The myth that open source requires the unadulterated attention of its copyright holder is not unfounded. If Kevin Fleming’s talk was any indication, determining the right license for copyrights is not a trivial task.

Thankfully, open source license reviewers such as the OSI and the FSF have done most of the heavylifting for us.

Why this post, then? Why not visit those forums or watch Fleming’s video?

Analogy

Apart from making an hour-long speech, Fleming makes an analogy between licenses and software itself. The key point he makes is that like software, licenses are not exhaustive – they do not cover all the edge cases and plug all the possible loopholes. Licenses are, however, useful for protecting your rights to fulfillment.

Yes. Fulfillment. Or as the English spell it, fulfilment.

Extra Intrinsic

Amongst all the technical details of which license is the most permissive, and how when you edit the license itself you cannot call it the same license, and which license spreads like a virus, he mentioned one important detail – one of the motivations for licensing your software is to ensure your name is propagated with that piece of software granting you everlasting life. Well, maybe not that dramatic but the idea is similar: making software your legacy. It is in that idea that people like to attach their motivations to – a sort of real-life gamification, if you will. Sharing, then, becomes a means to immortalize yourself in the minds of people; even if those around you are gone, there are generations to inspire.

Medusa

One aspect of Fleming’s video that caught my eye was that if you saw someone’s code on the bulletin board with your eyes and kept it in your mind, it would not be considered copyright infringement. It was interesting, I thought, that you could absorb someone’s code with your eyes and regurgitate it later, without infringement. Every piece of film on Greek mythology will tell you how the eyes are the windows to the mind, and that has never been more true than with copyright laws. The best photocopier for stealing someone else’s work, then, is an eidetic memory. Regardless, reproduction of some parts of the code from memory is considered fair use and I am glad that I shall not be held accountable for my honest glances would not land me in trouble.

Randomly Accused Memory

Althought Kevin dives deeper into cases of possible copyright infringement – and starts quizzing his audience to an amusing degree – he brings up a very valid and technical concern. It has been established that if your friend gives their unlicensed code to you on a flash drive, you can run the code but not copy it. However, those aware of how computer software works will instantly tell you that running the software entails copying the program from the flash drive to the system memory. This seems to be a violation of the default copyright laws, yet software is useless without the ability to run. The way the community mitigates the problem, as Kevin explains it, is what I like to call the existential clause – since software’s very existential purpose is to run on a machine, copying it to system memory for the purpose of running it cannot be considered an infringment.

Flaming Hot

After interesting analogies, Fleming goes back to discuss some of the clever ways the software industry has used licenses and to me, some of them felt exploitative. For instance, a dual license for corporations and community; this would usually be done with a permissive license for the former and a copyleft license for the latter. Although this feels more like a programmer’s trick, it is fascinating to see how the industry handles these laws and benefits from them. Fleming also talked about how choosing your license is more important than choosing a variable name. It is true that variable names have been infamous for its undecisive-ness, but when it comes to licenses, the choice is more permanent; well, mostly irreversible. If a license is changed midway, bad actors can always traverse the development tree to obtain a version that has the old license on it.

Therefore, when it comes to licenses, it is important for the author to think about how they would like for their children (aka source code) to be used.