Re: Irrevocability and intellectual property

Jay Maynard wrote:

> I was considering open source licenses only because closed-source licenses
> typically carry no redistribution rights at all. For those few cases where
> the user does have the right to freey redistribute OCO programs, my comments
> apply as well.

Your equivalencing these two fact situations tends to confirm in my mind that a
license to property granted without authority is the THE issue, and not whether
or not Hercules is open source.  There is nothing special about it --- If IBM has
no legal interest, then they have nothing distribution-wise to say about
Hercules, open or otherwise.


> In any case, how am I supposed to stop someone redistributing Hercules?
> Especially when he has no reason to believe his right to do so may have been
> invalidated? Especially when I have absolutely no way of knowing who has it,
> or where they got it?

Seems to me if there were a misappropriation matter, then its nothing special
just because the errant grant is one of open source.  Perhaps good examples are
counterfit cases, knock-offs,  illegal copying, etc.    In some sense all
counterfit dollars come "open source" -- copy it, embellish it, pass it on., but
it may turn out you shouldn't use it in certain ways!



>  I'll agree
> that it's not unique to OSD-compliant licenses, but it *is* common to all of
> them. If you say a license if OSD-compliant, you say that (among other
> things) it's transferable and irrevocable.
>
> If the grantor had no right to grant the rights in that license, then he
> screwed up and is liable for it. That doesn't mean that the court can
> effectively force him to do anything about the versions out there in the
> wild, any more than they can force him to strap a pair of Pratt & Whitney
> JT8D turbojet engines to a pig and order him to start passenger service to
> Pago Pago. That pig may fly, but you'll never get the drink cart aboard.

Same is true for counterfiting by the millions, but that doesn't alter the
analysis vis-a-vis the bad actor.

>  From that one can get an
> > appreciation (albeit anecdotally) for the licensing landscape.
>
> Because that doesn't answer the question. Whether or not some people are
> running the software without a license has no bearing on whether or not IBM
> will issue such a license.

A good existance proof would do wonders to improve the dialectic on this.

PDW


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