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Frequently asked questions: Difference between revisions
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The key for an open source project is not if you can win a legal argument or not. Rather, it is to avoid any legal argument in the first place, and at all costs. Meaning to stay out of court. To use something like this safely in an open source project, I would suggest something along the following lines: | |||
* Making your derivative product public, in full (but unlicensed, saying it is copyrighted material), | |||
* Going to the owners of the original data product, giving them a link to your derivative product, | |||
* Asking them to make a public statement that the derivative product can be licensed using the "GPLv2 or later version" licence, | |||
* Make sure to ask them to identify the public derivative product as a link, and identify all its parts (to avoid them saying at a later date that you included bits of the protected material), | |||
Any statement they make on the web can be backed up on the web archive ( http://web.archive.org/ ). To simplify the process, you could draft part of the statement detailing the derivative product in full, with all details. With this, there will no longer be any shades of grey! If they are happy to do this, then it is legally no problem to use (i.e. the grey situation has shifted to white). If they are not happy with your proposal, then they could turn around one day and sue (i.e. the grey situation has shifted to a clear black).<ref>{{cite web | |||
|url = https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/34561220/ | |||
|title = <nowiki> Re: [Flightgear-devel] External FDM to protect propriety data in a | |||
GPL eviirenment </nowiki> | |||
|author = <nowiki> Edward d'Auvergne </nowiki> | |||
|date = Oct 22nd, 2015 | |||
|added = Oct 22nd, 2015 | |||
|script_version = 0.37 | |||
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The open-source world depends on license terms and copyrights and cooperation and trust to protect our work. We put up with a small subset of people who willing abuse those terms and hope that larger group peer pressure will keep the bad actors in check. Sometimes there is legal recourse, sometimes it is tough to do anything about it when problems span country boundaries (or when someone just wants to break the rules for their own self serving reasons.) My feeling though is in the long term, most people are honest and do wish to do the right thing, and the small group that is truly there to cause problems or just serve themselves at the expense of others will never endure as long as the larger group of people with good intentions. In the end, you have to make your own determination of how much effort you put into a model, versus how much money you could make selling it, versus the risk of someone copying and distributing it themselves, versus the legal costs to try to stop them.<ref>{{cite web | The open-source world depends on license terms and copyrights and cooperation and trust to protect our work. We put up with a small subset of people who willing abuse those terms and hope that larger group peer pressure will keep the bad actors in check. Sometimes there is legal recourse, sometimes it is tough to do anything about it when problems span country boundaries (or when someone just wants to break the rules for their own self serving reasons.) My feeling though is in the long term, most people are honest and do wish to do the right thing, and the small group that is truly there to cause problems or just serve themselves at the expense of others will never endure as long as the larger group of people with good intentions. In the end, you have to make your own determination of how much effort you put into a model, versus how much money you could make selling it, versus the risk of someone copying and distributing it themselves, versus the legal costs to try to stop them.<ref>{{cite web | ||