Comments on: The Bugs in Mayor’s Open Source Software Announcement

By: Jackson West

Jackson West — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:33:21 +0000

Agreed, but in this context I referenced the GPL as the most widely-known of the licenses less relatively restrictive than the license agreements provided by corporate, proprietary, closed source software providers. It’s still the standard. That the city’s open source software review guidelines don’t specify these terms is the basic issue I was trying to address. Just as I don’t confuse open source with “public domain” as the city apparently has.

I would say that you don’t need a law degree to program a computer, but it certainly helps to have lawyers available if you ever care to distribute your code, especially in a commercial context.

By: Xenu

Xenu — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:13:24 +0000

That’s a little better, but still not quite right. The article confuses the term “open source” with GPL. Open source refers to a fairly large category of licenses, not just the GPL family of licenses.

For example, Mac OS X is built on top of an open source operating system developed by Berkeley called BSD, which uses its own license. That license is considered an open source license because the source is given away freely.

There’s many other licenses out there that can be considered open source, such as the Mozilla license, the Apache license, the MIT license, etc. All these licenses are fairly different. The unfortunate thing about all this is you basically need a law degree to program a computer these days.

By: Jackson West

Jackson West — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:52:45 +0000

Thanks, Xenu, I added a note of clarification.

By: Xenu

Xenu — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:25:33 +0000

“the Free Software Foundation owns the copyright to many applications released under the General Public License”

Um, NO. Read the link you supplied more carefully.

The FSF owns the copyright to *contributions* people make to code owned by the FSF.

That does NOT mean that if I write a program under a GPL license that FSF owns the copyright. I still own the copyright because my program was created by me; it’s not a “contribution” to an existing program owned by someone else.