Re: [Axiom-developer] GPLv2

[Ralf Hemmecke]

On 12/16/2014 09:34 AM, address@hidden wrote:
>> What does this have to do with Axiom?
> 
> License discussions arise from time to time. We have a long email
> history in Axiom discussing licensing.

OK. ;-)

> This is the first court case involving the GPL that has not (yet)
> settled out of court.

Maybe in the US. But there have been cases in Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpl-violations.org

> As for the employee issue, at least in the U.S., software is generally
> licensed to the corporation, not to the individual employee.

Wow! Actually, I don't know the exact situation in Germany, but what I
wrote was something that I read somewhere some years ago and it made
perfectly sense to me.

Nevertheless. "Copyright" in Germany is not existing in the american
sense. Rather, there is "Urheberrecht" and "Nutzungsrecht". Under German
law, I cannot give away the "Urheberrecht" (because "Urheber" means
"creator" and that right is bound to an individual). That basically
means I cannot legally put something into the public domain.
Per default the creator of a work (i.e. the Urheber) has the exclusive
Nutzungsrecht (i.e., right to use/copy/modify/distribute/...) of the
work in question, but, of course, if the work has been produced inside a
company, then the exclusive "Nutzungsrecht" usually immediately falls
into the hands of the company. And that means that the creator of some
work is not allowed to distribute his own work without consent of the
company. Well, that's of course reasonable, if the company pays this
employee.

Anyway, German law, is a bit different from US law.

If everyone would play nice, there wouldn't be need to spend a lot of
time into such legal issues and we could concentrate on real work and
release it under a free license.

Ralf