I ran across this article by the H today. It covers some of the issues around Open Source Licences and the problems in combining them.
There are lot of stuff that are not clearly covered by any license. Take for example the Qt library, one of my favourites. It has a lot of smart functions. The development is open and freely accessible for each and every one.
So, what if I surf around the bug tracker or more precisely the feature requests and when I find a nice one for my own stuff I steal it.
Take for example the idea of "advanced rubber band", the suggestion that the square used to change size of an object is rotated together with the object.
The question is then: who owns the idea and the feature request, and under what license is it made available to the public?
The same goes the other way around, what it the idea is stolen and then presented as a suggestion and implemented. Who is then responsible for stealing the idea?
I have had the favour of working with mixed closed and open source on an earlier assignment. The conclusion is that this is an area where one shall take particular care. One is actually playing with the risk of having the entire application suite forcedly licensed as open source with the requirement to supply full source code to any one that asks. We had each and every usage of open source licensed software reviewed by lawyers and signed by someone high in the hierarchy. Thinking of it I this was an reasonable procedure.
Just a disclaimer; I do favour open source software in general and Linux in particular. Meanwhile I do software engineering for living which implies the usage of paid software which in most cases means closed source software.
No comments:
Post a Comment