Re: [Twisted-Python] Twisted is now under the MIT license.
I have yet to read the MIT license, but am wondering if it is unilateral in that it only is eforceable under U.S. law? Or does the United Nations recognize the MIT license for enforceability issues? Side note: Microsoft announced yesterday that they're withdrawing from the U.N. Cefact (this makes me nervous about U.S. laws and big corporations like Microsoft who try to wield influence on other countries as well as the U.N.) _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail
Sergio Trejo wrote:
I have yet to read the MIT license,
Take 30 seconds and do so ;) . I think you'll find it's not the most evil thing in the world... http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php If you are using *any* open source project (and many closed source ones too), then you are almost certainly using either MIT or BSD-licensed code, and if you are using Twisted, then you are certainly using code which has a far more complex and scary licensing history (i.e. Python itself) than something which is licensed solely and explicitly under MIT. Basically MIT is one of the least restrictive licenses available, far less restrictive than LGPL, for instance. It says (approximately) you can do whatever you like as long as you don't sue the creator, and you retain the license + copyright notice in the source. As for the issue of how contributions work, Twisted has, as far as I know up until this date required assignment of copyright (to IIRC Glyph). That allows Glyph to relicense the project anyway he feels at some point. There is some legal murkiness in the US around the question of "joint" copyright, with most modern licenses tending to require that there be a single owner of the copyright who provides irrevocable sub-licenses back to the original author to avoid that murkiness. There is no legal reason to stop assigning copyright to a single person or entity as far as I know, but as long as each contributor is contributing their work under MIT license, the results can be combined (though technically each licensor would then require that their license + copyright statement be included, which can become rather ugly if there are a few hundred individual contributors). Assignment with irrevocable back-licenses seems to be the path most "monied" open source projects (i.e. those who can afford intellectual property lawyers) are taking, btw. However, most of these concerns tend to drop out when everything being considered is under MIT/BSD-style licenses, if the creator has the right to apply any license at all, applying MIT/BSD basically means that anyone can use the code for whatever purpose, so it doesn't particularly matter (other than for tracking copyright and license attributions) who owns the copyright. As for whether the license would be enforceable solely under U.S. law; you are asking the wrong question (do you really care whether it's enforceable in Nairobi?), what you want to know is whether it is a valid license[1] under the laws of your own country. The MIT license is an extremely simple license statement. A clear statement that you can use the software for basically any purpose is far more likely to be valid in multiple countries than the kind of overwrought licenses created by practitioners focusing solely on a particular country's legal idiosyncrasies. There may be jurisdictions under which the clauses disclaiming liability are not allowed. Arguably that would either leave the contributors open to liability damages, or entirely nullify the license. If you are really worried about that, then you'd have to talk to a lawyer (and I'm not one, of course)... and maybe a psychiatrist :) . With respect, Mike [1] Keep in mind that a license *loosens* restrictions that would otherwise be present. The enforceable restrictions on a license are simply trying to retain some of the already present restrictions and/or trade restraint of action in some form for the right to traverse the granted monopoly. In the MIT license case, unless you're planning to sue the developers for liability, or for some reason feel the need to strip off the copyright statement and claim the product as your own creation, there's very little that the copyright holders can enforce against you. ________________________________________________ Mike C. Fletcher Designer, VR Plumber, Coder http://www.vrplumber.com http://blog.vrplumber.com
participants (2)
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Mike C. Fletcher
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Sergio Trejo