Re: Calling a program without knowing the parms

On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 02:22:10AM -0400, Phil wrote:
> With all this trouble, why bother to license it at all?  Is there reason why
> you'd want it licensed?

In order to allow others to use the code.  Legally, code has been ruled to
be copyrightable.  Thus, any code that you write is automatically
copyrighted and "belongs" to you.

The exact details of how copyright applies to source code are somewhat
muddy at the moment, but the generalities of copyright hold.  Copyright
law gives the author exclusive rights to his code, while other can do very
little with it.  (There is the fair use doctrine, but that's one of those
muddy details with source code, and we're discussing an entire program,
which would be too large to fall under fair use.)  If you want others to
be able to use your code, you ought to give them the legal right to, which
means either supplying a license for the code or releasing the code into
the public domain.  (The latter is what happens e.g. to code published in
many magazines.)

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, but I have done a fair bit of research on
this topic.
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