🚀 go-pugleaf

Graham Murray wrote:
> But does distribution require transfer of ownership?

Certainly not. In the GPL case, you *never* transfer ownership, since
only the copyright holder "owns" the software (the GPL grants almost
"ownership" for all practical purposes to the licensee, but not the one
to change the license). The German civil law deliberately distinguishs
between ownership and possession, where the owner is who says what can
be done with something (sell it, lend it, limit usage), and the
possessor actually handles it. So you don't own your companie's pens,
but you possess them. Yes, this sounds stupid, because in common speech,
both words have the same meaning. AFAIK the US law speech uses the same
terms.

For copyright, this is quite important, since copyright only applys to
the "possess" part - the ownership is always at the original author. If
you want to possess software, you need a license from the original
author. This is completely ignorant if you currently function as agent
for a legal person, or on your own account, or for your neighbour's cat.
The right to run alone needs you accepting a license (because it
requires a copy into memory).

Note that all proprietary software licenses have to be covered by
copyright law. Everything that is allowed within copyright law (such as
fair use copies) is also allowed with proprietary software licenses -
they can't stretch copyright simply because they want to (they do try,
though). So if they require you to obtain a separate license for each of
your employees, that's because copyright requires that. Otherwise, the
company can aquire one license (it's a legal person with the right to do
so), and let an arbitrary number of people use the software on the
companie's behalf.

The GNU philosophy is pretty clear what they want - unencumbered access
to sources and programs for anyone. That certainly includes employees.
Since the GPL is a legal document, the spirit - in any case of doubt -
stands over the actual wording. For us programmers, this is somewhat
strange, since in our texts (specs, programms, test pattern), the words
are always right, and if they don't follow the spirit, they have to be
adjusted.

The spirit of copyleft is quite well put in the first sentence of the
draft GNU Free Documentation License (which has some rough edges, but
this is definitely not one of them - this is well established, anyway):

"The general idea of copyleft is to use the copyright system to ensure
that everyone who possesses a copy or a derivative of a certain work
has the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without
modifying it."

Read: "everyone", and "possesses" (rather than owning).

-- 
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/