[antlr-interest] The matter of licensing...

[Anthony Youngman]

A legal suit is unlikely. Ter's role as project lead and original
author, and his insistence that everything is pretty much public domain,
is about as sure-fire a guarantee as you can get that you will not get
sued. The doctrine of estoppel pretty much guarantees that such suit
would get thrown out as frivolous.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that you won't get sued. You only
need to look at the shenanigans with the SCO Group over linux to see
that. A cursory look at the FACTS will tell you that their suit is
hopeless, guaranteed to fail, and based very firmly in fantasy.
Unfortunately, that didn't stop them filing it ...

Ter says he wants Antlr to be used as widely as possible, hence his
aversion to any restrictive licencing (I don't think Antlr is public
domain, because that causes a few problems with some contributors ...).
Sadly, I think he needs to ditch his aversion to licencing and sort out
some sort of formal BSD, along with a "contributors" list that documents
their agreement to his licencing terms. Acutally, isn't that planned for
v3?

And I think the OP needs to point his lawyers at the SCO lawsuit (look
at www.groklaw.net), and point out that there is no guarantee of freedom
from suit - for anything! Point them also at the MS/Timeline dispute -
users of MS SQL-Server are vulnerable to A VALID suit from Timeline just
because they are using MS-supplied technology (and MS is protected
because they got themselves a licence). Basically, the OP's lawyers are
baying for the moon and fooling themselves, and this needs to be pointed
out very firmly with a clue-by-four. All you can really say to them is
that PRECEDENT (very important in legal circles :-) says they are LESS
likely to get sued for using Antlr, than they are for using MS
SQL-Server. And they are being unreasonable in holding Open Source to
far higher standards than they hold COTS stuff.

Cheers,
Wol

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Poirier [mailto:cpoirier at dreaming.org] 
Sent: 05 February 2004 10:15
To: antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [antlr-interest] The matter of licensing...

Hi Serge,

> Can you contribute code and break this statement , is that so easy to
break
> a claim , what did your lawyer(s) argue ?

One cannot assign or reliquish the rights of others.  If someone
(anyone) contributed code to ANTLR and did not intend for it to be
placed in the public domain, then it wasn't, regardless of what the core
development team intended.

Addi's lawyer has a reasonable concern, and what we need is a
clarification from those "in the know" about what steps were taken to
ensure that all contributions were also placed in the public domain by
their respective authors.


> If not , we have better to do than discussing about software rights ,
even
> if the investment returns is delayed .

Unfortunately, it's not that simple.  I'll be using ANTLR primarily for
open-source projects.  But I can't offer a license on code I do not own
or for which I do not hold the legal right to do so.  Which means I
lose the protection of that license (ie. that I cannot be sued for
damages) when I offer the code for use.

As an example, if a company using my open-source, ANTLR-based software
is sued by such a contributor (one who contributed to ANTLR without
placing the code in the public domain or by providing some other
sufficiently open-source license), that company can turn around and sue
me for those damages.

Maybe you feel differently, but for me, it's well worth my time to
verify this stuff now.  And if I can't get those assurances, then I'll
probably be following Addi's company's lead in not using ANTLR.  And I
doubt I'll be the only open-source developer to do so.  And that would
be a real shame.

Later,
   Chris.



 
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