[theme-reviewers] GPL

[Bryan Hadaway]

Man, this indeed a *very old discussion*. Better late than never I guess if
you had something you wanted to say, but none of this is very fresh in my
mind so I'll try to eloquently reiterate a whole ranty amount of thought
that I had on the subject.

Basically, all that I'm saying is that declaring a license is a very loose
concept legally (regardless of the license itself) as apposed to actually
federally registering/trademarking/copyrighting something etc, it's
basically your word and nothing else.

Essentially it's a good faith approach, like a hand shake. Obviously GPL
has legal precedence:

http://technosailor.com/2010/07/14/impending-legal-precedent-for-gpl-licensing/

Should you be able to adequately prove that something you created is your
creation and that you've defined it as "licensed" under the GPL.

This isn't a discussion about whether to license and how to license your
works, of course you should do any and all things you can to protect your
work and the freedoms of your users based on how you want them to be able
to freely use the software and so on.

It's kind of like trademark law, you don't *have* *to* actually register
something at the federal level, technically, if you coin a phrase or
company/product/service name, register the domain, sell a product and
establish yourself you're essentially protected under trademark law, but no
where near the level you are if you legally at the federal document level
register, "Here I am!"

So we're not really discussing to GPL or not to GPL, it's to Declare vs
Notarize. The idea being that declaring is really just your word, but to
notarize is to have external 3rd party proof on file that's dated and
sealed to back your word up. So you could print out the GPL (adding info at
the top about the software, your info, date etc) and go and have it
notarized. That's probably the best option right now. But I'm not really
finding any official, widely respected government body that allows you to
properly register software under GPL. Perhaps that's something for us to
consider forming or maybe there already is something like that?

It's probably called having your own attorney, after all, possession is
9/10 of the law. But, that's really not a viable solution for everyone and
is indeed a bit counterproductive to the overall spirit of *free* software.

End of rant 2.0.


Bryan Phillip Hadaway


Web & Graphic Designer
calmestghost.com
bhadaway at gmail.com


*Socialize:* Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/calmestghost> |
Twitter<http://twitter.com/calmestghost> |
LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/calmestghost> |
Google+<https://plus.google.com/104582075016689917593>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wordpress.org/pipermail/theme-reviewers/attachments/20120925/80d167fe/attachment.htm>