Re: Ada 83 Booch components

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <8bavjr$aik1@news.cis.okstate.edu>,
  dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org wrote:
> >Well of course you can't. They are copyrighted, and absent a
> >specific license from the copyright holder, you can't make a
> >copy let alone give it to someone else. It is not good enough
> >to hear third hand that Grady says it's OK with him (even if
> >he is indeed the copyright holder of record).
>
> If you have permission from the copyright holder to copy it,
> you have permission to copy it.

That's what we mean by a specific license to copy!

> It doesn't matter whether it'
> a formal license

It needs to be formal in a legal sense, otherwise there is a
legitimate course of copyright action. Of course you probably
are interpreting formal a bit wrong here. It does not have to
be a signed document, for instance a verbal commitment is
probably good enough if provable.

> or whether you got it first hand.

Well here you have to be careful. If the copyright holder
publishes a general license, then that's fine, but what I
was warning of here is that it is not good enough to read
on CLA a message from A saying that B has said it is OK!

> (How many people
> have first hand approval from any of the Linux copyright
holders
> to copy Linux?)

Anyone accessing the Linux sources or a prepackaged binary
version of Linux obtains a copy of the license
agreement that allows this copying. All Linux copyright
holders have assented to the issuing of this license.

If you were to get a copy of Linux from the combined copyright
holders that had a proprietary license (rather than the GPL),
you would NOT be able to copy it. In fact this is unlikely,
because it would be very difficult to get 100% of the Linux
copyright holders to agree on such a distribution.

> Now a formal license in the handwriting of the author
> would make it clearer, but if the author tells you can copy
                                                 ^^^
there's the important word :-)

> it, you can.


The handwriting is irrelevant, a license is formal precisely
if it meets the legal requirements for a license.

If you meet Joe in the street, and he tells you, sure, go ahead
and copy X (in which he holds a copyright interest), and there
is no evidence of any kind of this interchange, and no apparent
reason for Joe to have given this permission, Joe would likely
prevail in a subsequent course of copyright action (your defence
that you thought Joe had given you permission might be a
reasonable explanation, but I doubt any court would find it
a valid license given the standards of proof involved here.

People often are too sloppy in understanding when they can and
can not make copies. I have seen plenty of court cases result
from such sloppiness.







>
> --
> David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
> Only a nerd would worry about wrong parentheses with
> square brackets. But that's what mathematicians are.
>    -- Dr. Burchard, math professor at OSU
>


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