All Rights Reserved, so what?

[pfalconMember]

What is that “All Rights Reserved” witch hunt? Besides it being just an idiom, it’s underlying semantics is that Open Source code still has copyright holder, and it/s/he reserves his rights, releasing the code under non-exclusive Open Source license. The FOSS licenses are not revocable, so the only use for those reserved rights is for copyright holder to not release *future* versions as Open Source. Essentially it says, “hey, you can’t sue us if we withhold source for future versions”.

Ok, that’s account by me, and I’m not a lawyer. Wikipedia thinks that it’s not just an idiom, but also merely an anachronistic idiom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved

There’s also stackoverflow q, where most people also don’t find anything incompatible with the phrase: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1025081/would-an-open-source-project-have-copyright-all-rights-reserved-written-on-i

• This topic was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by  pfalcon. Reason: Add "non-exclusive"

[CiaranGMember]

The code currently in the scanner is not capable of discerning between what’s acceptable and what’s not. It needs to be a lot more intelligent.

It is a perfectly valid thing to be scanning for though, and it has revealed stuff that’s clearly non-free on a number of occasions. I’m also not a lawyer, but a file that says “Copyright X All Rights Reserved” without a license specified is quite clear in its meaning – no copying, modifying, distributing is allowed. The same goes if the phrase appears in the UI, without a license.

On the other hand, if the file says that, and then goes on to specify a Free Software license, that’s fine. The scanner is currently unable to differentiate between these two cases.

If you want a good example, look at these files before and after Google corrected them:

http://code.google.com/p/marketbilling/source/detail?r=c414a3dfef020a98afea0daffeed970940cbe86a

The former versions were unarguably proprietary software and not distributable.

I currently have those lines in the scanner commented out while I work on the more intelligent solution that catches the bad without complaining about the good. Maybe I should commit that removal in the meantime?

[pfalconMember]

Yes, sorry, I just saw a commit notification, and thought it’s about the phrase appearing in the full header:

https://gitorious.org/f-droid/fdroidserver/commit/7e22c0a75684b3474fa7331397541e0673fa2585

Later saw https://gitorious.org/f-droid/fdroidserver/commit/69b654b88070f435220c3f2f477398064b3c78c6 which clarified it.

I’m also not a lawyer, but a file that says “Copyright X All Rights Reserved” without a license specified is quite clear in its meaning – no copying, modifying, distributing is allowed.

Well, there’re quite a few (majority in Android FOSS?) projects which don’t have any blurb in source files – in this case, a license file in repository would apply (or what’s written on the web pages, as there’re quite a few which lack in-repo license either). But I guess, you’re right – if some file has some copyright header without further licensing info, it’s not additive to the repo’s license, but potential sign of licensing incompatibility.

So, thanks again for paying attention to such details. And the scanner is for sure a helpful thing (well, would be nice to be able to disable checks for internal usage). I actually wanted to propose to add checks for common problems with AndroidManifest.xml (need to document how to deal with them first).

[CiaranGMember]

You can disable the automatic scan that gets done with a build by using –force (which also happens automatically if you’re using –install). This also ignores the ‘Disabled’ status.

[pfalconMember]

Well, just had “All rights reserved” trigger also on http://code.google.com/p/prboom4android :


* Copyright (c) 2006 Vladimir Silva and others.
* All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
* are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
* which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
* http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html


So, some means to turn off just that error, like “license=verified” would be useful.

[CiaranGMember]

See commit f3d709 – I committed (accidentally actually, whoops) my commenting out of that check. I’ll put it back when it doesn’t trigger on things it shouldn’t.

[pfalconMember]

Nice, submitted a merge request for PrBoom then.

[Author]

Posts