On Fri, 2009-09-25 at 10:39 +0800, Ray Rashif wrote:
> The developer of a software knows best. Even if he does not, he has
> the right to determine how his software should be used, what should be
> patched, what should be improved.
The way I see this the creator of a creative work including software,
music etc. has various rights which include being identified as the
creator and determining who may copy or use the work, for what purpose
and how it may be adapted. These rights are enshrined in copyright law.
The creator may do various things with the rights:
1. He may sell or give rights to other people outright.
2. He may license one or more people to use some or all of his rights
and in so doing he may ask for royalies.
In the principles above 'he' also means 'she' or the legal person that
is a company or corporation for the case when the work was created in
the course of employment by that company.
The model above applies to the whole of the creative work industry
including books, films, music and computer software and for computer
software applies both to proprietary software and free software.
The big difference between free and proprietary software is not what
rights the creator starts with but what he then does with them.
In proprietary software the right to produce a derivative work (which
includes patched/improved versions) is typically reserved (retained by
the creator) and typically the only right licensed to the end user is
one to use the software as-is. It does not matter for this purpose if a
royalty is charged for this license.
In free software the creator typically gives away the right to make
derivative works though with certain restrictions. Depending on the set
of restrictions he is happy with he chooses a license such as the GPL or
one of the Berkeley-style licenses.
So, when we are talking about free software it is very likely the
creator is happy for others to create patches but to be completely sure
we must check which license applies and the terms of that license.
In the case a distribution like Debian making patches they well
understand these licenses having published a definition of which
licenses they consider to "free software" licenses and analysed the
common open source licenses against those criteria.
Regards,
Steve.
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Received on Sat Sep 26 16:15:09 2009
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