Facing the movement of open-source licensing
8月 14th, 2008A software programmer gave his work away did it mean could not be protected?
ONE decision of San Francisco federal court (A legal dispute involving model railroad hobbyists has resulted in a major courtroom victory for the free software movement also known as open-source software) shows the use of commercial contracts for the distribution of computer software and digital artistic works for the public good. The court ruling also bolsters the open-source movement by easing the concerns of large organizations about relying on free software from hobbyists and hackers who have freely contributed time and energy without pay.
There has implications for the Creative Commons license, a framework for modifying and sharing creative works that was developed in 2002 by Larry Lessig, a law professor at Stanford.
That license is now used widely by organizations like M.I.T. for distributing courseware, and Wikipedia, the Web-based encyclopedia. In March, the rock band Nine Inch Nails released a collection of musical tracks under a Creative Commons license.
The ambiguity facing open-source licensing has been one of the hurdles facing the movement, said Joichi Ito, the chief executive of Creative Commons.
There has long been a link between model train hobbyists and the free software movement. During the 1950s, for example, hobbyists who worked on the wiring of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology model railroad club project were informally known as “hackers,” according to “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” by Steven Levy. The term evolved to include people who developed and programmed computers and who passionately believed that software codes should be freely shared.
“I was terrified that we would lose,” Mr. Jacobsen(Robert G. Jacobsen, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Katzer claiming that his company was distributing a commercial software program that had taken software code from the Java Model Railroad Interface project and was redistributing the program without the credits required as part of the open-source license it was distributed under) said. “But I thought it was the right thing to do.”




























