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Ars Book Review: “Intellectual Property and Open Source”
“Lindberg starts with the basics, explaining how copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets work. He then dives into the details that are most likely to be of interest to software developers: employment agreements, software licenses, copyleft, reverse engineering, and formalizing a project by creating a non-profit organization. No book could replace the advice of competent legal counsel, but reading Intellectual Property and Open Source from cover to cover will give the average free software developer a clear understanding of the legal terrain she will have to navigate as she creates, improves, or uses free software.”
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Microsoft announcement tomorrow: No more Seinfeld ads!
“Microsoft flacks are desperately dialing reporters to spin them about “phase two” of the ad campaign — a phase, due to be announced tomorrow, which will drop the aging comic altogether.”
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Daily Links 09/18/2008 (p.m.)1 comment to Daily Links 09/18/2008 (p.m.) |
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Copyright © 2010 Bob Sutor - All Rights Reserved |
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There are a number of typical creators of ‘open-sourceable’ software.
Hobbyists, university students, academic researchers, commercial scientists, manufacturing engineers, and ‘business servants’ — those whose time is sold under contract to solve problems for 3rd-party businesses — are typical population segments. Quite varied; some well-paid by employers.
None of them have a direct interest in the legal terrain. That’s very much a commercial matter, not a scientific, engineering, or ‘hobby’ matter.
So it’s actually a management responsibility (where the managers are there to try to assure that the business makes a profit and does not run out of cash) as to whether the ‘open-sourceable’ software actually gets open-sourced, or not.
I think there’s quite a lot of ‘open-sourceable’ software in personal and corporate desk drawers around the world, which doesn’t see the light of day because whoever possesses it has no interest in exposure to the legal terrain.
Is that useful for the world ? And if that isn’t useful for the world, what should change ?