[osflash] Commercial use of OSFlash projects?

[Mark Winterhalder]

On 9/10/06, Till Schneidereit <tschneidereit at gmail.com> wrote:
> While I think that this would make sense as a process, I don't think it would make any legal difference at all. Technically, most licenses allow you to widen their scope, i.e. you can allow users of a gpl'd piece of to also use it under another license like Mozilla is doing with their GPL, MPL, NPL triple-licensing, but you can't put any more restrictions on the distribution. Thus, if you as the developer interpret the gpl in a way (this is just an exreme example, not that anyone here would actually do this) that allowed a user to modify the software and distribute binaries of the modifications without the source, you can't prevent any user of said modified binary from suing the person distributing it based on a more widely / at all legally accepted interpretation of the GPL.

In that extreme example you're probably right -- but as far as
interpretations are involved, it should be doable. Like, in the case
of LGPL libraries, the question whether "linking" in flash means it
must be an external SWF loaded at runtime. I'd say that strictly, it
is, but there is room for interpretation. Such a "signing statement"
would clarify these issues by giving the interpretation of the
library's author who would most likely say that it's OK to compile the
library directly into one SWF. It would be, in a way, part of the
license both parties agreed on.
But IANAL, of course...

> Because of that, I think it'd be best to go one of the following routes:
> a) Try to find a lawyer specialized on software licensing / directly work with the FSF or a similar organization to create some basic guidelines for the Flash world, or

Yeah, maybe just asking the FSF for advice on this would help? They
already have lawyers, maybe they could look into it for us?

> b) Try to find a field of software distribution that has enough similarities with the Flash world and where these discussions have already come to a sufficient conclusion and try to derive rules for the Flash world based on that.
> My take is that the second route should work out fine, seeing as there is a field of sofware distribution with lots of similarities - the Java applet scene - in which these discussions have pretty certainly already been conducted.

I don't know enough about Java applets to tell how far the
similarities go. If anybody knows a good resource where somebody
professionally looked into this it would be interesting.

But (damn!) do we need lawyers for everything...

Mark