Re: About the license of gserver.rb being "freeware"?

Thank you very much for your info :-)

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 5:38 PM, James Tucker <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> On 1 Apr 2008, at 00:03, Corey Jewett wrote:
> >
> > On Mar 31, 2008, at 04:53 , XiaoLiang Liu wrote:
> >> Can anyone help me on this?
> >>
> >> I think Ruby development team should have investigated the license
> >> issue
> >> before release the package.
> >>
> >> Thanks a lot.
> >
> > http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/freeware.html
> > http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/freeware
> >
> > The term "freeware" has no clear accepted definition, but it is
> > commonly used for packages which permit redistribution but not
> > modification (and their source code is not available). These
> > packages are not free software, so please don't use "freeware" to
> > refer to free software. -- http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
>
> Given that this freeware distribution *is* the source code, I don't
> see that there should be any restriction to it. In fact, more than
> this, the fact that it was well known to be published as source code
> by the author, any case law making this software non-public domain
> would be damaging to the industry.
>
> > IANAL.
>
> No, nor am I.
>
> > Freeware is different from public domain. Releasing something into
> > the public domain means you abandon your copyright and therefore
> > your ownership of the work. Freeware is a somewhat arbitrary
> > license, but it generally implies that the author has given you all
> > rights to use something. Modification and redistribution may or may
> > not be questionable.
>
> Traditionally (I'm talking back before everyone had typed "http"),
> freeware was common. From what I remember of the general actions of
> people, most freeware apps are considered free to distribute, and free
> to use, subject to other restrictions in the license. If there are no
> specific additional restrictions, one is effectively granted
> permission to use the software for whatever one might please. Reverse
> engineering of software is rarely regarded as allowable, however, in
> this case the source code *is* the delivered product.
>
> With regard to intellectual property law, anything which has a
> copyright on it is well protected in most countries with mature IP
> law, and as a consequence I cannot see the argument of public domain
> dropping copyright or ownership. This is just the same as a virus
> author not being able to release themselves from the law by way of
> claiming that they only wrote the code, they did not 'release' it.
> Similarly MIT licenses have been known not to provide protection in
> these cases, however, as far as I know the license remains sound and
> case law from such incidents is not used in copyright dispute cases.
>
> > Unfortunately, given that the term freeware is so vague, your best
> > bet is to either track down the original author. Perhaps you should
> > contact matz directly and ask why it was committed since it appears
> > he did the original checkin:
> http://svn.ruby-lang.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/trunk/lib/gserver.rb?revision=4102&view=markup
>
> Finally I would just argue that the GServer implementation is very
> largely 'standard' for a multi-threaded server design and
> implementation, as such I doubt that any significant copyright is
> actually owned here. The code is likely to have been derived from that
> which is already in the public domain, and moreover it could be
> replicated without reference as MIT licensed code in a short time-
> frame. Given this, anyone with concern about the license should
> probably just do that.
>
> > Corey
> >
>
>
>