Re: Switching to the OSL License, in a dual way.

["Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>]

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On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, [iso-8859-1] Gaël Le Mignot wrote:

>  >> Nonesense. If the business no longer has the licence to use BK (for
>  >> whatever reason) then it no longer has access to the data. Now to
>  >> get access to the data you must reverse engineer BK...
>
>  > Oh, I see, you violate our license, your license is revoked, and
>  > now you have the write to reverse engineer BK?  Show me the law which
>  > says that is true.
>
> I was working  on a project during  my free time using BK,  and then I
> get employed  by a company  contributing to Subversion. My  license is
> then void, but I want to be  able to still use the files and servers I
> used before. Reverse is allowed, and moral, in this case.
>
>  > BK has a command that will take a BK tree and produce pure SCCS files,
>  > there is even a GNU SCCS clone so tell me again you need to go poking
>  > around in BK?
>
> Without any lose of data and meta-data ?
> And still, my license being void, how could I do that ?
>
> (of course, I am not in this  case - I'll never be crazy enough to use
> a non-free software to store my data).
>

Ever heard of "Peoplesoft"? Some IT types converted a
business database(s) to Peoplesoft. The license expired.
The company was out of business until it was reinstated.
The fee to reinstate the expired license was like extortion.
Never again. You don't want to __ever__ convert your company
databases to some proprietary format that must be unlocked
with a license key that can expire. If you run a business,
you need to have access to your database even if the company
that produced the software goes out of business so you can't
renew your license. If a software company won't provide such
a license, then you set yourself up for a stockholders revolt
and suit. You need to get a perpetual license. If the software
company doesn't provide one, go to the competition.

There are software databases and development environments
that need to be reviewed to make sure they don't expire.
Rational Software is an example. We use Rational for some
of our stuff. Can I extract my source-code from their
proprietary VOBs if they go out of business? Actually, yes.
So, even if we have expiring licenses, we can still get
access to our intellectual property. These things are
important, but alas... off-topic..

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.20 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
            Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.