Copyright considerations

[BigEd]

Two members have recently died, and the question arises as to what happens with any projects or code they left behind.

I have more to write, but for now:

You have copyright as soon as you create a work, whether you want it or not, and you can't really lose it - you need to license your work somehow if you want grant access to others, even if your intent is to impose no restrictions. There are simple guides to assist choosing a license at
http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/
and
http://paulmillr.com/posts/simple-descr ... -licenses/

Legally, on death the copyright rests with the estate of the deceased, for at least 50 years. So the question really is, what are the licensing terms.

The license on ehbasic is a free-for-non-commercial-use-with-attribution, which is better than nothing, but it is not one of the regular ones. In the unlikely event that anyone wanted to pursue a copyright claim it might be a mess. Things are simpler if the originator selects a standard license.

I urge everyone to pick a favourite license and slap it into each of their projects. Homebrew licenses are, arguably, better than nothing, but not a good idea.

Quote:

EhBASIC is free but not copyright free. For non commercial use there is only one
restriction, any derivative work should include, in any binary image distributed,
the string "Derived from EhBASIC" and in any distribution that includes human
readable files a file that includes the above string in a human readable form
e.g. not as a comment in an HTML file.

Edit: a few pointers to previous discussions:
viewtopic.php?t=2071
viewtopic.php?p=26802#p26802
viewtopic.php?p=21084#p21081

[ChuckT]

Little can be done if users don't know how to contact the next of kin for permission.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Periodically I give this some thought, as I'm no youngster and have had some serious medical close calls. Currently all of my designs, including code, are copyrighted by my company (which company is owned by my wife and me), but are free to use in noncommercial applications. I've asked our company attorney to formulate something to allow these designs to continue to be used after my death and the dissolution of the company, both to save my wife the burden of making decisions on this and to make sure that there is no wrangling over the disposition of hardware and software designs.

[BigEd]

ChuckT wrote:

Little can be done if users don't know how to contact the next of kin for permission.

Indeed, and an appropriate license removes any reason to need to do that.

"Non-commercial" is to my mind a slightly problematic stipulation. Perhaps the intention is that no-one else should profit off the work. But what about projects which only cover reasonable costs? A hardware project might well want to bundle some software. Isn't it better to get exposure and some credit than to have your name filed off, or your software ignored? Anyhow, the Creative Commons have quite a lot to say about what non-commercial means, and that's even after they've been careful to define it in their licenses as
"NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation."
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/NonCom ... rpretation

Much like writing a will, or making note of all your financial accounts, or of all your internet presences and passwords, I think of licensing as a "putting your house in order" kind of activity - best done at the earliest rather than at the last minute, and better done than not done even if done imperfectly.

Head post updated a little.

Cheers
Ed

[ChuckT]

I mean, the next of kin may not have any interest in 6502 or computers. They may not be making the kind of money to be interested in advertising so unless they advertise, no one is going to be able to contact them or know who to contact. So unless there is a thread directing people to the relevant and interested parties, most of this technology is going to die in obscurity because even Amiga and Commodore users don't know who to contact in most cases but there are people waiting for the Commodore patents to expire and they have a list of them.

[BigEd]

I don't quite see what your point is, sorry. If someone makes a 6502-related project, and publishes it, then there's a good chance copies will remain around for some time. To work legally with those copies, we need a license. The best time to add a license is on day one.

In that case, there's no question arising of whether next of kin are interested or contactable, when the inevitable happens.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

BigEd wrote:

I don't quite see what your point is, sorry. If someone makes a 6502-related project, and publishes it, then there's a good chance copies will remain around for some time. To work legally with those copies, we need a license. The best time to add a license is on day one.

In that case, there's no question arising of whether next of kin are interested or contactable, when the inevitable happens.

The other path to take is to put stuff into the public domain. Doing so doesn't prevent commercial usage but does prevent someone from improperly claiming copyright ownership and preventing others from using the work.

Incidentally, I do provide an out for anyone who wants to use my work in something that will be sold in some fashion. They can contact me, describe what they want to do and I can give or withhold permission.

[BigEd]

BTW, it's not so straightforward to put things into the public domain: the closest you can get legally is something like the CC0 license, which disclaims as much as possible.
See http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

[ChuckT]

BigEd wrote:

I don't quite see what your point is, sorry. If someone makes a 6502-related project, and publishes it, then there's a good chance copies will remain around for some time. To work legally with those copies, we need a license. The best time to add a license is on day one.

In that case, there's no question arising of whether next of kin are interested or contactable, when the inevitable happens.

What I'm saying is that I don't know Lee Davidson's family or whom to contact. I've seen Lee's email address floating around but email sites have a policy that the email addresses are not transferrable to next of kin. So who would I contact? The answer is: I wouldn't. The owner of the I.P. wasn't involved with selling it, it isn't making money so they aren't going to advertise their address and as a result, no one will get to use it.

[BigEd]

Ah, so what you're saying is that the "contact me for commercial terms" approach to a license which freely allows non-commercial use isn't such a good idea, because it doesn't work too well after the demise of the author.

I can agree with that.

[ChuckT]

A lot of users in the Amiga community already are confused about who owns what because most of them don't know and they are still using their computers and writing programs for them. Getting a license is actually harder than it seems and they would do business with the person(s) if they would only come forward.

[BigEd]

This is why open-sourcing things from day one is a good service to all present and future collaborators!

[BigDumbDinosaur]

BigEd wrote:

Ah, so what you're saying is that the "contact me for commercial terms" approach to a license which freely allows non-commercial use isn't such a good idea, because it doesn't work too well after the demise of the author.

I can agree with that.

What that would simply mean is that when the author passes away, the availability commercial terms would cease, but non-commercial use would continue to be okay. Of course, following the author's death there may be no one else to enforce the terms of the license.

[bubblemonster]

Hi, if anyone is still interested in contacting Lees relatives regarding this then you can PM me.

[kc5tja]

On the subject of licensing, I generally follow this imprecise flow:

Answer three questions:

A) Do you allow proprietary extensions to the project? In other words, consider this hypothetical example. 6502 GEOS sources are now commonly available online at Github. Further pretend that GEOS is still alive and well in the industry, and that you're a maintainer for the project. Suddenly, Joe wants to create a value-added distribution of GEOS using some proprietary code he's written, and works well for the C64/C128 versions of GEOS, but not for the Apple II version. If Joe would only release his extensions openly, others could (if they so desired) pick up the work of porting those extensions to the Apple II as well. Do you think it's OK for Joe to withhold his source listings and lock the license down? YES or NO

B) Do you allow (even if you don't recommend) contributors to select their own license terms for contributions which are not to pre-existing files? Let's suppose Joe has a change of heart, and agrees to publish the sources to his contributions. Do you think Joe is free to change or replace a file with a given core project filename with his own? OR, do you feel that it's OK to use Joe's contributions even if he chose a different open-source license than you? YES or NO

C) Do you want to apply these terms to the project as a whole, or to individual files comprising the project? If the former, answer YES; otherwise NO.

Then we arrive at the following truth-table.

Code: Select all

 A   B   C  License
NO  NO  NO  Apache V2.0
NO  NO  YES LGPL Version 2 or 3.
NO  YES NO  Apache V2.0
NO  YES YES MPL Version 2.
YES NO  NO  Apache V2.0
YES NO  YES Apache V2.0
YES YES NO  Apache V2.0
YES YES YES Apache V2.0

As you can see, Apache is the most liberal of the licenses, being a BSD license derivative. However, MPL and LGPL are quite useful for providing legal guarantees about the openness of the project as well.

Note that I did not list GPL license in this listing. While it has its place, the legal can of worms it opens up is, I think, too complicated for the majority of people who just want to window-shop for a license that best suits their needs. Not that GPL is inherently bad at its job; many great projects use it. However, know the terms you're agreeing to before selecting it. It's not a simple license, even if you can read it in one sitting.