Re: Subscription/Service Fees - OSD Intent
Laura Majerus writes: I'm collecting information on gpl disputes that have been settled amicably (or at least settled out of court). "Plenty of companies" is a bit vague. Pointers anyone? You should ask Professor Eben Moglen. http://old.law.columbia.edu/ -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Subscription/Service Fees
David Davies writes: Maybe I don't get some key part. I wasn't thinking of any form of copying restriction, only having it clearly stated in the license that if you continue to use the software you are required to pay $x to xyz inc. There is no way to stop user A giving it to user B, and in fact that action is likely to be actively encouraged as it is with shareware. However, if the license clearly states an obligation to register and pay a subscription fee then users who are complying with either the legal or moral implication of the license will often pay. Some people think that copyright law doesn't actually allow you to prevent people who have a legal copy of the software from using it in any way they like. D. J. Bernstein, author of qmail, is a well-known proponent of this view: http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html The usual assumption in the free software community has been that probably software _can_ be accompanied with a legally binding license which even regulates non-copyright activities. But people don't necessarily think that this is a good situation, just that this is the way the courts or the industry are going. Professor Bernstein points out that there is no consistent legal precedent in the U.S. for licenses to regulate use. Free software licenses mostly don't attempt to -- although some licenses claim to be contracts. I think the uncertainty around this question prevented the OSD from specifically saying that the license must not forbid the program from being used for any purpose by anyone who has a copy. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: boomberg bloopers
it. So free software development can continue apace (for some values of "apace") without software companies doing it commercially. I mean, lots of the software I'm using to type this message was written _by a 501(c)(3) charity_ and _using tax-deductible charitable contributions_! What kind of competition is _that_, to be a for-profit company competiting head-to-head with a 501(c)(3) offering directly analogous goods and services to the general public? So one possible consequence that some people foresee is that the "pure-play" proprietary software companies are just going to go out of business, because they can't compete against charities and hobbyists once people realize that the charities and hobbyists can write and support really good general-purpose software. And this is a possibility which is not an unusual prediction in the free software community, and I think we can see from the statements we're discussing that some people in the proprietary software world _definitely_ see it as a real possibility. (This is not to say that there is not going to be specialized proprietary software and lots of niches of some sort for software which is not published -- but a trend toward a world where Richard Stallman's vision of "generally useful software" being free is realized.) Going out of business is a real, time-honored, traditional market response to changing conditions. Some people (Schumpeter?) have written entire books on how it's supposed to be a really good thing that firms can go out of business. But surely those firms would have to see that (by whatever means it might happen) as "a threat", surely they would have to feel threatened by that. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Wording in Open Source Definition
John Cowan writes: Richard Boulton scripsit: We were unable to come to a satisfactory agreement, so I am asking this list: "Is it permissible in any circumstances for an Open Source license to require a royalty or other fee for sale of the software?" The answer is clearly "no". If the answer is no, I humbly suggest that the "may not" be changed to "must not" where it appears in clause 1, and that "free" be changed to "free-of-cost" in the rationale for clause 1, to avoid others falling into this same argument. I think you are absolutely right, and "may not" should be changed to "must not" everywhere. As evidence that "may not" means "must not" in this document, however, consider clause 6. The second sentence purports to be an example of the general principle given in the first sentence, yet the second sentence reads "may not" where the first reads "must not". Maybe the OSD should be written to use terms like MAY, MUST, and SHOULD as defined by RFC 2119: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt (And it could then say so.) -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Public Domain and liability
Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M. writes: I think it may be a very good idea. In fact, some states are developing free software...especially state-run universities. It's fairly well-known that the contributions of the Univeristy of Illinois and UC-Berkeley are significant in regards to Internet software. States, of course, will not give away all (or even most) of their intellectual property, but I think some have made significant contributions as a result of the software development projects at universities, which often are sponsored by Federal grants. There's some interesting argument going on these days, too, because under some state public records laws, software developed by a state (not necessarily by a contractor or vendor) will be a public record, so that anybody may request a copy. (Some contractors are kind of scared about that, too. Remember that the ACLU recently made a very high-profile Federal FOIA request for the source code of the FBI's extremely secret Carnivore software. There are some law enforcement exceptions in the FOIA, so the FBI might not have to comply, but in general, it seems both Federal and state agencies would have to turn over most source code to most of their software, on request.) It's pretty clear that states can hold patents, but public records laws might severely limit their ability to use copyrights to control use of their original works. I once made a joke about requesting copies of all the work of a friend who works for a state government, but it's actually quite possible, in general. So what happens if someone tries to redistribute works of authorship which are matters of public record? How about derivation and sublicensing? -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Simple Public License, v0.20
John Cowan writes: Justin Wells scripsit: Your improvement must not cause our software to depend on additional software unless that additional software is distributed to the public under a license which allows everyone to use and distribute it free of charge; I don't remember if I raised this point before, but this seems to say that a patch allowing the software to run on Windows or VMS is impermissible, since the patch makes the software "depend" on a non-free operating system. This is clearly discrimination against a class of users and as such forbidden by the OSD. It's interesting to compare what the GPL does about this: ... However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable. I think this gives OS vendors the ability to make proprietary extensions to GPLed programs! -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Apache v. GPL
W. Yip writes: Hi. I have some trouble grasping why Apache license is incompatible with the GPL. Is it because of the naming restrictions in Apache constituting additional restrictions that are prohibited by the GPL? Or is it because of: Redistributions of any form whatsoever must retain the following *acknowledgment: *"This product includes software developed by the Apache Group *for use in the Apache HTTP server project (http://www.apache.org/)." The above sounds like the obnoxious advert clause in the dreaded 'old-BSD'. Then again, how does an advertisement clause such as the above amount to incompatibility with GPL? The GPL requires people relying on its permissions to grant the same permissions to others in order to distribute code. The GPL gives you permission to distribute with no advertising clause, so if you distribute with a requirement to retain an advertising clause, you have not successfully cause[d] any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. and you may also be in trouble because [y]ou may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. The conventional view on GPL compatibility, which has been disputed sometimes, is that a license must be strictly less restrictive than the GPL in every regard, or else allow sublicensing under the GPL, in order to be GPL-compatible. I shouldn't say "or else" -- because of the passages quoted above, we can argue that "strictly less restrictive than the GPL in every regard" _implies_ allowing sublicensing or dual licensing under the GPL. And that is what the GPL expects. My final question is this. When literature mentions 'compatibility', do they refer to compatibility of licenses in a situation involving: (i) dual licensing (eg. Perl under both Artistic and GPL); or It seems unlikely that a license would be successful in the free software world if it attempted to prohibit dual licensing, so no. (ii) intermixing of code released under different licenses. Yes -- as Jim Dennis said yesterday, "the ability to merge two projects" into one, or to excerpt code from one project and re-use it in another, releasing the end result to the public as a free software program. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Apache v. GPL
John Cowan writes: Seth David Schoen wrote: It seems unlikely that a license would be successful in the free software world if it attempted to prohibit dual licensing, so no. Indeed, it would be nonsense. Nobody but the author can license code under any particular license, so saying "I license my code under license X and no other" is a promise to one's self alone. I'm thinking of something like this: If the copyright holder of this package has granted permission to anyone to redistribute it under the copyright laws on any terms other than these, or by any instrument other than this license, then this permission is void, and you have no right under this license to distribute the software. In other words, a license could get so offended when an author dual-licensed some code that it cancels itself. :-) So it should be possible to have a license which is resistent to use in dual licensing situations. The author of the licensed code wouldn't be prohibited from granting the permissions; instead, one of the permission grants, by its own terms, might be inoperative. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Licensing and public performance
Andrew J Bromage writes: The OSD has no particular comment on this, although many people have felt that it is inappropriate to use a license to violate the privacy of the users of some software package. There may be media-creation software "out there" whose licences require that works created using the software include a credit. Could anyone who uses such software please take a look at their licences to see if they do? Mind you, that might be based on shrinkwrap agreements rather than appealing to "public performance". As for the OSD's comment, I was worried that it might be discriminatory against fields of endeavour: those producing media for distribution with this software have to redistribute the software, but others do not. That looks too much like "commercial users must redistribute the source but non-commercial users don't have to". Interestingly, the GNU GPL sort of does that: c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.) More specifically, noncommercial distribution is exempted, some of the time, from source code distribution responsibilities under the GPL (if an upstream distributor has made the source code distribution offer under 3(b) of the GPL, instead of distributing source code under 3(a) as would be nice). Why does nobody feel that this is an OSD violation? Is it because it's traditional, or just because it feels reasonable (and because it's an exception for some people, rather than an additional burden)? Does it feel reasonable _because_ it's traditional? How many people ever actually consciously exercise a right under the GPL's 3(c)? It's still not clear to me -- and has never been really clear -- whether the OSD prohibitions on discrimination only apply to discrimination which could make software non-free for some class of users, or whether they apply to _all_ discrimination, because discrimination is perceived as wrong. The truth in practice and public opinion and intuition has seemed to be somewhere in between. I was involved in OSI certification of at least one license which said that commercial users agreed to indemnify contributors against liability arising out of the commercial users' use of the software. However, noncommercial users were not required to indemnify anyone (if I remember correctly). This seemed fair, intuitively, but it is certainly discriminatory, and certainly someone could object to it. I often have the feeling that the OSD ought to be revised periodically by on-going discussions similar to the discussions which resulted in its creation. There are still a few situations which present real ambiguities for interpreting the OSD. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: loophole in the GPL?
Justin Wells writes: On Thu, Mar 30, 2000 at 02:52:38PM -0500, John Cowan wrote: The term "distribute" must be understood in the sense in which it is used in the Copyright Act. The term is not actually defined there, but is used thus: "distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending". So selling copies is a type, indeed the primary type, of distribution. However, I thought it was well established that a copyright license CANNOT prevent you from selling your copy of a copyrighted work. Mmmm, I think you're glossing over what "your copy" means here. I imagine that you're referring to the "first sale" doctrine, which restricts the ability of copyright holders to restrict resale of copies _that they sell_. First sale does not restrict the ability of copyright holders to restrict resale of copies _that other people make_. Once you have legally acquired a copy, you CAN sell it. That would be neat, because then you could make "fair use" copies for yourself, and then they would be legal, so you could sell them. The people you sold them to would then have legal copies, so they could make fair use copies, and then those copies would be legal, too, and they could sell them... This would be neat, but I don't think copyright law quite works that way. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Violation
John Cowan writes:
"W. Yip" wrote:
In the context of GPL, I wish to question whether there is a contract in
every case. The OSD s.7 'Distribution of License' stresses that no
subsequent execution of additional license is required for redistribution.
This implies that the OSS License is 'automatic'. This gives the likelihood
that in many cases a contract is PRECLUDED from the licensing mechanism.
For instance, if I were to download RedHat from FTP, and then install it
after reading and accepting the 'click wrap license' involved, would there
be a contract in such a case? I doubt it.
IANAL, but I agree with you. The GNU GPL and other open source "licenses"
(whether that term is justly applied to them is another matter) are in fact
conditional non-exclusive transfers of copyright. They are not contracts not only
for technical reasons (lack of consideration, etc.) but more fundamentally
because there is no agreement, no meeting of the minds. The copyright
owner grants certain of his otherwise exclusive rights to you, conditional
on your doing such-and-such and refraining from such-and-such. Provided
the conditions are met, you have those rights whether you agree or not.
This is the GPL's theory ("you are not required to accept this licensed,
because you have not signed it...").
A consequence of this interpretation is that it should not be possible to
sue any public license violator for anything _other_ than copyright
infringement (because there was no opportunity for the licensee to
acquire any contractual obligations).
Suppose I write some program and publish it with a public license which
says that anyone may use it, but that, by _distributing_ it, a distributor
implies agreement with my distribution-permission conditions, which are
"paying $1,000,000 into a fund for bearded programmers, to be established
by the Bearded Programmer Foundation". Now somebody distributes the
program, but does not pay the BPF.
I have a cause of action against the distributor for copyright
infringement (since under copyright law, "nothing else", as the GPL says,
grants permission for copying, and it is forbidden by default). But
I can't sue to recover the $1,000,000 for the BPF, unless there was
actually a contract there.
Your argument, and a popular argument among people who have looked this
sort of thing over, seems to be that, even though some public licenses
purport to be contracts, or to create obligations for people who
modify or distribute software, they are not actually contracts -- just
conditional permission grants under copyright law, which can either be
accepted or ignored. The result of this is either a copyright violation
or no copyright violation, but in any case no "license violation".
--
Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I
Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will
down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Should governmnet software be Open Source?
Derek J. Balling writes: At 10:52 AM 3/8/00 -0800, Brice, Richard wrote: Public domain and Open Source are not the same thing... No problem with that. But public domain is one form of Open Source; see below. As a specific example, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has written some bridge design software that they refuse to share the source code and charge non-government agencies upwards of $1500 per copy for the executables. Please refer to sections 4 and 5 of their license agreement as it asserts their copyright and position of ownership(ftp://ftp.dot.state.pa.us/public/pdf/Englicpackage.pdf) ftp://ftp.dot.state.pa.us/public/pdf/Englicpackage.pdf) . I don't know about State gov't's, but I'm almost positive the US gov't can't do things like that. Well, the Regents of the University of California, a public corporation of the State of California, certainly hold a lot of copyrights. Public domain is a legal term that means "not copyrighted". Anyone can take public domain software, tweak it, call it their own, and copyright it. From that point on, the software might not be "free" at all. If government wants to provide the maximum benefit of its assets to its citizens, then an Open Source license is the only way to go. Once a private individual or company copyrights and restricts the use and further distribution of software that was originally created by government, the remaining citizens are denied the maximum benefit of their investment. I think you are confusing Open Source with copyleft; there are lots of Open Source licenses which are not copyleft licenses, such as the BSD license. The argument that government agencies should use a copyleft license is a difficult one; copyleft is an activist tactic which might not be very patable to governments. Open Source requires the ability to copyright and "protect" the data, which to my recollection the US gov't at least cannot do. To use your example, let's say the gov't create Widget-Software-1.0, which does something "neat". Evil-Company (located in a Seattle suburb) gets WS1.0 and tries to copyright it. They CAN'T copyright 1.0, it's already in the public domain. They can take it, tweak it a little, call it 1.1, and copyright THAT all they want. That's their legal right. They have taken what their/your/my tax dollars paid for and modified it to their needs. The changed version has THEIR modifications, which they are free to deny you. You can still obtain the original 1.0 "from the source" and do whatever you like with it (possible creating a more open version of 1.1 to compete with Evil-Company's product). Since last year the OSI has accepted source code in the public domain as Open Source. Free software has existed longer than statutory recognition of copyright in computer programs. Proprietary software was originally treated as a trade secret (which is how I wish it were still treated, but the law has changed dramatically); presumably, at that time, _all_ free software was in the public domain. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Should governmnet software be Open Source?
Derek J. Balling writes: At 11:37 AM 3/8/00 -0800, Seth David Schoen wrote: At 10:52 AM 3/8/00 -0800, Brice, Richard wrote: Public domain and Open Source are not the same thing... No problem with that. But public domain is one form of Open Source; see below. Fair enough, BUT, I think the discussion was centering around "using some open source license" and "releasing it into Public Domain". Public Domain allows end-users FAR greater lee-way (they can close the source on their forked-tree if they like and go private) than a conventional Open Source License would do. Conventional wisdom is that you can do that with licenses like the BSD license and MIT license. I've heard that disputed recently, but this was at least the traditional interpretation upon which several vendors have relied. Well, the Regents of the University of California, a public corporation of the State of California, certainly hold a lot of copyrights. Either (a) they shouldn't be allowed to do that with taxpayer-funded works, or (b) all it takes is for someone with money,balls,time,energy to tell them to get stuffed and dare them to fight it in court. :) I'll look into that sometime. I think you are confusing Open Source with copyleft; there are lots of Open Source licenses which are not copyleft licenses, such as the BSD license. The problem is that it is a LICENSE at all. Using gov't-funded software is not something the gov't CAN[1] license. It's a right you have, since you paid for it. You can't license a right. I have the right to do what I want with gov't code, whether that be closed it, open it, sell copies of it verbatim, what-have-you. For the gov't to have a License, then you (a) cannot use it if you are a minor, since you cannot legally agree to the license, and (b) you have to agree to terms and conditions. There are no acceptable terms and conditions for using taxpayer-funded code. This is a difficult argument; after all, paying taxes does not allow you to attend a public university without being admitted, nor to enter government buildings and offices or military bases. Unless you know of the "Do Anything" license, which has OSI approval which says "You can download this code from me and literally do whatever you want with it. This is MY code, but you can do whatever floats your boat with it." Well, I once wrote the "World's Shortest Open Source License", but it's never been certified by anyone. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Is it possible to sue infringers under the GPL?
Justin Wells writes: A big problem with the GPL, and other OSS licenses, is that very few people have standing to press a complaint. If someone violate's a GPL license, only the author of the software has the right to press the complaint (or so I think, and I am not a lawyer). Worse, if there are multiple authors, you probably need a majority of them present to press the complaint. How do you find out who the authors of an OSS project are, and how on earth would you track down a majority of them? I'm just curious why you need a majority. In the absence of some agreement between developers about the disposition of the copyright, isn't a GPLed work normally copyrighted in part by each of its contributors? In my SPL, which I am *still* working on, I have this clause: For the sole purpose of taking action against an infringer of our copyrights, including actions seeking remedies, compensation, or the recovery of damages, anyone engaged in the lawful distribution of our software shall be considered a beneficial owner of the rights to copy and distribute it, and therefore has the authority to pursue such actions. The goal here is to give someone like Red Hat the standing to press a claim against a violator, even if the original author has vanished from the face of the earth. The copyright act (in the US) has some similar language granting television broadcasters "beneficial owner" status so they can go after pirates in their broadcast area, without having to track down the copyright owners. Isn't that ownership granted by law? If it weren't granted by law, could you create such a thing simply by publishing that statement in a license? -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: License Approval Process
Rob Edgeworth writes: snip The only other reason I can think of to get OSI approval for your license is for advertising purposes. In that case, I guess you'll just have to wait until somebody from the OSI speaks up. I'm no expert, but, personally, I don't think it's worth the trouble. So you can't put ``open source'' on your ads. Just say ``source code available'' instead. Big deal. Ian /snip I'm not certain this is the case. I recall something a few months ago suggesting the application for a trademark on open source was rejected. Can anyone confirm this? If so it would certainly explain the lack of certifications. "Open Source" was not accepted as a registered trademark. Because there is an Open Source Definition, and for other historical reasons, it is still in most cases meaningful to say that it's factually correct that a particular license (and distribution practice!) "is Open Source" or "is not Open Source". When someone says "I have an Open Source license", that claim can be _false_ (and people can point out that it's false), but it can't be a trademark infringement. The OSI's new trademark is "OSI Certified Open Source". OSI certification is not necessarily important to everyone, and there are other ways to have an open source license. I don't believe that OSI certification is _necessary_ to anyone (it's _always_ been possible to use an existing open source license, including traditional and useful ones from long before the term "Open Source" existed; and goodness knows that all sorts of people have written Open Source licenses or attempts at Open Source licenses without any comment from the OSI). I do believe that OSI certification can be, and has been, useful in many cases. Among other things, the OSI certification process has helped identify and eliminate problems in some proposed licenses before projects were released under them. This is not to say, of course, that the certification process is free of problems, including most obviously significant delays. I'm going to be talking to the OSI Board about some of the problems which people have for some time identified in the OSI's certification process. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: the skinny -- a LEGAL *nightmare*
y are so compatible, why can't they be interchangable? Just my thoughts on this. (Note: If Novell gets upset about this, you can tell them they still hold the copyright even if the license changes... and the license cannot change to anything too much different than what the NCL is already... Since of course, all the OSS licenses are compatible... right? ;-) The big problem is that the various open source licenses are _not_ compatible, and this is causing lots of trouble in the world. License changes can mean code forks. Section 5: "If the Contributor prevails, You shall pay the Contributors costs and attorneys fees, and the licenses granted to you by the contributor shall be revoked unless you cure the breach within a reasonable time specified by the arbitrator." -- Is this legal? If so, is it legal to do in every state/country? Something about this sets off alarm bells in my head... "If you prevail and the Contributors allegation of breach was brought in bad faith, the Contributor shall pay your costs and attorneys fees." -- Again, this is accepted practice in some parts of Europe (Britain), but I do believe this is not covered under Judicial laws in the U.S. and the Judge might constitute that this section is far too demanding and basically makes the judges decision on punishment for him. Some people think that the practice of awarding attorney's fees helps make good legal help accessible to people who are not rich, because more lawyers are willing to take cases on contingency. If the judges don't like it, they'll just ignore it, won't they? With a proper severability clause, that shouldn't make the rest of the license unenforceable. Otherwise we'd see more licenses saying things like, "...and if the defendant fails in court, he shall be flogged fifty times, and if the defendant wins, Brent Stone of Indiana shall be given a toy for his birthday, every birthday until his 20th birthday... If he is 20 after this fact, Brent shall have a Bachelor party and a pool installed in his backyard." I mean, seriously, give me a break. Instead of flogging the defendant, you should make him write a GPLed device driver in Visual Basic 6. Let me reiterate, this license is far too short and does not cover everything that needs be covered. Have you read the MIT X license recently? I fully expect to memorize that thing within the next year and to be able to recite it at parties. $ wc mit-license.txt; wc symbolum-nicenum 20 1671125 mit-license.txt 15 1631079 symbolum-nicenum Watch me write a (non-public-domain) free software license in one line: "Perpetual right to use, modify and redistribute for any purpose is granted." If you give me _two_ lines, I'll even throw in a free disclaimer! :-) -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: Copyrighting facts (was: Re: Can you alter the MIT license?)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: There's a great deal of information about copyright and copyrightable subject matter available from the Library of Congress Office of Copyright. It is probably all on the web too. Oh, I don't mean to suggest that there aren't standards or that they aren't published, just that the scope of copyright isn't intuitive (or logical, or accurately summarized by straightforward rules). And there are strange paradoxes and unclear dividing lines everywhere. I think, for this conversation, the key thing that applies, in the area of literary works (which software once fell into, but I haven't kept track of recent revisions), is that copyright applies to original expression. Caselaw in the United States has had an interesting time trying to explain the meaning of "expression". :-) -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/| have leisure; for perhaps you will http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)| not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Copyrighting facts (was: Re: Can you alter the MIT license?)
Bruce Perens writes: From: Justin Wells [EMAIL PROTECTED] How far can you go with this notion that you cannot copyright a fact? Can you copyright the arrangement of chess men on a chess board? The arrangement of chess pieces is not the same sort of concrete fact as "Woodhaven Rd. runs between these two points". The strange paradox of copyright is that facts which result from creative intellectual effort are nonetheless facts. For example, the last character of the main text of Douglas Hofstadter's _Godel, Escher, Bach_ is an "r". The second character of (l'havdil) Microsoft Word 97 is a "Z". These are objective facts. In the same vein, I could look up the six hundred twenty-sixth note of Andrew Lloyd Webber's _Requiem_ (assuming a standard ordering of the instrumental voices within a work and the notes within an instrumental line). The identity of that note would also be an objective fact. These particular facts are not copyrightable (because of fair use), but the co-ordinated public mention of a sufficiently large number of them would still be a copyright violation. E.g. The first character of _Neuromancer_ is a "T". The second character of _Neuromancer_ is an "h". The third character of _Neuromancer_ is an "e". The fourth character of _Neuromancer_ is a space. The fifth character of _Neuromancer_ is an "s". The sixth character of _Neuromancer_ is a "k". [...] If I continued this sequence for a little while longer, I would be guilty of a copyright violation. How is that sequence of objective facts essentially different from the following sequence of objective facts? The elevation, in feet, of Alameda, California, is 30. The elevation, in feet, of Berkeley, California, is 150. The elevation, in feet, of Cupertino, California, is 236. The elevation, in feet, of Daly City, California, is 300. The elevation, in feet, of Emeryville, California, is 15. The elevation, in feet, of Fremont, California, is 53. [...] Presumably, the information contained in one is the result of organized human creative effort, where the other is not. (It _is_ the result of human effort, in the form of the USGS GNIS.) So, can I copyright the following? 1aef 9a8e 707e 8274 391d 6de4 3c76 da65 bd62 d2bc 4635 c915 141b 3a33 2fc2 7baa 7be7 7f3d 0cb5 f460 5adb d52d 1231 274e 2f02 a75e 7cc8 faa5 f2fe ad36 110b ba02 fe23 17eb e15f 484a 776d 6a3a 08a1 686f a329 9593 58a0 54b4 6f48 75ea bc61 bd3e 90a2 6d76 03f5 a7ab b45e 3d4b 8b6a 8480 964b 614a 0c38 68c2 718b 53ce a39d 89f9 7109 66ed 6000 591e 6006 5e26 9b4b 7143 950a 2272 531d a0cd ccc9 9797 3670 7828 Do you need to know what it is first to say whether I can copyright it? I don't think it's possible to consider the copyright system reasonable, logical, intuitive, or founded on readily comprehensible rules. Certainly the idea that "you can't copyright facts" won't help someone who desires to report the fact that the text of Microsoft Word is... (well, that person is not myself). -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And do not say, I will study when I http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/| have leisure; for perhaps you will http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)| not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
Re: distribution: how much is enough?
Signal 11 writes: Quick question - I'm going to be releasing a program under GPL soon, and all the libraries I use are LGPL/GPL. My question is - how much of the original distribution do I have to include besides the necessary bits I need to get my program to compile? Is it safe to just grab the files I need, and put a note in the readme file with a location to get the full source for each library if they want it? I think the GPL/LGPL lets you do this.. but parts of it were somewhat vague. :\ There's never any obligation under the FSF's licenses to redistribute anything. Combining an excerpt of something with your own code is still a kind of derived work, which is subject to the same rules about derived works as any other. After all, if you _add_ something to my GPLed package, you're not obliged to distribute my original package as a condition of distributing your new version. If you were, every free software FTP site would have to carry every historical version of every package. You could use some data structures implementation that had been created as part of GNOME in your own program, without distributing GNOME at all, as long as you put your program under the GPL. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown" http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: support requirement
VAB writes:
[...] I've been
wondering about dual licensing for some time now. The example that
brought it to my attention was the PHP licensing. PHP consists of
an interpreted programming languages (much like perl), and a run time
for that interpreter. When you download PHP from www.php.net you are
allowed to choose between the GPL and a less restrictive license
written by the PHP programmers which allows commercial forking. What
position does this put the PHP programmers in? Are they allowed
to pick up code from the community (GPL'd code) and include it in
PHP from which it can then propagate to commercial forks of PHP?
No.
The idea is that the copyright law ordinarily prohibits people to do
certain things, but licenses allow them to do these things.
If the copyright owner grants you a particular license, you may then do
the things which the license allows. This is true regardless of what other
licenses have been granted to you or to other people.
Nobody is allowed to grant licenses to other people's code. (The GPL alludes
to this when it says "Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim
rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the
intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or
collective works based on the Program.") Issuing a program under one license
never precludes you from issuing it under other licenses in the future, but
this doesn't mean that you may ever issue other people's code under arbitrary
licenses.
I've seen many other people do dual licensing with supposedly "GPL"
compatible licenses such as the artistic license as well.
They are allowed to do that, if they are the authors. If they want to do
that with other people's contributions, and those contributions were not
also explicitly dual-licensed, they need to check with the contributors
before dual-licensing the contributions.
Am I mistaken and this type of dual licensing is only possible
with an original work which contains no previously GPL'd code?
It is only possible if all of the authors of the work have consented to it.
Whether or not the authors have issued their work under the GPL in the past
has nothing at all to do with whether it may be re-issued under other
licenses.
I had thought that this would be the case based on my reading
of the GPL, but I have a hard time believing that all of the
code dual licensed out there is original code. Will it satisfy
the GPL's viral clause (Paragraph 2b) to have the code licensed
by multiple licenses and at least one of those licenses be the
GPL?
Yes, certainly. (Remember that "it is not the intent of this section to
claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you".)
But it will not satisfy _copyright_ to have the code licensed by multiple
licenses without the consent of the copyright holders.
Is there a way I can prevent this from happening to my software?
Is it legally possible for me to write a license that restricts
any one at any time in the future from dual licensing any of the
code that I write and taking it away from the community?
The GPL will do that.
--
Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness
that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown"
http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: support requirement
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Vendor X plans on releasing software as Open Source. X makes a number of very interesting and useful research-derived programs, and also runs an ISO-9000-certified software development shop. Their ISO certification requires that they run only supported programs, and thus the development shop is prohibited from running the output of their own research department. Thus, one of X's _main_goals_ in making the software Open Source is that commercial vendors pick it up and _provide_support_ for it. Thus, their license requires that if you distribute a derived work of their program _and_ you provide support on reasonably comparable programs, that you provide support for their program too. The provision has no effect on organizations like Debian that don't provide support. This is currently the stumbling block for X's license being Open Source. Any ideas, folks? They could approach individual companies that might be interested in doing supported derived works and try to work something out in advance. For instance, they could tell their favorite ISV or consulting house that they will provide source code for something, and _promise_ to purchase a support contract on certain terms if that firm will offer one. Assuming that the contract is big enough, I imagine many companies could be interested in a proposition like that. It's still a really desirable goal to keep as much complexity as possible out of free software licenses. If a company has a particular business goal in releasing free software, it's much nicer if it can get the assurances it wants through side contracts rather than license provisions. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown" http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: support requirement
Dj writes:
VAB wrote:
A fact rarely mentioned on the list is that release under a
license other than the GPL brings with it the danger that
the software product will be reimplemented under the GPL.
This is likely if Vendor X releases under a license which
is unattractive due to say, required support terms.
That reads more like carefully couched GPL blackmail.
"Release under GPL or we'll copy your product make it GPL ourselves".
[...]
What are the ethics of duplicating the functionality of an application?
It's somewhat traditional. For instance, the GNU project duplicated the
functionality of essentially _all_ of the standard Unix utilities. I can
hardly count how many re-implementations of vi have been done.
Most people in the free software world are willing to accept the idea of
duplicating a proprietary program based on observing it (and reading its
documentation) without access to its source code. In _many_ cases,
proprietary libraries, kernels, or APIs have been re-implemented; this
sort of happened in BSD because of the ATT lawsuit, and the WINE project is
very consciously doing it with the Win32 API at the moment.
Some people are willing to accept duplicating a program through disassembly,
decompilation, and other reverse engineering techniques (assuming that no
actual code is copied). That's much more controversial, ethically and
legally.
--
Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness
that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown"
http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: support requirement
Dj writes: DEVILSADVOCATE [...] So, I'm Vendor Q. I have a working product and I make money from it. "Hey, GPL your product" says a section of the community (not necessarily my customers). "Why?" ask I. "Well, if you don't do it then we'll do it for you" comes the response. "So why should I make it easier for you?"... "But we won't duplicate it by looking at your code, but by external reverse engineering". "So you don't need my code"? "Er, no, but it'd be nice if you went GPL". "Why?"... [...] /DEVILSADVOCATE This can be put a little less harshly. (1) Free software developers are always trying to produce software that they need or want. Sometimes they write things from scratch, sometimes they join on an existing project, sometimes they try to imitate someone else's program. (2) If a company is persuaded that free software or Open Source is a good idea, they have to consider how to go about it. This includes the choice of a license. (3) If a company chooses a good license that developers are willing to accept, more developers will release improvements. If it chooses an unfriendly license, or an extremely complex or unusual license, fewer developers will be willing to contribute under that license, and many will be more interested in reimplementing the software in order to get equivalents under licenses that they are willing to deal with. The canonical comment that I think of on this subject is Jamie Zawinski's phrase "magic pixie dust". http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html Just because something is released under an Open Source license does not guarantee its the unconditional embrace by the community. Choosing a standard free license is one thing that could help on that score. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown" http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: gpl backlash?
John Cowan writes:
Kyle Rose scripsit:
[T]he LGPL, the license under which the major libraries are
released, specifically allows non-free programs to link to binaries
under that license.
The kernel, however (which is just another library), is under the GPL.
I know that Linus explicitly states that the GPL's viral properties
do not spread from the kernel to user-mode code, but I don't see how that
can be made consistent with the GPL's claim that "changing it [the GPL]
is not allowed."
It could be viewed as an additional permission, making Linux dual-licensed,
except that Linus doesn't have authority to grant that permission on behalf
of all of the other developers -- who presumably have the right to assert
that this is either
(1) merely Linus's personal opinion, and factually incorrect; or
(2) merely Linus's personal decision to dual-license _his own_ code, and
therefore not applicable to their own code, which, in compliance with
the terms of the GPL, was released under the GPL (so that Linus lacks
the authority to unilaterally re-license their work); or
(3) a copyright violation on Linus's part, because he made an unauthorized
derived work from the GPL, which is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation; or
(4) a mistake on Richard Stallman's part, because Linus's change to the
GPL is fair use, and not a copyright violation.
(I think most, if not all, people who contribute to the kernel are willing
to accept Linus's judgment on this point, but that doesn't mean that it
might not be an issue in the future.)
--
Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness
that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown"
http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: gpl backlash?
Matthew C. Weigel writes: On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, Seth David Schoen wrote: It could be viewed as an additional permission, making Linux dual-licensed, except that Linus doesn't have authority to grant that permission on behalf of all of the other developers -- who presumably have the right to assert that this is either No, he only has the authority to grant that on the code he originally wrote -- but that is part of the license, which by the GPL's viral nature ensures that all code distributed which is a derivative work of the kernel is, then, under the same license. _If_ Linus is allowed to modify the GPL, and actually did so (or if he modified it despite being forbidden to do so). It's not totally obvious that the sentence there is intended to be "part of the license", as opposed to a non-binding observation by Linus, or an expression of his wishes. (2) merely Linus's personal decision to dual-license _his own_ code, and therefore not applicable to their own code, which, in compliance with the terms of the GPL, was released under the GPL (so that Linus lacks the authority to unilaterally re-license their work); or But it wasn't released under the pristine GPL. _If_ Linus is allowed to modify the GPL, and actually did so (or if he modified it despite being forbidden to do so). (3) a copyright violation on Linus's part, because he made an unauthorized derived work from the GPL, which is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation; or Except that such additions are authorized -- hence it's not "...an unauthorized derived work..." They're not authorized, so far as we can tell from what's stated in public: Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. [...] Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. It's possible that the FSF explicitly gave Linus permission to modify the GPL, but we don't have any way of knowing that. (4) a mistake on Richard Stallman's part, because Linus's change to the GPL is fair use, and not a copyright violation. ??? How is it a mistake on RMS' part, even given that your above statements are true? Each of these possibilities, (1) through (4), is meant to be mutually exclusive with all the others. The "mistake" would be if fair use allows Linus to modify the GPL by adding to it (as opposed to "mere aggregation" with another, separate license :-) additional terms or permissions, since Stallman certainly did _not_ want people to be able to do so as a general rule. In that case, Stallman's claim that "changing it is not allowed" is not correct, and this would be the "mistake" to which (4) refers. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown" http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: GPL and LGPL question
Bruce Perens writes: I don't agree. It's just like the public-domain to GPL case. You have the option to distribute the program under the LGPL. You choose the GPL. You re-distribute that. The person to whom you redistribute it has the option to use the GPL, just as you did. Sure, but the current version of OSD 7 doesn't say that. It says that anyone who gets a copy has to have the same legal rights that were originally granted. I don't personally think there's any problem left here, except that OSD 7 is unclear. There are a few possible approaches to fixing it for greater clarity. Anyone who thinks that LGPL 3 is broken is certainly welcome to e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] and say so. I don't think there's any problem in it from the perspective of the OSD: the LGPL _allows_ redistribution under the same terms as the software was originally distributed, and developers who write under the LGPL choose to do so, with the knowledge (hopefully) that their efforts could possibly be distributed under the GPL. If they don't like that, they could write a new library public license that did most of what the LGPL does but didn't allow the license of the covered code to be changed. As I see it, license-discuss is intended for discussions of whether the Open Source Initiative should approve or disapprove of licenses under the OSD (and whether it should make improvements and revisions to the OSD). It's not really for discussions about whether particular licenses are wise or unwise, although that's not an unimportant discussion. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown" http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: GPL and LGPL question
Wilfredo Sanchez writes:
So this linking business is RMS's interpretation, but is not in
the license text. I know certain other licenses get heavily
critiqued for being vague, but I don't see the same scrutiny applied
to the GPL here.
Well, that sort of scrutiny _has_ been applied to the GPL on many lists for
many years, so that many people are sick of it. :-) Take a look at
gnu.misc.discuss, and you should find such a thread fairly quickly.
I personally have seen an interpretation-and-merits-of-GPL thread show
up on three mailing lists and two newsgroups, none of which were
license-related. That debate has been going on for years, and it's
pretty easy to be tired of it already.
Since the OSD hasn't existed for as long as the GPL, it's a new opportunity
to try to harmonize the GPL with something or something with the GPL; most
other GPL topics have already been done to death.
Version 3 of the GPL is being written and supposedly close to release.
Many people have provided input, and there have been some _huge_
debates about what GPL v3 should contain. I'm very optimistic that
it will fix some outstanding problems and ambiguities.
The lack of clarity here is the biggest reason I know of why some
companies prefer to avoid dealing with the GPL at all costs, even when
they are open to the idea of open source in general.
There are some very solid arguments for that decision. On the other
side, the GPL has been used with tremendous success in the past as the
license for a number of projects. One reason that many people trust
that GPL is that it has such a long track record in comparison with
some other free software licenses.
This proves that the developers who worked on those projects, at least,
had enough confidence in the GPL to make it useful to them. A particular
concern for companies, I know, is whether a license would stand up in
court, and whether it can be interpreted easily and clearly. At LinuxWorld,
I talked with some license enthusiasts about whether _any_ free software
license has ever been an issue in a lawsuit. Apparently, the answer is
no. The current version was written with the assistance of a law professor,
but it would be an appeal to authority to say that this means that it would
hold up. In the absence of litigation over the GPL (o si sic omnes!), each
company needs to decide for itself whether the current GPL is enforceable
and whether it contains loopholes or ambiguous wording.
If you have some proprietary code which may ship alongside
GPL'ed code, you may accidentally fall into the "derived work"
category. Certainly, it is reasonable to be wary of this.
I realize that this is intentional; after all, proprietary code is
inherently evil in the eyes of the GPL's authors. But I would argue
that this hardly represents freedom. Protecting one's right to
share code by removing one's right not to doesn't seem like a Good
Thing to me.
It's a question of emulation, an extremely old tradition in computing.
--
Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness
that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown"
http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
Re: Get ready....
Derek J. Balling writes: Your position seems contradictory. You support "freedom for the people", but you don't support the right of people to pick the pieces of licenses that best suit their needs. The only true freedom you have is choice -- the choice of not using software if you cannot abide by its license agreement, or developing your own application using the license of your choice to compete with the offending product. Allowing someone to use portions of a license does NOT deny people freedom. It is simply not necessarily granting them privileges the same privileges as others choose to. Let's remember that any alteration of a copyrighted work is a PRIVILEGE, not a right. It is something which is granted by the owner of the copyrighted work, NOT something which you inherently have by being alive. Rights CANNOT be taken away, privileges can. I can say that "no future versions of my software will be released under the GPL", and you no longer have the privilege of copying the code. The sooner you stop confusing "rights" and "privileges", you'll be a lot better equipped for the discussion. :) The author of the GPL, as far as I can infer from his writings and talking to him, does not believe that "alteration of a copyrighted work is a PRIVILEGE, not a right", because he does not believe that software should have any owners at all. Without understanding that, you can't understand the language of the GPL in its proper context. To put this another way, if copyright is not a real right (or intellectual property is not real property), then "true freedom" includes the choice to _ignore_ license restrictions altogether. Since copyright law does not provide this, Richard Stallman invented copyleft in an attempt to emulate as far as possible what life would be like if that choice were recognized as a right. If you think it's obvious that intellectual property exists, you'd naturally say that it's essential for software authors to have the choice of what license to use. If you think it's obvious that intellectual property doesn't exist, you'd equally naturally say that it's essential for users to have the freedom to copy (etc.), and that it's wrong to try to use licenses and copyright law to deny these freedoms to users. The philosophy of the GPL, which you don't have to accept in order to use it, and which accounts for Stallman's decision to copyright the GPL itself, presupposes that users have the right to use and copy software, and that software owners do not have the right to stop them: in other words, that IP does not exist. As Martin Pool just wrote in another message: The text of the GPL is not licensed to you under the GPL: you may think that's inconsistent, but it makes sense in terms of the FSF's goals. (And, of course, it doesn't make sense in terms of goals which are at odds with the FSF's goals.) http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/copyleft.html etc. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown" http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
GPL context
t a LITTLE say in how the code was used so that he could try and get some recognition for all the work. :) That's not bad, its a natural thing - to want recognition for your work. FSF (and company) have put a lot of effort into GNU, and their license allowed people to take all the work, call it something else and package it up as Linux. The GPL's a document that comes from elder days, when circumstances were very different. The conditions people face today are very different from what they were when the GPL v. 2 was written, and I think you could also say that Stallman probably wishes he knew then what he knows now. -- Seth David Schoen [EMAIL PROTECTED] They said look at the light we're giving you, / And the darkness that we're saving you from. -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown" http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ (personal) http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF)
