On 12/16/2014 09:34 AM, d...@axiom-developer.org wrote: >> What does this have to do with Axiom? > > License discussions arise from time to time. We have a long email > history in Axiom discussing licensing.
OK. ;-) > This is the first court case involving the GPL that has not (yet) > settled out of court. Maybe in the US. But there have been cases in Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpl-violations.org > As for the employee issue, at least in the U.S., software is generally > licensed to the corporation, not to the individual employee. Wow! Actually, I don't know the exact situation in Germany, but what I wrote was something that I read somewhere some years ago and it made perfectly sense to me. Nevertheless. "Copyright" in Germany is not existing in the american sense. Rather, there is "Urheberrecht" and "Nutzungsrecht". Under German law, I cannot give away the "Urheberrecht" (because "Urheber" means "creator" and that right is bound to an individual). That basically means I cannot legally put something into the public domain. Per default the creator of a work (i.e. the Urheber) has the exclusive Nutzungsrecht (i.e., right to use/copy/modify/distribute/...) of the work in question, but, of course, if the work has been produced inside a company, then the exclusive "Nutzungsrecht" usually immediately falls into the hands of the company. And that means that the creator of some work is not allowed to distribute his own work without consent of the company. Well, that's of course reasonable, if the company pays this employee. Anyway, German law, is a bit different from US law. If everyone would play nice, there wouldn't be need to spend a lot of time into such legal issues and we could concentrate on real work and release it under a free license. Ralf _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
