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Re: license too ill

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bob writes:

> Has anyone else been confused about whether they can use other's
> code or not?

Yes.

> I see licenses like MIT, Apache, GNU, GLPL, and I honestly have no
> idea what the real deal is.  Do I need to get a law degree to
> understand these?

I don't have a law degree. You have been warned.

The real deal is simple: you are not allowed to use other people's
code. Without their permission, that is. The authors of the code can
do nothing about it even if they would like to. It's the copyright
law.

The licenses you list give you the permission to use the code. They
are public licenses, so they don't mention you specifically, but if
you use the code and follow the conditions of the license and the
copyright holder decides to sue you, the license is there to protect
you.

(The GNU licenses are called GPL and Lesser GPL aka LGPL, and GNU
itself is not a license at all.)

If you want to use the protection of the license without following its
conditions, things get more complicated. Get that law degree and
prepare to defend yourself.

The most important condition you need to understand is the copyleft:
some of the licenses require you to use the same conditions if you
distribute the work or a derived work. This may be complicated if two
different licenses require this and you use code under both.

Permissive licenses only allow you to pass the freedom on and don't
require it.

Free software / open source licenses give you rights that copyright
laws by default deny you. They don't take away from what little
copyright laws already allow. In particular, a short, trivial piece of
code is not protected to begin with.

To draw the precise line between short and non-short, trivial and
non-trivial, get that law degree. (It may be simpler to simply write
your own code when in doubt.)

> How do most programmers learn the gist of the common licenses?

Vaguely at best, I suppose.

The Free Software Foundation documents their point of view at fsf.org,
The Open Source Initiative theirs at opensource.org, and Wikipedia has
a useful-looking article on Free Software Licence.

Learn about their motivation (and your own!), about the basic kinds of
conditions (attribution, no advertisement, copyleft; some others may
not be compatible with free software and open source licenses).

Ignore the rants, except maybe those that are funny.

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license too ill bob <bob@coolfone.comze.com> - 2012-03-17 04:57 -0700
  Re: license too ill Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@ling.helsinki.fi> - 2012-03-17 16:46 +0200
    Re: license too ill Nomen Nescio <nobody@dizum.com> - 2012-03-17 20:42 +0100
      Re: license too ill "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2012-03-17 21:36 +0100
      Re: license too ill James Dow Allen <jdallen2000@yahoo.com> - 2012-03-18 07:29 -0700

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