considered open source (the
> source is published after all) but legally, the copyright is still owned by
> the authors and using it means infringing their copyright.
> The interesting question is why would anyone make such a contradictory
> statement? Why would they make the code physically available to everyone and
> yet make it legally unavailable?
> One possibility is that people are just lazy. Adding a license to a project
> is work and they don't care enough to do it.
> There's a different possibility though. It's going to be weird, but bear with
> me, I have a point to make...
> So, the other possibility is that authors deliberately reject the legal
> system per se. The reasoning can go as follows: I do care about my peers
> using my software. I don't give a damn about whether the lawyers and
> mega-corporations they work for use it. So, if you are like me and you don't
> care about all the intellectual property antics, here's my project, feel free
> to use it. If you are the kind of moron who wants to have their legal ass
> covered, go screw yourself.
> And it's not hard to figure out why. It is often said that law is a kind of
> trade-off. You give up some of your personal freedom and what you get in
> return is a civilised way of resolving conflicts. But in the world of open
> source it's hard to think about it as a trade-off. You get obstacles and all
> kinds of legal threats, even criminalisation of what is, in many ways, a
> philanthropic enterprise. You get crypto wars and you get software patents
> and you get copyrightable APIs. And you get nothing in return. Can you think
> of a single case where law have helped you solve a problem you had in open
> source land?